If Scorsese can do it, why can't I?

Last night Ashley and I went to see the new Martin Scorsese movie Shutter Island. It was pretty good, but not great—wait for it to hit the cheap theaters, or maybe DVD if you've got a nice big TV. I found that the last third of the movie dragged pretty badly, and MAN did I see that twist ending coming from a looooooooong way off. Still, the first parts of the movie were quite unsettling—both Ashley and I had really messed up dreams.

Anyway, it got me thinking about genre. Scorsese is clearly playing a lot with genre, mixing 40s and 50s hardboiled noir-style narratives, camera angles, and performances with surreal and psychological horror. Leonardo DiCaprio's and Mark Ruffalo's dialogue from early on in the film sounds like something straight out of a fifties detective movies (plus a few F-bombs). I think a lot of the audience was a bit put off by the genre anachronisms early on in the movie. The acting style took a little while to get used to and the (intentionally, I think) overdramatic score drew giggles from the undergrads next to me, but I had a great time, especially as the straightforward detective narrative descended into weirder, hallucinatory spaces.

Whenever I see genre done right, in writing, film, or TV, I always miss Western. New Hampshire's MFA program coasts by on this “Yeah, genre writing is cool, we can talk about genre,” attitude, but when it actually comes up in conversation, none of the students or professors actually have the vocabulary to talk about it. WWU made sure its students could talk about genre fiction, in its popular and experimental forms. Matt, a friend and fiction classmate—and a sci fi nerd who takes his work to some pretty damn experimental places—gave me Dan Simmons's Hyperion for my birthday. “Wow,” I thought. “I knew Matt was a nerd, but this is some hard-core sci-fi nerdery.” I was surprised, but I shouldn't have been. Deep genre stuff, and our predilection for it, never comes up in class.

In a little over a month I'll be at the AWP conference in Denver. Michael Chabon, a supporter of ghettoized genres in all mediums, is the keynote speaker, and I'm curious to see if he'll bring up sci-fi or comic books in his speech to the—very academy-centric—AWP crowd. Chabon is interesting because he manages to be a best-selling author who genre-hops—Kavalier and Clay was a period piece, his next novel was sci-fi, and he's jumped through children's fantasy, serialized mystery novellas, and steampunk short stories since then—but also maintains pretty good cred with academic creative writers (he went to Iowa for his MFA and teaches in Berkeley, I think). I hope he takes stodgy academic writers to task—short stories and novels don't have to be boring. It's possible to have both nuanced characters and aliens, lyrical prose and exploding helicopters. I'll keep you posted on what Chabon says. I'm going to go write a story where something interesting happens.