Henry Jenkins's Blog

The Ludo-Centric Transmedia DreamPreaching to the Converted

Transmedia storytelling techniques, for me, are poetic devices on a storyworld scale. As poetry stacks images to create invisible meaning, transmedia stacks media to create invisible worlds with equally rapturous effect. Metapoetry. And since mainstream audiences are more naturally fluent in media than poetry, they are often more deeply moved by a well-executed transmedia moment than by a beautifully crafted line of verse.

Sometimes that poetry is an epic: The Dark Knight’s Why So Serious? campaign briefly made Gotham feel like a place we inhabited rather than a film we watched. At other times, the poetry is confessional (quieter, more intimate) like the way players carried the emotional reality of Telltale’s The Walking Dead or Life Is Strange with them, long after play, into reaction videos, playlists, and personal paratexts.

There’s little better a brand can do for itself than to delight across modes. But just as bad poetry is painfully bad, botched transmedia can land like a rotten egg. This seems especially true for video game fandoms. Both the transmedia devotee and the gamer in me both want to see a truly integrated game-anchored transmedia experience thrive. It’s my ludo-centric transmedia fantasy, and it remains stubbornly elusive.

The years that I spent chasing that dream as Story Architect inside an ambitious transmedia universe gave me an insider’s perspective on the challenge and left me chasing productive questions. Where in the lifecycle does transmedia belong? Can the world, the audience, and business realities collaborate from the start instead of colliding into each other at the end? Can game studios retrofit their worldbuilding pipelines to compose something like “poetry at the scale of a universe?”

What I did not anticipate was that processing my experiences through these kinds of questions would result in the development of my own creative pipeline. The WAG Pipeline proposes we treat transmedia not as marketing or extension but as R&D and early audience formation. Instead of guessing at what a future audience might want, we can let the signals emerge until they reach a point where the audience is asking for a game. Alongside this organic emergence, we deliver a worthwhile transmedia journey to encourage their participation. The result is a risk smart, audience backed, transmedia-primed pipeline for developing new game-ready IP.

Before we get into the model, I want to share the lived context that shaped it, so those of you working in transmedia can see the industry mechanics behind my ideas.

 

FIGURE 1: The major products of the Unknown 9 story world. Source: Bandai-Namco

Potential: UnknownGold in a Collapsed Transmedia Mine

When I joined Reflector Entertainment as Story Architect on Unknown 9, the mission was to build an entire story universe at once. It was bold and exciting. A major video game was in development and would serve as the revenue engine for the IP.

We wanted to create a transmedia world that truly affected audiences, one that sparked wonder and curiosity and inspired people to explore every corner. We dreamed of mysteries that would unfold over years and of communities that would form around them. We wanted a kind of narrative alchemy where each medium amplified the others. A podcast that somehow sounded like the comic book. A comic that somehow looked like the novel. Paratexts that mattered. Mind-bending metapoetry, touchpoints interlocking with touchpoints, media stacked on media, invisible worlds made manifest in the mind’s eye. Our ambitions were sincere and our vision was big. Transmedia would be our key to unlock these rarefied experiences.

When our teaser trailer launched, a few YouTubers reacted with genuine excitement. They discovered the wider transmedia plans and started searching for more details. Watching how curiosity pulled them from one medium to another was intoxicating. It felt like a glimpse of what transmedia could really do when everything clicked.

FIGURE 2: One of many YouTuber reaction. - Source: https://youtu.be/ibUajMnf6wE?si=t82MHFiAlt9I7uow

So, we set out to build a slate of interconnected storyworld products. Enough to sustain a year or more of releases that would grow an audience ahead of the game. The idea was to allow for organic discovery, community formation, brand evangelism, earned media, and a rising sense of anticipation. And, in some cases, it worked. A small but passionate community rallied around our first two ARGs.

The narrative design of the game anticipated all of this. Secret histories and recurring character origins were meant to pay off therein. Powers that had only been whispered about would be experienced directly by the player. Disparate narrative threads would converge to create material for the next story cycle.

In my opinion, video games are uniquely powerful not as first touchpoints, but as arrivals. Within a transmedia ecosystem, they function less as invitations and more as destinations. After reading, listening, speculating, and imagining, players would finally arrive inside the world and perform it themselves. They would now be doing everything they had heard and read about. Accumulated meaning collapses into presence. This is not a romantic notion; it is a structural strength of the medium. Games are the most immersive form of storytelling we have, and that immersion compounds when it is earned.

But business realities can shift. Instead of letting transmedia blaze the trail for the new IP, the ancillary content was reframed as a tool to extend the sales window of the game.

Reflector’s transmedia journey is complicated, and one day it will hopefully be told in detail because it contains lessons that could help creators everywhere. What became clear is that there was no established playbook for launching a whole transmedia universe whose commercial prospects were tied almost entirely to a AAA or AA game. Not even for Reflector’s parent company, Bandai Namco, who have a long history of successful franchises with cross media elements.

Along the way, online discourse around the game soured for reasons not entirely related to the actual content of the game, making the job of marketing it all the more complicated.

FIGURE 3: Key Art for Unknown 9: Awakening. Source: Bandai-Namco

The result is well known. Unknown 9: Awakening did not perform commercially and the IP, including the transmedia initiative, was shut down.

The cancellation felt like an existential crisis for me as a creator. I believed, and still believe, that transmedia can produce sublime outcomes, yet five years of my work had failed to move the needle in any measurable commercial sense.

And yet those signals were impossible to deny. Curious YouTubers pulling at loose narrative threads. Community members literally DM-ing me to tell me how much the project means to them. Tiny sparks that couldn’t be ignored.

What became clear to me wasn’t that transmedia had failed, or that the industry was somehow doing it “wrong.” The constraints are real. Most new IP fails. Games are extraordinarily expensive and increasingly risky to produce. Development pipelines are built around technology, iteration, and mechanics, not story worlds already in motion. Under those conditions, transmedia almost inevitably arrives at a late stage, once the shape of the game is already locked.

At the same time, the audience signals I’d seen were real. When transmedia works, it doesn’t just market a world. It changes how people relate to it. And when a game finally arrives after that kind of buildup, its immersion is amplified, not diluted.

The problem, then, wasn’t ideological. It was temporal. Worlds, audiences, and business decisions were all being asked to carry too much weight, too late in the process.

The WAG Pipeline is my attempt to reorganize that timing. It is a way of letting worlds, audiences, and business realities shape each other early enough that none of them must carry the full burden alone.

 

Introducing the WAG Pipeline

The WAG Pipeline is a progressive model that builds a World, then an Audience, and finally a Game. W-A-G. It borrows from the best habits of transmedia storytelling, like iteration, modularity, and community testing, and applies them to IP incubation.

Just as importantly, WAG treats community not as an emergent side effect of success, but as a system that is intentionally cultivated, observed, and shaped over time. Audience formation is not something that happens after the work is done. It is part of the work.

Before I outline the model itself, a note on scope. What follows is not a turnkey playbook or a fully costed production plan. It is a framework for thinking differently about how new IP is developed, tested, and ultimately greenlit. The specifics of staffing, budgeting, studio structure, and audience cultivation will necessarily vary from company to company. Those details matter enormously, but they are also contextual by design. My aim here is to describe a pipeline that reframes risk and timing, and to show where transmedia techniques can do their most meaningful work.

Phase 1: Strategic Framing and IP FunnelDefine the business opportunity and generate some viable candidate worlds

Everything starts with a clear sense of opportunity. It’s incumbent upon studio leadership to assemble a strategic brief that will motivate ideation. Phase 1 is not about narrative inspiration alone. It is about aligning creative exploration with real studio context.

This brief may include:

A genre gap the studio believes is underserved.

An audience segment the studio wants to reach but has not yet unlocked.

A portfolio need, such as live service potential, systemic replayability, or evergreen IP.

Existing strengths, such as patented mechanics, proprietary tools, or deep expertise in a particular design space.

Games are built on technology stacks, not story bibles. That reality does not disappear in WAG. Phase 1 is where it is acknowledged explicitly. The goal is not to build a world in a vacuum, but to explore worlds that could plausibly express themselves through the studio’s strengths.

From there, a small creative team develops a handful of original IP concepts. These are not fully fledged franchises. They are storyworld prototypes. Rough, directional, but promising.

Each IP concept includes a few key elements:

A short world bible describing setting, tone, and themes.

Pitches for a few story products suited to low-cost experimentation.

A game concept pitch outlining genre, player fantasy, and how the game would express the world.

A high-level scan of the market opportunity.

These concepts are evaluated not just on creative appeal, but also by their alignment with the strategic brief and with the studio itself. If the studio is known for its gory horror titles and the world pitched points to a game that is a sparkly marshmallow of an idle clicker, then toss that fish back. Discovering a mismatch between studio identity and proposed experience is a feature of the funnel, not a bug.

This phase benefits from a specific creative profile. Not just auteurs, though they matter deeply, but builders who thrive under constraints. Creators who do their best work with a team, a clock, and a clear objective. Structured development sprints tend to unlock that mode of creativity, and WAG is designed to take advantage of it.

Producers should be on the lookout for talent that can bring the right kind of following. You’ll get a lot more mileage out of whatever your crack creative team comes up with if they are collaborating with, for instance, a social media savvy actor-writer who is known for their work in that genre; genuine engagement with their existing community will be invaluable in the early phases. Their involvement must be genuine and substantial, however.

Acquiring the rights to an independently created project and supporting the original creator can be an alternative to developing an IP from scratch. Challenges can include finding a creator who wants to work within this framework, finding alignment between the existing IP and the initiative’s strategic brief. The upside is an accelerated path to audience building.

There are a ton of other creative strategies out there to help fuel this phase, and some signposts that can help point teams in the right direction. My humble blog post, “7 Critical Worldbuilding Principles for Transmedia-Ready IP,” can offer some guidance.

At this point, the studio has a small portfolio of possible worlds, each designed to respond to the Motivating Insight in a different way. Decision makers can decide which of these to pass to the next phase.

Phase 2: Initial Story ProductFlesh out your selected world(s) and launch them in low-risk formats.

Each chosen IP now gets one small, affordable, self-contained story product: a short podcast, a webcomic, an interactive vignette, a visual novella. The goal is not to announce a transmedia universe. The goal is to give the world its first breath of air and see how it moves.

In fact, resist calling it a “transmedia universe”. That often sounds like a pitch rather than a story. Let the work stand on its own. It is much more compelling if later cross media pieces feel like they emerged because the audience wanted more, not because a validated marketing plan required them.

Phase 2 is about creating the conditions for early community formation. Not scale, not hype, but the beginnings of a shared space where curiosity can turn into conversation. Comments, replies, duets, fan theories, and even confusion are all signals that people are not just consuming the work but relating to it together.

This first product must be satisfying even if no other piece ever appears. But it also functions as your test balloon. Does the tone land? Do people finish it, share it, ask questions, or make fan art? Which elements spark curiosity?

Everything in Phase 2 lives on platforms with no barriers to entry. Those with native affordances for interaction and remixing are even better. I want the world to meet people where they already spend time, and where they can talk back, speculate, and respond to one another.

FIGURE 4: Caption: Web Toon is a major force in IP incubation - Source: Web Toon

That means short videos, lightweight podcasts, web fiction, Webtoons style comics, and social channels where characters or lore can take on a life of their own. The point is to speak the native language of each platform. A chaotic TikTok character will not behave the same way in a comic panel or an audio log, and that tension is useful. Each platform becomes a small experiment that shows us what audiences notice and what they want more of.

There is a lot of comparable IP incubation happening in the webtoon space. A comic that gains momentum on a UGC platform arrives with a built in fanbase, a known tone, and genuine proof of concept. Platform owners then adapt the strongest performers into animation, print, and other media. They grow the audience first, expand second, following the same logic as Phase 2. It’s a great system, providing you own a massively popular UGC platform… For everyone else, there’s WAG. 

The goal here is to gather real signals: analytics, comments, shares, Discord chatter, fan creativity. Because the investment is small, you learn quickly without taking on major risk.

This phase also surfaces internal signals. Do people inside the studio feel excited about the world? Are developers seeing game potential? Genuine internal enthusiasm is a data point too.

After a few months, the team looks at everything. If the audience response is strong and the internal energy is real, the project earns its second greenlight.

Phase 3: Second Story Product and Community ExpansionA cross-media touchpoint sparks big IP momentum

The worlds that show real promise move into Phase 3. Here, the team builds a second story product in a different medium. If the first product was a webcomic, maybe this one is an audio drama. (Ideally, the world transparently incorporates community feedback.) This is more than just cross-platform distribution: it’s the introduction of transmedia magic. The first execution of a poetic device on a story world-scale.

You needn't design a dramatic twist or a universe-shaking revelation. Just experiencing that visual world in an audiomode is a jolt that only transmedia can produce and can ignite the audience’s imagination. This little webcomic I love became a podcast… What else could it become?

By Phase 3, community is no longer incidental. It is a core system of the IP. At this point, a dedicated community manager becomes essential, not as a marketer, but as a listener, translator, and steward of the relationship between audience and world. Audience cultivation requires intentional design and has established techniques, though their discussion is outside the scope of this article. Most mid to large studios already have strong community teams, so seconding someone into this phase may be feasible.

Merch signals are also important here. Too many IPs introduce merchandise too late and without sensitivity to what fans care about. Ideally, Phase 1’s worldbuilding included props, symbols, and costumes with real personality. Now the community manager watches closely. What iconography gets fans excited? What designs do internal devs want to wear? (Developers are reliably honest merch test subjects!)

Nothing in Phase 3 should feel like marketing. It is exploration, not exploitation. The audience should feel like they are interacting with something alive, not being shepherded toward a product page. When they start asking for more, that demand becomes the fuel that propels the world into Phase 4.

Phase 4: Evaluate Signals and Greenlight the GameExperimentation Gives Way to Commitment.

After two or more story products, the team can finally evaluate the world with real clarity. Phase 4 is where the experiment becomes a decision. The studio reviews a spectrum of signals, checking not just whether people are consuming the content, but whether they’re investing:

Are fans creating art, fic, memes, or discourse?

Are they crossing from one medium to another unprompted?

Are audience numbers rising, or is enthusiasm deepening?

Are internal teams still energized by the world and eager to build within it?

Importantly, these signals are not treated as vanity metrics. They are inputs into a decision-making process. We are not greenlighting based on vibes. Community behavior becomes part of how the studio evaluates viability, alongside financial modeling and production realities.

Sometimes, the smart choice is not to greenlight. That is not failure. It is the model working as intended. A negative signal here is a cheap signal compared to discovering it after millions have been sunk into a full-scale game.

Even when a world doesn’t earn a game greenlight, the work isn’t lost. By this point the studio has created a small but valuable transmedia asset with real audience traction. That can potentially be monetized through licensing, outsourced adaptations, low-cost standalone products, UGC-enabled asset releases that let the fan community build momentum on their own or simply vaulted for future development. In the WAG model, even a “no” is a productive outcome. The process returns value either way.

But when the answer is yes, the picture changes. Now the studio can greenlight the game with confidence grounded in behavior, not hope. The world has demonstrated tone, audience viability, cross-platform elasticity, and internal creative heat. Instead of betting everything on a single untested idea, the studio has cultivated several and can now invest deeply in the one that has clearly taken root.

This is the pivot point of the pipeline. Experimentation gives way to commitment, and the chosen world moves into full production supported by data, community energy, and creative momentum.

A natural question at this point is: how long do we let this build before a greenlight? The honest answer is that the WAG Pipeline doesn’t fix a timeline in advance, because time is not the thing being optimized. Instead, time is allowed to stretch until specific signals emerge: sustained audience curiosity, repeat engagement, and a clear pull toward a more expensive form, often a game. In this model, the timeline isn’t decided upfront; it reveals itself through the behavior of the world and its audience.

This represents a cultural shift for game studios, and one of several required for the model to take root. Transmedia universes are, almost by definition, slow builds. Meaning compounds over time rather than arriving all at once. Traditional marketing attempts to compress that process by spending heavily, effectively buying speed through reach. The WAG Pipeline takes the opposite approach. It treats time itself as a lever, allowing an IP to grow more cheaply by letting curiosity, attachment, and audience signals accumulate naturally before escalation.

Phase 5: Storyworld Bridge to LaunchIntegrating Transmedia Strategy with Game Development and Audience Growth.

Phase 5 begins once the game is officially greenlit. The world has already proven its viability and resonance. The community is no longer just an audience-in-waiting. It is a durable asset. Phase 5 is about respecting that relationship, deepening it, and ensuring that transmedia activity continues to reward attention rather than extract it as we guide players towards launch. This is where the R&D team becomes the engine of the storyworld. Ideally, the same people who incubated the IP are still shaping it, enabling a bridge to launch that is coherent, adaptable, and creatively aligned with the game team.

