EXPRESSIONS IN GENRELESSNESS: GENRE IN THE NETFLIX ERA OF TELEVISION

Alexis Isaac

A Thesis

Submitted to the Graduate College of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

May 2020

Committee:

Becca Cragin, Advisor

Jeff Brown

Esther Clinton © 2020

Alexis Isaac

All Rights Reserved iii

ABSTRACT

Becca Cragin, Advisor

The question of how genre is used in relation to television has been widely debated within the study of popular culture with voices like Jason Mitchell arguing that “every aspect of television exhibits a reliance on genre.” While his argument was largely correct for the time and his methodical approach to the study of genre indicates a broad definition, it was published before the widespread use of streaming services like Netflix and Hulu. Therefore, his argument fails to address the ways streaming services have changed the use of genre in television. My paper addresses the issue of how genre is changing with special attention to their emerging use as algorithms and their ebbing use as an analytical framework. Specifically, in my project, I will be looking at the Netflix original show The End of the F×××ing World to illustrate how shows created for streaming services play with genre in ways that create television that appears without genre altogether. I will do a semiotic genre analysis, using the first season of The End of the

F×××ing World, to show how adhering to one (or even two genres) is no longer the norm, but rather streaming service original shows participate in what I call genre microdosing. This is a process by which shows integrate five to seven genres to create product that appears without genre when observed wholly. In conclusion this project, by closely examining genre within The

End of the F×××ing World, sheds new light on the neglected issue of the changing use of genre in streaming services. iv

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

INTRODUCTION ...... 1

Introduction ...... 1

What and Why ...... 2

Approach ...... 4

Previous Research ...... 6

Limitations ...... 7

Chapter Outline ...... 8

CHAPTER 1: GENREMICRODOSING AND TELEVISION FOR THE INTERNET

AGE ...... 10

Introduction ...... 10

Existing Genre Theory ...... 11

Why Streaming Services Are Different ...... 15

Genre Microdosing ...... 19

Case Study: The End of the FXXXing World ...... 23

Conclusion ...... 30

CHAPTER 2: GENRE MICRODOSING AND REPRESENTATION ...... 31

Introduction ...... 31

Alyssa: Women and Representation ...... 36

James: Masculinity and Representation ...... 43

Conclusion ...... 49

v

CHAPTER 3: GLOBAL IMPLICATIONS OF GENRELESSNESS IN NETFLIX’S

THE END OF THE FXXXING WORLD ...... 51

Introduction ...... 51

Performance of Language ...... 57

Performance of Humor ...... 61

Conclusion ...... 66

CONCLUSION ...... 68

WORKS CITED ...... 76 1

INTRODUCTION

Introduction

I was in middle school when ABC family started airing commercials for a new DVD rental service called Netflix that would send subscribers a physical DVD via the United States

Postal Service. The screen flashed a startling true red while white shadowed block letters spelled out NETFLIX and the narrator said “Nanana NETFLIX! Just 5 bucks a month!” At the time, it seemed to be a competitor to blockbuster and family video – and not even a good one considering you had to wait for the mail to come before receiving your DVD (plus if you forgo the trip to blockbuster, how can you talk your mom into buying you and your friends movie snacks?!). While they did advertise a small streaming library, it was notoriously only a handful of B films that were not worth the switch from your local DVD rental store. However, my father, playing the good capitalist, wanted in – because for five dollars a month it did beat out its competitors. I had Netflix before most of my friends’ families had even thought about trading in their blockbuster cards for yet another username and password to keep track of. I did not understand then how valuable that username and password would become to me – to everyone who has one. I did not understand then that Netflix was – and still is – a game changer.

We know now that Netflix changed the entire face of television from the way that it is sold and profits to the way it is consumed; from the way that it is produced and written to the way it influences the people and culture around it. It wasn’t until 2013 that Netflix released its first popular Netflix Original show, Orange is the New Black. While binge watching practices had been established and Netflix culture was well on the rise, the show took the idea of streaming service television to the next level by creating a program specifically made for this platform. Released online, it was made to be binged, shared, and talked about within the context 2 of the internet. As Netflix Original films and television have progressed, the company has begun to understand the freedom that comes with having an online platform and the benefits to making content that caters to that. They get to be experimental. Netflix is unrestricted by the traditional restraints of syndicated television like broadcast schedules, series run time, episode run time, networks, sponsors, issues of carryover audience, and even space (where a show is released) can all be manipulated in ways that syndicated television never imagined.

What and Why

There are many different approaches to cultural studies – the approach that examines storytelling is not only important but frequently overlooked. It is important to study the stories a culture produces and how they’re telling them for several reasons. Most of which are touted for the rest of cultural studies as well: they’re both a product of and producing societal norms (and therefore provide not only a mirror but a guiding hand) mass amounts of people engage with the stories being told (and is therefore worthy of study), etc. Though perhaps this particular take on cultural studies stands out in that when it is stated “there is nothing new under the sun,” they simply cannot possibly be talking about storytelling. The basic human sentiments conveyed remain relatively the same but new stories, told in new ways, give new insights into how those sentiments can be examined, conveyed, and felt by their audiences. There is indeed value in discussing new forms of storytelling and examining the stories themselves as they change with the changing culture.

The lack of constraints placed on streaming service original shows has created new and innovative ways for the audience to experience and engage with the televisual story. While the idea of narrative complexity within television is not new, the extent to which streaming services are able to disregard previously known constraints and conventions has allowed narrative 3 complexity to be taken to an extreme (or at least what we perceive as extreme at the time of this writing). This new level of narrative complexity has yet to be fully explored academically, with most writings on television story telling focusing on syndicated television. The goal in this thesis is to excavate what the differences and similarities are in narrative complexity are between syndicated television and streaming service originals, to determine how and why these differences occur, to understand the implications of this form of narrative complexity, and most importantly to give language to this unique mode of storytelling.

This study attempts to introduce a theory of storytelling by which several different, but recognizable genres are layered on top of one another to create something that looks at first glance to be altogether genreless. We often don’t have the language to easily categorize these shows and end up saying things like “whatever we’re calling Orange is the New Black” or

“Netflix Original, Orange is the New Black” which is something more akin to authorship rather than genre. The point here is that we have insufficient language to discuss these shows and the ways in which they’re telling stories. If we had better language to discuss them, they can be better analyzed and studied. In this thesis I propose my own theory of genre microdosing in which these shows take the concept of genre and manipulate it to create stories that are altogether new. They’re taking enough recognizable bits of several genres and layering them on top of one another in such a way that the audience can be familiarize itself enough to keep watching but not so much that these shows appear to fall under one category. While genre bending has been something that all forms of television have been participating in for years, what I’m arguing here takes genre bending to an entirely new level. It is different, it is new, and we need language to discuss what is happening in order to better study and analyze these shows. More on this theory will be discussed in chapter one. 4

The innovation in story telling from streaming services has allowed them to play with old concepts like Raymond Williams’ “structure of feeling” while also forcing us to create new concepts that we may not have the language for yet. A major goal of this thesis is to give language to that currently implacable quality that allows companies like Netflix to make stories that are new under the sun. Our current theories about concepts such as genre, representation, and globalization are all effected by this new medium. We must revisit old theory and make up new theory to discuss these concepts and make them relevant to this particular mode of storytelling. While some might argue that it is futile to keep changing scholarship as technology changes, it is also our responsibility as academics of culture to ensure a complete picture of that culture (even if this is outdated the second it gets published).

Approach

For this study, the examination of narrative complexity will be largely centered around genre theory. Genre theory within the frame of cultural studies has been exhaustively debated and yet from Rick Altman to John Cawelti there is noticeably insufficient useful theory – insufficient language – to discuss the type of storytelling steaming service originals are participating in. Centering the discussion around genre, rather than having genre be a singular section, is useful for several reasons. First is that genre is what is used to classify television.

Indeed, it is one of the ways in which streaming services organize themselves, often one might click on the genre tab while searching for their next binge worthy title. This is important because a world set within the bounds of the internet is also a world predicated on algorithms that claim to know you better than you know yourself. In such a world, an algorithm that takes into account primarily genre taste has a profound effect not only on the way in which new series are created, but also how they’re advertised and sold to the consumer. 5

Second, genre implies formula and repeated syntactic and semantic elements; this repetition is what helps the audience to set up expectations about what their televisual experience is going to be. People expect a certain type of storytelling to happen based on genre. In the era of channel flipping, this was extremely important as one could tell based on simply the images and perhaps a few lines of narration what genre a channel was playing and then determine whether to watch based on this. Again, Netflix is unbound by this convention as they have several other methods in place for letting one know what a show is going to be. The narrative expectations are allowed to be set up in different ways making room for new forms of storytelling to emerge. As such, Chapter 1 of this thesis details precisely what is meant by this and why it’s important to give new theory and language to the complex storytelling Netflix is engaging in by using genre in previously unimagined ways.

Lastly, this thesis is centered around genre because it most clearly highlights the difference between traditional televisual storytelling and streaming televisual storytelling. This is because genre offers the brain a familiar framework on which to overlay and understand new stories. This is important to think about moving forward as genre also operates as a way of organizing storytelling, both from the point of view of the audience and that of the storyteller.

This allows us to understand the specific steps that these shows are taking to subvert not only genre expectations, but also take up issues of representation and the creation of a global audience. More detailed examination of genre and storytelling will be given in chapter one.

This study will be based on textual analysis of the Netflix Original show The End of the

F***ing World. Textual analysis offers the best starting point for understanding modes of storytelling. It’s important to understand that with a media form so new, textual analysis needs to lay the groundwork before other forms of study – perhaps ethnography of audience reception – 6 can be fully explored. We must first understand and give language to what is happening before delving into further study. I chose the series The End of The F***ing World for two main reasons, the first is that it’s relatively short with only one season,1 with only eight episodes at twenty minutes each. While it is an incredibly rich text, going in depth with a shorter series will better illustrate the theories produced. Second, is that this is an incredibly detailed, well crafted, and interesting show – it is a story I know intimately well and it is still exciting and interesting with every re-watch. I could have easily chosen Stranger Things, Maniac, or Love, Death, and

Robots. Netflix is producing quite literally thousands of shows that are also using the same kind of innovative story telling and I may also use them as examples throughout. However, most of this thesis will be centered on The End of The F***ing World.

