A Highly Fluffy Bunny Movie Marathon

When I was a humble A-Level music student (about 150 years ago) I was asked to write an essay on a topic that still haunts me.

Can Beethoven's 'Eroica' Symphony be considered a work of "Romantic" music? Why or why not?

In the (many, many) decades that followed, hardly a day has gone by when I haven't thought about that essay topic. Not because I think it's a difficult question, and not even because I care so very deeply about the 'Eroica' Symphony (Beethoven is great, but give me Mozart or Brahms any day) but because I see this question as a microcosm of the current state of modern cultural discourse.

I'm serious.

Think about the implications of this essay question for a moment. In order to answer it, one first needs to establish what is meant by "Romantic Music". Then one needs to consider whether this particular symphony meets those parameters. Since "Romantic Music" is a very fuzzy term, this is necessarily a very subjective exercise.

In essence, the A-Level examination board was asking me if I thought the Eroica Symphony "identifies" as Romantic.

Who would have suspected that a Beethoven symphony would have been at the vanguard of what is now called Identity Politics?

I am well aware that modern culture doesn't actually spend an awful lot of time obsessing over the Identity Politics of the Eroica Symphony, but debates like these never seem to stop with Beethoven symphonies.

Nothing ever stops with Beethoven symphonies.

While you may not see too many heated arguments in your social media feed about the definition of Romantic Music, you probably will have seen some doozeys about some other hot-button terms. What about the definition of, say, Fascism? Or the definition of Genocide? How about the definition of Woman? Words like these are the front lines in a very ugly and violent culture war that is being waged all around us; a war in which even the humble pronoun has been deployed as a weapon. 

The Eroica Symphony is but a minor skirmish in this war, but that ancient essay question I was given all those years ago was basically asking me to do for Beethoven what so many culture warriors are now doing on a larger scale. To couch that essay in modern terminology, I was being asked what I thought the symphony's pronouns should be.

But why is it important to worry about that? More to the point, why should a symphony (or any other work of art) be defined by its pronouns? "Romantic Music" is a description, but it doesn't need to be an identity. An Eroica by any other name would sound as loud. Beethoven is still Beethoven, whichever box we put him in.

And by the way, who says that we need to put the "Eroica" in a box of any kind? Environmental groups are always telling us to cut down on packaging, so perhaps we should start right here. Beethoven certainly wasn't worried about how future generations might compartmentalise his symphony (trust me; he had other problems) and giving the work a "Romantic" label (or any other label, for that matter) has absolutely no impact on the music itself. We can call it Romantic, we can call it Classical, or we can call it the Fluffy Bunny Symphony if we really want to. The music will sound exactly the same. (I didn't actually use the term "Fluffy Bunny" in my A-Level essay, but now that I've got my degree, I can say anything I want.)

From Fluffy Bunny Symphonies to Fluffy Bunny Movies

Up to now I've been talking about Beethoven-in-a-box, but what about movies? Applying labels to films can be just as restricting as applying labels to music.

Genres such as Westerns or Thrillers or Rom-Coms sometimes become so formulaic that the terms resemble strait-jackets rather than simple descriptions. We expect these films to follow certain conventions, and film-makers will often respect those conventions; sometimes excessively so. Thus (for example) we don't expect a crime drama to behave like a musical, and when it does, the effect is often jarring and unexpected, as is often the case when conventions aren't followed.

The film series I have planned for the coming months is to be a celebration of Genres Without Borders, if you will. I want to showcase films that are not constrained by the usual conventions of their genres: Westerns that don't identify as Westerns (to use the modern terminology once again); Rom-Coms that are neither romantic nor comic; even horror movies that are... not about what you think they're about.

If I may borrow once again from modern parlance, these are all films that are

Some of the films I have chosen are "fluid" in rather straightforward ways. 

Some exist in the nether space between one genre and another. (Transgenre?)

A few might be surprisingly mainstream (at least at first glance!)...

Still others play with the structural conventions of film-making itself...

And a couple are just downright bonkers.

All of these films have one thing in common: they pull at the conventions of their genres, and avoid the "obvious" routes - some more dramatically than others. They demonstrate that Westerns, Rom-Coms, Noir Thrillers etc don't all have to be the same, and they don't always have to adhere to the familiar formulas. 

They show that all sorts of movies can be "Genre Fluid".

Our new film series will begin on Thursday, the 12th of September at the Victoria Park Baptist Church.

Please note that we will be meeting upstairs, in Screen One for the remainder of the year, so you will be able to arrive by the main entrance on Grove Road.

I look forward to seeing you there!