At this point, the model becomes intentionally flexible. Production timelines, audience behavior, and narrative momentum all vary, so Phase 5 focuses on goals rather than prescriptions.

The first goal is to maintain and grow the audience through steady engagement that deepens the world without spoiling the game.

The second is to align narrative momentum so every storyworld beat feeds anticipation.

The third is to experiment and reward, using formats that Phase 2 and 3 couldn’t justify: longform podcasts, serialized webfiction, visual stories, even light ARGs.

And finally, everything must coordinate with development so storyworld work supports, not burdens, the game team.

Three strategic arenas shape this phase.

Narrative rhythm defines when the world “speaks”: Does it go quiet to build anticipation, or escalate toward a pre-launch crescendo?

Narrative interface defines how transmedia events connect to the game: Are mysteries seeded here resolved in-game? Do audience actions influence factions, lore, or cosmetic designs?

And media scope determines what’s feasible within bandwidth and timelines — from novellas to character journals to multi-week interactive campaigns.

Optional enhancements can increase resonance: letting fans shape small elements of the final game, timing major transmedia beats with trailers, or creating onboarding tools so newcomers can catch up before launch.

By the end of Phase 5, the team locks the narrative handoff to the game. Everyone knows what stories pause, conclude, or continue, and the world is ready for a launch campaign powered by everything learned along the way.

Why This Matters

Most pipelines ask teams to predict what audiences will love. The WAG model flips the pressure. It builds a world step by step, gathers honest signals, and only makes a major investment when those signals are strong. It protects creative teams from guesswork. It protects leadership from unnecessary risk. It protects the IP itself by letting it grow in a natural sequence, instead of forcing it into a game before it is ready.

This approach also creates alignment across publishing, game development, and community work. Everyone sees the same early artifacts. Everyone understands how the world behaves under different mediums. Everyone has visibility into what audiences actually respond to. Silos are toxic in this industry, and that alignment with audiences is rare and valuable.

Limited early investment is not merely a protective measure, but a creative affordance. Low-cost media invite bolder experiments precisely because failure is survivable. They allow unfamiliar ideas to surface, mutate, and find their audience before large-scale commitments are made. In that sense, the model doesn’t suppress risk; it relocates it to stages where originality can actually breathe.

WAG will not guarantee a hit. Nothing does. But it does guarantee that the studio learns early, learns cheaply, and learns together. That is the difference between building blind and building with a compass.

Easier Said Than Done

None of this is effortless. Studios are built to ship games, not necessarily to incubate worlds in public. Cultural shifts are often harder than creative ones. Leadership must tolerate uncertainty for longer. Teams must accept that early experiments will be small. And transmedia design must live alongside production realities without becoming a distraction. This article cannot offer all the answers, nor can it convey every expensive lesson learned along the way. What it can do is sketch a different path, one that treats audience demand as something to be earned before the biggest bets are placed. If that path is worth exploring, then the next step is not another model, but a conversation. I’ve learned some of those lessons the hard way. I’d much rather help others learn them more cheaply.

Who Should Run This Pipeline?

FIGURE 5 - Caption: An example of how a transmedia jam can be run. Source: https://www.storyworldexplorers.com/

This pipeline will be most feasible for mid to large studios because they already possess many of the required ingredients. They have cross-disciplinary talent, from narrative to design to community. They have publishing and marketing teams who can help identify strategic opportunities. And they have enough runway to allow ideas to mature before locking in large-scale production decisions.

Smaller teams can absolutely apply this model, too. In fact, the creative generalists on many indie studio rosters could thrive on such a structure. But larger studios tend to have the institutional bandwidth to run multiple experiments in parallel and to absorb uncertainty without panic.

If you want to try this without committing to the full pipeline, begin small. Hold a transmedia jam with a few creators from different disciplines. A creative skunkworks, if you will. Give them a creative prompt or light strategic brief and one week to outline the world and generate three story touchpoints. Watch what comes alive and what falls flat. This alone will tell you more than six months of slide decks.

I recently teamed up with the hosts of the Story World Explorers Podcast, Frank and Jack Konrath, and piloted a transmedia jam format ourselves. We were so pleased with the results, that we’re doing it again with multiple teams and will podcast the results! Stay tuned for “Around the Story World in 8 Days.”

Closing Thoughts

If Unknown 9 was about building a finished universe and dropping it into the world, the WAG Pipeline is about growing one in plain sight. It is slower, humbler, and I think, much smarter. It is not a formula, but an invitation to build worlds with patience, curiosity, and respect for the audience. It asks studios to let stories breathe and to follow the energy wherever it gathers. When a world is ready, the signals are unmistakable. And when it is not, the work still enriches the studio, the creators, and the craft.

Transmedia is not dead. It just needs to remember that it was never about selling more stuff. It was about connecting story and audience in new ways. At its core, WAG assumes that worlds do not become meaningful in isolation. They become meaningful when people gather around them, talk about them, argue over them, and imagine within them together. Designing for that gathering is not optional. It is foundational.

And maybe that is the simplest version of the idea: before you build the game, build the world. Then let the world wag the game.

 

Biography

Christopher Masson is a writer, narrative designer, and media producer who builds worlds designed to travel through games, interactive experiences, and beyond. His creative work spans theatre, comics, film and television, poetry, photography, digital video, and advertising. He’s fascinated by participatory culture, and the “sites of magic” where familiar worlds are encountered in new forms. His current focus is on advancing ludo-centric transmedia, with video games at the creative center, while critically exploring how AI is reshaping narrative experiences and creative production.

This piece is part of a series of critical responses based on the films nominated for the 98th Academy Awards. In this contribution, Lauren A. Sowa discusses Hamnet, which is nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Actress, Best Production Design, Best Costume Design, Best Original Score, and Best Casting.

As a life-long attendee, fan, and (youth) participant in ballet and opera, I was actually rather unbothered by comments made by Timothée Chalamet, this year’s frontrunner for the Best Actor Oscar. I am used to this subset of my interests being overlooked and scoffed at by many. When my peers were clamoring to get tickets to NSYNC concerts, I was much happier with season subscriptions with my mom to the Lyric Opera, Joffrey Ballet, and (my absolute favorite) Chicago Shakespeare Theatre – which means I was obviously really, REALLY cool in junior high. But I always followed the original you-do-you, Laertes’ advice from Hamlet, “to thine own self be true”. With these forms of entertainment as my long-standing interests, I have always found the cultural hierarchies debate fascinating: what is considered mid, mass, pop, high, low, etc. (Macdonald, 2011) and the categorizations and opinion making that follows. Chalamet’s statement, and the subsequent battle cry from the arts community (“once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more” – Henry V), has brought up some generative questions with which to grapple especially as it relates to Hamnet (2025) receiving 8 Oscar nominations. To be clear, I am not interested in adding to the array of think pieces about how Chalamet ruined his image in saying opera and ballet were dying art forms (“reputation is an idle and most false imposition; oft got without merit, and lost without deserving” – Othello). When he stated he doesn’t want to be a part of art that “no one cares about anymore,” giving ballet and opera as examples, he evokes a sentiment of how culture is classified and understood. He is not wrong in noticing that the classical arts have less mass appeal than pop art (“therein lies the rub” – Hamlet). Given this logic, if the classical arts have a connotation of decline because the masses no longer engage with them/or they are inaccessible, why does William Shakespeare—arguably just as distant from everyday popular consumption—continue to carry enormous cultural prestige, especially in industries like awards-season filmmaking? I am taking the trendy and hip adaptations out of the equation here. This is not about how Shakespearean themes and influence permeate contemporary storytelling. I am interested in how classic Shakespeare, the figure and the plays, have maintained mass relevance while also giving off a connotation of prestige. And furthermore, how does the “Shakespeare prestige” work in its favor when it comes to the Academy Awards?

To understand Shakespeare’s mutable cultural position today, it helps to remember that he was rarely treated as an untouchable figure of high culture. The sophisticated and prestigious connation we associate with Shakespeare is a far more recent development. As clearly depicted in Hamnet, William Shakespeare was a part of the merchant class. He was educated, worked as a Latin tutor, but was not in the upper-echelons of society. From the onset, Shakespeare’s works were accessible to audiences of various social standings. Liza Picard (2003) cites the account of a foreigner’s visit to the Globe theatre that exemplifies the nature of Shakespeare’s plays to transcend class hierarchy. The foreign playgoer describes the experience:

They play on a raised platform, so that everyone has a good view. For whoever cares to stand below only pays one English penny, but if he wishes to sit he enters by another door and pays another penny, while if he desires to sit in the most comfortable seats, which are cushioned, where he not only sees everything well but can also be seen, he pays yet another English penny at another door (as cited in Picard, 2003, p. 223).

performance of hamlet at the globe in hamnet (2025)

There are three distinct levels of audiences in attendance for Shakespeare’s plays. Depending on their financial status, they can pay for additional comforts and perks. However, the play they have all come to witness speaks to all the distinct social classes. As we see in Hamnet, the diverse audience are all deeply moved by Hamlet’s soliloquies. Shakespeare’s work resonated with the groundlings as much as it did for the wealthy, the court, and even the Queen herself (Beauclerk, 2010). From the onset, his plays transcended social class and were not only made available to, but his verse and themes were enjoyed by a cross section of the masses. He was their Taylor Swift—his work popular, catchy, emotional, and capturing the human experience (especially a good break-up, thank you, Ophelia). So, why would we bestow such strict social and educational shackles on storytelling that initially included all? Even in nineteenth century America, Shakespeare was a household name, and his plays widely known. Levine explains how “the theatre, like the church, was one of the earliest and most important cultural institutions established in frontier cities. And almost everywhere the theater blossomed Shakespeare was a paramount force” (1990, p. 18). Levine traces the rich history of Shakespeare performances on riverboats and even parody performances. Parody is only entertaining if the audiences have enough knowledge of the original text to understand and appreciate the humor and satire of a lampooned performance. Thus, Levine asserts the common and intimate knowledge average Americans had of Shakespeare (1990). However, a transformation occurred during the end of the nineteenth century and into the beginning of the twentieth century where, for Americans, the “theater no longer functioned as an expressive form that embodied all classes within a shared public space” (Levine, 1990, p. 68) such as it had for 16th century Londoners. The causes are hard to explain and slow to take effect, but essentially between the class struggles of the Astor Place Riots and advertising that eliminated the boisterous entertainment of the plays, “Shakespeare [did not] much longer remain the common property of all Americans” (p. 68). It is because of this complicated conversion that Shakespeare becomes the status symbol and “cultural deity” we see him today (p. 53). Ultimately, Shakespeare’s current prestige is historically constructed and the shift between cultural hierarchies creates a tension about where Shakespeare sits.

The Chalamet discourse is fascinating in that he stumbled into what I see as a key element in the dilemma of cultural hierarchies. Adorno and Horkheimer (2002 [1947]), and later Macdonald (2011) worried that mass culture would erode the integrity of high art by transforming it into easily consumable entertainment. Chalamet separates himself from classical artists by saying films are an art form that is more popular. Many of the opera and ballet artists responded with sentiments of “your movie is literally about ping-pong.” And bam! Cultural hierarchies. This inadvertently reveals a cultural paradox: while forms like opera and ballet are framed as relics of niche culture at best and elite culture at worst, works that evoke Shakespeare continue to function as both popular storytelling and a marker of prestige—an ambiguity that helps explain why films like Hamnet remain so attractive to awards institutions. Of course, films that center the ballet (Black Swan [2010]) or opera (Amadeus [1984], Maria [2024]) also carry a similar prestige that are recognized by the Academy. This demonstrates that these classical forms are not culturally irrelevant; rather, their prestige is reactivated when they circulate through the more accessible medium of film. Shakespeare simply occupies this position more consistently, allowing works associated with ‘William Shakespeare’ to move fluidly between elite cultural authority and popular cinematic storytelling.

Which brings us to Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet. The film is an adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell 2020 novel of the same name; it had received multiple literary awards (cue prestige!). The narrative centers on Agnes Hathaway and tells the story of her and William Shakespeare as parents and their extreme grief in the wake of the death of their young son, Hamnet. Importantly, the narrative does not adapt one of Shakespeare’s plays directly. Rather, the focus is on a fictionalized emotional narrative around the Shakespeare family and specifically focuses on Agnese as a mother. Less central, but also poignant, is this story depicts the circumstances that may have shaped the writing of Hamlet. The film draws upon Shakespeare’s cultural aura without requiring audiences to engage with the formal complexities of the plays themselves. Having a basic knowledge of Hamlet adds to the experience, but is not essential but any means.

 

hamnet (2020) novel by maggie o’farrell

hamnet is nominated in 8 oscar categories

 

This dynamic allows Hamnet to operate effectively within Oscar awards culture. The film carries the weight of Shakespearean prestige while remaining accessible in the ever popular, historical fiction drama genre. The audience is not expected to have the same familiarity with Shakespeare’s language, theatrical conventions, or characters (as the previously stated 19th century frontier audiences did) to understand and engage with this piece. That said, its mere association with Shakespeare signals the seriousness and artistic legitimacy loved by the Academy. Certainly it’s “Oscar bait” (Boucaut, 2025); as Boucaut explains in a previous post in this series, it holds all the key elements for a well-made film to get attention in this arena: well-acted drama, portrayal of deep grief, historical fiction, Oscar winning director, and … Shakespeare. What I find compelling is how Shakespeare functions as a kind of cultural shorthand: we invoke the Bard and it immediately situates the film within a lineage of “important” storytelling. It was a strong choice of literary material to adapt for film.

chalamet in the king (2019)

Cinema as an art form acts as a powerful mediator of cultural hierarchy. Hamnet exemplifies this at a unique moment when the classical arts feel under-attack. Ultimately, the reaction to Chalamet’s comments reveals less about the death of classical arts and more about the shifting ways cultural prestige circulates. Opera and ballet may genuinely struggle to attract mass audiences within their traditional institutional spaces—so do movie theatres. But going to the movies is still more accessible to broad audiences than ballet and opera. And the aesthetic authority— Shakespeare’s in particular— is significant when reframed through popular media. Chalamet did after all play the Shakespearean hero, Henry V, in The King (Netflix, 2019).

Shakespeare’s enduring prestige is not the result of being frozen in an elite cultural sphere, but rather of his remarkable ability to move between cultural registers. It makes me think of the Shakespeare Bridge in Los Feliz, my old neighborhood in Los Angeles. It’s a bridge built in 1927 and the reason for the name is unclear other than it gives romantic, Tudor vibes. Shakespeare, to this day, is still like this bridge—transcending hierarchies and connecting many spaces. The Bard was once popular entertainment for London’s masses; today he continues to function simultaneously as both mass storytelling and cultural high art. Films like Hamnet simply remind us that these categories have always been far more fluid than cultural gatekeepers might prefer to admit; all’s well that ends well!

References

Adorno, T. W., & Horkheimer, M. 2002 [1947]. The culture industry: Enlightenment as mass deception. In Dialectic of enlightenment: Philosophical fragments (G. S. Noerr, Ed.; E. Jephcott, Trans.; pp. 94–136). Stanford University Press. (Original work published 1947)

Boucaut, R 2025, Oscar Bait: The Academy Awards & Cultural Prestige, Routledge.

Levine, L. (1990). Highbrow/ lowbrow: The emergence of cultural hierarchy in America. Boston, MA: Harvard Univeristy Press.

MacDonald, D. (2011). Masscult and midcult: Essays against the American grain. New York, NY: New York Review Books Classics.

Picard, L. (2003). Elizabeth’s london: Everyday life in Elizabethan london. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press.

Biography

Lauren Alexandra Sowa is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Communication at Pepperdine University. She received her Ph.D. from the Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California and has a BFA in Acting from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. Her research focuses on intersectional feminism and representation within production cultures, television, and popular culture and has been published in The International Journal of Communication and Communication, Culture and Critique. These interests stem from her several-decade career in the entertainment industry as member of SAG/AFTRA and AEA. Lauren is a proud "Disney Adult" and enthusiast of many fandoms. Lauren is also a Pop Junctions associate editor.

This piece is part of a series of critical responses based on the films nominated for the 98th Academy Awards. In this contribution, Tara Lomax discusses One Battle After Another, which is nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor (twice), Best Supporting Actress, Best Cinematography, Best Film Editing, Best Production Design, Best Original Score, Best Sound, and Best Casting.

One Battle After Another (2025) bears a weight of signification that extends beyond its own formal boundaries. Indeed, its narrative of revolutionary action in a contemporary world is politically and culturally relevant, such that it resonates with a current cultural zeitgeist in ways not necessarily intended by filmmaker, Paul Thomas Anderson (PTA). In a recent interview with Sight and Sound, PTA was asked what impact the contemporary political climate might have had on the film during post-production: “Nothing, because the story is the story. . . But then the irony is, it’s the same headline over and over again. It’s a disease, isn’t it? We like to think that it’s all brand new, but it happened four years ago, it happened before that” (Bell 2026, 27). This speaks to a key sentiment that drives the film’s plot, temporal settings, and its title: its premise is not isolated or singular in its significance but one of unrelenting repetition and persistence, one battle after another.