Previous Research

The most comprehensive previous work on television storytelling is Jason Mittell’s

Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling which draws on approaches of historical and cognitive poetics to understand and analyze narrative complexity in shows such as Veronica Mars and Lost. He noted a shift in televisual storytelling that began in the late 1990s and has continued. Mittell’s work is incredibly important in chronicling this shift and theorizing about what makes serial television so interesting and how its increasing complexity has become the norm. He discusses the effect of this narrative complexity on concepts such as authorship, characters, and audience comprehension. His work is invaluable to this study and important to understanding television narratives today. However, while his book laid the groundwork for much of television studies, it discusses topics of narrative complexity within the constraints of syndicated television. For example, it is important to his work that there are commercial breaks

1 At this time of writing. They have been renewed for a season 2 but little is known about its release date. 7 in the episodes, breaks in episodes airing, and a certain amount of runtime given to each episode and series. Mittell rightly frames much of his arguments about narrative complexity within these confines. The goal of this study is to take away those confines and then re-examine narrative complexity. For example, Netflix does not have commercial breaks, entire seasons get released at once, and perhaps most interestingly, run time varies not only from season to season but from episode to episode. What happens when the external factors structuring television production and modes of viewing are taken away?

Other key scholars in this discussion include Andrew Tudor, Rick Altman, John Cawelti, and Theodor Adorno. These scholars theorized about genre and formula in ways that influence what we think of as genre. Their work is still relevant and will be used and added onto in this study. Another scholar that must be mentioned here is Henry Jenkins and his work Spreadable

Media which theorizes about how the internet works in terms of sharing and spreading media.

This work is important in understanding how and why Netflix operates the way that it does, which has a profound impact on the ways in which it tells stories.

Limitations

This study is limited most notably in that it does not do ethnographic work to determine audience reaction. This was a deliberate decision. I would like to keep this area open as an option for future study, either for myself or someone else, because I believe that it is indeed an entirely different book. One could fill a whole book with the knowledge gained from talking to audience members about their response to this type of storytelling. It should be noted that vast cult like fandoms have come from this type of storytelling. Mittell points out that part of the shift into complex tv included smaller cult followings rather than broad appeal. Yet the fandoms that have emerged from streaming service television are both broad and cult like; rich with art, cosplay, 8 fanfiction, and other creative modes of expression. The Stranger Things fandom alone requires and immense amount of study (it is somehow both incredibly vast and extremely deep – having their own conventions, fan art, merch, online forums, etc). While I absolutely think that these things are important to study, the goal of this project is to lay the groundwork for understanding what makes those fandoms unique. I focus on textual analysis and understanding the modes of storytelling because I feel that this understanding needs to be explored first. Although, it is increasingly true that audience reception has an influence on storytelling and while some of this theory will be discussed it is a limitation not to have ethnographic evidence of this.

Chapter Outline

Chapter 1 will detail the key ideas and terms that will be used throughout this study. It will explain what genre microdosing is and how it leads to narrative complexity and opens up an almost limitless conceptualization of genre. It is here that I will highlight how and why streaming service television is different from that of syndicated television and do a detailed comparison of

The End of the F***ing World to the syndicated show Gilmore Girls.

The goal of chapter 2 is to illustrate how characters operate without the traditional constraints of syndicated television. This chapter is meant to explore what the new limits might be for illustrating character change and examining the similarities and differences in technique between streaming service television and traditional media.

Chapter 3 illustrates how releasing content to a global platform influences storytelling.

For syndicated television it was often about writing stories for the country and therefore audience they expect to watch most. But with Netflix, shows are created with a global release – and a global audience – in mind. 9

Chapter 4 discusses comprehension in a way that is a direct response to Jason Mittell’s discussion on comprehension. Again, we must explore the ways in which audience comprehension changes in the absence of traditional television constraints. It is also important to discuss in terms of genre and genre microdosing, as one of the main functions of genre is to offer a framework for understanding a show. Genre gives us a mode of familiarization that allows for easy comprehension of a show. The goal of this chapter is to meet Mittell on his terms and discuss the cognitive poetics and the ways in which they change with streaming service television.

The conclusion attempts to draw these things together in a cohesive way that shows how the theory of genre microdosing is valuable to our discussion of current television practices. 10

CHAPTER 1: GENRE MICRODOSING AND TELEVISION FOR THE INTERNET AGE

Introduction

The show The End of the Fxxxing World appears wholly unrecognizable as a traditional televisual experience upon first watch. What is peculiar is that even though it’s unfamiliar, it is still captivating and entertaining. Mass produced art is reliant on the structure of formula.

Formula creates a template by which the human brain can understand and make use of storytelling which helps make the art marketable. Early popular culture scholars, Horkheimer and Adorno were critical of this, calling it the ‘culture industry’ and insisting that it created a sense of psudoindividualism that forced everyone into complacent conformity to a hegemon. In his work, On Popular Music, Theodore Adorno asserts that formula and repetition have broad appeal because they allow the average person familiarity. “Popular music must simultaneously meet two demands. One is for stimuli that provoke the listener's attention. The other is for the material to fall within the category of what the musically untrained listener would call "natural" music: that is, the sum total of all the conventions and material formulas in music to which he is accustomed…” (Adorno, 68). Humans do indeed crave familiarity. Adorno goes on to discuss this when he says, “It would not affect the musical sense if any detail were taken out of the context; the listener can supply the "framework" automatically, since it is a mere musical automatism itself” (Adorno, 64). The ability to graft one’s own framework onto popular culture drives its marketability and creation. This is where the idea of genre comes from.

Similarly, when a thing is unfamiliar to the human brain, it makes a narrative that fits within its context to explain that unfamiliar thing. Phycologists have determined that humans evolved to recognize patterns and create narratives to explain that which is unfamiliar and have called this patternticity (Shermer). The brain will then group these narratives, organize them, and 11 give them names – which is in itself a narrative. These names or labels make up every known taxonomical system. Postmodernism is the questioning of these labels and these systems we can also call metanarratives. Genre is a metanarrative that organizes the narratives within storytelling. While several scholars have discussed the ways in which genre is useful and its inherent hybridity, the goal of this paper is to examine where we are with the postmodern breaking down of genre boundaries. I argue that within the context of streaming service television, it is possible for genre to be entirely necessary and wholly absent.

We must make space in our minds for certain paradoxes to live if we are to understand the world around us. This chapter focuses on presenting the major theory of this thesis which I call ‘genre microdosing’ and showing how this leads to the appearance of a genreless text.

However, before we get to this we will fist discuss existing genre theory, postmodernism, psychology, and what I call the ‘metanarrative paradox.’ The goal of this is to give better language to the way in which we think both about genre and taxonomical systems more broadly.

This paper will be sectioned into three major sections: existing genre theory, the Netflix difference, and a case study on the show The End of the Fxxxing World.

Existing Genre Theory

‘Genre’ is a broad word that has taken on several different meanings throughout culture studies. It is difficult to define and yet easy to recognize. In his essay A Semantic/Syntactic

Aprroach to Film Genre Rick Altman expresses the fundamental frustration with determining what genre is, “The more genre criticism I read, the more uncertainty I note in the choice or extent of essential critical terms. Often what appears as hesitation in the terminology of a single critic will turn into a clear contradiction when studies by two or more critics are compared…

These uncertainties reflect constitutive weaknesses of current notions of genre” (Altman, 27). 12

Perhaps genre is like obscenity, we know it when we see it or maybe it is a structure of feeling that we cannot at all see, but only feel or, as Rick Altman himself went on to suggest, maybe it is a set of semantic and syntactic conventions that can be clearly defined. The reality of genre is that it is messy and likely all of these things at once.

Popular culture or mass-produced art must adhere to the laws of capitalism in some form or another, lest they die. This is particularly true of television and film. Genre is the tool that allows the medium of television to adhere to the laws of capitalism – even when this is secondary to the production of art, it is still there. Early popular culture scholars noted this –

Theodore Adorno, Mas Horkheimer, Raymond Williams, Walter Benjamin all got at the profound influence of capitalism on culture. Genre, such as the genre of jazz in music, allows the audience familiarity. Genre offers the promise of expectation – and if used well, the satisfaction of met expectation. Edward Buscombe sums up this relationship between capitalism, popular art, and genre nicely:

Popular art does not condemn its creators to a subsidiary role. Instead it

emphasizes the relation between the artist and the material on one hand, and the

material and audience on the other. The artist brings to the genre his or her own

concerns, techniques and capacities – in the widest sense, a style – but receives

from this imposed limitations… Constant exposure to a previous succession of

films has led the audience to recognize certain formal elements as charged with an

accretion of meaning… (This has led to) the notion that a genre film depends on a

combination of novelty and familiarity. The conventions of the genre are known

and recognized by the audience, and such recognition is in itself a pleasure.

(Edward Buscombe, 22) 13

In this way, it is understood that genre comes from the endogenous relationship between the means of production and the audience. The audience enjoys the satisfying feeling of having their expectations met and the producers enjoy the ability to use those expectations to both market to and pleasurably manipulate the audience.

It was not long after the film industry took off that we began to note this phenomenon of expectation which quickly fell into the taxonomical structure set up by Plato to organize narratives – that which we know as ‘genre.’ In film and television, the clearest and perhaps most useful theory of genre comes from Rick Altman who suggested a “semantic/syntactic” approach.

This theory of genre, like several before it, relies on convention and invention. Convention is the recognizable, familiar, and repeated, while invention is the new and refreshing. However,

Altman suggests a way to clear up disagreements about the conventions of a genre. He suggests we discuss convention is it is revealed in through the various repeated semantic and syntactic elements of a genre. We therefore know what genre a text belongs to by examining its semantic elements and syntactic elements. Both are needed to determine genre because “the semantic approach stresses the genre’s building blocks, while the syntactic view privileges the structures into which they are arranged” (Altman, 30). The semantics of a genre include its repeated symbols, images, sounds, iconography, character types, sets, etc. and syntax is the way in which these things are arranged.

Genres often find overlap and compound to make a single genre such as ‘romantic comedy.’ The idea that genre lines are indistinct and often overlap is not new. “Hollywood films have never been ‘pure’- that is, easily arranged into categories.” (Staiger, 203). In addition to recognizing that genre has never been pure, theorists have also recognized that genre is a 14 process, “genres are, neverleless, best understood as a processes. These processes may, for sure, be dominated by repetition but they are also marked fundamentally by difference, variation, and change.” (Neale, 189). So far, we have established genre as a set of conventions and inventions in which the conventions are the repeated and recognizable semantic and syntactic elements.

