The Unified Theory of Genre: What It Is, How to Use It

What is the Unified Theory of Genre?

Albert Einstein tried (and failed) to create a unified theory of gravity and electromagnetism and, while I’ve taken a look at the math, it goes completely over my head. But I like that guy’s thinking and he sparked inspiration in me once I started teaching a screenwriting workshop at Fordham University focusing on science fiction, horror and fantasy.

‍Writing The Genre Screenplay (FITV 3525) was a course that I built from the ground up and am extremely proud of. The thing about teaching is that it’s malleable—I’m constantly learning from my own students. It was during the second semester I’d taught the course when we collectively came up with a unified theory that ties all three of these expressive genres together.  

In her essay “Science Fiction and Mrs. Brown” the preeminent Grandmother of Sci Fi, Ursula K. LeGuin, espouses on the power of genre when discussing Phillip K Dick’s The Man In The High Castle alongside D.G. Compton’s Synthajoy:

“[These novels] express something the authors wanted urgently to say as clearly as possible. Something about human beings under stress, under peculiarly modern forms of moral pressure.

If the authors wanted to speak clearly why didn’t they write an essay, a documentary, a philosophical or psychological study?

They write science fiction, I imagine, because what they have to say is best said using the tools of science fiction, and the craftsman knows his tools.”

Easy enough to sub in horror or fantasy into this example as well. Genre writers tend to have tools at their disposal through which reality is filtered in a uniquely prismatic way. But what exactly is the unifying psychological underpinning that links these instruments?

Let's Start With Horror

I often encounter people who say to me: “I don’t like horror, I don’t like being scared.” There are even folks out there who claim to never have seen a horror film due to said aversion to fear. The jump scares. The gore. The death. All of these elements that make up a great horror storyteller’s toolkit are the very things that give people pause when watching or reading horror content.

I often ask a follow up question: “Do you like roller coasters?” While I haven’t applied good survey skills here, the answer is usually commensurate with their opinion on watching horror films—never. Hate roller coasters. They make me anxious.

Ah ha! I glommed onto this word anxiety. 

Looking up at a rollercoaster, hearing the screams of the riders as they speed overhead, of course induces fear—much like watching the trailer to a scary movie does. Then I strap in, ride the ride (all the while screaming my head off) and it’s over. I get off and, lo and behold, I’ve survived to tell the tale. It’s this closeness to the idea of death, the whiff of it, that snaps things into perspective for me. After riding, I can look back up at the coaster and say: “I survived that. And it was fun! Let’s do it again!”

We all experience anxiety and I know I spend a lot of effort avoiding it, or tuning it out. So I understand if choosing a rom-com on Netflix or a nonfiction book for your beach read feels safe… (akin to skipping the ride for the teacups or log flume) but I wanted to dig a little deeper into this idea of anxiety in horror. 

Stephen King once said: “We make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones.” And that coping has, generationally speaking, compensated for the anxieties of the times. This is well documented in academic literature on horror fiction and cinema: Mary Shelly explored her anxiety of the Romantic era's disjunction between nature and artifice in Frankenstein; Toho Studios unleashed Godzilla on the world from fear of nuclear fallout, Howard Hawks produced The Thing in 1951 as a response to the world’s anxiety about the cold war, 80s slasher films like Friday the 13th emerged as a response to Reagan-era puritanism… well, the list goes on.

My point being that horror has always been a way to express our current fears through metaphor. And we, the audience, inevitably survives the experience better off. Perhaps we even tell our friends to go see it, too. 

Applying The Theory to Sci-Fi and Fantasy

If we apply this theory to the science fiction and fantasy genres it becomes clear that they examine similar anxieties—albeit, those of the future and of the past, respectively. The two genres almost operate as opposite sides of the same coin. One of the films I teach every semester is Alex Garland’s masterful near-future thriller, Ex Machina.

‍The film is about a young engineer who’s invited to participate in a Turing Test, whereby he must determine whether a seductive female-presenting robot passes for human. The surprise of the script is that Garland actually invites his audience to participate in said Turing Test for an hour and forty five minutes and, considering all of the hand-wringing about modern artificial intelligence, the film flips those anxieties on their head.

