Promiscuous Genres

A recent article in the New York Times argues that the original Star Trek was not a true science-fiction show, but rather a pastiche of old b-movie genres. Each episode would find the Enterprise parked in orbit around a different planet, whose landscape consisted of old genre movie sets and props left on the studio lot, representing a different genre: the gladiator-movie planet, the detective-movie planet, the gangster-movie planet. Science fiction, however, has always been a promiscuous genre. Let me explain what I mean: All genres are friendly, but some genres are a little friendlier than others. They like to mingle, to the extent that one rarely finds them alone. This is not a new phenomenon; nor did Star Trek, as the argument goes, really represent a new height in cultural literacy. It is as old as epic. The hero of Virgil’s Aeneid, the great epic poem of the Roman empire, sails his ship from one classical genre to the next, tragedy in Carthage, a paean to athletics in Sicily, pastoral in Italy, cosmological poetry in the underworld, and finally martial epic a la the Iliad. In both cases, it is the romantic element that allows for this quick change of scenery and genre, the episodic structure of the journey from one island world to the next. Aeneas and his crew sail on the wine-dark sea; the crew of the Enterprise through the darkness of space. Star Trek has old b-movies; the Aeneid the poetry of the ancient world.

Science fiction always asks a question in the form, “what if…?” What if the machines we create to help us start thinking for themselves? What if we make contact with an alien race somewhere among the stars? A sub-genre of science fiction is the spaceship adventure, which always asks the same question: “what if we could fly not only to the other planets in our solar system but to the stars themselves?” Like the naval dramas of Joseph Conrad or more recently (and less remarkably) Patrick O’Brian, these stories are about a microcosmic hierarchical society under pressure, surrounded by a vast and dangerous void, hopping from one outpost of civilization to the next. The vastness of space, though, can be not only the vastness of the ocean, but the broad vista of an open landscape as well. Joss Whedon, in his short-lived sci-fi series Firefly, turned space into the wide-open plains of the American West. The planets in Firefly did not each represent a different genre; they were each aspects of the same genre, the western. The crew of Serenity would rustle cattle, rob trains, and get into bar fights and shootouts, while sticking primarily to what they called the “frontier-planets.” Space, though, is also, as we know, where no one can hear you scream. The closed world of the spaceship, as Alien proved, is thus also the perfect setting for a horror film. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. The best you can hope for is to jettison a nasty creature out the air lock.

Perhaps the most promiscuous of genres, though, is the medical drama. As the setting of the spaceship as the bridge between different worlds is at the heart of the spaceship adventure, so the hospital (or its rough equivalent) as the segregated zone in the modern world where life and death decisions are made is at the heart of the medical drama. ER is the baseline, the medical drama as pure and simple as it gets, but there have also been medical dramedies (Gray’s Anatomy), sitcoms (Scrubs), soap operas (General Hospital), detective shows (House)—even a medical western (Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, anyone?).

Maybe if these genres are so successful at getting along, it is because they are relatively low-maintenance. At the heart of every genre is a specific philosophical concern, a dilemma that the culture that produced it is working out. The medical drama gets its particular charge from the ethical questions surrounding the life and death decision. Is it right to sacrifice one life for another? How much risk is acceptable in the attempt to save a person’s life? How do we escort people out of this world and how do we usher them in? For science fiction, the question is primarily historical rather than ethical, a concern with the unpredictable effects of technological progress. Will our technology outstrip our ability to control it? Will it be a tool for peace and equality or a weapon for domination and war? Will it do more harm to our world than good? Will it lead us into dangers we can hardly imagine? To raise these issues, though, demands relatively little in terms of character and plot. The setting, a spaceship or a hospital (or a space hospital—wouldn’t that be cool?), does most of the work.

Think, by contrast, of a not-so-promiscuous genre enjoying an immense amount of popularity these days: the police procedural. All police procedurals are essentially the same. The cops may change along with the high-tech methods they employ but the story stays the same: each episode a crime is solved. This never varies and the plot very rarely ventures into the territory of other genres. If science fiction and the medical drama are consummate flirts, the procedural is the confirmed bachelor. The problem is, it demands too much: a crime scene (preferably with a body) and a bunch of detectives. These are things that can only exist in the modern city. The procedural thrives on its anonymity-- only the city serves up fresh bodies with fresh secrets on a daily basis. It cannot be penned in, say in a hospital or any other confined setting-- it needs its dark alleys and blind corners, the places where the systems of surveillance and control break down. On the other hand, it cannot survive in the vast emptiness of space (not enough bodies), nor in the wide open spaces of the western. The zone between lawlessness and civilization, between order and chaos is where the “wild” in “wild west” comes from. The crime scene investigators would get bushwhacked before they could pull out their white gloves. The big exception to this rule that procedurals do not mix might be Law & Order, which is a police procedural plus legal drama; but, even though there is always interaction between the detectives and the lawyers in the show, its two halves tend to separate out, like oil and water. It is not a mixed genre show, but a show in which two genres share a single hour uneasily.

It’s a good thing, then, that we like this genre so much. Currently there are more murders on TV in a year than there are in many major American cities. And that’s saying something.