Fantasy films and Political Thrillers

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.

How Scary is Scary Enough?

A very scary Angela Lansbury in
  The Manchurian Candidate

My entire family has been pushing me to post ever since my last post.  The fact is, well, it's been a rough couple of weeks.  My uncle is having spine surgery this coming week, and from what his doctors are saying, his whole life is going to change, and not in a good way.  At the same time, my oldest aunt got a bad mammogram last week, and she's having surgery on Tuesday to remove a lump and some nodes (I'm not sure what those are, and I'm afraid to ask).  

The strange thing is that they all have been asking me about my research project, and not just the usual "hows-school-going" kind of questions everyone asks when they see me.  Rebbie says that they're trying to think about something besides what's going on, so if it helps, I'm up for it.  Obviously, it's going to help me, anyway, and I can't think of anything else I can do to help them.

My aunt actually led me to a question I should have been asking. She sees Divergent as a horror film, not a political thriller.  And her question is:  "aren't political thrillers a subgenre of horror?"  She made a good case, using The Manchurian Candidate and V for Vendetta for examples.  After seeing The Manchurian Candidate, I can see why she said this.  It is totally creepy, especially considering it was made right before JFK was assassinated.  And the Kate Winslett character is a lot like the one Angela Lansbury played in TMC, so maybe the horror connection is not too farfetched.  

I need to think more about this, and I need to use this in my research into genres.  

Well, It's Not a Musical . . .But What Is It?

Regarding my last post-- I decided to give up on the hair idea, even though I'm sure that in Tris's position, I would cut my hair immediately.  Not cutting it makes her seem vain, to me at least.  I looked at it again, and that didn't really take me anywhere.

So, I've decided to do my project using genre criticism.  Once I started thinking that way, I realized that Divergent (and a whole bunch of similar films) doesn't quite fit into any of the established genres, except broadly.  You could call it an action film, or a political thriller, I guess, but neither of these is a comfortable fit.  
I'm thinking it's a subgenre of political thrillers at this point; there's not enough action (it's not a "non-stop thrill ride," which seems to be mandatory lately for action films), and it's more about political ideas than anything else.

As I understand genre criticism, I need to identify the characteristics of political thrillers and then figure out how Divergent sets up a set of additional characteristics that amount to a subgenre.  The most obvious other member of this category is The Hunger Games, and I'll be doing some thinking about what other films fit, too.  For now, I have enough to start my research into the overall genre, and I've got a good (I think) draft of a proposal.  

What's wrong with long hair?

This is not funny

A couple of nights ago, Rebbie loaned me her DVD of Divergent, which I'm going to use for my research project.  I saw it in the theater when it was first released, but I didn't pay much attention to details outside of how it "diverged" from the book.  Anyway, I watched it again, and I think I've got an idea to get me going.  The first fight Tris has is with another initiate, Molly (I think that's her name), a really tough-looking woman about her age, and she (Tris) gets beaten up.  What I noticed this time was their hair.  Molly's is about chin length, but Tris's is pretty long, and it's usually in a ponytail just below the crown.  It suddenly struck me that this said something strange about her.  
A couple of years ago, when Rebbie was starting college, our folks signed us up for a basic self-defense class that was taught by a couple of police officers, one male, the other female.  After their lecture about how to avoid trouble in the first place, they did a quick demonstration of an attack with one of the other students.  I mention this because it turned out that they picked her for her long hair (in a ponytail).  The female officer grabbed her arm and used her other hand to grab the ponytail and pull her head back.  They pointed out that not only is having a ponytail giving an advantage to a mugger (or worse), you can be injured, possibly badly, depending on how hard the attacker pulls.  She suggested that we might want to think about changing our hairstyles.
I just thought of something else about this.  I'll be back in a bit once I've given it some more thought.