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I feel that people often praise movies that call out or subvert expectations of their genre solely because they do that, even if execution of the subversion itself is not good.

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"Subversion" is what technically accomplished but deeply uncreative people do. As an act of artistic creation, it is by definition reliant on the creative exercise of countless other artists. The trope must be subverted, but a "trope" is nothing more than a whole lot of individual creative decisions that converged in some sense.

It is witless rebellion for its own sake, and as such, we can look forward to hearing a lot more about it for the next millenium.

I'm more inclined to think that subversion can be done well or poorly, like much else. Parody and pastiche seem like natural subcategories of subversion, and those require considerable creativity to execute well. I find less value in the more purely iconoclastic approaches to subversion, though.

Well or poorly for sure, but even at its heights, subversion can never reach greatness. It is only by "subverting" some better work that it exists, after all. Subversion is to story as impressions are to comedy.

I'd argue many of the great enduring works are subversive. The Christian gospels are extremely subversive works in many ways. Everyone thinks Jesus is marching into Jerusalem to take the throne as "king of the Jews," but his real purpose there is to be tortured to death like a common criminal. "The last shall be first, and the first shall be last." The gospels are loaded with stuff subverting the religious and cultural expectations of the time and place.

I think my argument stands. The gospels aren't exactly great literature.

2000 years worth of history would appear to disagree.

Meh, Fifty Shades of Gray outsold The Fall by a factor of seventy. I'll stand by my judgement.

Except we're not talking about Camus, we're talking about the Bible.

Icons are a prerequisite for iconoclasm. Once the great idols of gods are torn down, the statues of great men are next, and then the statues of ordinary men. When only the memory of statues remain, they must rail against and try to tear down memories too, to remain iconoclasts.