[25 years ago this coming weekend, The Blair Witch Project was released in theaters. Blair is one of the most prominent and successful examples of a longstanding genre, the found footage story, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of such examples, leading up to a weekend post on what Blair can tell us a quarter-century later!]
On two
ways to contextualize a bestselling dystopian YA series.
I try
always to be honest with y’all, dear readers, and so I have to start this post
by noting that I have not yet had the chance to read Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff’s
Illuminae
(2015), nor its two sequels Gemina
(2016) and Obsidio
(2018). (My younger son is a huge fan of dystopian YA stories, so I promise we
will try to rectify this oversight ASAP.) In lieu of pretending to have more
knowledge about the book’s and series’ specifics than I do, I’ll ask you to learn
a bit more just as I did, through this Wikipedia entry, and
then come on back for some further AmericanStudying thoughts.
Welcome
back! Even if you don’t have the same level of expertise about YA dystopias
that being a Dad to an obsessed son has granted me, you’re likely aware that a
focus on both teenage protagonists generally (often, although not always, teenage
girl protagonists) and their teenage romances specifically is pretty ubiquitous
in the genre, and so the least surprising clause in that Wikipedia description is
likely “the collective story of teenage colonist Kady Grant and her boyfriend
Ezra Mason.” By 2015 those character types and tropes had already been so well established
that any author entering the genre would need to find a variation in order to
stand out from the Hunger Games and Divergents and Maze
Runners of the world, and it seems that Kaufman and Kristoff hit on found
footage as their twist, using (again quoting Wikipedia) “classified reports,
censored emails, camera transcriptions, and interviews” to fill in the story of
Kady and Ezra and their journey through a sci fi dystopian world.
To me the
most interesting clause in that particular Wikipedia sentence is actually the
final one, right after that list of found footage types: “all of which were
curated for a court case against the main antagonist company, BeiTech.” Another
prominent subgenre of dystopian stories features nefarious corporations and
their destructive effects on their worlds, with the Weyland-Yutani
corporation from the Alien franchise as a particularly clear case in
point. But I’m not familiar with any other cultural works that tell that story
through found footage that documents the corporation’s effects after the fact,
and certainly not one that creates such a logical rationale for the existence
of the found footage as evidence for a trial. As all of this week’s posts illustrate,
the question of how and why the audience has access to the found footage is a
consistent conundrum faced by the genre, and Kaufman and Kristoff found a
strikingly successful and elegant answer in their found footage trilogy.
Last found
footage studying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Other example of the genre you’d highlight?
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