By PAYTON McCARTY-SIMAS
THE JACKET: “Genre-less”? Or, Towards a Unified Definition of Bwaaaa!!
Now that we understand the themes of the film and the myriad stylistic and temporal slights of hand it uses to get there (CliffsNotes: paranoia about state power, surveillance critique, nonlinear storytelling, a love story, a crime plot, mystical/semi religious allegory, metaphysical machinations, plot twists, weird science, questioning reality), let’s talk about genre.
By now, you may have read this far and decided something like, “THE JACKET is just a psychological thriller, Payton.” I’ll start by pointing out that even the term “thriller” was contested through the late ‘90s, with genre scholars like Barry Keith Grant denigrating the “fallacy inherent in the dubiously labelled genre ‘thriller’, a term that is more appropriately used to describe tone and that, unlike the horror film, is too vague as a generic category” in his 1995 book The Film GenreReader II. By 2005 when THE JACKET came out, we’d fully accepted the term, but as a kind of umbrella for films ranging from crime thrillers to erotic thrillers to conspiracy thrillers to horror thrillers to movies about serial killers (a branch of the psychological thriller) or supernatural beings (supernatural thrillers) or any number of increasingly specific categories. You could make the case, as does Wikipedia, that THE JACKET is a “science-fiction psychological thriller.” My point here, though, is that “thriller” is an inherently hybrid genre based on what scholar Virginia Luzón Aguado called its “affect.” In this context, the thriller becomes a vibe, calling something a “thriller” is about how the film tells its story as much as it’s about plot alone, so even saying that THE JACKET is a science-fiction psychological thriller explains some of its elements, but not the chain-smoking, eye twitching, manifesto-writing, New-Age-spirituality-dabbling feeling at its core.
This is where Bwaaaa!! comes in. The feeling at the heart of THE JACKET comes from a specific confluence of cultural factors that build on ‘90s filmmaking with the full-blown feeling of dread-laden panic that pervaded during post 9/11 years, fomented by the resurgence of evangelical fundamentalism in America (think Jesus Camp or jokes in almost any episode of South Park or The Simpsons). Reviews of THE JACKET often read like laundry lists of references to earlier films. Variety called the film “a high-art popcorn movie disguised as … a mindbender on the order of Memento or The Sixth Sense.” Three different critics (in Video Business, The St. Petersburg Review and The Times of London) compared the film to Jacob’s Ladder, and two of those same critics cited Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. “Here we go again,” one continues, “tripping through someone else’s fantasies, memories or premonitions, a cinematic conceit that has inspired fascinating films, such as Being John Malkovich, Adaptation … [and] The Final Cut.” “THE JACKET feels like it must be the 12th jolt-laden morbid thriller to open this year,” Entertainment Weekly complained, while Rolling Stone called it “an out there mind-teaser” and compared it to A Clockwork Orange, 12 Monkeys, Memento and “crap like The Butterfly Effect or Identity or TV’s Touched by an Angel.”
These lists tell us something important right off the bat. THE JACKET was part of a trend. “A gothic, absurdist, psychological horror film is how you’d start to characterize ‘THE JACKET,’” Rolling Stone begins, “but this surreal, time-traveling, Kafkaesque … you get the point,” the writer concludes his thought dismissively, telegraphing the idea that readers have all definitely seen this kind of thing before. “When a sub-genre evolves seemingly out of nowhere, it must signify something,” Kim Newman agonized in Sight and Sound, bringing that point into sharp focus.
This Sight and Sound piece is probably the closest a critic has come to defining the problem of what I’m calling Bwaaaa!!. Newman’s genre laundry list reads like this: “Patient zero seems to be Fight Club… and Memento… and THE JACKET [is] coming along towards the end of a clutch of such pictures, including Butterfly Effect, Donnie Darko, A Beautiful Mind, The I Inside, Trauma and The Machinist.” After emphasizing that Maybury was attracted to the script because “it was kind of genre-less. I hope no one comes up with a label for it because for me, the fact that it slips between the cracks of various genres makes it interesting as an experience,” Newman concludes that “This run of ‘subjective reality’ shockers (there, a label!) has many signature elements: head wounds … menacing, perhaps imaginary companions … doppelganging … memory games, complicated by unreliable recorded details; visions of possible and revised futures and/or pasts; almost grudging nostalgia for years that seem too recent to get misty-eyed about … waiflike all-things-to-all-men girls who could easily be wish-fulfilment phantasms … and solipsist central figures who see others in simplistic terms that occasionally undergo radical revision.”
