Your final paper will be a deep dive into genre and point of view in the novel My Sister the Serial Killer. I am
particularly interested in your take on the novel’s use of genre. If you aren’t overly familiar with the concept,
“genre” really just means a type or category of literature. It is very similar to the idea of “species” in biology.
Each genre has its own tone, rules, and expectations. When writers, filmmakers, game designers, or almost
any creative person, produces a work, they are generally thinking of its genre. It helps shape the work, not to
mention to market it, as the entertainment industry runs by being able to group products into genre categories.
If you look at the iTunes store, Netflix, or almost any other streaming service, their works are broken down into
genres like “action” “science fiction” “drama” “family” or, if it’s Netflix, “international movies with strong female
leads who solve crimes in the snow.”
I think we’re all pretty familiar with how the idea of genre works. Two genres that typically have pretty
consistent rules are horror movies and romantic comedies. Romantic comedies for example, tend to follow the
pattern of:
- boy-meets-girl
- boy and girl fall in love
- boy and girl have a great time
- boy and girl have an argument and break up
- boy and girl are reunited, usually because someone makes a grand, romantic gesture that wins the other
person’s heart.
Some works can put a twist on this, i.e. Groundhog Day or Palm Springs introduce time loops, and Happiest
Season makes it be about two women, adding a coming-out dimension to it, and so forth.
But here’s the thing about writing: writers often try to mess with genre rules. I would say that Avengers: Infinity
War is at its best when it is challenging some of the key aspects of the genre of super-hero movies (if you
haven’t seen it, the heroes in the movie are vulnerable, which is usually not done often in that genre). People
have argued that Deadpool is so successful because its main character goes against the grain of almost every
PG superhero movie. You can also argue that the twist in the middle of Parasite not only changes the plot, but
changes the entire type of movie. If you’ve seen From Dusk Till Dawn (and I am not sure if you need to), it
begins as a heist movie and mid-way through becomes a vampire apocalypse. Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho
famously began as a crime movie and abruptly shifted to an early slasher film. Get Out does something similar.
And, really, the Sharknado series shows what you can do when you completely mix genres (comedy, shark
movie, and, later, space, etc.) without reservation.
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