What Exactly is a Fantasy Film?

I’ve been having an ongoing argument with a friend over what the best romantic comedy is. I correctly maintain that it is When Harry Met Sally… while he incorrectly contends that it is Pretty Woman. The frustrating part of the argument, in addition to being so obviously right, is that he concedes that When Harry Met Sally… is better in almost every conceivable way, except for as an exemplar of the genre—that is, while When Harry Met Sally… might be the better movie, Pretty Woman is the better romantic comedy.

This is a dubious claim we’ll come back to, but it got me wondering about genre generally. There’s lots of confusion (including my own) around genre and the nature of genre. For instance, what precisely is the relation between horror films and thrillers? What about action and adventure? What makes something a fantasy film, and why do there not seem to be many of them? (I think frequently about AFI’s 10 Top 10 lists and how the #1 and #3 spots on the fantasy list are The Wizard of Oz and It’s a Wonderful Life, respectively. Check out the list and you’ll see that those aren’t even their oddest picks for the fantasy genre.) In fact, when you bracket out animated movies or limit yourself to movies made for adults, then you recognize that the genre all but disappears. And then there’s this.

In any case, what I want to do in this post is investigate genre (and some of its strangeness). One thing you’ll immediately notice is that most genres are not comparing apples to apples. We might contrast a science-fiction movie with a fantasy film, but those aren’t necessarily exclusive of other genres like comedy or horror. So, in part, I’m going to try to organize genres into categories, but as I attempt to do so, it will quickly become clear how unwieldy movie genres are. Hopefully by the end, though, some of this will help me win that argument about what makes a good genre film.

Perhaps the broadest way we can think about genre is in terms of what’s called “modes,” categories that get at the most basic kind of dramatic experience a work belongs to. If you’re studying Shakespeare, it’s maybe something like tragedy and comedy, or if you’re watching the Golden Globes, maybe drama and comedy. Basically, Is it cheery? Or a downer? You can thank the Greeks for these especially broad labels.

If we get a little more granular, we get at genre descriptors for tone and affect, the ways in which a film approaches its material and, especially, the sort of emotional experience it seeks to produce. Genres like melodrama (e.g., Moonlight) heighten emotion and invite strong sympathy from the audience; horror (e.g., Friday the 13th) seeks fear and dread; thriller (e.g., Rear Window) seeks suspense, anticipation, and anxiety. (The proximity of anxiety to dread is part of why the labels “thriller” and “horror” are so often conflated. To my mind, horror is distinguished more by its subject matter—discussed below.) Satire also fits in here, right alongside comedy, but with the added feature that it is trying to make a point—as in Kubrick’s critique of nuclear war planning in Dr. Strangelove.

Some genres are concerned with how the story is told in the script: the narrative situation, the basic progression of events, the relationships and goals around which the story is organized, and the recurring plot conventions or tropes that structure it. Romance, for instance, is organized around the development or testing of a romantic relationship; coming-of-age around maturation and the movement from one stage of life to another; tragedy (or a rise-and-fall narrative) around catastrophic loss, usually involving some form of reversal or irony. In The Godfather, for instance, we watch as Michael Corleone’s rise to power unfolds alongside his moral decline and the destruction of his family. Slice-of-life films, like Clerks, only become a genre in contrast with these usual dramatic quests or crises.

Other genres describe more specific narrative structures: mystery is organized around an unknown that must be discovered or explained; procedurals around the systematic process of solving or accomplishing something; adventure around a journey, quest, or series of extraordinary encounters. The difference shows in how the stories move: Knives Out advances by accumulating clues and narrowing the field of suspects, whereas Raiders of the Lost Ark lurches from one obstacle to the next, each episode pulling the hero further away from home. Importantly, these genres require nothing more specific than persons doing things. It’s once the story begins to take on particular features—when a procedural is about robbing a bank, or a tragedy occurs on the football field—that they become genres of subject.

Subject concerns what the film is principally about: the specific kinds of people, professions, institutions, activities, or social problems that supply its central material. Thus we can have films about criminals and gangsters, law and politics, journalism, sports, or the lives of particular people in biography. Superhero films center on superheroes, even if they can utilize a variety of narrative structures or take on different tones. Where The Dark Knight treats superheroes through the conventions of a grim crime thriller, Guardians of the Galaxy takes a lighter, comic, space-adventure approach. In addition to their intended effect, horror films are characterized less by their plotting (as standard as they may be) than by their subject tropes: monsters and people dying. And action movies, though often paired with adventure, are defined less by the way the story unfolds and more by their incorporation of fighting, weapons, and (if we’re lucky) sick explosions. Likewise, parodies (e.g., Spaceballs) are satires of a particular subject, and dark comedies (e.g., Fargo) are comedic films with dark subjects.