At this point, let me bring out my own laundry list, drawn from a highly scholarly source: a Letterboxd list my fiancé and I made a few weeks after watching almost 40 of these films. Bwaaaa!!, to me, includes Signs, The Butterfly Effect, The Village, The Forgotten, THE JACKET, Stay, The Da Vinci Code, The Fountain, The Number 23, The Happening, Eagle Eye, Passengers, Knowing, The Box, 2012 and 11-11-11. (Donnie Darko and Final Destination count, too, because they get at the vibe these movies bring to the post-9/11 landscape even though they’re from 1999 and 2000.)
In a lot of ways, Newman’s piece on THE JACKET is a great start to defining the subgenre I’ve been digging into here. But it’s not perfect. Identifying ‘90s genre hybrid “mindbenders” like Fight Club and Memento as the inspiration for a lot of the trend is important, but critics’ repeated references to The Sixth Sense touch on another element that some of the films he mentions lack: The M. Night Shyamalan effect. Newman’s own separate review of one of my favorite Bwaaaa!! movies, The Happening, speaks to this detail: “The Sixth Sense served as a template for a run of more cannily pitched movies that have served to make ‘the M. Night Shyamalan film’ a genre of its own,” he tells us, and Shyamalan brings “a slightly pompous ‘quality cinema’ tone to pulpy fringe subject-matter” from “paranormal or mythic subjects” to aliens. His films take the lurid, mind-bending qualities of a ‘90s thriller or fears around Y2K and inflect them with the urgent quasi-religious existentialism of the time. Speaking to this, Newman suggests that “The Happening is (Shyamalan’s) take on the post-9/11 end-of-the-world movie.” With this in mind, our Bwaaaa!! canon includes films like THE JACKET, but not justbecause they build on movies like Fight Club which rely on big twists and bad vibes. THE JACKET’s pointed reference to Gulf War Syndrome, a contested diagnosis that some viewed as a psychosomatic result of PTSD and others suggested was a symptom of a covered-up conspiracy to experiment on soldiers reflects the notion that The Gulf War did not take place with urgency, fear and spiritually personal stakes.
Bwaaaa!! hinges on the precise kind of fear embodied in both Shyamalan films like The Happening and, in a different way, THE JACKET: the concern that the world is careening out of control, that an attack is around every corner, that the government doesn’t have Americans’ best interests at heart, that there are conspiracies and ulterior motives hidden under the surface of everyday life. If the thriller is a hybrid genre, Newman’s inclusion of The Machinist (one of those “he was dead the whole time” type movies), to me suggests that Bwaaaa!! combines his “subjective reality shocker” with what Catherine Zimmer called “surveillance cinema” – movies that incorporate fears around the surveillance state and big brother as the opening of THE JACKET does – as well as Newman’s own “post-9/11 end of the world movie,” a type of film that Kirsten Moana Thompson has studied deeply in her wonderful book Apocalyptic Dread: American Film at the Turn of the Millennium.
Thompson’s book identifies films like Signs and War of the Worlds as combining “cataclysmic violence, prophetic revelation and radical transformation” based on an “apocalyptic dread” or dread based in “social anxieties, fears and ambivalence about global catastrophe” after 9/11. Any of these movies literally restage 9/11-style disasters (plane crashes in Knowing and Passengers, scenes of cities being destroyed in 2012). Even though THE JACKET doesn’t feature the apocalypse, it embodies elements of apocalyptic dread through personal, subjective narratives where the fabric of reality feels like it could collapse at any moment (if in THE JACKET Jack’s story is really just a death fantasy – or is it?? – is Jackie saved at all? When he disappears from “2007” does that timeline disappear? What is reality?? etc.). It’s a personal apocalypse. All of these movies obsessively work to decode signs (in fancy terms, an “eschatological” obsession), get to the bottom of an existential, mystical/religiously-coded metaphysical secret (Jack’s death-defying, morally-motivated time travel, for example, or Mark Wahlberg’s character’s obsession with dying bees in The Happening, or Jim Carrey’s character’s numerological obsession in The Number 23, etc.). That’s another element we can pull in through Shyamalan: Newman’s read of his “mythic subjects,” (“I see dead people”) and Thompson’s religiously-tinged apocalyptic dread.