However, it is well established that by the vary nature of needing invention, genres are subject to change – we call this process of change the genre cycle. Genres “change, develop, and vary by borrowing form, and overlapping with, one another. Hybrids are by no means the rarity in

Hollywood many books and articles on genre in the cinema would lead us to believe.” (Neale,

190). While genres have not been regarded as ‘pure’ in quite some time, the farthest extent to which genre hybridity has been taken is found in streaming service television and has created increased narrative complexity.

This concept of genre leads us into narrative theory more broadly. In perhaps one of the most comprehensive studies on modern television, Jason Mittell’s Complex TV, explores the narrative shift in television that occurs from the 1990’s into the early 2010’s.

Complex TV is about this shift, exploring how television storytelling has changed

and what cultural practices within television technology, industry, and viewership

have enabled and encouraged these transformations. Often these changes are

framed as television becoming more ‘literary’ or ‘cinematic,’ drawing on both

prestige and formal vocabulary from these older, more culturally distinguished

media; however we can better understand this shift through careful analysis of

television itself rather than holding onto cross-media metaphors of aspiration and

legitimation… expectations for how viewers watch television, how producers 15

create stories, and how series are distributed have all shifted leading to a new

mode of television storytelling that I term complex tv… (Mittell, 3)

His work suggests that storytelling in television has undergone dramatic shifts in a short amount of time that has resulted in more complex narrative techniques that served to play with temporality, construct ongoing characters, and incorporate transmedia. This essay seeks to build off this idea by introducing the ways in which streaming service television has taken genre hybridity and consequently narrative complexity to the next level.

Why Streaming Services Are Different

Jason Mittell frames his argument of complex TV squarely within the framework of syndicated television. He speaks heavily about the relationship between complex tv and syndicated television’s constraints.

A given season will have a specific number of episodes, with variable scheduling

for how long breaks between episodes might be… Additionally, the series is

consumed as it is still being produced, meaning that adjustments are often made

midsream due to unexpected circumstances. Such adjustments can be due to

casting constraints… or feedback from networks, sponsors, or audience in relation

to an emerging storyline. Constraints such as these make television storytelling

distinct from most other media… Such constraints work to limit how television

stories can be told but also provide clear structures within which innovations can

flourish, creatively challenging well-established norms. (Mittell, 33)

Netflix has significantly less of these constraints, and are not making television for these constraints, but are rather making their television for the constraints (or lack thereof) of the internet. 16

Netflix’s business model changes the very structure of how television is being made because it is selling television in a different way than cable networks are selling television. In fact, cable networks are not selling television at all. The commodity in the traditional syndicated model of television is the viewer. The viewer gets sold to the advertiser. Netflix has cut the middleman, rather than sell the viewer, they are selling content. They are dependent on making watchable, sharable content – content that people feel like they need to see. To truly understand this, it is necessary to look into the history of Netflix and examine its business model.

Before Netflix started producing original content, before being able to buy media directly from producers, before streaming – Netflix was a service that delivered DVDs. In order to do this, they had to compete in a market with Blockbuster. Blockbuster built their business on recognizing the fact that ‘movie night’ was an impulse; it was not thought out by the customer, it was not an event, it was an everyday occurrence that relied heavily on impulse. “To customers deciding at the last minute that a given night was “movie night,” the ability to quickly obtain the newest release was a priority. Statistics showed that new releases represented over 70% of total rentals” (Shih, Kaufman, Spinola, 2). Netflix couldn’t keep up with the amount of demand for new releases largely because they had no direct deals with media companies and were building their DVD library at full mark up. Rather than purchase more new-releases, Netflix came up with an early form of its current recommendation system. Upon signing up for Netflix, the customer would take a quiz about what movie genres they typically liked to watch in addition to rating a handful of specific titles. This allowed Netflix to recommend lesser known independent films that it had in stock. Reed Hastings, founder of Netflix, recognized very early on that “A personalized experience is the benefit of the Internet. If you can otherwise do it offline, people 17 won’t pay for it online. If our Internet offering was going to be better than stores, we had to find something stores couldn’t do well” (Shih, Kaufman, Spinola, 6).

The thing that Netflix has always done better than stores (and later on better than traditional television) is recommend art that the viewer might not otherwise be aware of. Ted

Sarandos, Chief Content Officer for Netflix states,

For a technology company like Netflix, we are the group that is most dependent

on art. What we do is probably 70% science, 30% art. Our buying staff has to

have their finger on the pulse of the market to make their decisions… And for the

independent films, Netflix can be the dominant channel, representing between

60% and 75% of the earnings for some films. At Netflix, a lesser-known film can

really succeed on its merits… (Shih, Kaufman, Spinola, 8).

In other words, Netflix has always been in the art game. They are selling content direct. While the basis of the recommendation system was the need to sell lesser known movies simply because they did not have a big enough DVD library, the ability to sell lesser known, artful content what made Netflix unique and ultimately marketable. The result is that they chose to continue with their personalized recommendation system rather than sell box office hits, even after they acquired the proper dealings to do so. The movement of this personalization into their current platform allows them to produce television based on specific individual’s preferences.

This allows them more freedom in terms of narrative complexity and genre experimentation because they know enough about us to create content they know we want to see – even if that content doesn’t necessarily adhere to the marketable conventions that are comfortable to us.

Aside from the recommendation algorithm, Netflix takes the business of selling art seriously by allowing audience expectations to be set up by trailers and blurbs. This is very 18 different from syndicated television where the traditional ‘flipping’ through channels method of choosing a show requires that you be able to identify the genre of that show within seconds so that you know what to expect. While they have determined blurbs to be largely ineffectual, they still have one for every show, and they do help set up expectations, however minor their effect may be (Shih, Kaufman, Spinola, 8). Trailers on the other hand, have allowed Netflix the freedom of experimentation in the realm of TV on the same level of the box office. Trailers for

TV shows are not exactly a Netflix advent, but this gets coupled with the recommendation algorithm and automatic play, to make trailers a force for setting up expectations. Upon opening the Netflix home page there is a large banner across the top that will recommend a movie or show based on your watching habits and then it will automatically begin to play the trailer for that movie or show. The goal here is to function almost like trailers before a film at the cinema would – to almost force the viewer into watching. While the effectiveness of this has yet to be studied (if Netflix has data on this, it is extremely difficult to find (Netflix keeps all their data under lock and key)), it is anecdotally effective.

Lastly, Netflix is producing experimental content partially to encourage binge watching.

Binge watching creates a feeling of need or intense desire to continue viewing a show in an almost addictive pattern. While it’s no secret that binge watching has been around since the first video recording machines, it is also true that it has taken on a whole new meaning in the Netflix era of television. Binge watching implies an extended audience/text relationship; one in which the producer wants to capture audience attention for a significant amount of time – almost like a film. While Netflix is partially responsible for an increase in binge watching, they have started to recognize its value and make television specifically for this practice. They release seasons all at once to encourage this behavior. This is important because it leads to the desire to create ‘binge- 19 worthy’ television which is almost exclusively complex TV. In a study done by the University of

Oregon in 2015 indicates that viewers who binge watch feel that they can more actively participate in a series and connect on a deeper level to both the characters and the plot through binge watching. “In this study, the engagement factor included statements which indicated a much more active involvement in the viewing activity, such as “binge-watching is more interesting than other ways of watching” and “binge-watching is exciting.” Additionally, individuals are highly engaged in the characters and the story lines when they binge watch”

(Pittman, Sheehan, 2015). This increased engagement is both a result of complex narratives and causes further production of complex narratives. “This ‘binge-worthiness’ is, at least partially, due to particularly complex narrative structures” (Jenner, 312).

Streaming service original shows are different for a number of reasons that stem from the fundamental change in commodity. The business model for streaming services operates on the selling of content rather than selling viewers to advertisers. This gives services like Netflix incentive to experiment – to create television that appears new and innovative. Selling content means that technology such as the recommendation algorithm becomes important when engaging customers in new media. The algorithm, coupled with blurbs and automatic trailers, allows the viewers to establish expectations outside of genre. The increase in binge watching is both an effect and cause of the continued narrative shift in these shows. Given this information, high narrative risk can lead to high financial reward as more people subscribe or choose keep subscriptions specifically for Netflix original content.

Genre Microdosing

Genre, at its core, is a taxonomical system by which we can organize narratives and consequently narrative complexity. We have gotten to a point in our postmodern world where it 20 is necessary to address why we have taxonomical systems at all considering the difficulties that manifest when too many labels are being used at once. The human brain works in clean cut narratives and repeated patterns. In his book How We Believe, psychologist and philosopher

Michel Shermer argues “that our brains are belief engines: evolved pattern-recognition machines that connect the dots and create meaning out of the patterns that we think we see in nature.”

(Shermer) Throughout our evolution, this served us well, allowing us to recognize weather patterns which helped develop agriculture and ensured we knew when we were prey rather than predator. As we evolved, the brain only became more and more excellent at recognizing patterns and making meaning from them. This is how we get narrative. This is what the Greeks were doing when they saw spring happening every year and explained the occurrence with intricate and entertaining lives of Demeter, Persephone, and Hates. This is also how we get taxonomical systems, which are narratives in themselves.

Taxonomical systems are not just useful for capitalism – they are entirely necessary to our understanding because this is how the human brain works. This is why I have chosen to frame this essay around genre rather than narrative complexity. Genre offers us language, familiarity, patterns, and expectations that we can then use to discuss narrative complexity and understand its implications. However, in our postmodern understanding of taxonomical systems, it seems that the dissolving of these clean-cut narratives becomes more of a problem that we must workout. There are two ways in which this needs to be discussed. First, we must determine a theory for how we are going to think about taxonomical structures in the postmodern era and secondly, how this gets employed to create complex TV within the context of streaming service television. This section is meant to address, theorize, and give language to new ways of thinking about these topics. 21

Postmodernism’s staple is the questioning of metanarratives, which are narratives.

Metanarratives are narratives that organize our society – which sounds suspiciously like a taxonomical system. There are inherent problems with our current understanding of postmodernism. One is that it is entirely too meta and often written about too opaquely for most to understand what the discourse is. There are narratives that organize other narratives we call these organizing narratives labels and then we give a set of labels another label and so on. This seems unnecessary and confusing, but again, the most basic human psychology understands that our brains work in this way and we must do this in order to make sense of the world around us.

