Chapter 9 of Film Art by Bordwell and Thompson delves into the meaning behind the word “genre”. A section of the chapter that caught my eye was the part which discussed genre conventions. Though I did not realize until the reading, I, like many viewers of film, have become acutely dependent on conventions within film genres to form an initial perspective and expectations of a film. When we watched Gene Kelly’s 1952 Singin’ in the Rain, my experience with musicals and love stories, and the conventions they propagate, shaped my expectation for how the film would progress. Ironically, many of those conventions were introduced and popularized by Singin in the Rain, long before I saw it.

Generally, it is common for writers and directors to follow conventions of a genre, for a variety of reasons. The two primary ones are simply that it allows the audience to orient their expectations and that it allows the filmmaker a roadmap to follow. Westerns are known for their setting, gritty protagonists, and high action sequences, and the conventions of the genre allow both the filmmaker and audience to find common ground that can either be shifted or built upon, depending on the filmmakers intentions. As such, I always find it interesting when filmmakers break genre conventions, and I believe when it is done well that break from convention can be very interesting to watch.

A primary example that comes to mind for me is the ending of Damien Chazelle’s 2016 film, La La Land (warning… spoilers ahead). La La Land is a romance and a musical meant to invoke many of those emotions that Singin in the Rain and 1950s and 1960s Hollywood popularized so many decades ago. It follows many hallmarks of the genre. The two young, attractive, heterosexual leads have their meet-cute moments in and around Hollywood. Like in other films of these genres, such as When Harry met Sally, initially they have some animosity to one another. The outgoing, passionate male lead, in this case it’s Ryan Gosling’s character, Sebastian, playfully provokes the female lead and the tension between them builds. A perfect romance blossoms between them, and all seems well until tension and their respective careers separate them. Already this is a break of genre conventions, but for me the most shocking and memorable instance of that in La La Land is the infamous ending, where we see our two leads together for the last time and have to accept that this film will not end with another “Happily Ever After”. Instead, Emma Stone’s character, Mia must accept that she and Sebastian had their time but she sacrificed that life with him to pursue her career dreams. She met and fell in love with another man, with whom she had a child. Such a violation of genre convention works very well here, in my opinion. Damien Chazelle and his crew’s decision to end the film in this heart-breaking way gave it a dimension of complexity that would have otherwise been absent. Even in a world as perfect, colorful, and thoughtfully constructed as La La Land, despite the expectations of the audience that the filmmakers set up, everything is not perfect. The melancholic ending has made the film exponentially more memorable as time has passed, and it’s a fantastic example of purposeful usage of genre convention to set up expectations and then very intentionally break them.

La La Land is a brilliant film for many reasons. Its constant flirtation with the line defined by the genre it fits into is one of the aspects that make it memorable. Other films do this too, and in my eyes those films are always much more interesting to analyze, though again, that is just an opinion. Rango, for instance, is an animated Western that toys with the tropes of the Hero’s Journey. It held the setting conventions of Western’s, but rather than an invincible and incredibly masculine protagonist, the proper and sheltered Rango was thrust into a world where he had to find his way or die trying, a new type of protagonist not typical in Westerns. Often these films also set new conventions, or subgenres. The raunchy and gratuitous comedy of Deadpool was the catalyst for a plethora of mature superhero films and series like the 2021 installment of The Suicide Squade and Amazon Prime’s The Boys. In my eyes, genre is a bubble, not a box, and I am curious to know how you feel about genre and subgenre conventions, and I am curious to know how you react to them being broken. What emotions are evoked? Can you think of some other examples besides the few I have listed? Can you think of an instance where a break of convention became the new norm?