This sentiment of recurrence also relates to how its allusions to existing works—including films, novels, songs, and political artefacts—extend its signifying potential. While it is credited as an adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland (1990)—albeit quite loosely (Sandberg 2026)—its depiction of revolutionary motivation evokes broader histories of political rebellion, civil rights activism, and counterculture, with the title ultimately inspired by a 1960s political manifesto (Bell 2026, 26). Even as One Battle After Another stands out as PTA’s most ‘present-day’ film since Punch-Drunk Love (2002)—and as “certifiably fresh” and original as the film itself might be perceived—it is also indebted to a multiplicity of other existing works, including the song “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” (1971) and films The Battle of Algiers (1966), The French Connection (1971), Dog Day Afternoon (1975), Star Wars (1977), Mad Max (1979), Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991), and The Big Lebowski (1998). Allusions to these works vary from explicit to indirect, but all infuse it with deeper expressive power and context. 

‘The dude’ (Jeff Bridges) in The Big Lebowski (1998)

‘Ghetto Pat’ (Leonardo Dicaprio) in One Battle After Another (2025)

Allusionism describes the practice of alluding to existing works from film history, primarily as an annotation that provides further context. As Noël Carroll explains, “allusion, specifically allusion to film history, has become a major expressive device, this is, a means that directors use to make comments on the fictional worlds of their films” (1982, 52). Here, Carroll refers to a form of expression that exemplified filmmaking of the New Hollywood era (from the late 1960s and through the 1970s). This was a period of aesthetic revival following the decline of the studio system and was driven by filmmakers such as Martin Scorsese, Peter Bogdanovich, Frances Ford Coppola, George Lucas, and Brian De Palma who were immersed in film culture through film schools, filmmaking collectives, film criticism, and wide-ranging viewing cultures that exposed them to international cinemas, alternative cinema, and avant-garde film in tandem with early silent cinema and classical Hollywood. We know this group of filmmakers as the ‘Film School Generation’ and, regardless of whether they actually went to a film school, the point was that they were proud cinephiles who studied film history and used that knowledge to enrich their own work through connections to older films, refine their auteurist voice through a specific curation of tastes, and consequently redefined American cinema through an awareness of film history. 

The Night of the Hunter (1955)
Do The Right Thing (1989)
Punch-Drunk Love (2002)

As a form of authorial expression, allusionism is a tool that aims to invoke and embed the signification of older works into the unified whole of another work. Writing about literary allusions, Michael Leddy distinguishes allusions from other forms of quotation or reference in its intention towards invocation, whereby “allusions typically describe a reference that invokes one or more associations of appropriate cultural material and brings them to bear upon a present context” (1992, 112). For example, Taxi Driver (1976) uses a range of allusions to film history—from The Searchers (1956) to Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1967)—to ‘invoke the contexts’ of these other films and deepen expression in ways that is not consistent with the characterization of Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver (Thurman 2005). Another example of this kind of allusionism at work is in the throughline that occurs from The Night of the Hunter (1955) to Do the Right Thing (1989) and Punch-Drunk Love: in The Night of the Hunter, Reverend Harry Powell (Robert Mitcham) delivers an elaborate sermon on the personal struggle between good and evil that is symbolized by the words ‘love’ and ‘hate’ tattooed on his knuckles; an allusion to this film in both Do the Right Thing (as knuckle rings rather than tattoos) and Punch-Drunk Love invokes this sermon and expands the authorial commentary within these later films. Therefore, this use of allusionism uses the signifying power of film history to say what cannot always be said in different scenarios.

The effectiveness of allusionism as an expressive filmmaking tool during the New Hollywood era was also enabled by a film-going audience that also participated in cinephilic appreciation of film history and cineliteracy. According to Carroll, “such films are the direct beneficiaries of a widespread, eager, contemporary willingness to endorse an explicit film-historical consciousness as a hallmark of ambitious filmmaking and film going” (1982, 56). As such, while filmmakers activated their knowledge of film history for expressive intent, they also used allusionism to outwardly perform their cinephilia in an effort to add credibility to their work. Therefore, allusionism works as a two-way dialogue between filmmakers and their audiences, and it requires filmmakers to trust that the audience would have the film literacy to identify the layers of expression invoked by allusions.

It is in this context that I consider One Battle After Another—and PTA’s broader oeuvre—most effectively recalls a New Hollywood sensibility. To be sure, there has already been cultural commentary directed towards the use of VistaVision cameras that effectively blend grittiness with epic scale that recalls a vintage aesthetic of a former Hollywood. Michael Bauman, cinematographer of One Battle After Another, also recounts PTA’s direction that “it’s got to look like a ’70s movie” (Desowitz 2026). Moreover, the film doesn’t just look like a 70s movie, but it also employs expressive auteurist strategies associated in this period, such that its form becomes imbued with a subliminal history that extends beyond the temporal parametres represented in the story itself. Upon first viewing the film, I was struck by how the film felt so present yet historically contextual, familiar, and tethered to something more beyond its singular textual form. One Battle After Another therefore uses allusionism to extend the boundaries of its expression and deepen its revolutionary context beyond the specific plot and characters of this story.

Allusionism and a cinephiliac admiration for film history are not just critical to One Battle After Another, but also key to PTA’s auteurist signature. In The Cinema of Paul Thomas Anderson: American Apocrypha, Ethan Warren describes PTA as an “apocryphal historian” who relies on a “shared language between viewer and artist and using reference to mediate the audience’s encounter with the narrative” (2023, xxi)—indeed, this description is very similar to allusionism. This ‘apocryphal’ dimension might seem to undermine the validity of PTA’s historical engagement, but rather it speaks to an ostensibly ‘hidden’ film history that drives signification in his works. In the book Blossoms & Blood: Postmodern Media Culture and the Films of Paul Thomas Anderson, Jason Sperb considers how this allusive practice extends back to Boogie Nights (1992) as a form of “postmodern cinephiliac pastiche” made up of a “hyperreal collage of sights and sounds meant to evoke an affective sense of (cinematic) history” (2013, 83); this also speaks the questionable credibility of representation in his works. Of course, there is much that can be explored in relation to how these ideas might continue to function in PTA’s more recent work, especially Inherent Vice (2014) and Licorice Pizza (2021), but a deeper curiosity here is the dynamic that exists between allusionism, expressive signification, and an ‘apocryphal’ treatment of history through cinephilia. As such, PTA’s use of allusionism in One Battle After Another is less ‘apocryphal’ or hidden but is declared as an act of expressive curation that—much like during the New Hollywood period—works in dialogue with the audience’s shared cinephilia.

With One Battle After Another, these (phantom) threads of authorial expression, allusionism, and cinephilia converged when PTA joined Ben Mankiewicz on Turner Classic Movies (TCM) to celebrate the film’s release as a guest programmer (King 2025). Of the many works that seem to have influenced or been alluded to with One Battle After Another (some referenced above), PTA chose to highlight a compelling collection of films to frame the audience’s entry into this textual world: Running on Empty (1982), Midnight Run (1988), The French Connection (1971), The Battle of Algiers, and The Searchers (1956). The idea of an auteur-curation being used to help communicate the film’s intentions seems to unashamedly reinforce the performative aspects of allusionism, but it also goes a step further to ensure that audiences are cognizant that another layer of significance exists in this film that ties it to a rich tapestry of film history.

Running on Empty (1982)
Midnight Run (1988)
The French Connection (1971)
The Battle of Algiers (1966)
The Searchers (1956)

These five films make up an intriguing curation of various genres, styles, periods, and national contexts to frame One Battle After Another. While films like The Battle of Algiers and Running on Empty invoke an explicit treatment of activism and revolutionary history, Midnight Run stands out for its lighter tone, buddy dynamic and action-comedy premise. What the inclusion of Midnight Run perhaps really draws out in One Battle After Another is a sense of mundanity within an intense or high-stake environment. Midnight Run involves bounty hunters (one played by Robert De Niro), mobsters and the FBI all trying to find and return an accountant (played by Charles Grodin) back to LA, while One Battle After Another depicts an ex-revolutionary (Bob Ferguson, formerly “Ghetto Pat”, played by Leonardo DiCaprio) who can’t remember the password to access information from his former rebel group. Although the allusion to Midnight Run isn’t as strong as some of the other selections in PTA’s curation, its inclusion together with The Battle of Algiers establishes a thematic dynamic between the political and the mundane that underpins One Battle After Another. This dynamic is most explicitly present in the scene where Bob watches The Battle of Algiers while getting stoned.

allusion to The battle of algiers (1966) in one battle after another

mundane life for ex-revolutionary Bob in one battle after another

Of the five films showcased in PTA’s curation, this allusion to The Battle of Algiers is the explicit in One Battle After Another. As PTA notes in the TCM clip (below), the placing of this reference aims to signals how revolutionary action has become so distanced for Bob that it’s now just a nostalgic fantasy reserved for chilling on the couch. This is perhaps at the heart of some criticisms of the film that suggests it doesn’t go far enough politically, only to relegates the substance of its revolutionary politics to “the edges of the frame” (Molloy 2025). In this context, allusions to films like The Battle of Algiers might be seen to do the ‘heavy lifting’ in terms invokes revolutionary contexts, just as allusions in the New Hollywood era were used to invoke contexts that weren’t always explicit within the work itself.

  

PTA’s curation also includes The Searchers and The French Connection, noting the use VistaVision in the former and the low-budget rawness and a visceral car chase in the latter. In addition to these notable achievements in production practice and craft, The Searchers and The French Connection also invoke periods of revisionism and disruption in Hollywood: The Searchers might be considered a ‘classic’ Western, but its iconicity really comes from its subversive critique of American mythology and heroism that is also alluded to in Taxi Driver; similarly, The French Connection is a cornerstone work of the Hollywood Renaissance that disrupts classical Hollywood conventions (both in narrative form and style) and exposes urban grittiness and corruption through a morally toxic anti-hero. Allusions to The Searchers and The French Connectionin a contemporary work such as One Battle After Another go deeper than admiration or homage but also evoke a critical period of industrial change in Hollywood history that is playing out again in current times.

One Battle After Another is nominated in thirteen categories at the forthcoming 98th Academy Awards, including Best Picture for producers PTA, Sara Murphy, and the late Adam Somner, as well as Best Director and Adapted Screenplay for PTA, and Best Cinematography for Bauman, to highlight only a few. In the lead-up to the Oscars, One Battle After Another has garnered a notable collection of top-billed awards, including Best Film at the BAFTAs, Best Picture at the Critics’ Choice, and Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy at the Golden Globes, which puts the film in high contention for the Best Picture Oscar. Regardless of the outcome on the night, the critical regard and award season success of One Battle After Another—and PTA’s open and forthcoming regard for how cinephilia shapes his expression—draws attention to a creative approach that recognizes the value of film history and cinephilia in a changing cultural and industrial zeitgeist.

References

(Online sources referenced through hyperlink in text)

Bell, James. 2026. “An Audience with the Master.” Sight and Sound 36 (2): 24–34.

Carroll, Noël. 1982. “The Future of Allusion: Hollywood in the Seventies (And Beyond).” October 20: 51–81.

Leddy, Michael. 1992. “Limits of Allusion.” British Journal of Aesthetics 32 (2): 110–122.

Sandberg, Eric. 2026. “It is but it isn’t”: Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another and Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland.” Adaptation 19 (1): 1–4.

Sperb, Jason. 2013. Blossoms & Blood: Postmodern Media Culture and the Films of Paul Thomas Anderson. University of Texas Press.

Thurman, John. 2005. “Citizen Bickle, or the Allusive Taxi Driver: Uses of Intertextuality.” Senses of Cinema 37, https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2005/american-cinema-the-1970s/taxi_driver/  

Warren, Ethan. 2023. The Cinema of Paul Thomas Anderson: American Apocrypha. Wallflower.

Biography

Tara Lomax is the Discipline Lead of Screen Studies in the Master of Arts Screen program at the Australian Film Television and Radio School (AFTRS). Her research focuses on contemporary Hollywood entertainment, primarily blockbuster franchising, multiplatform storytelling, and storyworld development. She has published on topics such as the superhero and horror genres, franchising and licensing, transmedia storytelling, storyworld building, and digital effects. Her work can be found in publications that include JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies and Quarterly Review of Film and Video, and the book collections Starring Tom Cruise (2021), The Supervillain Reader (2020), The Superhero Symbol (2020), The Palgrave Handbook of Screen Production (2019), and Star Wars and the History of Transmedia Storytelling (2017). She has a PhD in screen studies from The University of Melbourne and is one of the associate editors at Pop Junctions.

This piece is part of a series of critical responses based on the films nominated for the 98th Academy Awards. In this contribution, Melanie Robson discusses It Was Just An Accident, which is nominated for Best International Feature Film and Best Original Screenplay.

Figure 1: Family framed in car in It was Just An Accident (2025)

For anyone familiar with Jafar Panahi’s body of work, the opening images of It Was Just an Accident will be immediately recognisable as belonging to him. The camera frames a family of three through the windshield of a car at night, driving along a windy road. Car interiors have become the filmmaker’s hallmark. The fixed framing and lack of non-diegetic sound reinforces the realist and formally minimalist style characteristic of Panahi’s work (Figure 1). Even when the titular accident occurs—the car hits a stray dog on the road—and the man, Eqbal, steps out of the car to check it out, the camera barely moves. We never see the dog. Formal restraint is established early in the film, and Panahi is asking us to use our ears as much as our eyes.

While familiar in its presentation, the film coincides with a lot of firsts for the filmmaker. In 2010, he was sentenced to a twenty-year ban from filmmaking by the Iranian government for “propaganda activities against the Islamic Republic,” which overlapped with a travel ban for the filmmaker and a six-year stint in prison. Not one to quit easily, Panahi released a film the following year, facetiously titled This is Not a Film (2011), followed by a further three feature films made in secret under the ban. It Was Just an Accident, in many ways, feels like a new chapter for Panahi. It is the first film since the ban to be an entirely fiction film (the others could be classified as hybrid documentaries). It is the first in 19 years in which Panahi does not appear. And, with the lifting of his travel ban, it is the first of his films in 18 years he could watch with an audience and for which he could accept awards in person. This is particularly significant given that the film is the most awarded and nominated of his career. It received 130 nominations and 39 wins for a diverse array of awards, the most prestigious of which was the Palme d’Or at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. Despite these firsts, I want to explore how It Was Just an Accident is a continuation, and even the culmination, of the specific style and way of working Panahi developed post-ban.

The film’s fictional scenario affirms this continuity. After the unfortunate car accident described earlier, the family’s car begins giving them trouble. They go to a local mechanic. One of the workers there, Vahid, recognises the squeak of Eqbal’s prosthetic leg as belonging to an intelligence agent who tortured him while he was blindfolded in prison. Planning to get revenge, Vahid kidnaps Eqbal. Wanting to be sure he’s got the right man, he drives around Tehran with Eqbal in his van, picking up fellow former prisoners who might be able to confirm Eqbal’s identity. Together, they then must decide what to do with him. Panahi’s films are typically deeply and overtly personal, with each of those made after his filmmaking ban particularly so, given that the filmmaker appears as himself in each of them. Taken as a body of work, his post-ban films have effectively ‘trained’ the viewer to be aware of Panahi’s subjectivity and his position behind the lens. This awareness began with The Mirror (1997), when the fictional façade of the film is torn down as the child actress throws a tantrum and Panahi has to intervene. From then on, he became both filmmaker and subject.

In It Was Just an Accident, this personal dimension is more difficult to determine but no less present. In an interview with Dennis Lim during the 2025 New York Film Festival, Panahi reflects on why he does not appear in the film (Film at Lincoln Center, 2025). Prior to the film’s release, his filmmaking ban was lifted. He says that the ban’s lift “had a psychological effect, that I was no longer in the centre of my films, and I stepped aside, and I went behind the camera” (Film at Lincoln Center, 2025). Those accustomed to his style will feel his absence, but the film’s personal nature exists in the story’s inspiration: while serving time in prison, Panahi, too, was blindfolded and subject to interrogation by men he only recognised by sound and not by sight.

