Ave, Charles!

Charles writes an interesting essay on the tyranny of genre.  People get into fights all the time over genre, taxonomy, classification, or however else you want to describe the parsing of phenomena.  Look at my tussle with my buddy Mike and my brother Sean over the term "grilled cheese."  As Charles notes, it's the edge cases that can be troublesome; Robert Pirsig, the author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, called this the "platypus problem."  

When I'm wearing my film-critic hat, I occasionally encounter movies that seem to straddle genres; this is sometimes a pleasant experience and sometimes an unpleasant one for reasons that Charles notes in his essay.  I may have observed, long ago, that certain Korean movies vary wildly in tone and genre; "YMCA Yagu Danji," a dramedy about the introduction of baseball to occupied Korea, is one such film—first comic, then tragic as the story's focus moves from the tentative beginnings of Korean baseball to the larger context of the Japanese occupation.  The shift in tone is jarring for those expecting the story to be comic until the end.  The American superhero film "Hancock," starring Will Smith, undergoes a similar shift in tone and genre (two concepts that often seem linked in film and literature), starting off as a zany comedy, then becoming something much darker and more serious by the end.  A more recent example, among movies I've reviewed, is "The Hunt," which combines elements from the action, thriller, satire, comedy, and horror genres.  Platypi abound.

Anyway, give Charles's educational, edifying essay a read.  It might make you (or me) think twice before you (or I) facilely pigeonhole something in an effort to make sense of it.