The subject matter of a film can often lend itself to special audience genres: family, children’s, teen, chick-flick, etc. As a note, historically “adult” wasn’t really a genre, unless talking about pornography—it was the default. But, more and more, media is interested in being seen as mature (think: Game of Thrones) and thus there is a growing gap between media made for children and for adults.

Similar to subject matter, but less central to the plot and more expansive in scope, are the genres of world-building and setting. These concern the context in which the story takes place—the background assumptions, historical environment, physical setting, or governing premise of the narrative. Most famously, science fiction and fantasy are broad world-building categories: science fiction generally imagines a world shaped by speculative technologies, scientific possibilities, or altered social arrangements, while fantasy permits forms of magic, myth, or supernatural reality. The more subdued these elements (think one sci-fi device in Back to the Future versus an entire galaxy of strange technology in Star Wars), the less likely I am to think of the movie as being science-fiction as much as I am to think of it as having science-fiction elements. Conversely, even while the fictionality of The Martian’s world permeates the movie, it is so imperceptible that it hardly seems worthy of the classification science-fiction.

It’s also worth noting regarding science fiction and many of the subjects mentioned above (sports, gangster, courtroom drama, etc.), that while the definitive features of these genres are their trappings, artifacts, activities, and so on, they are often accompanied by specific narrative tropes. Science fiction, for instance, is an ideal form by which to explore different philosophical dilemmas. Filmmakers could often do this just as easily through fantasy and horror, but for whatever reasons, science fiction has become the genre of choice for such What Ifs.

Other genres of setting include the historical film (which, coincidentally, tends to lend itself to epic lengths) as well as the subcategory of Westerns. Whether you like them or not, there is no escaping the recognition that Westerns are the best genre—or at least the quintessential genre, receiving the lion’s share of analysis in film genre discussions. Beyond the singularity of their particular landscape, historical moment, social order, and mythology, few other genres can be captured simply by an individual like John Wayne. (Regarding Westerns, though, I should acknowledge that even my attempt to compare apples to apples runs into problems. Firefly, both science-fiction and Western, blows my whole schema apart.) I’ll also include war movies here, even though they may fit better as a subject genre.

A final class of genre is aesthetic style, which concerns how the film is actually presented—its visual language, sound, editing, scale, medium, and formal conventions. Most of these features go unnoticed by viewers (or at least, beyond their capability to articulate), but occasionally some styles are so blatant that they become their own genre. Noir is marked by high-contrast lighting, deep shadows, stark compositions, and a distinctive visual atmosphere; epic by long runtimes, widescreen cinematography, large-scale staging, and visual spectacle; realism by naturalistic lighting, unobtrusive camerawork, and restrained editing; and musicals by choreographed movement, stylized staging, and the integration of song and dance into the film’s audiovisual form. (Animation, as a medium, may be an adjacent topic here.)

Let me return, here at the end, to that question of what makes something a good instance of its genre. If this is to be a different question than something being both good and also within a genre, I imagine there are at least two other ways we could think about it: how well a movie operates with the story tropes typical of that genre, and how well a movie accomplishes whatever is distinctive of that genre. In the former, we might recognize a slew of 1990s rom-coms (Sleepless in Seattle, While You Were Sleeping, You’ve Got Mail) that have the same story beats (the meet-cute, the misunderstanding, the last-minute breakup, the grand gesture), but that You’ve Got Mail is the best movie to follow that formula. In the latter, we would ask what is the essence of that genre—does it, as a comedy, make us laugh? And as a romance, does it portray the unfolding of a believable relationship? For my money, the latter is what makes a great rom-com. Is it really, genuinely funny? And, does it show real, genuine romance? Something may be a more representative romantic comedy, but that is not the same as being a great romantic comedy. A movie can faithfully reproduce the conventions of its genre and still fail to accomplish what those conventions are for. Ultimately, we may not be able to agree on which movie does that best, but hopefully we can all agree that Love Actually does it the worst.