Despite the lifting of the ban, however, It Was Just an Accident was not officially approved by the government. Its production came under intense scrutiny, and it was shut down for a month when authorities failed to find and confiscate the footage. So, although the film is undeniably fictional in its presentation, it carries with it similar stakes and similar tensions as those present in Panahi’s earlier films. The film’s framing is a constant reminder of the restrictions under which it was filmed. Panahi pointed out, “I shot It Was Just an Accident more in secret than all the films I made since 2010” (Bodroian, 2026). These tensions are felt most acutely in the scenes filmed within the city. Amid the hustle and bustle, the camera always remains either within the van or within a shop. The city streets are off-limits. Panahi reflected on the precarity of filming out on the street, saying “When we had to leave the van, that was much scarier. We had to shoot fast, under the same stress as being interrogated. That feeling bleeds into the film” (Russell, 2026). The stakes are perhaps highest when one of the group, Shiva, leaves the van without wearing a hijab and runs across the road to convince Hamid to join them (Figure 2). She gets into a physical scuffle with Hamid and his friends and falls on the ground, drawing attention to her on the busy public street. With the camera remaining in the van out of sight, the unusual distance between camera and subject is felt. Shiva seems vulnerable as cars and trucks pass between her and the camera; the point of audition is the interior of the van, which further emphasises Panahi’s restrictions. We still, therefore, feel a guerilla filmmaking sensibility running through the film. The risk of the film’s making is imprinted on its framing.

Such moments in It Was Just an Accident make it clear that Panahi’s films post-ban have not only been subject to greater restrictions and clandestine working conditions, but that these conditions have become part and parcel of his directorial style, too. His choices in response to his ban (which includes his choice to make films at all) have evolved into a signature aesthetic that is uniquely Panahi. Scholar Jamsheed Akrami, while interviewing Panahi, proposes that the director’s career might be divided into two eras, which he uncontroversially designates pre-ban and post-ban, but subsequently nuances this further: what he calls outside films and inside films (2018, p. 68). Panahi’s films pre-2010 are all shot and take place predominantly outside. The White Balloon (1995), The Mirror, The Circle (2000) and Offside (2006) take place out in public, in the city streets. The interiors of homes and other buildings only figure very minimally throughout that first period. From This is Not a Film onwards, nearly everything is shot inside looking out. In Closed Curtain (2013)—ostensibly also about a filmmaker trapped in a house—perhaps the most striking shots are those, reflecting the title, in which the camera frames a window, in turn framing the beach beyond. In Tehran Taxi (2015) the camera never leaves the confines of the taxi. Interiority in these films is accentuated. It is this interiority that is perpetuated in It Was Just an Accident, not just in the scene taking place in Figure 2, but also in scenes that take place within the cramped confines of the van as tensions rise over the fate of the group’s hostage.

It is only when the group go out to the wide-open spaces outside the city, where they consider what to do next (including potentially burying Eqbal), that we’re presented with wide shots and the characters are staged spread out outside the van (Figure 3). Akrami suggests that Panahi’s sentence, while intended to end his career, has instead “been like a permit to work freely, albeit not too visibly” (2018, p. 67). We feel this balance between freedom and restriction (tied to the production’s visibility) in It Was Just an Accident. In these moments, the film revels in the wider framing made possible by the rural setting, where production is no longer under such intense scrutiny. More conventionally cinematic long panning shots capture sparse dialogue and carefully composed framing. Unsurprisingly, rural settings have allowed Panahi greater freedom in the past, as well as offering different formal choices. Both his previous two films, 3 Faces (2018) and No Bears (2022), are filmed predominantly in rural villages, which allow for more exterior shots and for Panahi (as both filmmaker and actor/character) to move freely without excessive surveillance or risk of arrest. Nonetheless, in No Bears, impenetrable borders still cast a shadow: Panahi goes to live in an Iranian town near Türkiye, crossing the border of which would have serious implications for the filmmaker. It’s in these rural spaces, then, that It Was Just an Accident feels truly like an evolution in both freedom and style. The sheer time allowed for these exterior shots feels appropriately indulgent. Undeniably the boldest shot (both logistically and formally) of the film takes place outside, away from the city in the dark of night: a thirteen-minute static long take captures the final interrogation of Eqbal, his face bathed in the van’s red light. This moment cements the film’s message in a raw, uncompromised way that hasn’t always been possible in Panahi’s career.

Figure 2: Shiva leaves the van without wearing a hijab in It was Just An Accident

figure 3. use of wide shots in It was just an accident

Given Panahi’s relative freedom in promoting and touring It Was Just an Accident around the world since Cannes 2025, he has reflected at length in various press releases and interviews on the position this film has in his career. He has implied in these reflections that with the temporary lift of his filmmaking ban, he essentially returned to how he worked before 2010. He returned to fiction and stepped back behind the camera. But it is clear that the film represents an evolution in his filmmaking style, one undeniably impacted and changed by his experiences over the last 15 years.  Those elements that were once only a practical response to restrictions—filming in vehicles, working in small crews, and prioritising rural over urban locations—have cemented themselves in his style. In It Was Just an Accident they don’t feel like limitations but rather choices that enrich the film’s visual presentation.

References

Bodrojan, S. (2026, February 27). Jafar Panahi will go to prison and write another movie. Paper. https://www.papermag.com/jafar-panahi-interview#rebelltitem1.

Film at Lincoln Center. (2025, October 10). Jafar Panahi on It Was Just an Accident [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlLCk6IlDsM.

Panahi, J., & Akarami, J. (2018). Dissident Cinema: A conversation between Jafar Panahi and Jamsheed Akrami. World Policy Journal, 35(1), 56-69.

Russell, S. A. (2026, January 15). Jafar Panahi is ready to go to prison for the film the Iranian government doesn’t want you to see. ABC News. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-01-15/jafar-panahi-iran-it-was-just-an-accident/106227500

Biography

Melanie Robson is a Lecturer in Screen Studies in the BA program at the Australian Film Television and Radio School (AFTRS) and has a PhD from UNSW Sydney. She has co-edited a collection on Alfred Hitchcock (One Shot Hitchcock, Oxford University Press) and published in Studies in European Cinema, Mise-en-Scene: The Journal of Film & Visual Narration, Refractory and MAI: Feminism & Visual Culture.

This piece is part of a series of critical responses based on the films nominated for the 98th Academy Awards.

And the nominees for Best Picture are: Bugonia, Frankenstein, Hamnet, Marty Supreme, One Battle After Another, The Secret Agent, Sentimental Value, Sinners, Train Dreams and… F1: The Movie?

One of these things is not like the others.

 

figure 1. Damson Idris and Brad Pitt at the Silverstone Grand Prix. Oscar night won’t be the first time the team from F1: The Movie have had to convince an audience they belong in a lineup of genuine articles.

 

With Oscars prognostication having become a fine art, it is rarer and rarer that the announcement of the Oscar nominations offers up genuine surprises. But when Danielle Brooks and Lewis Pullman stood up early in the morning on 22nd  January and announced Joseph Kosinski’s blockbuster, motor-racing drama F1: The Movie as one of the ten contenders for Best Picture, more than a few eyebrows were raised. It headlined many of the next day’s mandatory ‘Surprises and Snubs’ pieces. Pundit reactions ranged from bemusement (Perry, 2026) to outrage (Simmons, 2026), though the nomination did get a very supportive write up on the official website of the Formula One (F1, 2026). It has fallen to a few brave contrarians to mount the defence of F1’s position in this particular race (Surrey, 2026); however, even those defenders tend to position the nomination as part of a cynical effort by the Academy to include more popular films to draw larger audiences to the broadcast, rather than genuinely entertaining the idea that the film might represent one of the ten best cinematic achievements of the year.

Arguing the comparative merits of films as different as F1 and Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident, which many considered the surprise omission from the field, seems like a subjective and ultimately futile exercise. A question that is more interesting to me is, why did people get so cranky? When there are always two or three nominees in the pool who don’t feel like genuine contenders, why has this nomination been cause for such vitriol? And, why is it that I, someone who really likes F1 and watched it multiple times in cinemas and a couple more times at home since, also feel a little bit funny about it being nominated?

Over decades of Oscar watching, we have built up an image of what a Best Picture nominee looks like, and a conventional crowd-pleaser like F1 isn’t it. Even for those who have called for the Academy to expand their thinking beyond the middle-brow Oscar bait that usually gets attention, this is not the type of ‘different film’ they had in mind. It simply doesn’t correlate with internalised assumptions about what ‘quality’ cinema looks like. In that light, this is an interesting counter-situation to when the online mob came for Martin Scorsese after he suggested in an interview with Empire magazine in 2019 that he didn’t consider Marvel movies to be “cinema” (De Semlyen, 2019).

The Academy, of course, was already aware of an issue with the narrow perception of what constitutes a Best Picture. In June 2009, when they announced the decision to expand the Best Picture field from five to ten nominees, it was widely accepted to have been in response to mainstream, critical and commercial hits Wall-E and The Dark Knight being overlooked for Best Picture nominations in favour of more traditional quality dramas (the five films that vied for Best Picture at the 2009 Oscars were Slumdog Millionaire, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Frost/Nixon, Milk and The Reader). Speaking to this belief that the view of cinema represented by the Best Picture nominations year on year was becoming too narrow, then-President of the Academy Sidney Ganis said this move was designed to make the field “more interesting and less cloistered” (Gray, 2009), with the additional spaces creating opportunities for the consideration of animations, documentaries, comedies, and genre films.

On the genre front, we can see that this move has been successful. With an expanded pool of nominees and a revitalised Academy membership and voting body, genre films like Get Out, District 9, Black Panther, Barbie and The Martian have made their way into Best Picture contention. The Shape of Water and Everything, Everywhere, All at Once even managed to win the award, and just this year Ryan Coogler’s vampire film Sinners broke the record for most nominations for a single film. But while genre has become a more accepted presence in Best Picture consideration, it tends to be a particular type of genre film: auteur-driven genre pieces that use the familiar conventions of the form to explore important ideas. That’s right, we are talking about ‘elevated genre.’

F1 is not elevated genre. It is not attempting to subvert our expectations of the sports movie. Nor does it attempt to use the conventions of that genre to say something important and pressing about the state of the world. As a sports movie, Kosinski and Ehren Kruger’s screenplay hits a number of very familiar beats: the veteran getting one last chance at their dream; the young, upstart with all the ability and none of the humility; the outmatched team with their backs against the wall; the tension between those who see sport as a business and those driven by the purity of the contest. But it is not the story or the themes that make F1 stand out. It is not the story or themes that made F1 one of the year’s commercial success stories, taking over US$630 million at the global box office. F1 plays the hits and plays them satisfactorily enough to serve as the foundation for what actually makes the film exceptional: the spectacle.

This brings us to the second challenge F1’s nomination offers us. Not only is F1, as a conventional genre film, not the type of film that we expect to see in a Best Picture field, it is also not the type of cinematic achievement this award traditionally recognises. What sets F1 apart from previous racing films is the authenticity of its race sequences, the result of an impressive logistical and technical achievement. Working in close collaboration with the Federation Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA), the production and its fictional APX GP joined the 2023 and 2024 Formula One tour, effectively as an eleventh team on the grid. APX GP was given a marquee on pit lane, and the film shot in and around the live F1 race weekends. At the Silverstone Grand Prix, actors Brad Pitt and Damson Idris joined the real drivers in the lineup for the national anthem (Fig. 1), and their cars were at the back of the grid for the actual race start. A Formula One race weekend is a large and highly orchestrated event with minimal flexibility to accommodate a film shoot. As such, Kosinski and his team had to find short windows to shoot within the tightly scheduled race weekends, while working to ensure their presence was not evident in the race broadcasts (Apple TV, 2025). It is a very different set of logistical challenges to, say, shooting The Revenant in freezing, rural Alberta, but the production challenges are no less demanding.

Figure 2. The exhilarating authenticity of F1’s racing footage, achieved through technical innovations and collaborations with sporting bodies, set a new high bar for the genre

Figure 3. Putting actors in actual Formula One cars, driving on the actual Formula One tracks, unified character and spectacle in F1’s racing sequences.

For the race footage itself, Kosinski was determined to give the audience the experience of what it is like to be in a Formula One car. Unwilling to resort to shooting on a Volume stage or at lower speeds for convenience, Kosinski and cinematographer Claudio Miranda worked with Sony to customise cameras small enough to be mounted on a Formula One car, robust enough to withstand the vibrations associated with speeds in excess of 120mph, but with a large enough sensor to capture images for both standard theatrical and IMAX distribution (Dillon, 2025). The sound team had to work out how to record dialogue in live race environments, while also working with the broadcast team to integrate 150 microphones placed around the track with the broadcast system (Tangcay, 2026).

In recognition of these achievements, F1 was nominated for major prizes at the awards for the Producers Guild of America, the American Cinema Editors, the Motion Picture Sound Editors, the Art Directors Guild. It has been Oscar-nominated by the editing, sound and VFX branches of the Academy. These are achievements that make it a strong blockbuster and fantastic cinematic experience. But are they the kind of achievements that make a Best Picture?

F1 has received four Oscar nominations. That is the same number as fellow Best Picture nominees Bugonia, The Secret Agent and Train Dreams. It is more nominations than previous Best Picture winners CODA (three nominations), The Broadway Melody (three), and The Grand Hotel (one). History tells us four nominations isn’t a problem. The issue is that F1 has the wrong kind of nominations for a Best Picture contender. We don’t bat an eyelid if a Best Picture nominee only has three or four nominations as long as they are in the screenwriting, acting or directing categories. But the below-the-line categories tend to be populated with blockbusters and commercial fare. A genuine contender can also have below-the-line nominations (see Sinners), but it can’t only have below the line nominations.

Yet, part of the reason the Academy Awards holds its privileged position as the culmination of the award season is that, unlike the various guild awards that precede it, the Academy’s voting body represents a cross-section of production roles. For the screenwriters, actors and maybe even directors in the Academy, F1 might not be one of the pinnacle achievements of the last year, but for the producers, editors, sound editors and cinematographers there is clearly a great admiration for the achievement the film represents. For the last 20 years, the efforts to expand and diversify the Best Picture field have focused on recognising more commercial films, more international films, more culturally representative films, but not different types of cinematic achievement. An overall award like Best Picture needs to be able to genuinely consider how F1’s achievement in the areas of spectacle, editing, sound and effects compare to a film like Sentimental Value’s achievements in writing and acting, rather than assuming achievement in one area trumps achievement in another. Is it not more interesting to have F1 in the mix as the best achievement in blockbuster spectacle rather than having its spot go to the seventh or eighth best drama?

Having said all of this, I don’t believe F1 is a genuine Best Picture contender. Not even Sonny Hayes himself could find a way to weave through to the front of this field. But it is absolutely a good thing that it is there. The joy of cinema, the reason we love it, is the diversity of experiences that it can provide for an audience. It can provoke, challenge and inspire us. It can also exhilarate and entertain us. If we are going to engage in an exercise as futile as singling out one film as being the best of the year, then we need to be willing to genuinely weigh different types of cinematic achievement against each other rather than operate on the assumption that one is inherently more worthy than the others.

References

Apple TV (2025). F1 the Movie - Making it to Silverstone| Behind the Scenes | Apple TV  [Video]. YouTube.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5xE-WdGokg

De Semlyen, N. (2019, Nov 7). The Irishman Week: Empire’s Martin Scorsese Interview. Empire Online. https://www.empireonline.com/movies/features/irishman-week-martin-scorsese-interview/

Dillon, M. (2025, Nov 1). On the Fast Track for F1: The Movie. American Cinematographer. https://theasc.com/articles/f1-the-movie-cinematography

F1 (2026, Jan 23). ‘F1: The Movie’ Gets Four Oscar Nominations After Hugely Successful 2025 Release. Formula1.com. https://www.formula1.com/en/latest/article/f1-the-movie-gets-four-oscar-nominations-after-hugely-successful-2025.59jbRGRMmjrn0G2tJ5X5IC

Gray, T. (2009, Jun 24). Oscar Expands Best Pic Noms to 10. Variety. https://variety.com/2009/film/awards/oscar-expands-best-pic-noms-to-10-1118005322/

Perry, K.E.G. (2026, Jan 22). Brad Pitt’s F1 Somehow Got an Oscar Nomination for Best Picture – Here’s What Should be on the Podium Instead. Independent. https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/f1-best-picture-oscar-nomination-shock-snubs-b2905895.html

Simmons, J. (2026, Jan 22). Hear Me Out: F1 is One of the Worst ‘Best Picture’ Nominees Ever. Far Out. https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/f1-is-one-of-the-worst-best-picture-nominees-ever/

Surrey, M. (2026, Mar 9). Make the Case: F1 Doesn’t Deserve Your Best-Picture Scorn. The Ringer. https://www.theringer.com/2026/03/09/oscars/f1-best-picture-deserved-oscar-brad-pitt-apple-make-the-case

Tangcay, J. (2026, Feb 27). How F1’s Sound Team Gave the Film Its Sense of Scale and Authenticity With Unprecedented Access to Formula 1 Tracks, Grand Prix Races, Camera Footage and Audio. Variety. https://variety.com/2026/artisans/news/f1-movie-sound-formula-1-grand-prix-races-1236672932/

Biography

Duncan McLean is the Discipline Lead for Screen Studies in the BA program at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School (AFTRS) and has a PhD in Film Studies from Macquarie University. In addition to Pop Junctions, Duncan’s writing on genre has been published in The Journal of Popular Film and Television and Refractory: A Journal of Entertainment Media.