Another problem is that this confusion and meta nature can lead us to post-truth; or the world of

“fake news” and “alternative facts.” Afterall, if we are in the postmodern era that questions all metanarratives, how can we know what is ‘true’? However, it is possible that we are evolving.

This is where it gets interesting because what we are actually doing is creating a post- postmodern era. We can (and some already have) create space in our brains for the following paradox which I call the metanarrative paradox: metanarratives are entirely necessary and help our human brains to understand the world around us, create concrete belief systems, and construct our reality and at the same time metanarratives are completely meaningless as they are entirely fabricated based upon our current cultural ideals and change as frequently as we change.

Holding these two entirely conflicting beliefs is not only possible, but fundamental to helping us understand the world around us.

This paradox leads us to make use of postmodernism in a way that we could not before.

Genre then, is a metanarrative that organizes the narratives we find in our stories. It is extremely useful to us for setting up expectations, making media marketable, and familiarizing ourselves enough that we can understand and enjoy the media. Genre is also entirely constructed and our 22 idea of what is ‘romantic comedy’ or ‘horror’ changes with what we know as the genre cycle. I would like to propose that Netflix is acutely aware of this paradox and is consequently creating content with a process I call genre microdosing. Genre microdosing is when the producer of a media text inserts several distinct, but wholly intact genres into one singular text, such that when the whole of the text is taken in it appears as though it is new and inventive, sometimes the text may even appear to be without genre at all. This is done so that the audience feel familiar enough with the narrative that they do not immediately turn it off, but unfamiliar enough that they feel it is completely new. This is done in shows such as Stranger Things, Daybreak, Black Mirror, and of course The End of the FXXXing World. These producers are not always genre microdosing in the same way and it doesn’t always result in the same type of newness. For example, Stranger

Things falls squarely within the sci-fi genre. However, when the text is examined further, we can tell that the characters are broken off into different groups and each group is living a different genre. In season three, they even named these groups: the Griswold family (Eleven, Will, Mike,

Lucas, Max, Johnathan, and Nancy), the scoop troop (Dustin, Steve, Robin, and Erica), and the bald eagle (Joyce and Hopper). The Griswold family takes on a horror narrative, the scoop troop is living in a cold war spy film, and the bald eagle is a buddy cop. Genre microdosing is a way in which producers sell innovative television and complex narratives that could not be otherwise well understood or sold.

We understand these new and complex narratives because some part of us recognizes the microdosed genres lie within the greater text, even though these are only evident after analysis.

Within the context of streaming service television, this means that we can take in narrative complexity that has never before been imagined or attempted and that this innovation gets rewarded by the very business model set up by streaming service television. While Stranger 23

Things still falls well within the bounds of science fiction, some of these shows do not have a singular clear genre at all. The End of the Fxxxing World is a show in which genre microdosing was used to skillfully create full rounded characters and a complex, innovative narrative. The rest of this paper will be a case study on The End of the Fxxxing World and is intended to illustrate this theory of genre microdosing. The implications of this theory are discussed not in this chapter, but in chapters two and three.

Case Study: The End of the FXXXing World

The End of the FXXXing World is an excellent example of how genre microdosing can result in the appearance of completely dissolved genre boundaries. Upon first watch it is difficult to discern what to expect from the show – even as the viewer is actively watching it. The basic premise is this: James is a seventeen-year-old who believes he is a psychopath. He kills small animals as a hobby but grows bored and decides he wants to try killing “something bigger.” He settles on Alyssa, a ribald, rebellious seventeen-year-old classmate with mental issues of her own. After initiating an awkward romantic relationship, Alyssa suggests that the two run away together in the hopes that she’ll escape her sexually abusive stepfather and emotionally distant mother. James agrees thinking he’ll find an opportunity to kill her later. The pair embark on an epic road trip across England and begin to develop a real romantic relationship after a series of uncomfortable misadventures. The show’s “more like this” recommendation algorithm suggests everything from The Vampire Diaries to The Good Place – from You to Friends. These are dramatically different shows with dramatically different genres. The only genre headings that

Netflix displays under ‘details’ for The End of the FXXXing World is “Teen TV Show, British TV

Show, TV Drama, and TV Comedy.” All of which are broad and vaguely unidentifiable – for example what makes a “teen show”? The End of the FXXXing World is rated TV-Mature meaning 24 unsuitable for those seventeen and under which excludes most teenagers. Does that mean it’s a teen show because it stars teenagers? “Teen TV” seems almost uniquely undefinable in this context. Rather, this show participates in genre microdosing, meaning that it belongs to several definable, visible genres when broken down into its smaller parts. These genres include romantic comedy, action/adventure, thriller suspense, britcom, family melodrama, and even film noir.

Although recognizable when broken down, the show appears completely as though it is completely without genre when viewed as a whole. The rest of this paper will systematically show how The End of the FXXXing World has at least six genres microdosed into it’s whole to create the appearance of a genreless text. Implications of this will be further addressed in chapters two and three.

Syntactically, the plot plays out in a similar way to that of any romantic comedy: The show starts with our couple meeting in a comedic way. James is sitting alone at lunch when

Alyssa comes up to him and says, “Hey. I've seen you skating… You're pretty shit.” James replies “Fuck off.” The whole exchange is delivered completely dead pan for comedic effect.

True to romcom form, the characters are opposites and have their differences. “The choice of alternating focus had important thematic implications (in romantic comedy). As we gain more knowledge about each character, we understand that each is missing what the other can provide.”

(Friedman, 136) The alternating focus on the differences between these two characters is evident as the text gets narratively complex with alternating voiceovers accompanied by flashbacks as each character introduces themselves.

James: I'm James. I'm 17, and I'm pretty sure I'm a psychopath. I was eight when

I realised I didn't have a sense of humour. 25

Alyssa: I get these moments when I have to lie down because everything feels

sort of too much. And I look up and see the blue, or the grey, or the black, and I

feel myself melting into it. (S1E1, 0:30)

We immediately see that James feels too little where Alyssa feels too much. Our couple goes through a few trials before they are seen having fun together in a classic ‘falling in love’ scene.

This happens in the third episode when they’re seen drinking and dancing around a Livingroom.

She gestures for James to come to the floor, while his inner monologue tells us “As a rule I don’t dance. But it was hard to say no to Alyssa.” She gains his trust by telling him she’ll close her eyes as to not look at him while he’s dancing. In true romantic comedy fashion, she does open her eyes her inner monologue stating, “I think he’s properly beautiful.” Later on in the that episode we understand that the contrast between them has been overcome and they’ve begun giving each other what the other needs. James states, “She made me feel things. And I didn’t like it at all.” Then, syntactically a complication must occur that they come together to overcome. For these two it’s the murder of Alyssa’s would be rapist. Then a second, bigger complication occurs, this time its dealing emotionally with the murder. The couple splits up and then they come back together realizing that they need each other. This show is clearly syntactically a romantic comedy. It is also semantically a romantic comedy as the theme of love conquering all pervades in everything from the rose-tinted iconography to the music – even when the murder occurs, the blood pooling on the hardwood floor makes the shape of a heart.

The End of the FXXXing World also adheres strongly to the action-adventure genre. “The term action-adventure has been used to pinpoint a number of obvious characteristics common to these genres and films: a propensity for spectacular physical action, a narrative structue involving fights, chases and explosions, and… the deployment of state of the art special effects” 26

(Neale, 52). There is also a call to adventure which occurs at the end of the first episode when

Alyssa says, “I'm serious, let's leave this shithole town, now. You hate it, I hate it. Our parents are dickheads, you've got a car.” There is chase narrative throughout the course of the show in that there is a cop duo hot on their case as both missing minors and murder suspects. They face both mental and physical struggles as they grow. But perhaps most obviously, this is an action- adventure story in its semantics. It’s geographically undefined, taking place in several locations around England. The iconography shows scenes where there are explosions, or with marked and bloody bodies. They even poke fun at this genre when the kids crash the car and James says, “Do you think it will explode?” to which Alyssa replies, “It’s not a film,” just before the car explodes.

Most importantly, Alyssa and James both show courage and self-discovery – Alyssa is constantly sticking up for herself and for James both physically and mentally. There’s a scene where the pair gets picked up by a trucker and who goes into a bathroom with James and effectively molests him. Alyssa walks in. While the trucker was trying to leave the bathroom, she places herself in the doorway:

Alyssa: Give me your wallet.

Trucker: You what?

Alyssa: Give me your wallet.

Trucker: No. No...

Alyssa: Give me your wallet or I swear to fuck I’ll go visit Liz and Abi and your

weird potato baby and tell them what you like to do with teenage boys in toilets.

(S1E2, 14:05) 27

This kind of bravery and (and savvy to think to ask for his wallet) is characteristic of a hero in an action-adventure story ad embodies the themes of courage and self-discovery that are paramount in that genre.

This show is also heavily reliant on the genre of family melodrama. “At their best, melodramas strive for the sublime, and when the succeed, they provide an unparalleled experience of emotional plentitude” (Friedman, 81). The plot can be read as character driven in that much of the actions taken by Alyssa and James stem directly from their troubled home lives.

Alyssa describes her homelife:

My mum used to be nice but then she got divorced from my dad and met Tony.

Last week, he said he thought I needed a bigger bra. So I threw a chicken Kiev at

his head. Mum pretended that she hadn’t heard him… I haven’t seen my dad since

I was eight. He never fitted in, he couldn’t settle, so he had to leave. I don’t blame

him. But he sends me a card, without fail, every single birthday. (S1E1, 2:57)

James has an equally troubling story, which is shown rather than told. In a flashback, his mom’s depression is made clear to the audience when his dad suggests to her that she try to get outside.

A child James asks her to take him to the park to feed the ducks. When they arrive, child James leaves the car to feed the ducks and then his mom commits suicide in front of him by driving the car into the pond and drowning. This is shown with an absence of sound that highlights the emotional resonance of the scene. The entire plot is predicated on the two escaping these troubled home lives and many of the decisions that they make along their adventure are a direct result of this. For example, Alyssa suggests they dine and dash because her dad told her it was okay to dine and dash so long as the restaurant is not independently owned. James kills the man who attempts to rape Alyssa because he views himself as her ‘protector,’ something he couldn’t 28 be for his mom. This becomes more emotionally resonant as his character develops and he discovers “I was never Alyssa’s protector. She was mine.” In addition to the clear aim of emotional resonance, the series relies on music (or lack thereof) to create a structure of feeling.

The show also uses dilatory tactics, a staple of melodrama to delay climax until the last possible moment.

