To think in genre terms about films and other narratives is to think about overlapping inscriptions, conventions, and story paradigms. These overlaps cross-classify familiar textual cate-gories, potentially drawing on sources as diverse as those used in The Matrix, for instance: medieval Romance literature, a range of recognizable film genres, popular “shoot ’em up” video games, and even such contemporary cultural “texts” as Goth and grunge fashion. Thinking in genre terms involves recognizing how a particular genre film fits into a complex set of industrial, historical, and communicative exchanges between producers and consumers of genre fictions. To “read” a film in genre terms
is also to consider how audiences come to genre films with expectations based on their previous engagement with similar sorts of films. In the case of The Matrix, that might involve such things as fan recognition of Keanu Reeves from Speed (Jan de Bont, 1994) and Johnny Mnemonic (Robert Longo, 1995), fondness for films with futuristic settings—for instance Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982/1991)—where humanity is in crisis, and familiarity with such contemporary cultural mani-festations as comic-book narratives and computer games. To assess a film in genre terms is to see how the thematic mean-ings of various genres impact our understanding of the film in front of us. Perhaps the most important element for The Matrix is the audience’s familiarity with essentially inscrutable genre heroes—a tradition that ranges from the Western through to science fiction and which Keanu Reeves has virtually perfected in this film. If we approach the philosophical aspects of The Matrix by way of the question of genre, we find that most of what counts as “philosophical” is in fact already part of the film’s genre inheritance.
The broadest useful set of genre categories is wonderfully set out in Northrop Frye’s classic The Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays.2They are Tragedy, Romance, Comedy, and Irony/Satire.
The characteristics of these master genres are abstractions from a wide range of narratives. As abstractions, they track dominant narrative trajectories, focusing simultaneously on the intended relationship between protagonists and audience, and the over-all tone and teleology of the narrative. Tragedies concern pro-tagonists who are superior in skills and knowledge to the members of their audience. For this reason, according to a tra-dition that dates back to Aristotle, we admire the tragic hero or heroine, and respond with fear and pity at his or her downfall.
The Romance, as a master genre, is a quest story, an attempt to discover something as crucial as one’s identity or to save one’s society from a fallen existence if not certain doom. The protag-onist of Romance undergoes a series of trials, through the course of which his or her true character is fully revealed. Perhaps the hardest genre to understand as a master genre is Comedy, given
2Northrop Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957).
how easy it is to think that a comedy is just something funny, something that makes us laugh. The master genre of Comedy, by contrast, concerns the integration of an outsider figure into a community, and so involves the redemption of the qualities that initially marked the hero as “other.” The master genre of Irony/Satire identifies narratives where the audience is clearly in a superior position to the protagonist, and where we should expect criticism of dominant social institutions.
Considered in terms of master genres, The Matrix is unprob-lematically a Romance. It is a quest narrative, and like so many quest narratives it combines three classic themes: the discovery, initiation, and full self-realization of the true hero, the threat to the rightful community, and the eventual romantic union of the hero and heroine, which also symbolizes or at least signals the triumph of their community over the evil forces that had threat-ened it.
What The Matrix deliberately does not do is position itself easily into any single consensus genre or subgenre. Consensus genres are the ones we talk about most easily when identifying movies. Familiar examples include: detective films, action films, horror films, thrillers, science fiction, musicals, romantic come-dies, Westerns, swashbucklers, war films, biopics, teenpics, and many more. This is not to say that there is always a clear agree-ment in the critical literature about just how one demarcates genres. Some genre theorists emphasize shared conventions, iconographies, character types, and plotlines as the features that distinguish one genre from another. Others note that not all gen-res can actually be identified by, for instance, iconographies—
iconography works for the gangster film but not for the biopic.
Some genres get their names from the response they want to elicit from their audience—for instance, horror—while others get their names from the setting or location of their action, for example the Western, and still others get their names from their most striking devices as opposed to their iconography, for instance the musical. Other theorists, such as Linda Williams, have reconfigured consensus genres by linking melodrama, hor-ror, and pornography within the term “body genres” which she identifies by such categories as bodily excess, ecstasy, perver-sion, originary fantasy, and temporality of fantasy. For instance, Williams explains the bodily excess in horror films in terms of violence, while ecstasy is shown by ecstatic violence or by
blood.3 Williams’s notion of “body genres” cuts across consen-sus genre categories in ways that both draw upon our familiar knowledge of genres such as the horror film and, in the case of The Matrix, confront us with the innovative structuring of the threat posed to Neo, the stylized body movement in slow-motion action sequences, not to mention the final sequence where Neo’s control over the threat of bodily violence is a final confirmation of his true role as Romance hero.