This piece is part of a series of critical responses to the films nominated for the 98th Academy Awards.

Oscar Bait: The Academy Awards & Cultural Prestige (Boucaut 2025)

Last year I released my first monograph, Oscar Bait: The Academy Awards & Cultural Prestige (Routledge). The book is a comprehensive account of the modern Academy Awards, operationalising the colloquial ‘Oscar bait’ into an academic framework to understand the complex mediatisation constructing awards worthiness in Hollywood. In my sample years of 2019 – 2021, I explore how the modern Oscars navigate social expectations around representative, diverse filmmaking, the new social and traditional media spaces that support today’s celebrity labour, and what the modern Oscars can communicate about filmic worth.

As a long-time Oscars enthusiast, completing this project has certainly complicated my relationship with Hollywood’s film culture, and my thoughts on engaging with the Oscars since. Picking up on some of my book’s themes, this piece offers some insights and opinions on the current Oscars season. In the spirit of blogging, it is decidedly less academic, so I’m sure we’ll disagree on some hot takes. While writing my book, my sensible mentors helped me to tone down some instinctual snark (‘going so hard on Joker may be alienating!’), but alas, the time has come to expunge such compulsions—strays will be copped!

Following the race from Australia is expensive!

I don’t doubt the same being the case from wherever else you may be reading this from—unless you yourself are an Academy voter with access to its members-only streaming service for your consideration (hello if you are!).

Of course, knowing what films are likely to be awards contenders across the year is something of a guessing game, particularly if you aren’t interested in the promotional strategies going on: seeing Weapons or Sinners earlier in 2025 out of sheer interest only to have it ticked off your Oscars watchlist would have been a happy bonus!

But, for the most part the glut of awards hopefuls dropped around the change of the calendar year means audiences will have to make some tough choices and pick some favourites. In a cost-of-living crisis and in-between seasonal contracts (shout out to the precariously employed academics) I only forked out AUD$24 (approx. US$17) a ticket for a handful of Best Picture and Acting nominees currently in theatres (apologies to The Secret Agent, I am still determined to get to you—Song Sung Blue, not so much…). To be a real completionist and assuming you hadn’t caught them in cinemas earlier in the year, you may also be looking at subscriptions to at least three different streaming services (Apple TV at $12.99 for a month to watch F1; Netflix at $9.99 for a month of ‘Standard with Ads’ for Train Dreams and Frankenstein; HBO Max at $11.99 for a month of ‘Basic with Ads’ for Sinners, Weapons, and One Battle After Another). And there’s the $6.99 rental of If I Had Legs I’d Kick You to cheer on our Aussie hopeful Rose Byrne, a film that barely exists otherwise.

Netflix at the Oscars: Train Dreams, KPop Demon Hunters & Frankenstein

Besides an indulgent whinge about how expensive life and culture is right now, these sentiments point to an ongoing problem facing the Academy in terms of relevance and investment: that of the unengaged cinema viewer. My book charts a time in the Oscars history where ceremony viewership was on a drastic downward decline, with producers of the telecast throwing whatever gimmicks might work at the wall to excite a casual viewer. In 2020, for example, there were a slew of non-cinematic celebrity presenters recruited into the host-less ceremony, which in practice only achieved a bloating of the runtime (George MacKay quipped late in the proceedings, “time is of the essence, which is why I’m here to introduce myself before introducing someone else, who will in turn introduce someone else”). And in 2022, the Twitter poll decided ‘Oscar Fan Favourite’ and ‘Oscar Cheer Moment’ shoutouts drew the ire of Academy members for cheapening the austerity of their ceremony (and, in an entirely predictable turn, these were even (allegedly) hijacked by Zack Snyder’s online stans using bots—and the Oscar Cheer Moment is, ahem, ‘The Flash Enters the Speed Force’).

Missteps like these make the Oscars’ identity crisis all the more pronounced and exacerbate the divide between the assembled cinematic elites and the home viewers. Efforts to inject more star power or to cut the runtime are clumsily integrated and fail to address an underlying threat to the Oscars in the demise of a Hollywood monoculture. More organic efforts to represent box office successes at the awards—for example, the nominations of franchise fare like Black Panther: Wakanda Forever or Joker—perhaps mark a more significant investment. The potential for cinematic prestige to accommodate genuine admiration amongst the voting cohort for broader popularity or box office achievement marks a more meaningful cultural shift, and one that a nomination haul like Sinners may be a direct beneficiary of.

So, if the Academy’s logic that a ceremony representing more popular films translates into a higher and more invested audience shares, they may be stung by the general pressures hitting the regular cinema-goer’s wallets. Having to budget selectively to only see some films in cinemas at a given moment sits poorly with the Oscars campaign machine, where a perceived recency bias from Academy voters sees most of the relevant films screening all at once. Interestingly, my book inadvertently serves to capture this broadcast tension in its twilight, with the unexpected recent announcement that the exclusive global rights to the ceremony will move to YouTube from 2029. What Frankenstein’s monster of a ceremony will be stitched together from recognisable telecast formulas past for the Oscars YouTube age?

But what of the films?

Hot take—they are pretty good! Out of the 2026 Best Picture nominations (that I’ve seen) there has been a better-than-usual hit rate of genuinely interesting work. One Battle After Another was maybe the tightest long film I’ve ever seen: snappy and exhilarating, with an instantly classic original score, it’s a presumptive winner I am on board with. Train Dreams is the kind-of slow and slight story that could easily slip into pretentious and boring—for me, it was staggering in its meditative focus, and Joel Edgerton could have certainly made the Best Actor cut. Hamnet has proven to be divisive amongst the critics, some who found it emotionally manipulative versus those leaving the cinema in a heaving puddle—I, and the one stranger also in my midday screening, fell in the latter camp. The opening scene of Sentimental Value—a narrated essay from the point of view of a family home—signals the sharp, original and playful work to follow. Bugonia and Frankenstein are maybe default inclusions as good enough works from their auteur helmers, but were good enough, nonetheless. I was fairly ho-hum on Sinners, but I think it is a fun inclusion for the race (particularly Wunmi Mosaku’s nomination). And I agree with my fresh crop of first year students—Timothee Chalamet was very good in Marty Supreme.

Still Got It! Brad Pitt and Javier Bardem in F1. Credit: Beata Zawrzel/NurPhoto

And then there’s F1, an obvious outlier as the season’s biggest surprise inclusion. I’m obliged to have thoughts on F1 given this film sits in the centre of the Venn diagram that is my long-term research projects: on one hand, the Oscars and prestige in film, and Apple TV as a supportive streaming service on the other (with Alexander Beare—shameless plug of published works here and here). I’ll declare my distaste for car films generally before connecting F1 to a film from my book’s corpus, Ford v Ferrari (yes, yes, I know they are such different films and car races, Dad!). As a Best Picture nominee in 2020, Ford v Ferrari was seen as something of a nostalgic antidote: sure, it only has one substantive speaking role for a woman (the aggrieved wife), but isn’t it fun to enjoy a film that’s “just guys being dudes who love fast cars” (Murray 2020)?

From this, my reaction to F1 getting a Best Picture nod was that we should never be surprised when a handsomely shot, vaguely conservative car film makes the cut! At least F1 features more speaking roles for women, including Kerry Condon as the racing team’s technical director (yes, Brad Pitt sleeps with her). The Academy’s now-decade-long quest to diversify its membership away from the ‘stale, pale and male’ stereotype has certainly seen some strides—most acutely in the continued appearances of films not performed in English across its top categories. Such efforts are perhaps better understood to be making more space for diverse nominees rather than overriding the prevailing tastes of Oscars past. Not only is F1 about cars, its narrative casts Pitt as an ageing guy who has still got it—he just lives to drive cars, man, and the young guns who wrote him off when he steps up to the wheel sure do learn a thing or two when he turns out to be right about everything. What could be a more reassuring message to the average demographic of Oscar voter? Vroom vroom!

As for performances, it was a bumper crop this year—and with options to spare (pour one out for Chase Infiniti and her phenomenal debut in One Battle After Another—do we really think Kate Hudson did something better?). It’s exciting to see the Supporting acting categories still undecided, with precursor awards given across a fair spread. As much affection I have for Amy Madigan’s Aunt Gladys in Weapons (an excellent sprinter), and as much as Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas and Wunmi Mosaku were the hearts of their ensemble casts in Sentimental Value and Sinners respectively, I can’t go past Teyana Taylor in One Battle After Another. A showy performance, sure—but one requiring such strength and impact to pull off, for it to reverberate across the entirety of the plot to come. Out of the Supporting men, Benicio del Toro’s performance was my favourite for how thoughtfully and playfully he filled the corners of One Battle After Another with life.

Another refreshing detail of this race is not having an effusive celebrity biopic draining all the actorly discourse of interest (Blue Moon and Song Sung Blue are both biographical performances but of more subcultural figures; Marty Mauser of Marty Supreme is a fictional construct loosely based on the real-life Marty Reisman). Performances like Rami Malek’s in Bohemian Rhapsody or Renee Zelwegger’s in Judy absorb glowing praise for how ‘convincing’ their ‘transformations’ were—rather than being challenging works, their films affirm broadly held beliefs about their central figures, thus tying an actor’s success with an already beloved entity.

Jessie Buckley in Hamnet. Credit: Focus Features

If biographical acting makes for obvious Oscar bait, then a performance like Jessie Buckley’s in Hamnet demonstrates how these stereotypes are malleable in practice. Spoiler alert: Buckley’s Anne is a mystically grounded, ethereal figure—she’s sensual yet unknowable when being courted by Will Shakespeare—she is intensely visceral when she’s giving birth to her child—and, the kicker, she howls in the most desperate anguish when her child passes. That’s a lot of ‘Big Acting’ to showcase, almost to the point where it could be a cliched awards grab. And yet, the critical and industrial goodwill afforded to Buckley and director Chloé Zhao insulates her from such critique. The same evaluative logic worked for Olivia Colman in The Favourite: “a period piece about a queer monarch…in a love triangle, in the middle of a war…on the verge of  mental breakdown caused in part by the trauma of losing multiple children—oh, and she has gout” (Be Kind Rewind 2019, a terrific video essayist covering Hollywood history). Buckley’s work in Hamnet is surely a lot—but it’s astonishing.

The Continued Fun of Following the Oscars

Writing a book about the modern Oscars hasn’t exhausted my interest in them. I theorised Oscar-worthiness as a discursively mediated phenomenon: that is, the fickle label of Oscar bait is given meaning and utility by an orbiting film and celebrity promotional ecosystem. That the stereotype endures in the collective imagination is itself some kind-of testament to the ongoing value of the Oscars in Hollywood’s global mythology. There are several further interesting threads rising from this season ripe for more reflections: the cancelled nominee and the blast radius of a scandal (Josh Safdie problematic, but Chalamet unscathed), or the snubbed pop sensation (Ariana Grande should have just won last year!), or the unquenching need to document historic firsts (or seconds, like Emma Stone “37, is now the second-youngest person in Oscar history to reach seven career nominations”; Davis 2026).

Looking at an Oscars season in isolation inevitably invokes threads from and links to Oscars of recent and distant pasts. Connecting the dots paints an interesting cultural legacy.

References

Be Kind Rewind 2019, A Best Actress 2019 Hot Take, YouTube, March 4, https://youtu.be/OI5QwWphDM8?si=pKlUHv9DqYtzfN5s.

Boucaut, R 2025, Oscar Bait: The Academy Awards & Cultural Prestige, Routledge.

Davis, C 2026, ‘Oscars Diversity Report: ‘Sinners’ Ties Record for Most Black Nominees From a Single Film, Plus Milestones for Chloe Zhao, Guillermo del Toro and More’, Variety, January 22, https://variety.com/2026/film/awards/oscars-diversity-report-2026-sinners-latinos-women-1236632578/.

Gonzalez, U 2022, ‘Did Zack Snyder Stans Rig the Oscar ‘Fan Favourite’ Vote With Online Bots? (Exclusive)’, The Wrap, May 12, https://www.thewrap.com/zack-snyder-oscar-fan-favorite-rig-vote-bots/.

Murray, I 2020, ‘Oscars 2020: Ford v Ferrari Should Win Best Picture’, GQ, February 6, https://www.gq.com/story/academy-awards-2020-ford-v-ferrari-should-win-best-picture.

Biography

Robert Boucaut is a Lecturer in Media at Adelaide University—his research interests include prestige media texts and celebrities, streaming services and programming imperatives, and mediated gender. His book Oscar Bait: The Academy Awards & Cultural Prestige (Routledge) builds new frameworks for analysing Hollywood media ecosystems and awards. He has published works in International Journal of Communication, Critical Studies in Television, and Media International Australia.

This contribution is part of a series of posts on genre and the ‘global shuffle’.

Have you ever wondered where films like Blade Runner (1982) or Ghost in the Shell (1995), with their massive, towering skyscrapers and claustrophobic corridors, get their inspiration? Kowloon Walled City (KWC, also known as the “city of darkness”), considered to be the most densely populated city on Earth before its demolition, inspired numerous forms of media, such as films, graphic novels, and video games. Renowned for its staggering architecture and congested wiring and cables covering the skyline, KWC stands apart as its own independent character within Hong Kong media. KWC’s spatial presence across Hong Kong’s global mediascapes reveals more than a visually haunting, post-apocalyptic fortress; it also draws attention to issues of nationhood, personal liberation and social justice that are integral to the genre of cross-border film.

Film genre is the “vital structure through which flow a myriad of themes and concepts [and] through which material flows from producers to directors [and] from the industry to distributors, exhibitors, audiences and their friends” (Kitses qtd. in Altman 14). According to writer and film theorist Rick Altman, film genres are more dynamic than presented. Therefore, they should be viewed as transcendent and demonstrative of stylistic devices or metaphors that establish connections (14). It is from these connections that a massive, postwar fortress like KWC has stood the test of time and carved out its own existence within Hong Kong film genres. Even decades after its demolition, KWC continues to intrigue and inspire compelling works of art. A prime example that led to a resurgence in Hong Kong cinematic features is Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In (2024), directed by Soi Cheang. Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In, which has become Hong Kong’s second highest-grossing film, foregrounds the spatiality of KWC and Altman’s theory of genre mixing by incorporating nostalgic kung fu/martial arts, neo-noir, and gangster/crime themes all within one feature film.

Dominating a small percentage of Hong Kong’s infrastructure from the First Opium War until the early 1990s, KWC is “most commonly associated with iconic images of the form it took from the mid-twentieth century: an inexplicable, densely packed, and seemingly anarchic urban settlement nestled within British colonial Hong Kong [where] mainland Chinese refugees and Hong Kong residents flowed into Kowloon Walled City” (May). KWC acts not only to historicize but also as a cultural symbol for both its residents and those who wander in. Historically, the rising tensions from China, Britain, and the outbreak of World War II with the Japanese occupation led to an awkward and uncertain political status: KWC was left out of the original treaty agreement between Britain and China, leaving KWC to effectively adopt its own laws and future. From these disputes of territory and mutable borders, KWC became an unintended, lawless byproduct—an enclave within an enclave that absorbed many mainland refugees escaping famine and political persecution. By the 1970s, KWC “…had grown so large within its confines that its over-height buildings were posing a safety hazard to aeroplanes from the nearby Kai Tak Airport (itself notorious as the world’s most terrifying airport due to its proximity to the city centre)” (Morisawa). KWC’s rapid expansion opened internal gaps for cheap labor, illegal drug trade, and prostitution to fill, coupled with a lack of surveillance, all of which made up the overall social ecosystem of the community. Where administrative oversight was largely absent, triad leaders and police officers conspired to regulate, control and profit from the wide-ranging illicit industries that flourished in KWC (Fraser and Li 223). The lived experience of KWC was therefore intimately bound up with experiences of crime and untethered nationhood. However, for Hong Kong it resulted in ad-hoc residences and economic revenue for smaller businesses. While there was also limited access to city maintenance and running water, there have been resident oral histories led by a group of Hong Kong-based community scholars that revealed that KWC had “…strong community ties, affordable housing, and a higher quality of life than international reportage usually depicted” (Blakemore). Moreover, since its demolition in 1993, countless oral testimonials and major photographic, architectural and journalistic accounts have emerged about KWC and revived the enclave via physical and virtual contexts.