Perhaps most obviously, this is a suspense thriller text. The suspense thriller genre is one that is very specifically defined within the Hitchcockian context. Charles Derry states, “The suspense thriller (is) a crime work which presents a generally murderous antagonism in which the protagonist becomes either and innocent victim or a nonprofessional criminal…” (Derry, 62).

The invention on this in The End of the FXXXing World is of course that our beloved protagonists are both innocent victims and ‘nonprofessional’ criminals. The show adheres to this genre by sticking to the Hitchcockian idea of suspense in which the audience is given enough information that they can anticipate a specific action. The clearest examples of this are in the beginning when the audience knows James’ intent to kill Alyssa and when they’re in Professor Koch’s (the rapist) house. James opens a cabinet to get a vase to put hand-picked flowers in, while ignoring the copious amounts of duct tape, bleach, and rope stored there. He then finds video tapes of Dr.

Koch raping and killing several women. The tension comes to a head when Dr. Koch comes home to find Alyssa in his bed and attempts to rape her. James then steps in and kills him, setting up new suspense as he leaves a token in the room for the police to find.

Though less clearly adhered to, the show finally pulls from both britcom and film noir.

The twenty-minute episode format and deadpan humor aim the show toward British-sitcom or britcom. The jokes in the show are a mix of deadpan expressions, comedic timing, and 29 hyperbolic or absurd situations. In episode two after the car explodes, Alyssa gets upset at James for asking if they should return home.

Alyssa: I don't want to go home, James…

James: So, what do you want to do?

Alyssa: I don't know. Why don't you fucking think of something for once?

James (voiceover): I couldn't have done it there; the car would have linked me to

the crime. (S1E2, 6:24)

At this point James still thinks he’s going to murder Alyssa. Which makes the next scene even funnier as the two decide to hitchhike. Alyssa hates this plan and states, “I am going to be so fucked off if we get murdered.” This type of humor is particularly interesting because it is what is known as dark humor or gallows humor and is meant to upset traditional thought on grim topics such as murder. This type of dark humor can also be read as resignation regarding the human condition, a staple of the film noir genre.

The protagonist in noir is generally male; often, therefore, these films feature a

male victim who may be set up to take the fall for a crime committed by someone

else or who may be lured into committing a crime… the other character type

central to noir is… the femme fatale, the deadly but seductive woman who

manipulates her lover into committing a crime and may even lead him to his

death. (Friedman, 498)

The use of noir in the show is interesting and inventive because while it follows all of this, the interplay with comedy, especially on dark topics allows for a postmodern type of playfulness that helps create the sense of newness in the show. James is very much a noir male lead with his resignation about his life circumstances. It can be read that Alyssa is a femme fatale in that she is 30 the reason why James commits a murder and ultimately gets shot in the last episode of season one. The show also makes use of the voiceover, one of noir’s most defining characteristics.

Between the voiceovers, the dark subject matters, the resignation about circumstances, and the male and female roles, it is clear that The End of the FXXXing World heavily pulls from the film noir genre.

Conclusion

Netflix original shows are often participating in genre microdosing which has lead to interesting and new narrative complexity. Unencumbered by the constraints of traditional television and operating within a business model that rewards the avant-garde, Netflix has figured out how to cater to that sense of familiarity so subtly that the viewer must actively analyze for it to be noticed at all. There shows then have the appearance of newness and even genrelessness, when in fact they are adhering to several genres quite strongly. While genre hybridity is not new, the idea that a show can be marketable while presenting as genreless is interesting and merits this exploration. Further implications of genre microdosing will be explored in chapters two and three. 31

CHAPTER 2: GENRE MICRODOSING AND REPRESENTATION

Introduction

In chapter one we discussed the theory of genre microdosing which can be described as when the producer of a media text inserts several distinct, but wholly intact genres into one singular text, such that when the whole of the text is taken in it appears as though it is new and inventive, and sometimes the text may even appear to be without genre at all. It was discussed that this has been seen in streaming service original television specifically because of the advancements in the algorithm technology that suggests content as well as other technological advancements (auto trailers, blurbs, etc) that allow for audience expectations to be set up in the absence of a clear genre. While the audience may feel familiar enough to continue watching, there is certainly an equal measure of confusion that must take place as a result of learning to navigate this appearance of genrelessness. The resulting confusion is meant to pleasurably manipulate the audience into feeling that this content is something new and exciting, however can also leave the audience without clear orientation. This disorientation can then be used to make statements, explore difficult topics, and approach subjects with nuance and humanization.

This chapter is meant to explore the implications of genre microdosing and the appearance of genrelessness on representation.

The theory of genre microdosing has multiple implications including within the area of representation. While issues of representation can include everything from race to sexuality to gender, this essay is going to focus on gender representation. The idea here is to demonstrate the implications of genre microdosing within the field of representation broadly through the specific example of gender representation. This is not to say that the text does not take on other issues of representation (in fact the representation of teenaged sexuality within the show perhaps merits its 32 own essay). However, the focus will be to highlight how genre microdosing can affect representation through a clear and well proven example.

The idea of genre microdosing is inherently postmodern in its defiance of clear categorization. Without clear categorization, the show stands to be interpreted by average viewers as being without genre. This opens up the narrative and the creative process in a way that allows the content and its creators access to a wide range of theoretical tools that can then be used to take on topics that already exist on a postmodern spectrum (such as gender). Shows that genre microdose exist in the in between – an amorphous and ineffable queer space. This is useful to scholars of representation because it lends itself to the subversive. As feminist and queer studies scholar Donna Haraway writes in her Cyborg Manifesto,

A cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realities in which people

are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of

permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints. The political struggle

is to see from both perspectives at once because each reveals both dominations

and possibilities unimaginable from the other vantage point. Single vision

produces worse illusions that double vision. (Haraway, 154)

A show written to exist in multiple genres sees its characters from multiple viewpoints which allows for the political work to be done with ease. Alyssa does not have to stay trapped in the confines of the teen in a horror movie or portray the romantic interest who must succumb to role of wife and mother – she doesn’t have to stay in any one category. The postmodern space allows for the mobility of character that creates human beings rather than formulaic character types. The main criticism of this is that this viewpoint is too utopian – it does not allow for the lived experience to come through. 33

Textualization of everything in a post structuralist, postmodernist theory has been

damned by Marxists and socialist feminists for its utopian disregard for the lived

relations of the domination that ground the ‘play’ of arbitrary reading. It is

certainly true that post modern strategies like my cyborg myth, subvert myriad

organic wholes. In short, the certainty of what counts as nature… is

undetermined… So, my cyborg myth is about transgressed boundaries, potent

fusions, and dangerous possibilities which progressive people might explore as

one part of needed political work. (Haraway, 152)

The argument here is that the lived experience is mixed, partial, contradictory, existing within and without binaries. It’s not that this is too utopian a view, but rather it is the only view that can encompass the lived experience with nuance because it accepts all the contradictions that make up a human. The political work can get done not in spite of this queer space, but because of it – because the postmodern allows for identity formation in a way that considers identities that exist both within and without binaries. In her essay Feminism, Postmodernism, and the “Real Me”

Angela McRobbie writes,

But, for the moment, I would want to signal postmodernity as marking a

convergence of a number of discourses each of which opens up new possibilities

for positioning the self… I think there is a brave and necessary inclusion in the

new intellectual agenda of difference, a different kind of language, on which

insists on the interplay between intellectual boundaries and borders and also one

which recognizes the importance of what have been the hidden dimensions of

subjectivity, those which arise from positionalities which, within modernism, had 34

no legitimate place, i.e. that of the black woman, that of the mother, the daughter,

that of the feminist intellectual, the feminist teacher. (McRobbie, 522)

In this way, it is important to recognize that the postmodern fragmentation of identity has made space for minority identities to show themselves. Individuals are now left to decide the ways in which they would like to be identified. Similarly, genrelessness is then able to reflect this and allow characters to define their own identities.

Identity formation can then take several different forms and processes. The reflection of these processes in media, especially in coming of age narratives, can be difficult. The argument here is that the show’s postmodern take skillfully allows the two main characters to form their own identities in a way that upsets the patriarchal hegemon through the process of identity formation we can call abjection. Abjection can take many forms and is in itself a postmodern idea – it is formless and relies on each individual. Julia Kristeva writes,

It is something rejected from which one does not part, from which one does not

protect oneself as from an object. Imaginary uncanniness and real threat, it beckons

to us and ends up engulfing us. It is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that

causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect

borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite. (Kristeva,

4)

Abjection is a process by which identity can form because it tells us what we are not. While it is itself borderless, it defines our borders for us. In this way, the show itself is reflective of the abject with its refusal to be categorized. The abject is often uncanny (both familiar and unfamiliar), it is not easily placed, and it can be difficult to put into words. In this way, what the show and abjection have in common is that they are both postmodern – rejecting and questioning 35 their identities. This commonality allows the show to use abjection as a tool in a much more effective way than other media texts. The way in which the show combines humor, horror, and melodrama, for example, allows its main characters to experience abjection in such a way that their disgust is aimed at patriarchal norms and the characters end up identifying themselves in opposition to that. Kristeva’s foundational work goes on to suggest that female bodies, especially that of the mother, are themselves abject or at least considered abject by society. What is interesting about The End of the Fxxxing World is that what is considered abject in the story world, indeed the thing that is meant to revolt the viewer, is not the female body but rather the patriarchal limitations on it in addition to that which we can call toxic masculinity. Toxic masculinity is characterized here as the societal ideal of masculinity that rejects expressions of emotion and accepts (often in the stead of emotional expression) violence.

This abjection of toxic masculinity rather than the female body upsets the patriarchal hegemon and allows the two characters, who are just coming of age, to orient themselves not as male and female within the story world, but instead as human beings. Both characters get to experience emotion, speak their minds, control their bodies, and ultimately choose their identities. This chapter will work to explain how the main characters of Alyssa and James define their identities through the abjection of toxic masculinity and patriarchal limitations. In the case of Alyssa, the text does this through the rejection of the male gaze, the use of Alyssa’s voice, and the normalization of what is normally considered the most abject part of the female experience: menstruation. For James, the text plays with music, iconography, and his characterization to highlight his (quite literally) vomitous abjection from toxic masculinity. 36

Alyssa: Women and Representation

This discussion of the female character and her role on the screen cannot be addressed properly without first discussing Laura Mulvey’s idea of the male gaze. Feminist film criticism often call back to Mulvey’s male gaze theory which built upon Freud’s psychoanalytic ideas of voyeurism, scopophilia, and narcissism. Mulvey asserted that in a world of male screen writers and male directors, the naturally voyeuristic setting of film lends itself uniquely towards the voyeurism and ultimate objectification of women. “In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female figure which is styled accordingly.” (Mulvey,

11) While this theory has been considered the backbone of feminist film criticism for years, it does not apply to our text. In fact, it will be argued here that the text, fully aware of the male gaze, actively upsets the male point of view and instead takes the point of view of Alyssa. In addition, her costuming refuses over sexualization and Alyssa often removes her physical body from the gaze of men in the story world.

