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SeekingBlood  2yr ago (text post)   3063 thread views

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.

(Spoilers for No Country For Old Men and A Cabin in the Woods)

Obviously, no one believes that literally all movies that call out or subvert tropes are good, but I feel that people often attribute positive points to movies solely for subverting expectations, even when the execution of those subversions are subpar.

One of the reasons I didn't like No Country For Old Men as much as many other people did was precisely because of this, although I would still consider it a good movie. The first half of the film is fantastic—it masterfully builds tension, has some incredible and intense battle scenes, and I like that, for the most part, the characters all make the smartest decisions they can; I could scarcely improve on any of them without the knowledge of hindsight, which is something uncommon in action movies (many movies often have an otherwise smart character acting unusually stupid to give another character a chance to take advantage).

I understand that the latter half of the movie is supposed to be a subversion of expectations and what would realistically happen to someone even as tough as Llewelyn in his situation—the protagonist dies off-screen to a group of unnamed cartel members without even facing the antagonist—but I believe that it is a lazy and unsatisfying ending to the protagonist we have built a connection to over the course of the movie, especially since his death was not even shown in the screen.

How good would the first few seasons of Game of Thrones have been if Tywin Lannister abruptly died of a disease in the beginning of Season 3, or if Jon Snow were killed by unnamed wildlings after he travels with the Night's Watch beyond the wall, as realistically someone in his position would be? How good would Breaking Bad have been if Walter White were killed by some random unnamed drug dealers in Season 2 of the show, as someone like Walt would realistically be in his position? Had there been a final showdown between Llewelyn and Anton where Llewelyn dies, with the rest of the movie playing out the exact same way it did, it would have had a satisfying conclusion while also being a subversion of the trope that the protagonist must always win; instead, I felt that it was just a cheap subversion for the sake of being a subversion.

Another highly rated movie that calls out common tropes in its genre would be A Cabin in the Woods, although it does so in a different manner to No Country For Old Men. The primary problem I have with this movie is that it is completely generic; I understand that it was intentionally made to be that way, but it is just not very interesting to watch what is essentially the most generic horror movie ever made for two-thirds of the film. I've heard people say it's creative in calling out the tropes in the genre, but I would say its method of criticizing tropes is perhaps the most uncreative way it could criticize the genre. The first two-thirds also have "comedic" scenes in a lab watching the main characters struggle which I felt utterly failed at making me laugh. The last one-third of the film didn't really have much a plot, and in all honestly wasn't very good either; at the end a character was literally just listing common tropes and saying that they must happen, which I thought was an even more uncreative way of calling out tropes. Despite being a pretty terrible movie in my opinion, it is rated 92% by critics on Rotten Tomatoes mostly for "subverting tropes of the horror genre."

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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.

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