KWC’s recent resurgence across diverse media has allowed for a ‘second life’ in which its “…reconstructions are less about the lived space of the Walled City itself and more about the idea that it represents: a self-sustaining social ecology that emerged in the cracks between the forces of ‘collaborative colonialism,’ a multistoried space of anarchic urbanism in which crime and corruption were deeply embedded” (Fraser and Li 222). KWC has since become a timeless trademark in the realm of cultural memory. Across a spectrum of cultural reconstructions such as film, graphic novels, and online gaming, KWC has come to represent a manifestation of the simulacra, in which ‘reality’ is replaced by systems of signs and symbols (Baudrillard, 1994). This reconstructed memory of KWC exists in the loopholes of pluralized communal memories, each its own copy of what once was. As a result of this reconstructed memory, KWC’s spatial existence has since been redeveloped as a “different facet of the contemporary crime-media nexus in Asia” (Fraser and Li 223); essentially partaking in a mix of genre play. In an interview for the 77th Cannes Film Festival, Cheang was asked about KWC and his intentions behind his research and reasons for selecting it as the primary focus for Twilight of the Warriors. For the set design, there was a blend of physical reconstruction of tin material, wires, and makeshift shops but also CGI during post-production by aligning, compositing, and matching layers of images and visual effects. Cheang opens with questions of how to replicate the terrifying yet sentimental complexities of what was also considered home for residents of many nationalities and walks of life. He further remarks on how:

The challenge would be the setup. Could we create the same essence of the space? The other thing was the action. I wanted it to be a little different from the action that we are generally kind of accustomed to. The good thing was that the story was also adapted into a comic book, and so looking at that, I saw it had a very specific vision for the action. We used that as a tipping point to then go into creating a new kind of action choreography that made reference to the old Hong Kong style but also allowed for it to be a little bit new in the process. (Hullender 2024)

This ‘old Hong Kong style’ Cheang refers to reveals a demarcation between film depictions of KWC from the period before demolition and those from the period after. Where early films such as Brothers from the Walled City (1982), Long Arm of the Law (1984) and Crime Story (1993) use KWC as a backdrop for crime and lawlessness – ‘a slum to escape from’ or a no man’s land of darkness and crime – they nonetheless take care to show a version of the lived experience in KWC (Fraser and Li 225). In more recent years from post-demolition, representations of KWC have taken a turn as a symbol of nostalgic communality, thrilling aesthetics or anarchic urbanism, as seen in Hollywood interpretations such as Bloodsport (1988) and Batman Begins (2005). Additional genres include cyberpunk and neo-noir, which all contribute to generic concerns for clarity and consistency throughout cinematic studies. This mix of genres within cinematic representations of KWC subsequently coincide with Altman’s question in Film/Genre where he asks: “…what is it about genres that makes them so easy to mix?” (132).

To answer this question in the realm of Hong Kong cinema, genre mixing does not always consist of mutually exclusive categories. However, in some cases with specific category types, genre mixing becomes more indiscriminate. For example, the generic application of Hong Kong neo-noir[1] and martial arts within the context of Hong Kong and KWC can be seen as a result of the geopolitical “…fear and uncertainty concerning the handover of the sovereignty of Hong Kong from Britain to China in 1997” (Chan 10). While there were familiar characteristics of the martial arts genre in Twilight of the Warriors with certain key factors of manual combat and stylized fast-motion cinematography, Cheang explains in an interview with Zolima CityMag that while shooting and researching during the early stages of the film: “…I got to thinking the Walled City was kind of like the situation in Hong Kong. I chose 1984 for a reason. At the time, everybody asked ‘who am I?’ Were we British or Chinese?” (Kerr).

In tracing the genealogy and development of popular generic trends in Hong Kong cinema, viewers can see that there has been a “presumed transformation or repositioning of colonial subjectivity” as well as the Hong Kong imagination (Chan 29). This shift in colonial subjectivity in the eyes of the viewer gives rise to possibilities in Hong Kong genre mixing since categories “…such as nationality, are so dependent on history that they may give rise to such anomalies as dual citizenship or statelessness” (Altman 32). This representation of statelessness parallels with the fluidity of genre that is depicted in Twilight of the Warriors via mainland refugee Chan Lok-kwun (played by Raymand Lam Fung), who scrapes for money across dangerous jobs in the slums of Hong Kong in order to acquire a passport. The characters in Twilight of the Warriors find themselves left to the mercy of stateless limbo, external decisions, and vicious triad wars, all while being protected by the walled city. This is reminiscent of the neo-noir genre. By adding themes of brotherhood, loyalty-and-betrayal, and recognizable, choreographed fight scenes that harken back to older Hong Kong films, Cheang succeeds in demonstrating precisely how “genre is first and foremost a boundary phenomenon” (Grindon 42). Boundaries that provide a glimpse into sociopolitical conflicts contribute to genres becoming compatible with one another.

This search for KWC since its demolition has resulted in a conjuring of space that no longer exists. Not only to retrieve but to define what the KWC once stood for is a challenge that contemporary writers and directors like Cheang must face. Considering the postcolonial history and cultural meaning behind KWC, viewers are confronted with multiple cultural meanings. In films like Twilight of the Warriors, KWC is remediated and rearranged as a new spatial experience that resolves discordant and seemingly eschewed tropes from before its demolition where “the cultural memory of a city that was too grimy, anarchic, and monstrous to even exist is re-affirmed” (May). Twilight of the Warriors therefore makes way for a more nuanced second life for KWC by reappropriating the nostalgic themes of martial arts, like brotherhood and loyalty, and neo-noir themes, like underground crime and lawlessness. Lastly, focusing on KWC allows for blurred boundaries within nationhood and statelessness that opens possibilities for a mix of genres. The mixing of genres allows for more pronounced relationships and themes that were not prominent in older depictions in Hong Kong cinema. In the same way that there are borderless and fluid notions of statehood within KWC, Twilight of the Warriors: Walled Insuccessively anchors the KWC’s spatial presence and reinvents it as a timeless, cultural memory.

 

Works Cited

Altman, Rick. Film/Genre. British Film Institute, 1999.

Blakemore, Erin. “Inside Kowloon Walled City—a Lawless Metropolis Where Anarchy Reigned in Hong Kong.” History, 16 Oct. 2025, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/kowloon-walled-city-history.

Cannes 2024: Interview with ‘Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In’ Director Soi Cheang | Fantastic Pavilion. https://fantasticpavilion.com/cannes-... 12 Oct. 2025.

Chan, Kim-mui E. Elaine. Hong Kong Dark Cinema: Film Noir, Re-Conceptions, and Reflexivity. Springer International Publishing AG, 2019. East Asian Popular Culture Ser.

Fraser, Alistair, and Eva Cheuk-Yin Li. “The Second Life of Kowloon Walled City: Crime,

Media and Cultural Memory.” Crime, Media, Culture 13, no. 2 (2017): 217–34. https://doi.org/10.1177/1741659017703681.

Grant, Barry Keith. Film Genre Reader IV. University of Texas Press, 2012.

Kerr, Elizabeth. “The Kowloon Walled City Comes to Life in a Surprise Action Hit.” Zolima CityMag, 2024, https://zolimacitymag.com/kowloon-twilight-of-the-warriors-walled-in-action-movie/.

May, Lawrence. “Virtual Heterotopias and the Contested Histories of Kowloon Walled City.” Games and Culture 17, no. 6 (2022): 885–900. https://doi.org/10.1177/15554120221115398.

Morisawa, Masaki. “Kowloon Walled City: An Accident of Hong Kong History.” The Gale Review, https://review.gale.com/2024/07/30/kowloon-walled-city/.

What Is Neo Noir? Definition and Essential Examples | No Film School. https://nofilmschool.com/neo-noir-mea.... Accessed 15 Oct. 2025.

 

[1] Neo-noir is the reimagining of the genre of film noir, which was a term coined by French film critic Neo Frank for movies that had an emphasis on criminal psychology, violence, misogyny, and the breaching of a previously steadfast moral system (Hellerman).

Biography

Georgiana Yasumura is an assistant lecturer and a doctoral student in the Comparative Media and Culture program at the University of Southern California, where her research focuses on the intersections of grief and mediated realities within AI platforms and video games. Some of her academic interests delve into Okinawan transcultural literature and media. 

This contribution is part of a series of posts on genre and the ‘global shuffle’.

 

Erik Skjoldbjærg’s Insomnia (1997) illustrates how cinematic genres migrate across borders, reworking familiar visual styles and ethical frameworks within new cultural and industrial environments. Set amid the perpetual daylight of northern Norway, the film follows a detective whose case becomes a descent into guilt and erasure, turning noir’s visual obscurity into psychological exposure. Although rooted in the crime thriller, Insomnia reshapes noir’s aesthetic and ethical vocabulary through a distinctly Nordic sensibility marked by rationalism, solitude, and moral reflection. Since the 1940s, scholars have defined film noir not as a stable genre but as a cinematic mode shaped by alienation, ambiguity, and visual tension (Schrader, 1972; Borde & Chaumeton, 1955). When these traits move across borders, they acquire new meanings through adaptation and convergence that reflect shifting industrial and cultural contexts (Altman, 1999; Jenkins, 2006). Insomnia exemplifies this process by translating noir’s darkness into relentless light, revealing how transnational cinema transforms inherited moral and visual codes to explore regionally specific anxieties about guilt and perception.

Placing this transformation within the broader framework of contemporary European and world cinema clarifies how such cross-cultural translations of noir occur. Thomas Elsaesser (2005) notes that European cinema has evolved from auteur-centered national traditions into a fluid, transnational field situated between the decline of “national cinema” and the rise of “world cinema.” Rather than a binary opposition between Europe and Hollywood, today’s European production is defined by public subsidy systems, state broadcasters, renewed interest in genre filmmaking, and the normalization of EU-funded co-productions since the 1990s. These industrial and cultural shifts produce hybrid forms that circulate internationally while preserving local inflections, as filmmakers balance art-cinema prestige with the accessibility of genre. Viewed through this lens, Insomnia and Holy Spider (2022) embody noir’s circulation within this European and global ecology: Skjoldbjærg reimagines noir’s moral ambiguity through the psychological realism of Scandinavian state-supported cinema, while Abbasi employs its shadows within a transnational framework to navigate censorship and critique patriarchal power. Both films thus reflect Elsaesser’s dynamics, in which genre functions as a flexible interface between national industries and global audiences, articulating culturally specific versions of shared moral concerns.

This transnational approach aligns with Altman’s (1999) view of genre as a dynamic system shaped by ongoing interaction among textual, industrial, and cultural forces. He identifies three interrelated dimensions of film text, industry, and national culture through which genre operates as a process of negotiation, continually redefining meaning in response to changing creative and institutional contexts. From this perspective, film noir cannot be restricted to the stylistic codes of postwar Hollywood; its continual reinvention across time and geography demonstrates how genres evolve through processes of cultural translation. Jenkins (2006) extends this logic by describing convergence as the movement of stories and aesthetics across media, industries, and cultures, generating hybrid forms that reflect their environments. Together, Altman and Jenkins position genre as a transnational system of circulation where meaning is reconstituted rather than merely transferred. Within this framework, noir appears not as a fixed American tradition but as a mobile discourse that transforms when its visual and moral language interacts with new cultural and industrial conditions. Insomnia exemplifies this transformation by adapting noir’s ethical and visual codes to Scandinavian realism, translating darkness into illumination and ambiguity into introspective guilt that reflects regional psychology and values. Viewed through Altman (1999) and Jenkins (2006), the film becomes evidence of how transnational cinema reshapes inherited forms to articulate evolving global anxieties about morality, perception, and identity.

Schrader (2009) defines film noir not as a genre with fixed conventions but as a cinematic mode distinguished by alienation, moral disillusionment, and ambiguity. He argues that noir’s distinctive tone emerged from postwar disillusionment, translating the era’s moral uncertainty into narratives where characters confront guilt and fatalism within what he calls “a mood of cynicism, pessimism, and darkness” (Film Genre Reader IV, p. 265). Borde and Chaumeton (2002) describe noir as a stylized cinematic world governed by fatalism and moral instability, where anxiety and existential despair replace the moral order of classical Hollywood. Place and Peterson (1974) emphasize that noir’s psychological and ethical instability is expressed primarily through visual form rather than narrative, as low-key lighting, obstructed compositions, and reflective surfaces create an atmosphere of confinement and fracture. This focus on visualizing moral instability suggests that noir’s strength lies in its aesthetic language, which enables its imagery and tone to migrate across cultures and acquire new meanings. Together, these perspectives demonstrate that genre should be understood not as a fixed category but as a fluid cultural process, where style and tone adapt to different contexts while preserving a shared sense of tension and uncertainty. Desser (2009) extends this argument, showing that global noir evolves through transnational exchange as filmmakers recontextualize familiar aesthetic codes to reflect distinct historical and cultural anxieties. 

Classic film noir emerged in mid-twentieth-century American cinema as a mode defined by moral ambiguity, psychological unease, and a visual aesthetic that mirrors the instability of its world. Borde and Chaumeton (2002) describe noir as a cinematic universe shaped by uncertainty and fatalism, where the collapse of moral order becomes both a narrative condition and a way of seeing. In this sense, noir transforms ethical confusion into a visual and emotional experience. Its darkness operates as a language of uncertainty, suggesting that perception itself is clouded by guilt, desire, and self-deception. Through this aesthetic language, noir’s moral and visual codes become transferable across cultures, allowing filmmakers to reinterpret its imagery to express their own historical and psychological concerns.

insomnia 1997

In Scandinavian cinema, noir’s visual darkness and moral ambiguity are reinterpreted through landscapes shaped by isolation, rationalism, and introspection, giving rise to what scholars call “Nordic noir.” Norðfjörð (2010) notes that this form preserves the alienation of classic noir but relocates it to bleak, open settings where the environment reflects the characters’ inner turmoil. In Insomnia, the perpetual daylight of northern Norway turns noir’s traditional darkness into exposure, making guilt and moral collapse visible rather than hidden. By reimagining noir’s aesthetic and emotional language within a Nordic context, Insomnia shows that transnational cinema does not simply adopt established conventions but reshapes them to express local moral and psychological tensions. Skjoldbjærg’s film demonstrates that noir’s durability depends on its ability to adapt across cultures, transforming its themes of alienation and guilt through new visual vocabularies that reflect regional conditions.

Skjoldbjærg visualizes noir’s moral instability by inverting its conventional aesthetics, employing blinding daylight, reflective surfaces, and spatial confinement to externalize the protagonist’s psychological collapse. In the pivotal fog sequence, when Jonas Engström mistakenly shoots his partner, the lack of visual clarity becomes a metaphor for moral blindness, echoing Place and Peterson’s view that noir transforms lighting and framing into expressions of ethical uncertainty. As the fog thickens and the visual field disintegrates, Skjoldbjærg converts environmental disorientation into an ethical condition, using obscured sightlines, diffused light, and muffled sound to translate Engström’s confusion into a sensory metaphor for guilt and self-deception. The director thus extends noir’s tradition of visualizing internal fracture through obstructive composition, treating the fog not as atmosphere but as an active agent that fractures space and erases the boundary between victim and perpetrator. Across the film, noir’s darkness becomes a suffocating brightness, as perpetual daylight functions less as illumination than as exposure, forcing guilt into visibility and denying any refuge in shadow. This inversion supports Norðfjörð’s (2010) claim that Nordic noir reconfigures instability and alienation within cold, desolate environments where natural light magnifies psychological tension rather than easing it. In Insomnia, visibility itself becomes punishment; the absence of night mirrors Engström’s inability to escape his conscience, turning the landscape into an instrument of judgment. Through this transformation, Skjoldbjærg shows how regional environments can redefine noir’s aesthetic language, translating its universal preoccupation with guilt, perception, and moral decay into a distinctly Scandinavian meditation on exposure and isolation.

This same sequence also highlights how cultural and industrial conditions reshape noir’s moral framework when adapted across contexts. While Skjoldbjærg’s fog sequence portrays the shooting as a moment of confusion and panic that merges perception and guilt, Nolan’s version reframes the same event within a context of professional tension and moral compromise. In the Norwegian film, Engström’s disoriented vision causes him to fire blindly, turning the environment into an externalization of his inner collapse. Nolan relocates this scene to a world defined by institutional pressure and reputation, where Detective Dormer is under investigation for past misconduct and faces betrayal from his partner. When Dormer fires in the fog and kills Eckhart, the question of whether it was accidental or intentional lingers, shaping the film’s moral tone. His later uncertainty reflects noir’s concern with self-deception, yet the American version grounds that unease in systemic corruption rather than existential guilt. This distinction illustrates Altman’s (1999) idea that genre evolves through negotiation between industrial and cultural forces. Skjoldbjærg’s version treats the fog as a psychological metaphor for moral blindness, while Nolan’s turns it into a visual expression of ethical avoidance within a bureaucratic system. The comparison reveals how transnational adaptation transforms noir’s shared themes of guilt and perception to reflect differing cultural beliefs about responsibility and redemption.

holy spider (2022)

A parallel process of cultural translation unfolds in Ali Abbasi’s Holy Spider (2022), which adapts noir’s fascination with guilt, corruption, and decay to the Iranian social and religious context. Whereas Skjoldbjærg renders guilt visible through relentless daylight, Abbasi restores noir’s darkness and shadow but uses them to expose how moral rot thrives beneath the surface of patriarchal piety. His night sequences, illuminated by dim streetlights, television glare, and uneven pools of artificial light, transform noir’s chiaroscuro into a visual discourse on surveillance, control, and complicity. Darkness becomes a language of both concealment and revelation, reflecting a society where violence is simultaneously condemned and sanctioned. In this way, Holy Spider converts noir’s visual lexicon into a critique of institutional power, replacing the solitary crisis of conscience typical of classic noir with a collective blindness maintained by religious and political authority. Read alongside Insomnia, the film exemplifies what Altman (1999) and Jenkins (2006) describe as the transnational life of genre, in which shared stylistic codes move across borders and acquire new moral significance within distinct cultural frameworks. Holy Spider thus extends noir’s global evolution by reinterpreting its moral language through an Iranian lens, using shadow not only as concealment but as complicity, and exposing how genre conventions adapt to local histories of repression and control. Both Abbasi and Skjoldbjærg reveal that noir’s endurance depends on this capacity for absorption and reinvention, transforming an American cinematic mode into a global vocabulary for depicting psychological and ethical anxiety. 

