In my last post, I mentioned "another difference" between films like Divergent and other political thrillers, and I've been trying to come up with a good way of explaining it. Thanks to a classmate who is working on a different film (one of the Harry Potters), I have a good quotation from a source she found, a book called Fellowship in a Ring: A Guide for Science Fiction and Fantasy Book Groups, by librarian Neil Hollands, who says that "Some of the best political fiction written is speculative fiction. By devising political and sociological systems in alternate worlds or by hypothesizing alternative events in our own world, authors can create a fictional laboratory in which to explore any political question" (233). Yeah, what he said.
When I was trying to think of how to put this, I kept coming back to how Divergent and other stories like it work is by setting up a kind of closed system. It almost makes Hollands seem to be referring to Divergent, which is, after all, about a social experiment gone bad.
As a result of a lot of family issues, I've been letting this go for a couple of weeks (my aunt is better, maybe, and my uncle is not-- they decided his heart wasn't in good enough shape for spinal surgery), but I've been keeping up with the work otherwise. My annotated bibliography looked good to me; I just hope that it looks good when it's graded. I finished revising my review of scholarly literature on the political thriller genre (just in time: it's due today), so here I am to talk about what I've found.
It seems that the crucial element that defines the genre is the presence of a conspiracy. This is what puts Divergent into the same category as The Manchurian Candidate and Enemy of the State. What makes it less obvious to a casual viewer is the presence of kids. In those films, a single innocent person somehow stumbles upon a conspiracy to overthrow an elected leadership and has to survive numerous attacks while trying to take the whole thing apart. It's probably needless to point out that this innocent person is usually an adult (and male).
And, I just thought of another difference, but I'll save that for my next post.