Whether a character is trying to save themselves or the world, these movies give characters the agency to decode the signs and change their fate. As Frederich Jameson puts it of sci-fi in general, “We can imagine the future, but we cannot conceive the kind of collective political strategies necessary to change or ensure that future,” and that, as Thompson continues “as a result, science-fiction films repeatedly replay resistance to alien invasions in the form of romanticized messiahs or small guerilla groups, rather than through systemic political change.” Or, as Mark Wahlberg put it in 2011, “If I was on that plane with my kids (on 9/11), it wouldn’t have went down like it did. There would have been a lot of blood in that first-class cabin and then me saying, ‘OK, we’re going to land somewhere safely, don’t worry.’”
Ultimately, what unifies Bwaaaa!! is a more specific kind of hybrid affect that the scholars I’ve cited have described. It’s conspiratorial and apocalyptic and draws on ‘90s “mindbenders” and their nu metal aesthetics (Entertainment Weekly on the look of THE JACKET: “that brackish gray-green school of cinematography that might be dubbed Formaldehyde Fluorescence,”) as well as post-9/11 religious and political dread. Here’s a list of the central features of Bwaaaa!! as we outlined them for a PowerPoint party where we subjected everyone we knew to a lecture on the subject:
You may be wondering: Why are you so obsessed with this topic? You sound crazy! Like I said, mainlining Bwaaaa!! makes you feel crazy. The process of writing and thinking about Bwaaaa!! has been pretty method (was this all a dream? …). Watching characters hack their way through tangled plots and unveil the fundamental instability of reality really brings out that wild-eyed, goofy but also deadly serious, impassioned kind of argumentation most often left to subway religious pamphlets, doomsday preppers and stoners at parties (all great Bwaaaa!! audience demographics!). Bwaaaa!! is a fake genre, yes, but so are all genres, as my brief history of thrillers shows.
Looking at the algorithmic nonsense that is Letterboxd “nanogenres” for Bwaaaa!! movies like THE JACKET, you find labels like “Surreal and Thought-Provoking Visions of Life and Death” and something the AI called “Humanity and The World Around Us,” which includes seemingly the entire Bwaaaa!! canon as well as Requiem for a Dream, Schindler’s List, Citizen Kane and Solaris on the one hand, and Moonrise Kingdom, Hook and Barbie on the other. Like a Bwaaaa!! protagonist, this AI’s relatively useless/facile look at loosely shared themes can be seen as a metaphor for humanity’s fascination with making broader meanings and finding connections eschatologically. Genre scholar Rick Altman put it like this: “We critics are the ones who have a vested interest in using generic terminology, which serves to anchor our analyses in universal or culturally sanctioned contexts, thus justifying our all but too subjective … positions. We are thus the ones that see to it that generic vocabulary remains available for use (even though) producers (like, as I’ve pointed out, John Maybury and M. Night Shyamalan) are actively destroying genres by creating new cycles, some of which will eventually be genrefied”.
In the same way Maybury hoped no one would ever do exactly what I’m doing (and what Kim Newman did in 2005) by trying to give THE JACKET a genre label, critics will always do this –and so will humans, in general, and even AIs! Criticism is, at times, a fundamentally paranoid thing to do, and as Eve Sedgwick pointed out in her classic essay on the subject, “You’re So Paranoid You Probably Think This Essay Is About You,” critics like me (or Bwaaaa!! protagonists like Jack) sometimes end up looking for connections they already believe to be there. Jack believes that he’s been murdered, so he investigates his own death. Once you come up with a genre label, you want to find movies to fit it. Is Bwaaaa!! real, or was it dead the whole time? It’s all there for those who can read the signs …