This process of circulation and reinvention extends beyond Europe and the Middle East, reaching back to Hollywood through Christopher Nolan’s 2002 remake of Insomnia. Nolan’s version reabsorbs Skjoldbjærg’s Nordic reinterpretation into an American industrial and narrative framework, illustrating how transnational exchange can culminate in cultural re-domestication. Set under the perpetual daylight of Alaska, the film preserves the original’s premise of a detective haunted by guilt yet reconfigures its moral texture. Where Skjoldbjærg’s Insomnia sustains ambiguity and paralysis, Nolan’s adaptation reshapes guilt into a path toward resolution, translating existential unease into a quest for ethical clarity. Al Pacino’s portrayal of Detective Dormer reflects this transformation: his exhaustion and guilt resolve through confession and self-sacrifice, reaffirming a redemptive morality absent from the Norwegian version. Visually, Nolan tempers the alienation of Skjoldbjærg’s film through a warmer palette and controlled compositions, replacing psychological disorientation with narrative coherence. The result demonstrates Hollywood’s tendency to absorb foreign aesthetic experimentation into familiar genre conventions, neutralizing moral ambiguity through closure. In this way, the remake completes noir’s circular migration from Hollywood to Scandinavia and ultimately back to its American context, showing how industrial conditions determine whether ambiguity is sustained, reframed, or resolved.

In Holy Spider, Abbasi reconfigures noir’s visual vocabulary to critique the intersection of faith, gender, and violence in contemporary Iran. In a key scene, Saeed watches his own murders replayed on television, his face lit by the cold blue glow of the screen. This image collapses the distance between spectator and subject, transforming the act of viewing into complicity and turning self-reflection into public spectacle. The screen replaces the mirror of classical noir, situating Abbasi’s imagery within a culture governed by surveillance, mediation, and moral performance. Rather than exposing guilt, visibility sanctifies violence by portraying Saeed as a religious martyr. The televised light functions as both halo and indictment, revealing how institutional authority transforms moral corruption into collective affirmation. Jenkins (2006) observes that convergence allows media forms to circulate and adapt across social and technological contexts; Abbasi’s film enacts this process by merging noir’s play of light and reflection with Iranian sociopolitical critique. Where Insomnialinks visibility with conscience, Holy Spider ties it to power and control. Together, the films demonstrate how transnational noir translates shared moral and psychological tensions into culturally specific visual systems that reflect distinct modes of seeing and believing.

Both Insomnia and Holy Spider operate within the framework of the crime drama, employing investigation and pursuit as narrative structures through which moral and psychological questions emerge. Yet neither film resolves its central crime by restoring order; instead, each reorients the procedural form toward ethical inquiry. In Insomnia, the detective’s guilt eclipses justice as the dominant concern, while in Holy Spider, the investigation exposes institutional complicity rather than isolating individual wrongdoing. Through this fusion of noir and crime drama, both directors convert investigation into a meditation on conscience, surveillance, and power. Considered together, the films illustrate how hybrid genre design enables filmmakers to balance global accessibility with local specificity, reshaping familiar narrative frameworks to express culturally grounded moral and emotional tensions. In each case, noir’s aesthetics intertwine with the conventions of the crime narrative to transform investigation into a form of moral excavation, demonstrating how transnational cinema employs genre hybridity to interrogate both personal and systemic corruption.

The comparative movement between Insomnia and Holy Spider reveals noir not as a static American inheritance but as an evolving cinematic discourse shaped by cultural translation. Both films demonstrate how genre conventions adapt as they cross borders, transforming visual and moral codes to articulate localized forms of anxiety, guilt, and corruption. A closer look at the shared fog sequence in Skjoldbjærg’s and Nolan’s versions of Insomnia underscores this process at the level of cinematic detail, showing how the same narrative moment acquires distinct moral and emotional meanings through its cultural and industrial contexts. In doing so, they reaffirm Altman’s view of genre as a dynamic negotiation between text, industry, and culture, while extending Jenkins’s notion of convergence to the realm of global aesthetics. Noir’s persistence in these contexts underscores that its power lies not in fixed iconography but in its flexibility as a moral and psychological language. Through their distinct manipulations of light and darkness, Insomnia and Holy Spider, along with the circulation between Skjoldbjærg’s original and Nolan’s remake, reveal how transnational cinema uses genre hybridity to explore universal ethical tensions within culturally specific frameworks. In this way, noir’s global evolution underscores its dual role as both a shared cinematic idiom of ethical reflection and a mirror through which diverse societies confront their cultural and moral complexities.

 

References

Altman, R. (1999). Film/Genre. British Film Institute.

Borde, R., & Chaumeton, É. (2002). A Panorama of American Film Noir: 1941–1953 (P. Hammond, Trans.). City Lights Books. (Original work published 1955)

Desser, D. (2009). Global noir: Genre film in the age of transnationalism. In B. K. Grant (Ed.), Film genre reader IV (pp. 628–648). University of Texas Press.

Elsaesser, T. (2005). European cinema: Face to face with Hollywood. Amsterdam University Press.

Jenkins, H. (2006). Convergence culture: Where old and new media collide. New York University Press.

Norðfjörð, B. Æ. (2015). Crime up north: The case of Norway, Finland and Iceland. In T. Gustafsson & P. Kääpä (Eds.), Nordic genre film: Small nation film cultures in the global marketplace (pp. 145–163). Edinburgh University Press.

Place, J. A., & Peterson, L. S. (1974). Some visual motifs of film noir. Film Comment, 10(1), 30–35.

Schrader, P. (2009). Notes on film noir. In B. K. Grant (Ed.), Film genre reader IV (pp. 265–278). University of Texas Press. (Original work published 1972)

Films Cited

Insomnia [Film]. (1997). E. Skjoldbjærg (Director). Norsk Film A/S.

Insomnia [Film]. (2002). C. Nolan (Director). Alcon Entertainment; Section Eight; Hilary Seitz Productions; Warner Bros. Pictures.

Holy Spider [Film]. (2022). A. Abbasi (Director). Profile Pictures; Film i Väst.

Biography

Lauren Reel is a graduate student in Communication Management at the University of Southern California, where she focuses on marketing, strategic communication, and storytelling across global media industries. She earned her Bachelor of Arts in Cinema and Television Arts from California State University, Northridge, graduating summa cum laude. Alongside her professional work in marketing and brand strategy, Reel studies global cinema with a particular interest in Latin American and transnational film. Her academic research examines how genre, memory, and cultural identity circulate across national contexts, reflecting her broader interest in the intersection of global film industries, communication, and narrative.

This contribution is part of a series of posts on genre and the ‘global shuffle’.

In a 2014 car insurance ad, a group of terrified young people flee some horrific threat, parodying a stereotypical schlocky horror film.1 They deliberate what they should do next alternatively suggesting to hide in the attic of a dilapidated house, the basement, and the reasonable idea that - as one sobbing youth asks - why can’t they simply leave via the running car? That idea is quickly shot down as farcical, and instead chose to hide behind a bunch of rusty chainsaws in a foul looking garage. The parodic killer is in the exact spot they chose, rolling his eyes as a voiceover narrates: “If you’re in a horror movie, you make poor decisions. It’s what you do.” The ad contrasts it with the rational choice of purchasing their car insurance over a shot of the hapless gaggle running towards the cemetery. The ad, in a breezy one-minute runtime, neatly outlines a commonly perceived facet of the horror genre: characters compulsively act against the grain of sound decision making, submitting themselves to the terror that we, the sagacious viewer, would surely avoid if we were in their stead. Leaving car insurance for another day, I want to focus on how this generic feature is elaborated. 

Irrationality, or stupidity in many cases, can come in various forms over the course of a given horror film. Frequently, this unfolds as a character fails to maintain a relationship to space that would keep them from the grasp of the particular bogeyman threatening them. The more caring individuals among us may try to warn them, crying out, “DON’T GO IN THERE”, ignoring the diegetic world’s indifference to the protestations of the audience as a character crosses a threshold that would have been better left uncrossed. I see this as a compulsive attitude wherein characters, in part because of the demands of narrative (we wouldn’t have a movie if horror characters avoided such circumstances) depart from “typical” psychological attitudes as a means of articulating genre. It is none too interesting to say that different genres employ different psychological relations that fall outside of day-to-day activity. What I hope to suggest by broaching these moments of spatial indiscretion is the interface between the text and the audience and the location of genre somewhere between the two. I propose the term generic compulsion to address how both film text and audience are drawn to generic classification. I argue something is lost when theorizing genre completely abandons either the text or external sites of meaning making, such as advertisement or public perception. On the one hand, a strictly textual approach overlooks the discursivity of genre and how it is deployed. On the other hand, discursive strategies that completely elides an important fact of that discourse: despite various moves in genre studies to unmoor genre from the text, a common-sense conception will point back to the text. Compulsion mediates between the two by pointing to how film texts locate themselves within generic tradition and how the audience is able to make such a claim that this film is that genre. 

To get to the dual aspects of generic compulsion, I will discuss Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Creepy (2016), which features several moments of a character passing into the maw of horror against better judgement. The film follows an ex-detective turned criminology professor, Takakura who, after relocating to a new home in the suburbs with his wife, Yasuko, is drawn to a mysterious case by one of his new colleagues. Years prior, a family mysteriously disappeared, leaving behind their teenage daughter who only has a fragmented account of the events. While Takakura chases this unsolved mystery, Yasuko has an increasingly strange series of encounters with their Neighbor, Nishino. Nishino lives up to the title of the film, emulating the physicality of a Looney Tunes caricature of Peter Lorre channeled through an awkward suburban avatar. The couple directly address his ominous bearing as early on, after a mangled attempt to give Nishino a neighborly gift, Takakura assuages Yasuko of unease as he explains it's not the ones you’d expect to commit crimes. Unfortunately, Nishino’s external appearance proves to be a pretty reliable indicator of his internal character, a book best judged by its cover. 

Despite how off-putting Nishino is, Yasuko valiantly attempts to maintain a cordial relationship with him, at one point bringing him leftover food. Nishino asks Yasuko further into his abode, but, upon a look from his daughter, Yasuko hastily makes an excuse to leave the premises. Her initial hesitancy gives way later on as she crosses the threshold, joining Nishino’s pretend daughter and until this point unseen wife as captives. Nishino fashions his prisoners into a quasi-nuclear family, with himself at the head, wielding complete patriarchal authority. Moreover, this is a cyclical ritual for him. Taskakura’s investigation slowly reveals the connection between the cold case and his domestic situation. The film concludes after several deaths and moments where characters “should not have gone in there,” with Nishino taking his makeshift family on the road, ready to reincarnate his next cycle until Takakura breaks his grip, shooting the ghastly neighbor dead. 

This is a cursory overview of the film and smooths over a lot of its intricacies and convolutions, which I hope will come out in further analysis, but should highlight a few elements. First, the role of hypnosis in the narrative. While we know there is a chemical basis for the victim’s reactions, with Nishino injecting Yasuko, we don’t really know what it is, how it works, or the extent to which it determines behaviors or merely suggests them. What we do know is that it is effective. Effective enough that Nishino has been doing this for years. Second, his house, and more specifically the hallway leading to the heavy metallic door which holds his captives, acts as a kind of binding agent for his hypnosis wherein characters are seemingly completely subjected to his will.  Even though not strictly hypnosis, I argue that the threshold of horror-space acts as a hypnotic agent both diegetically and for the audience in how they relate generically to the film, which is doubled in Creepy through the hypnotic effects of Nishino’s injection. 

This is a prime example of generic compulsion. Compulsion is meant to highlight that, while it still connotes a lack of autonomy in decision making, does not include the same level of unconsciousness suggested by hypnosis.  Often it is the force of the narrative that drives this compulsion. For example, a slasher film needs a requisite amount of death and thus requires a level of compulsion from the characters to enable that, but should also be read for its deeper signification of the cultural valence of the horror genre. The compulsion to enter horror-space can be viewed as what Rick Altman has called “generic crossroad,” points in a narrative where decision opens up the possibility of generic pleasure for the audience. Altman introduces the term, writing, 

To the extent that they are indebted to specific genre, Hollywood films incorporate a series of paradigmatically designed and often repeated ‘crossroads’. Each one of these moments depends on a crucial opposition between two paths open to the text, each representing a different type of pleasure for the spectator. Strategically simplifying, we may say that one fork offers a culturally sanctioned activity or value, while the other path diverges in favour of generic pleasure…Though they may remain unaware of the process, those who delight in a particular genre are always affected by the crossroad experiences involving that genre, simply because their continued pleasure depends on the ‘proper’ negotiation of those crossroads. (1999, 145).

In Creepy, we come to the crossroads in the aforementioned scene where Yasuko is first invited into Nishino’s lair. Everything screams that this is not the place to be, reinforced by the scared and meaningful look of Nishino’s fake daughter. What Kurosawa does that perhaps diverges in the usual offering of generic pleasure is forestall the revelation of what’s behind the door. We come to the door and not pass it several times before getting let in on the magnitude of Nishino’s depravity, which amplifies the moment when we are finally let into the room.

While Altman’s thesis here is helpful in delineating how these particular moments enable generic pleasure, I would like to muddy the water a bit. The bifurcation of pleasures, between the culturally sanctioned and its opposite, is not so clear, especially when that pleasure is derived from a sense of fear. In Creepy, disgust and affection are comingled, never intractable from one another. The generic crossroads offered by the film aren’t permanent divergences between the sanctioned and the unsanctioned, but rather a continual process of re-connecting. In fact, the distinction between the sanctioned and its opposite is blurred as Nishino assembles his makeshift family, which for a little bit appears to be more cohesive, even if that cohesion is coerced, than the marital until of Takakura and Yasuko. While generic crossroads may refer broadly between choices that don’t necessarily involve a spatial element, compulsive decision making in horror films is best realized through spatialization. These areas are examples of a Bakhtinian “chronotope”, spatio-temporal knots whose expression engenders specific generic relations, “[Defining] genre and genre distinctions” and “determines…the image of man” (1981, 85). In other words, spatio-temporal arrangement of narrative elements compels characters to act generically. This should not only be thought of as structuring the narrative and character relations, but orienting the audience to the specificity of these relations, or, in other words, its worthiness as a generic indicator. 

In Creepy, and other Kurosawa films, space-time undergoes a strange series of dilations and contractions. In the several instances where a character inadvisably enters Nishino’s house, the space to the bunker door seems to yawn into an abyss, the seconds inching by. Horror is enacted through these permutations, with the narrative continually receding back to the house. It is only when Nishino’s newly assembled family are removed from these environs that Takakura is able to break from the compulsion at the end of the film. The recursivity of these moments, doubled by the fact that Nishino appears to be carrying out his plots on nearly identical geographical and social formations, acting first as neighbor to the victims, underscores that these elements are fundamentally generic. The deployment of sameness in the film conjures the image of a genre coming into definition through the repetition of recognizable elements. The most disturbing element of this recursivity is in how it centers domestic space as horror-space, and death (at least for Yasuko and Takakura) is not the immediate source of terror, but rather the mimetic recapitulation of the domesticity that is the supposed good object to pursue. In this blurring, domestic life itself is seen as a grim kind of compulsion towards stereotypic behavior. Yasuko plays a dutiful wife, cooking elaborate meals, greeting Takakura at the door, pouring him beer, etc, but she isn’t happy. The horror-space of Nishino’s house is a reflection of the unrealized horror of her own space. But I shouldn’t overstate my case; being a bad husband is not the same as vacuum sealing dead bodies. A difference of degree, if not of kind. 