Ava, the female-presenting robot, does not operate like a Terminator or the nefarious machines in The Matrix. Instead, she becomes sympathetic in the eyes of the audience and the magic of the film is that Garland rejects those aforementioned cliches, giving the film new meaning. Ava’s survival isn’t necessarily the beginning of the end for mankind. We can set our fears aside. 

The fantasy genre seems preoccupied with anxieties of the past. Our high watermark for fantasy is (and always will be) the story of Frodo and his journey to destroy the ring of power. Tolkein’s world is ancient and packed with detail—but it’s the underlying themes of his story that I’m interested in. The man himself illuminates such in a letter to Joanna De Bortadano, dated April, 1956:

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The real theme for me is about something much more permanent and difficult: Death and Immortality: the mystery of the love of the world in the hearts of a race 'doomed' to leave and seemingly love the world in the hearts of a race 'doomed' to leave and seemingly lose it; the anguish in the hearts of a race doomed not to leave it, until its whole evil-aroused story is complete.

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Tolkein is speaking about his elves (the race “doomed” to leave the world of Middle Earth and live on in immortality) versus the race of man and hobbits (the race “doomed” not to leave it). This reading of The Lord Of The Rings is in plain sight—death and immortality have fascinated man since time in memorial. It’s this anxiety precisely that endeavors Frodo on his quest to save everyone and everything he knows. And history has flung mortality in the face of man through countless wars, or the threat of war— genocides and horrors Tolkein himself bore witness to.

If history, writ large, is meant to contextualize and examine the anxiety of man’s fragility (read: mortality) then Tolkein was operating well within the limits of our unified theory.

Similar things can be said of the other fantasy cultural phenomenon, George. R. R. Martin’s never ending saga, A Song Of Fire And Ice. Ripped quite literally from The War of the Roses (1455-1485) the houses of Lancaster and York are transposed into the fictional houses of Lannister and Stark (with dragons thrown in for good measure). Martin’s fantasy world mirrors that of medieval Europe with a closeness that raised the hackles of many critics of the books and HBO series—particularly in its portrayal of violence toward women. If we examine the text through the lens of our unified theory, this is Martin’s point.

By depicting the violent ways of the past, Martin illuminates our cultural anxieties of repeating said violence, which he spelled out in an interview with Time magazine:

“To be non-sexist, does that mean you need to portray an egalitarian society? … That’s not in our history; it’s something for science fiction. And 21st century America isn’t egalitarian, either… Rape, unfortunately, is still a part of war today.”

So what do we make of the importance of these three genres? How does examining the anxieties of past, present and future help us at all? To me, this is the purpose of storytelling. The “tools” of genre craftspeople like Tolkein, Le Guin, Martin and Garland allow us to wrap meaningful stories in entertaining allegory. I suppose you could tell the story of someone on a journey to defeat evil that’s grounded in reality, but the depth and meaning found in a world populated by trolls, ents and dragons allows for Tolkein to dive that much deeper (and, in my mind, is that much more entertaining).

But to be more specific: the roller coaster is meant to make us afraid, then blow our hair back, all in the service of proving to us that we can, we do, we will survive these collective anxieties.   

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SIDEBAR: 

Apply this unified theory to the Star Wars franchise, which is often (mis)categorized as science fiction, and some interesting revelations emerge. Star Wars is fantasy set in space—not simply due to the mythical “force” or the corollary of lightsabers to fencing swords or the simple fact that none of the technology in the Star Wars universe is ever explored or explained—but mostly because the concerns of those films is not the anxiety of a future yet to come, but an anxiety of repeating the mistakes of the past, a dream of rebellion against fascism (the Empire).

Frank Herbert’s Dune also falls into this space fantasy category, as do a few others… Star Trek, on the other hand, remains an example of hard science fiction. I hope by now it’s become clear that I enjoy the effort of categorizing my works of fiction!  

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