The character of Alyssa creates a structure of feeling that embodies seventeen-year-old womanhood in a way that is both utterly human (average and common) and completely surreal.

This combination of surrealism and average humanness is precisely what makes this character so authentic and resonant. On one hand the audience recognizes this character. She is familiar to us because she is everything we were at seventeen: awkward, angsty, uncomfortable in both body and character. Yet her story arch and character growth throughout the season offers us the surreal version of ourselves we wish we could have been at seventeen. Alyssa is a risk taker with an absolute zero tolerance for the disrespect the world is ready to throw at her in fact, it rather disgusts her. She is adjected by it. First, Alyssa actively refuses the male gaze, often working in 37 cahoots with the camera and literally removing her body from the environment in which she experiences the male gaze. Second, she refuses to be silenced, often using profanities, I suggest that her word vomit is a metaphorical stand in for actual vomit, highlighting her abjection.

Lastly, she refuses to be disgusted by her own body, but rather normalizes its ever-changing desires and fluids, including menstruation.

The first thing the audience notices about Alyssa is that she looks like a seventeen-year- old girl. What is meant by this is that she does not look like a thirty something playing an overly glamorous seventeen-year-old girl (ex. Pretty Little Liars), but rather a real seventeen-year-old girl. When the audience is introduced to Alyssa it is evident that she wears no apparent makeup, her hair is down (not styled and presumably natural), she is wearing lose jeans, a boxy grey tee shirt, and a red cardigan sweater. She is not wearing the tight clothing of the action heroine or even the more feminine clothing of the romance heroine. She is not the over sexualized, crop top wearing, teen in the horror movie, nor is she femme fatal glamorous. Yet there are several remarks within the show to remind us of her understated and natural beauty. This is evident because while Alyssa, both in character and dress, refuses the male gaze on screen, she is still all too realistically oversexualized by the men in her story world. This separation between the camera refusing to sexualize her while the characters in her world continue to do so portrays the reality of what young women go through in the world today. The show engages with the male gaze in this way to make the audience think about its real-life damaging effects without feeling the need to add onto them with their own camera use. For example, in episode one, there is a scene that artfully engages with this discourse on the male gaze when Tony, Alyssa’s stepfather says, “You look good when you make an effort, don't you?” and then proceeds to touch her waste in overtly sexual and inappropriate display of what can only be described as power. (S1E1, 38

14:23) Music starts playing with the lyrics, “I learned the truth at 17, That love was meant for beauty queens, And high-school girls with clear-skinned smiles...” The music fades away into

Alyssa’s inner monologue – her decision to leave this life. Alyssa is disgusted by her step farther and even her mother, who watched the scene play out from the doorway and said nothing. This is the scene in which she decides to physically remove herself from this environment and become a heroine of a different kind. As Alyssa continues with her inner monologue, she is standing on a balcony. The camera here takes her gaze, and pans over the party, her mother and Tony with their new twin babies, before turning back on Alyssa’s face as she says, “Fuck. This. Shit,” and physically removes herself from the party, from that life. (S1E1, 15:11) Both the character and the show are taking a stand in this scene by gazing back at the man who was so willing to objectify her and literally saying ‘fuck this shit.’ Removing themselves from her stepfather’s gaze, which is clearly the thing that inspired disgust; abjection.

The abject has only one quality of the object—that of being opposed to I. If the

object, however, through its opposition, settles me within the fragile texture of a

desire for meaning which… makes me ceaselessly and infinitely homologous to

it, what is abject, on the contrary, the jettisoned object, is radically excluded and

draws me toward the place where meaning collapses. A certain "ego" that merged

with its master, a superego, has flatly driven it away. (Kristeva, 2)

Alyssa mirrors this by refusing to accept the song’s lyrics letting them fade away into her decision to leave and by refusing Tony the opportunity to look at her again before she removes herself from the environment. Her refusal to be the looked upon, the object, but to instead to assert her own gaze and then remove herself from having to experience the objectification again is intentional. 39

This poetic play between the melodrama of an abusive stepfather and the comedy of her saying “fuck this shit,” makes the abjection possible. The tension between the genres here invites disgust at the double standard set up for women. They must be beautiful and feminine but to do so is also dangerous. Alyssa is expected to be beautiful as male gaze theory suggests this is the way in which women are valued in media. However, in making her a realistic woman, the show calls out this type of value tagging and the song in the background highlights this. Her androgynous costuming makes her less of a woman and yet when she becomes more feminine – when she ‘makes an effort’ by putting on a nice sweater and doing her hair – she gets sexually harassed. The disgust, the feeling of opposing the actions of both Tony and this double standard is meant to fall over the audience in the same way it does Alyssa. We are here as witnesses rather than voyeurs, to see it and say this is not ‘I.’ In this way, the separation between the way in which the story world wants to view her, the way she wants to view herself, and the way the camera views her all work together to point out the injustices associated with being a young woman while still giving Alyssa the autonomy to refuse the male gaze.

Alyssa also speaks for herself. She is constantly using her voice and her words. She tends to state whatever is on her mind, despite the circumstances or consequences. She often uses profanity even if the situation does not call for it, asserting it is her right to do so. Alyssa has a tendency toward word vomit, when she feels disgusted by another’s behavior. This is a stand in for actual vomit, in that it is still a means by which Alyssa is experiencing abjection and identity formation. She is still attempting to expel something from her body that she wishes not to identify with. For example, on their first date, Alyssa and James go to an American themed restaurant.

Waitress: I can take your orders. 40

Alyssa: Uh-- I will have a... banana split with extra cherries. Some blueberry

pancakes. And a hot chocolate with cream.

Waitress: [giggles] You're hungry!

Alyssa: [giggles insincerely] And an extra fucking spoon.

Waitress: Sorry. You can't use language like that, otherwise I'm gonna have to

ask you and your boyfriend to leave.

Alyssa: [sighs] I will have... a great big banana shit with extra fucking cherries all

on top of it.

Waitress: [shouts] Marvin!

Alyssa: Oh, yeah! Go get Marvin! See if Marvin can make a banana split for me,

you fucking cunt! [shouts] Bye, Marvin! [door slams]

James: It seemed Alyssa had some issues (S1E1, 6:30)

Alyssa in this scene is clearly abjected, angry, and participating in what is colloquially known as ‘word vomit.’ She is angry for many reasons in this scene, the waitresses demeanor and giggling suggest that she is not treating them like adults with agency, but children. In addition, the waitress says ‘you’re hungry’ by way of commenting not only on Alyssa’s food intake, but also her body. This gets at something that women broadly must endure. Women are constantly being told that it is feminine to take up as little space in the world as possible. To defy this notion with eating habits is punishable by comment and judgement from others. Alyssa, in an attempt to assert her agency, says, ‘and an extra fucking spoon.’ Then she is told that she

‘can't use language like that’ which is to say that her autonomy of not only her food choices, but her language choices are being challenged. This is when we see Alyssa’s true abjection in the form of word vomit. She is clearly trying to get something out of her that she has identified as 41

‘other’ or not ‘I.’ The societal standards for her body and her language are decidedly ‘other’ for her. The scene ends when we once again, we see her physically remove her body from the space in which she feels her autonomy has been challenged.

In addition, James’ inner monologue reflects the male point of view here, ‘it seemed

Alyssa had some issues.’ At this point in the story James is meant to embody toxic masculinity in that he feels that he cannot feel or share emotion and instead chooses to express himself in violence towards small animals. This will be discussed further in depth later on, however, it is important to note that this comment about Alyssa having ‘issues’ comes from the male protagonist who, at this point in his character arch, fully embodies toxic masculinity. It also conjures up the idea of the ‘hysterical’ woman, where in showing too much emotion makes women ‘crazy.’ The scene itself, and Alyssa call this viewpoint into question. First, the fact that

James chooses to think this rather than say it out loud seems to suggest that he is aware of some wrongdoing. Second, Alyssa is seventeen, a more than acceptable time to be feeling what is known as angst or anger and frustration at the identity formation process itself. Teen angst takes the space in culture of pointing out what is frustrating about trying to form an identity within the limitations of a given society. What is angst if not the abjection one feels at societal constraints.

In this way, the attention given to Alyssa’s teen angst is intentional. Her decision to remove herself physically from the scene is another form of abjection, of physically stating her disgust for how the world would choose to limit her autonomy. It is her attempt to escape from that which she cannot.

Lastly, Alyssa and her abjection not of the female body itself, but the way in which it is treated, is highlighted in two contrasting scenes. In what can only be described as a truly iconic 42 scene, Alyssa has picked up a guy named Topher presumably to make James jealous. She invites

Topher up to the bedroom to have sex. However, she changes her mind, mid-foreplay.

Alyssa: I'm sorry… I changed my mind. I'm sorry, I'm not into this.

Topher: Are you... Are you kidding?

Alyssa: Nope.

Topher: [stutters] That's not fair.

Alyssa: Uh, yes, it is.

Topher: Please, Alyssa. I think you're amazing.

Alyssa: Well, then, respect me changing my mind, and fuck off, please.

Topher: [sighs] It's like... [angry] There is a word for girls like you.