To close, I want to extrapolate how the compulsion of characters to enter horror-space relates to spectators' relationship with genre itself. If hypnosis/compulsion has been thematized in countless films, it has been doubly posited by theory. Eisenstein's “montage of attractions”,2 apparatus theory’s infantalization of the audience,3 Linda Williams’ “body genres,”4 and more all point to an idea that the spectator is at the whim of the film, each theory outlining its own method of compulsion. I use generic compulsion to indicate how genre orients us in a specific direction towards itself.  

For Peter Rabinowitz, “genres can be viewed as strategies that readers use to process texts” and, changing the scenario for the moving pictures, audiences choose which textual elements signal generic leanings (1985, 419). I concur with him, but slightly modify it through the lens of compulsion. Rather than choosing, although one can always choose after the fact, I argue that an audience is compelled towards generic features, which then enable the type of reading Rabinowitz describes. Like the characters who cannot but help to enter horror space, we are compelled towards generic elements as anchor points for our understanding of the text. This is especially relevant to “genre film.” Take Umberto Eco’s classic treatment of the cult film, that “one must be able to unhinge it, to break it up and take it apart so that one may remember only parts of it, regardless of their original relationship to the whole” (1985, 4). Cult film and genre film are not synonymous, but I’m leveling the difference here to make a point: there are elements, and they don’t necessarily have to be textual, that have a strong pull over us and shape our relationship to the text. Generic compulsion isolates those elements that hold unnatural sway over us, and it is these moments that shape our understanding of a given film as generic. 

What I hope to achieve in this tentative formulation of generic compulsion is to point to the sympathies between how narratives appear to belong to a given genre and how those judgements are made. While I typically privilege an approach to genre that hinges on the discursive construction of genres, we should not abandon the text and the sway it holds. Compulsion figures as a model for both the structure of generic texts and how they are deemed to belong to this or that genre. Horror is fertile ground for this examination because of its overemphasis on non-rational choice making, but compulsion can and should be thought across a range of genres and audience’s relationships to them. 

 Notes

Car Insurance, Geico. “Good Choices: Geico Horror Movie Commercial”. Advertisement. 2014.

“An attraction (in relation to the theatre) is any aggressive aspect of the theatre; that is,any element of the theatre that subjects the spectator to a sensual or psychological impact, experimentally regulated and mathematically calculated to produce in him certain emotional shocks which, when placed in their proper sequence within the totality of the production, become the only means that enable the spectator to perceive the ideological side of what is being demonstrated-the ultimate ideological conclusion.” (1974, 78).

For example, Dayan, in “The Tutor-code of Classical Cinema”, uses the Lacanian imaginary to describe how it “sutures” the audience into the ideology of the film. (1974)

For Williams, horror evokes a mimetic reaction in the audience. (1991)

Bibliography

Altman, Rick, and British Film Institute. 1999. Film/Genre. London: BFI Pub.

Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 1981. Dialogic Imagination : Four Essays. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Dayan, Daniel. 1974 “The Tutor-Code of Classical Cinema.” Film Quarterly 28, no. 1: 22–31. 

Eco, Umberto. 1985. “‘Casablanca’: Cult Movies and Intertextual Collage.” SubStance 14, no. 2

Eisenstein, Sergei, and Daniel Gerould. 1974. “Montage of Attractions: For ‘Enough Stupidity in Every Wiseman.’” The Drama Review: TDR 18, no. 1: 77–85. 

Rabinowitz, Peter J. 1985. "The Turn of the Glass Key: Popular Fiction as Reading Strategy." Critical Inquiry, vol. 11, no. 3,  pp. 418–431.

Williams, Linda. 1991. “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess.” Film Quarterly 44, no. 4. 

Biography

Graham Paull is a PhD student in Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Southern California. His main research interest is in the representation of animal life across media, science, culture, and philosophy. This work has been presented at the Domitor Conference graduate workshop (2024) and inaugural Hollywood Conference (2025), with particular attention to the transformation in human-animal relations reflected in the rise of CGI technologies. Outside of work, you can find him at the movies or watching baseball.

This contribution is part of a series of posts on genre and the ‘global shuffle’.

In a 2014 car insurance ad, a group of terrified young people flee some horrific threat, parodying a stereotypical schlocky horror film.1 They deliberate what they should do next alternatively suggesting to hide in the attic of a dilapidated house, the basement, and the reasonable idea that - as one sobbing youth asks - why can’t they simply leave via the running car? That idea is quickly shot down as farcical, and instead chose to hide behind a bunch of rusty chainsaws in a foul looking garage. The parodic killer is in the exact spot they chose, rolling his eyes as a voiceover narrates: “If you’re in a horror movie, you make poor decisions. It’s what you do.” The ad contrasts it with the rational choice of purchasing their car insurance over a shot of the hapless gaggle running towards the cemetery. The ad, in a breezy one-minute runtime, neatly outlines a commonly perceived facet of the horror genre: characters compulsively act against the grain of sound decision making, submitting themselves to the terror that we, the sagacious viewer, would surely avoid if we were in their stead. Leaving car insurance for another day, I want to focus on how this generic feature is elaborated. 

Irrationality, or stupidity in many cases, can come in various forms over the course of a given horror film. Frequently, this unfolds as a character fails to maintain a relationship to space that would keep them from the grasp of the particular bogeyman threatening them. The more caring individuals among us may try to warn them, crying out, “DON’T GO IN THERE”, ignoring the diegetic world’s indifference to the protestations of the audience as a character crosses a threshold that would have been better left uncrossed. I see this as a compulsive attitude wherein characters, in part because of the demands of narrative (we wouldn’t have a movie if horror characters avoided such circumstances) depart from “typical” psychological attitudes as a means of articulating genre. It is none too interesting to say that different genres employ different psychological relations that fall outside of day-to-day activity. What I hope to suggest by broaching these moments of spatial indiscretion is the interface between the text and the audience and the location of genre somewhere between the two. I propose the term generic compulsion to address how both film text and audience are drawn to generic classification. I argue something is lost when theorizing genre completely abandons either the text or external sites of meaning making, such as advertisement or public perception. On the one hand, a strictly textual approach overlooks the discursivity of genre and how it is deployed. On the other hand, discursive strategies that completely elides an important fact of that discourse: despite various moves in genre studies to unmoor genre from the text, a common-sense conception will point back to the text. Compulsion mediates between the two by pointing to how film texts locate themselves within generic tradition and how the audience is able to make such a claim that this film is that genre. 

To get to the dual aspects of generic compulsion, I will discuss Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Creepy (2016), which features several moments of a character passing into the maw of horror against better judgement. The film follows an ex-detective turned criminology professor, Takakura who, after relocating to a new home in the suburbs with his wife, Yasuko, is drawn to a mysterious case by one of his new colleagues. Years prior, a family mysteriously disappeared, leaving behind their teenage daughter who only has a fragmented account of the events. While Takakura chases this unsolved mystery, Yasuko has an increasingly strange series of encounters with their Neighbor, Nishino. Nishino lives up to the title of the film, emulating the physicality of a Looney Tunes caricature of Peter Lorre channeled through an awkward suburban avatar. The couple directly address his ominous bearing as early on, after a mangled attempt to give Nishino a neighborly gift, Takakura assuages Yasuko of unease as he explains it's not the ones you’d expect to commit crimes. Unfortunately, Nishino’s external appearance proves to be a pretty reliable indicator of his internal character, a book best judged by its cover. 

Despite how off-putting Nishino is, Yasuko valiantly attempts to maintain a cordial relationship with him, at one point bringing him leftover food. Nishino asks Yasuko further into his abode, but, upon a look from his daughter, Yasuko hastily makes an excuse to leave the premises. Her initial hesitancy gives way later on as she crosses the threshold, joining Nishino’s pretend daughter and until this point unseen wife as captives. Nishino fashions his prisoners into a quasi-nuclear family, with himself at the head, wielding complete patriarchal authority. Moreover, this is a cyclical ritual for him. Taskakura’s investigation slowly reveals the connection between the cold case and his domestic situation. The film concludes after several deaths and moments where characters “should not have gone in there,” with Nishino taking his makeshift family on the road, ready to reincarnate his next cycle until Takakura breaks his grip, shooting the ghastly neighbor dead. 

This is a cursory overview of the film and smooths over a lot of its intricacies and convolutions, which I hope will come out in further analysis, but should highlight a few elements. First, the role of hypnosis in the narrative. While we know there is a chemical basis for the victim’s reactions, with Nishino injecting Yasuko, we don’t really know what it is, how it works, or the extent to which it determines behaviors or merely suggests them. What we do know is that it is effective. Effective enough that Nishino has been doing this for years. Second, his house, and more specifically the hallway leading to the heavy metallic door which holds his captives, acts as a kind of binding agent for his hypnosis wherein characters are seemingly completely subjected to his will.  Even though not strictly hypnosis, I argue that the threshold of horror-space acts as a hypnotic agent both diegetically and for the audience in how they relate generically to the film, which is doubled in Creepy through the hypnotic effects of Nishino’s injection. 

This is a prime example of generic compulsion. Compulsion is meant to highlight that, while it still connotes a lack of autonomy in decision making, does not include the same level of unconsciousness suggested by hypnosis.  Often it is the force of the narrative that drives this compulsion. For example, a slasher film needs a requisite amount of death and thus requires a level of compulsion from the characters to enable that, but should also be read for its deeper signification of the cultural valence of the horror genre. The compulsion to enter horror-space can be viewed as what Rick Altman has called “generic crossroad,” points in a narrative where decision opens up the possibility of generic pleasure for the audience. Altman introduces the term, writing, 

To the extent that they are indebted to specific genre, Hollywood films incorporate a series of paradigmatically designed and often repeated ‘crossroads’. Each one of these moments depends on a crucial opposition between two paths open to the text, each representing a different type of pleasure for the spectator. Strategically simplifying, we may say that one fork offers a culturally sanctioned activity or value, while the other path diverges in favour of generic pleasure…Though they may remain unaware of the process, those who delight in a particular genre are always affected by the crossroad experiences involving that genre, simply because their continued pleasure depends on the ‘proper’ negotiation of those crossroads. (1999, 145).

In Creepy, we come to the crossroads in the aforementioned scene where Yasuko is first invited into Nishino’s lair. Everything screams that this is not the place to be, reinforced by the scared and meaningful look of Nishino’s fake daughter. What Kurosawa does that perhaps diverges in the usual offering of generic pleasure is forestall the revelation of what’s behind the door. We come to the door and not pass it several times before getting let in on the magnitude of Nishino’s depravity, which amplifies the moment when we are finally let into the room.

While Altman’s thesis here is helpful in delineating how these particular moments enable generic pleasure, I would like to muddy the water a bit. The bifurcation of pleasures, between the culturally sanctioned and its opposite, is not so clear, especially when that pleasure is derived from a sense of fear. In Creepy, disgust and affection are comingled, never intractable from one another. The generic crossroads offered by the film aren’t permanent divergences between the sanctioned and the unsanctioned, but rather a continual process of re-connecting. In fact, the distinction between the sanctioned and its opposite is blurred as Nishino assembles his makeshift family, which for a little bit appears to be more cohesive, even if that cohesion is coerced, than the marital until of Takakura and Yasuko. While generic crossroads may refer broadly between choices that don’t necessarily involve a spatial element, compulsive decision making in horror films is best realized through spatialization. These areas are examples of a Bakhtinian “chronotope”, spatio-temporal knots whose expression engenders specific generic relations, “[Defining] genre and genre distinctions” and “determines…the image of man” (1981, 85). In other words, spatio-temporal arrangement of narrative elements compels characters to act generically. This should not only be thought of as structuring the narrative and character relations, but orienting the audience to the specificity of these relations, or, in other words, its worthiness as a generic indicator. 

In Creepy, and other Kurosawa films, space-time undergoes a strange series of dilations and contractions. In the several instances where a character inadvisably enters Nishino’s house, the space to the bunker door seems to yawn into an abyss, the seconds inching by. Horror is enacted through these permutations, with the narrative continually receding back to the house. It is only when Nishino’s newly assembled family are removed from these environs that Takakura is able to break from the compulsion at the end of the film. The recursivity of these moments, doubled by the fact that Nishino appears to be carrying out his plots on nearly identical geographical and social formations, acting first as neighbor to the victims, underscores that these elements are fundamentally generic. The deployment of sameness in the film conjures the image of a genre coming into definition through the repetition of recognizable elements. The most disturbing element of this recursivity is in how it centers domestic space as horror-space, and death (at least for Yasuko and Takakura) is not the immediate source of terror, but rather the mimetic recapitulation of the domesticity that is the supposed good object to pursue. In this blurring, domestic life itself is seen as a grim kind of compulsion towards stereotypic behavior. Yasuko plays a dutiful wife, cooking elaborate meals, greeting Takakura at the door, pouring him beer, etc, but she isn’t happy. The horror-space of Nishino’s house is a reflection of the unrealized horror of her own space. But I shouldn’t overstate my case; being a bad husband is not the same as vacuum sealing dead bodies. A difference of degree, if not of kind. 

To close, I want to extrapolate how the compulsion of characters to enter horror-space relates to spectators' relationship with genre itself. If hypnosis/compulsion has been thematized in countless films, it has been doubly posited by theory. Eisenstein's “montage of attractions”,2 apparatus theory’s infantalization of the audience,3 Linda Williams’ “body genres,”4 and more all point to an idea that the spectator is at the whim of the film, each theory outlining its own method of compulsion. I use generic compulsion to indicate how genre orients us in a specific direction towards itself.  

For Peter Rabinowitz, “genres can be viewed as strategies that readers use to process texts” and, changing the scenario for the moving pictures, audiences choose which textual elements signal generic leanings (1985, 419). I concur with him, but slightly modify it through the lens of compulsion. Rather than choosing, although one can always choose after the fact, I argue that an audience is compelled towards generic features, which then enable the type of reading Rabinowitz describes. Like the characters who cannot but help to enter horror space, we are compelled towards generic elements as anchor points for our understanding of the text. This is especially relevant to “genre film.” Take Umberto Eco’s classic treatment of the cult film, that “one must be able to unhinge it, to break it up and take it apart so that one may remember only parts of it, regardless of their original relationship to the whole” (1985, 4). Cult film and genre film are not synonymous, but I’m leveling the difference here to make a point: there are elements, and they don’t necessarily have to be textual, that have a strong pull over us and shape our relationship to the text. Generic compulsion isolates those elements that hold unnatural sway over us, and it is these moments that shape our understanding of a given film as generic. 

What I hope to achieve in this tentative formulation of generic compulsion is to point to the sympathies between how narratives appear to belong to a given genre and how those judgements are made. While I typically privilege an approach to genre that hinges on the discursive construction of genres, we should not abandon the text and the sway it holds. Compulsion figures as a model for both the structure of generic texts and how they are deemed to belong to this or that genre. Horror is fertile ground for this examination because of its overemphasis on non-rational choice making, but compulsion can and should be thought across a range of genres and audience’s relationships to them. 

 Notes

Car Insurance, Geico. “Good Choices: Geico Horror Movie Commercial”. Advertisement. 2014.

“An attraction (in relation to the theatre) is any aggressive aspect of the theatre; that is,any element of the theatre that subjects the spectator to a sensual or psychological impact, experimentally regulated and mathematically calculated to produce in him certain emotional shocks which, when placed in their proper sequence within the totality of the production, become the only means that enable the spectator to perceive the ideological side of what is being demonstrated-the ultimate ideological conclusion.” (1974, 78).

For example, Dayan, in “The Tutor-code of Classical Cinema”, uses the Lacanian imaginary to describe how it “sutures” the audience into the ideology of the film. (1974)

For Williams, horror evokes a mimetic reaction in the audience. (1991)

Bibliography

Altman, Rick, and British Film Institute. 1999. Film/Genre. London: BFI Pub.

Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 1981. Dialogic Imagination : Four Essays. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Dayan, Daniel. 1974 “The Tutor-Code of Classical Cinema.” Film Quarterly 28, no. 1: 22–31. 

Eco, Umberto. 1985. “‘Casablanca’: Cult Movies and Intertextual Collage.” SubStance 14, no. 2

Eisenstein, Sergei, and Daniel Gerould. 1974. “Montage of Attractions: For ‘Enough Stupidity in Every Wiseman.’” The Drama Review: TDR 18, no. 1: 77–85. 

Rabinowitz, Peter J. 1985. "The Turn of the Glass Key: Popular Fiction as Reading Strategy." Critical Inquiry, vol. 11, no. 3,  pp. 418–431.

Williams, Linda. 1991. “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess.” Film Quarterly 44, no. 4. 

Biography

Graham Paull is a PhD student in Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Southern California. His main research interest is in the representation of animal life across media, science, culture, and philosophy. This work has been presented at the Domitor Conference graduate workshop (2024) and inaugural Hollywood Conference (2025), with particular attention to the transformation in human-animal relations reflected in the rise of CGI technologies. Outside of work, you can find him at the movies or watching baseball.