If Life Is A Movie, Then Where the Hell Is My Agent?

Over the years of working with film genres, I’ve often run into the comment that “the best movies transcend the concept of genre.” In other words, the best films are better than all that formulaic nonsense. The comments usually come from people in the arts who place great importance or originality and therefore dress like nobody else. Mind you, in dressing like nobody else, they distinguish themselves from people in uniforms and office attire. You could argue that their love of originality helps them identify with each other and bond – that is, until they have to work together on a local production of Les Miserables and can’t agree on anything. That tempestuousness is another of their common traits.

One of my favorite films that plays with its genre is Scream. The film milks the audience’s knowledge of horror conventions and openly refers to those conventions even while it both breaks and reinforces them in the story. But the film also has one of my all time favorite lines. It’s the main character’s boyfriend’s response when she says that sometimes her life feels like a horror movie. He says, “Life is like a movie. You just can't pick your genre." First of all, dump any guy whose best attempt at reassurance is a perverse kind of fatalism. Second of all, the idea that life is a movie should offend many people, and that your life in particular is only one genre is preposterous.

But look closely at your life. Do we truly transcend the expectations that people have of us? Do we see ourselves as fully individual and unique? We certainly don’t see others that way. Despite movies like The Breakfast Club, don’t we all still tend to put the people around us into categories? Life goes on after high school for each of us and yet we can sum up people around us with one line (“Doesn’t anybody teach you people how to drive?”) or even one word (“Asshole!).

The truth is that most of us are proficient at putting people into categories, including ourselves. It’s the kind of thing Walter Truett Anderson discusses in his book, The Future of the Self: “We love anything that reduces the burden of complexity. We love labels of race, gender, and nationality; movies of good guys bashing bad guys; songs of undying love; stories in which people are propelled through life by a single motive.” (p.164) I mean, since he’s mentioned people propelled through life by a single motive, let’s consider someone like George W. Bush, and possibly even Alberta Premier, Ralph Klein. These are politicians whose success rests on their persona as ‘gold ol’ boys.’ We know the type right away. They emanate common sense (remember Klein’s Common Sense Revolution?) and do-it-yourself stick-to-itiveness. The Democrats keep losing because they’ve been cast as dull elitist eggheads. It’s not a policy problem – take it up with central casting.

We can be stereotyped based on gender or even subgenres within our gender (the jock, the dumb blonde, the geek, the corporate slut). Or it could be our professions (what’s the first animal that comes to mind when you think of lawyers?), our lifestyles, our class, what part of the country we’re from, whether we’re married or single, etc.

And it’s not easy crossing genres. It’s not easy, for example, working in the fields of education and media simultaneously. The priorities, expectations and values of university professors and television producers and executives are very different. By working in television, I’ve lost some academic credibility and by working in academia I am a separate animal from my media colleagues.

But there are certainly examples where people have ‘crossed genres’ successfully – people who marry outside of their faith or cultural milieu, people who move to other countries, people who have multiple careers over their lifetimes, and even people who root for teams that aren’t from their city. It’s all about becoming more fully human – not rejecting the things about us that are ‘generic.’ We have very little control over what genre we belong to because the next person we meet will just put us in a category after a few minutes (or less) of conversation. But we can keep stretching ourselves – or maybe it’s more accurate to say that we can continue being more honest about the many selves inside us, “to look at wider vision of our humanity,” as Anderson argues later on.

At least I hope that kind of adaptive behaviour is possible because I’m getting tired being this serial dystopic dramedy with an increasingly smaller cast and so-so ratings. I’d like to be more of a philosophical action hero blowing up people’s expectations. I hope I get the part.