These days I’m watching , a series that interests me, among other things, because it has something unclassifiable and unexpected twists. If we had to define it, we could say that it is a dystopian futuristic western with elements of adventure, gore and parody. One hundred years ago, the studies systematized the norms of the genres, and we still drink from that ten. Comedy, Western, Sci-Fi, Drama, Porn; each genre had a specific range of archetypal characters, star settings, a type of photography, even a favorite shot. But the truth is that all this is useless today. For some time I have realized that the labels that classify audiovisual content are of no use to me. In order to overcome the obstacle of the uselessness of the classifications we handle, nichelization has become fashionable: for example, within horror we distinguish between slashers, paranormal, monsters, gore, zombies, psychological, survival, classic horror, comedy horror, etc. The atomization of genres is a bit scary; this is also happening in literature, and it disturbs me, for example, this flood of novels about bookshops, which has been followed by the flood of novels about cats. What worries me is detecting that readers seek repetition in a very unstimulating (and pathological?) way. Both repetition and the desire to classify exhaustively feed on the same obsession: control.
The – something good had to have – has led us to break the genres and jump over the barriers that separated them, although there continues to be a more or less strict genre offer. The hybridization of genres has to do, in part, with the maturity of the audience. Content that respects gender boundaries in a way that is neither ironic nor self-aware satisfies that same kind of childlike longing that pushes creatures to ask for the same tale over and over again: the motto is worth more crazy known than wise to know; that is, it makes them feel safe. Yes, the framework of the genres served to know what to expect from a film and not have surprises. The mature audience, however, gets bored (or should get bored) if they are always told the same thing. If he doesn’t get bored, it’s because he looks for audiovisuals as a way to disconnect from the world and himself, which saves him from having to think a lot; the repetition is the reflection of a stupefying consumption, which I would say is the very opposite of what should define culture. In contrast, hybrid genres require the viewer to be more awake and satisfy a different kind of gratification circuit. Not being able to predict what will happen in a movie is closer to contemporary life, which in the last decade has become terrifyingly unpredictable. There are those who say that dreams are a mental mechanism to train us for real life; maybe the consumption of fiction is also that, a training for life, and hence the chaotic mix of genres is more interesting, because life is at the same time a drama, a comedy, an adventure and a love story, with some porn scenes and too few superheroes. And it also occasionally has touches of gore, survival, zombie horror.