Alyssa: I'll bet (S1E3, 14:16)

This scene engages with the conversation of consent in a way that reminds the audience that consent can be revoked at any time. More than this though, we once again see our female protagonist disgusted and angry with how the world chooses to treat her female body. Alyssa expects respect and says as much, and when she doesn’t get it, she uses profanity to show her anger and disgust. In stark contrast to this abjection Alyssa has been experiencing in regard to the patriarchal expectations of her body, she experiences absolutely no abjection at what can be considered to be the most abject thing women must experience – menstruation. In episode four,

Alyssa and James experience a brief separation. As she is walking through a small, unnamed town, we’re given her inner monologue, “It was the right thing, to leave James... I didn't kill anyone. It's better if I go to my dad's on my own, anyway. I wish I hadn't left James with the money, though. Oh, God,” here she takes her fingers up her skirt and when she removes them, there is blood on them, she continues, “I'd really like it if this was some horrendous, murder- 43 inspired fantasy moment. But no.” (S1E5, 6:41) All the while she looks completely bored by what is happening, even rolling her eyes at the blood on her fingers, as if it’s the most mundane and annoying of events – because it is. While menstruation is the most literally abject thing that

Alyssa does, the moment is not treated with the feeling of abjection. This is important and suggests that the inclusion of this scene is meant to highlight that the female body itself is not abject, but rather what is abject is the treatment of it in society. This is further highlighted by the fact that Alyssa, alone and without money, must then steal tampons and new underwear. The show is making a clear point – women’s bodies are not disgusting or abject. The abject thing is how women are treated. The character of Alyssa displays her abjection to toxic masculinity and patriarchal rules for feminine behavior by physically removing her body from situations in which she is subjected to the male gaze, by allowing her word vomit and teenaged angst to stand in for her actual vomit, and by normalizing menstruation and opposing non-consensual sex. The show artfully combines music, camera angles, dialogue, and iconography in a display of postmodernity that allows for a feminist take on abjection.

James: Masculinity and Representation

The show’s discussion on masculinity is perhaps even more interesting. The male protagonist takes the form of James. The audience is introduced to James with the announcement that he believes himself to be a psychopath because he feels devoid of emotion. This is interesting because it calls attention to one of the main pillars of toxic masculinity: emotion is never to be shown. The idea that James initially understands himself as a ‘psychopath’ for not having emotions, is perhaps a hyperbolic comment on toxic masculinity. Over the course of the season, James learns that he is not a psychopath at all, but rather becomes fully aware and can access the entire range of human emotions quite easily. The moment of most significant 44 character change for James is signified in the show by a moment of abjection in its most literal form – James sees the corpse of Dr. Koch (pronounced cock) and vomits. It is only through the process of abjection that James is able to come to terms with his masculinity in a way that allows him to understand himself as a human being. This section of the essay will show how The End of

The FXXXing World uses the elements of comedy, horror, and melodrama to highlight James’ abjection in a way that upsets toxic masculinity and instead allows James to identify himself as fully human.

It is important to start with the introduction of James, because this version of him is the most extreme and is intended to later highlight the amount of character growth he experiences.

James introduces himself this way:

James: I'm James. I'm 17. And I'm pretty sure I'm a psychopath.

♪I'm laughing on the outside/Crying on the inside/'Cause I'm so in love/With you♪

James: I was eight when I realized, I didn't have a sense of humor.

Phil: Why doesn't the Queen wave with this hand? Eh? Why doesn't the Queen

wave with this hand? 'Cause it's my hand! (S1E1, 00:46)

The show’s use of music here is interesting and directly contradicts everything James is saying.

Rather than suggest that he is devoid of emotion, they choose a song about feeling emotion and choosing not to show it. “I’m laughing on the outside/Crying on the inside” was an intentional choice by the show creators to call attention to this form of masculinity while simultaneously signaling to the viewer that this is going to be a love story, “Cause I’m so in love/With you.”

This scene also contradicts what he’s saying through the example he gives us of ‘not having humor.’ The scene cuts to an eight-year-old James sitting at the dining table with his dad who is waving like the queen and saying, “Why doesn't the Queen wave with this hand? Eh? Why 45 doesn't the Queen wave with this hand? 'Cause it's my hand!” Eight-year-old James fails to laugh and instead is shown resting his head on his hand and looking utterly unentertained. Rather than draw the conclusion that this was simply not a funny joke, James instead comes to the conclusion that he has no sense of humor. This is also an intentional signal to the viewer that perhaps his perception of himself is nascent and all too informed by the society in which this boy lives. The scene continues:

James: I'd always wanted to punch my dad in the face. When I was nine, he

bought a deep-fat fryer. He saw it on an American shopping channel. One day, I

put my hand in it. I wanted to make myself feel something. When I was 15, I put

my neighbor's cat in a box and took it into the woods. It probably had a name…

After that, I killed more animals. And I remember every single one.

♪ Laughing on the outside/Crying on the inside/'Cause I'm so in love/With you ♪

(S1E1, 1:12)

The focus on violence here again can be read as a signifier of toxic masculinity. In these scenes

James shows us not only violence against small animals, but also violence against himself. This violence against himself again indicates that toxic masculinity is not his true character. The line

“I wanted to make myself feel something,” is telling. It indicates a desire to be a part of the grater humanity, a desire to access that full spectrum of emotions. But like may men and boys,

James has been told that masculinity should not access these emotions, but rather should show itself instead in violence. The same song continues at the end of this scene again undermining everything James has told us about how this story is going to go and instead foreshadows great emotion. In this way it can also be read that the tension between the comedy of the song and the horror of the violence James displays is building a tension in which abjection sits. 46

As the episodes continue, we see James begin to change through his relationship to

Alyssa. Alyssa frustrates him, challenges him, and ultimately endures him to her. Toward the end of episode two, Alyssa is crying in the bathroom at the realization that she cannot go home.

James is outside the bathroom with a knife, ready to strike, when he hears her crying and puts the knife away. A sad acoustic guitar song plays over this scene with the lyrics, “Suddenly it's there/On a Saturday night/When you're feeling alive and calm/And all the children inside/Meet before the sun/To keep them warm and dry.” (S1E2, 17:14) Again, the tension between the horror of the violence James wants to commit and his refusal to do so under the melodramatic circumstances signifies that James is not the psychopath he perceives himself to be. He cares enough about Alyssa at this point to let her crying in the bathroom affect his decision making.

The music here also reflecting the idea that perhaps he is discovering feeling, “suddenly it’s there.” In the next episode, James finally admits, “I tended not to feel things. For a long time, I was good at it. Good at feeling absolutely nothing. I didn't even have to try… Being with Alyssa had started to make me feel things. She made me feel things. And I didn't like it at all.” (S1E3,

9:12) While all this gradual growth is important, the most significant moment of change that occurs both for James and the series, is the end of episode three, the murder of Dr. Koch.

Dr. Koch, pronounced “cock,” is everything James could have become if he had continued to cling to the idea of himself as a psychopath. Dr. Koch embodies the worst of humanity and is toxic masculinity – the audience is aware by the time of the murder that Koch himself has murdered and raped several women and recorded it both on film and in photographs.

He was undeniably assaulting Alyssa when James comes out from his hiding spot underneath the bed to stab Koch in the carotid artery causing blood to spray everywhere including on Alyssa.

The camera angle here is striking and takes Alyssa’s point of view. In this way, it shows her 47 struggle and fight against Koch, but also highlights the gruesomeness of the scene as the blood splatters directly onto the camera (Alyssa). James backs away with his hands shaking. Koch falls onto the floor and the blood vividly pulses out of his body onto the floor in the shape of a heart.

A song plays over the scene, “I'm sorry/So sorry/That I was such a fool/I didn't know/Love could be so cruel/Oh, oh-oh-oh, oh-oh, oh, yes/You tell me/Mistakes are part of being young/But that don't right/The wrong that's been done/I'm sorry/I'm sorry/So sorry/So sorry/Please accept my apology/But love is blind/And I was too blind to see…” (S1E3, 17:11) The screen goes black marking the end of the episode. It isn’t until the beginning of the next episode that we see James staring down at Koch’s dead body when he turns away and vomits. He stands back up, wipes his mouth, and the two continue to stare at the corpse while James says ‘Sorry.’

This scene, and James’ reaction to it are abject. That abjection lives in the tension between the horror of the corpse and the comedy of the music. Julia Kristeva uses the sight of the corpse as one of the primary and most universal examples of the abject. Speaking of abjection regarding a corpse, specifically Kristeva states,

Corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live. These body

fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with

difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am at the border of my condition as a

living being. My body extricates itself, as being alive, from that border. Such

wastes drop so that I might live, until, from loss to loss, nothing remains in me

and my entire body falls beyond the limit—cadere, cadaver. (Kristeva, 3)

Kristeva goes on to suggest that the abject is a process by which one expels themselves – a process of identity formation. James’ vomit at the sight of the corpse signifies a moment of abjection in its most literal form; a moment of identity formation. In that moment, James is 48 rejecting the idea of death, the idea of Koch, and the idea of himself as reflected in Koch.

Kristeva suggests that the sight of the corpse offers a binary option: life or death. The human disgust of a corpse is then the choice of life. In a similar way, James is choosing life in this scene. Not just in the literal sense of having killed a murderer, but in the metaphorical sense of choosing to experience the full range of human emotion and rejecting violence. The abject acts as an in between, but in that in between one can then choose an identity. In this moment, James can no longer call him self a psychopath. Indeed, toward the end of episode four he states,

“Having finally murdered a human, I was pretty sure I wasn't a psychopath.” (S1E4, 20:19)

The fact that this scene is overlaid with a song of remorse over youthful mistakes is also interesting. This could be read as James remorse for having killed Koch, but it is perhaps more likely that the ‘I’m sorry’ lyric is referring to idea that he is remorseful over thinking he could have ever harmed people in the same way Koch did. He is remorseful for having believed and having acted as though he was without emotion. This is reflected in the shape of the heart that

Koch’s blood pools into. By using this bit of iconography, the show pulls itself back into the love story between James and Alyssa. The fact that Koch’s name is pronounced ‘cock’ suggests that this is an intentional, literal stab at the ideas of masculinity that are portrayed in this character including the absence of emotion and the emphasis on violence. This perhaps supports the evidence that James is indeed sorry that he ever thought of masculinity in the same way Koch did.

James’ literal abjection at the sight of the dead Koch is a turning point for both his character and the show. It is meant to illustrate the moment of James’ identity formation in which he rejects Koch and all that he stands for, literally killing Koch and metaphorically killing that part of his own character that is similar to Koch. In the moments afterword we get a 49 reflection both through the song and through the iconography which further allows both the audience and James to reflect on the actions that have just been taken. Both the scene and James’ characterization here are intended to illustrate the abjection of toxic masculinity or that form of masculinity which rejects feeling and embraces violence. Instead, at the sight of the corpse James chooses life and the full spectrum of human emotion that goes with that.

Conclusion

The postmodernity of genre microdosing leaves room for the political work to be done. In

The End of the Fxxxing World, the creators have made use of abjection, which by it’s very nature can only exist in the in between, the unidentifiable, that queer ineffable space. In so doing the creators have taken the idea of the abject and flipped it so that the disgust emanates from the forms of masculinity that would relegate women to objects, detune man’s own humanity and emotion, and instead focus itself on violence. This is shown through the character of Alyssa who is disgusted with this form of masculinity from the beginning. While her abjection is more abstract, it is visible in her instance on removing her physical body from the site (and more literally sight) of this form of masculinity, as she refuses to be subjected to the male gaze. She also shows her abjection through her language, using that which the audience can recognize as word vomit as a stand in for actual vomit when she feels she has been objectified and limited by societal rules. There is also the abjection of the male use of her body for pleasure which stands in stark contrast to the normalization of what is normally considered the most abject female experience, menstruation. This contrast can be read as an intentional attempt to upset the idea of women’s bodies as abject and instead assert that what is abject is the treatment of them. The show uses James’ characterization as a tool to illustrate more literally the abjection at the sight of this masculinity. As the show’s male lead, James starts the show by repressing emotion and 50 instead displaying violence against small animals. While he admits that he thinks he may be a psychopath, the reality becomes clear as the show progresses that he is not a psychopath, but rather has not been given the tools to deal with his emotions properly as a man in the society in which he lives. His characterization takes a turn at the moment of literal abjection when he sees the corpse of the man he just stabbed and vomits. In this moment abjection offers James a binary: life or death and metaphorically human emotion or toxic masculinity. In this moment James chooses life and all the emotions that go along with that. In these ways the show, through its postmodernity, is able to create an elaborate critique masculinity and promote instead a feminist take. 51

CHAPTER 3: GLOBAL IMPLICATIONS OF GENRELESSNESS IN NETFLIX’S THE END

OF THE FXXXING WORLD

Introduction

The most obvious and largest change about streaming television as opposed to traditional syndication is the matter of the global release. There are many different facets to this. For starters, this allows the spread of other cultures in an authentic and highly accessible way. From

Cable Girls (Spain) and Narcos (Columbia) to Hello My Twenties (South Korea) and Dark

(Germany) Netflix’s international originals allow viewers to step inside story worlds and cultures completely different from their own. This contributes to the increasing feeling of globalization, but it also allows us to understand the ways in which might have a shared human story. Netflix does not try to take shows out of their context and in fact will often allow the characters and settings to speak for their context. Yet, the dichotomy between the differences in culture and the unique humanization of each character allows for the audience to simultaneously understand and recognize the character within their context but also understand and recognize the human experience that is shared with them as well. The End of the Fxxxing World is no different. This essay will discuss the global implications of the streaming service medium, how this effects genre, and the ways in which global story telling contributes to the shared human experience as well as better understandings of individual cultures.

Globalization has an interesting interplay with the technological advancement that is the streaming service. First, globalization is a contributing factor to genre microdosing; globalization isn’t simply effected by this concept, but is instead an active contributing factor to it. Scholars such as Andrew Tudor, Jean-Loup Bourget, and Rick Altman have given us a foundation of 52 genre theory that helps us understand genre and the way that it operates in terms of the global.

Tudor states,

…the crucial factors that distinguish a genre are not only characteristics inherent

in the films themselves; they also depend on the particular culture within which

we are operating. And unless there is world consensus on the subject (which is an

empirical question), there is no basis for assuming that a western will be

conceived in the same way in every culture. The way in which the genre term is

applied can quite conceivably vary from case to case. Genre notions—except the

special case of arbitrary definition—are not critics’ classifications made for

special purposes; they are sets of cultural conventions. Genre is what we

collectively believe it to be. (Tudor, 7)

The theory put forth here is meant to suggest that we take media texts in their context. Tudor is attempting to consider the ways in which genre acts as a mediator between a audience and the cultural output. However, one must question this approach when the context is global. On one hand Tudor is absolutely correct in that there is no world consensus on the topic, and we must therefore consider the culture from which a text came in order to understand it’s genre. On the other hand, it is important to recognize that the context of a streaming service original is not so much a geographically placed country as it is the internet itself. Tudor goes on to suggest a certain use value that genre has to reflect the social and psychological context of a work and the society from which that work was created (Tudor, 8). Again, we must update this and consider it within the context of television created for the global.

Netflix changed the face of television by providing a commercial free viewing experience that could be accessed from anywhere, rather than just the television set. It is both an online 53 platform and a traditional television network. As Ramon Lobato suggests we must therefore be studying Netflix from both of these angles, “Netflix – like many disruptive media phenomena before it, including radio and broadcast television – is a boundary object that exists between, and inevitably problematizes, the conceptual categories used to think about media.” (Lobato, 20) The blend of platform and television has clear consequences in terms of what is actually being sold.

In traditional cable, the viewer is sold to the ad agency – the viewer is the commodity that is being exchanged. Because it is a platform, Netflix is not selling the viewer to the ad agency, rather they are selling the viewer content directly. Within the context of the internet, we must also understand that this content must then fall under what Henry Jenkins would call ‘spreadable media’ as this is what allows for capitalist expansion. Netflix doesn’t have commercials that air on regular schedule for its new and upcoming shows, so advertising largely relies on this concept of spreadability. “Spreadability refers to the potential both technological and cultural for audiences to share content for their own purposes sometimes with the permission and rights of the holders, sometimes against their wishes” (Jenkins, 3). Netflix wants their viewers to create reddit forums for Stranger Things – they want gifs, fan fiction, pithy twitter accounts, and

Buzzfeed quizzes that will tell you what character you are based on your taste in cheese. Jenkins concept gets explained further here,

This shift from distribution to circulation signals a movement toward a more

participatory model of culture, one which sees the public not as simply consumers

of preconstructed messages but as people who are shaping, sharing, reframing,

and remixing media content in ways which might not have been previously

imagined. And they are doing so not as isolated individuals but within larger 54

communities and networks, which allow them to spread content well beyond their

immediate geographic proximity… (Jenkins, 2)

When we examine Netflix as an internet platform combined with a television network, it becomes clear that they have even more incentive to create media that is both nuanced and new.

They actively attempt to create shows no one has seen before, because these shows are able to maintain spread ability. One way in which Netflix does this is through genre microdosing which allows the viewer to recognize up to five or six separate genres within a single text effectively making that text appear without genre. This is precisely what happens in their show The End of

The Fxxxing World which adheres to several recognizable genres including family drama, romantic comedy, action/adventure, horror thriller, and sitcom.

The End of The Fxxxing World was originally a comic written by American author Charles

Forsman that was adapted into an eight-episode Netflix original series in 2017. It was released as a “global original” meaning that it can be found in any country that has Netflix. This means that Tudor’s idea that genre must come from a specific context and be released into a specific context becomes significantly more complicated. The global reach of the streaming service is therefore part of the reason that a show may appear genreless. While the show’s American roots may have had an effect on the final product, it is deeply and wonderfully a British show (one of its few visible ‘genre’ tags within Netflix is ‘British TV’). It has an almost entirely British cast and crew and was made by British producers. In this way we see how a show is already geographically ambiguous – an adaptation of an American text made by the British for the global. What is interesting here is that even if we accept that the show was made by the British for the global, how do we mediate this in terms of genre and storytelling when the existing theory no longer works? I would like to suggest that the appearance of genreless in the show acts 55 as a mediating factor between the local context and global audience by allowing both audiences more freedom of imagination. Ultimately, the genrelessness is what creates the tension that both displays the local intimately but actively works to make the global audience into an imagined community. It does this through allowing the audience an unconfined space to imagine themselves within – the appearance of genreless. At the same, time show makes no effort to hide its British identity and in fact intimately engages with displays of Britishness. What we end up getting out of this interplay between the British identity and the desire for the global appeal is a set of deeply human deeply British characters that are able to reveal their context as well as contribute to the global human story. They are relatable in their full, round, and deeply human development but also in their colloquialisms and national identity which can remind us so much of our own.

The global audience is left to interpret the characters within their British context but is also asked to see them as relatable human beings, and without the confines of an apparent genre they are free to do so. The text works incredibly hard for this and ends up using their British identity as a relatable selling point in creating a structure of feeling that allows the reader to graft their own national identity onto the text. In this way, the text forces the audience imagination to play a role in the in negotiating one’s own individual and social constructions within the global community. Appadurai gets at this idea of the global and imagination when he states,

Implicit in this book is a theory of rupture that takes media and migration as its

two major, and interconnected, diacritics and explores their joint effect on the

work of the imagination as a constitutive feature of modern subjectivity. The first

step in this argument is that electronic media decisively change the wider field of

mass media and other traditional media. This is not a monocausal fetishization of 56

the electronic. Such media transform the field of mass mediation because they

offer new resources and new disciplines for the construction of imagined selves

and imagined worlds. This is a relational argument. (Appaduri, 3)

This idea of the imagined selves and the imagined worlds is a relational argument in part because it rests on the idea of being able to relate – much in the same way spreadable media does. I want to be clear that this is ultimately a translocal approach to the globalized text. As defined by

Darling-Wolf:

The fact that the culture we experience as “local” (or even, in this case,

“traditional”) is inescapably embedded in broader global processes is increasingly

difficult to ignore. Globalization theorists identify this “collective awareness of

growing global interconnectedness” as a defining element of our contemporary

condition. They point to the fact that globalization is marked by a new role for the

imagination in social life as individuals simultaneously envision “the global” and

negotiate their own locality through their engagement with flows of cultural

products, images, and information increasingly disconnected from their place of

origin. (Darling-Wolf, 1)

This is important in genre because it leads the audience to a space of confused expectations to begin with. In this way, the audience becomes an active participant in the text by allowing their imaginations to mediate their relationship between themselves, the text, and the global. In this regard, the text asks a lot of the audience. First, they are being confronted with a text that is outside of their own context and knowledge of genre. Second, the text itself is aware of this and has taken it to an extreme by allowing several different genres to combine and even poking fun at this fact. Third, the audience must then use their imaginations to orient themselves, rather than 57 genre; to find their place in the world and their relationship to the text. An audience is used to having different genres use elements such as humor, language, structure, and plot/character exposition differently. When a show is a compilation of multiple genres, perhaps these elements must be examined within the context of the whole show, or what I have been calling the appearance of genrelssness.

Therefore, we can see that globalization has two main effects on the streaming service – contributing to genrelessness and encouraging a global imagined community. Both at play and work together in Netflix’s The End of the Fxxxing World (TEFW). This paper will seek to examine how the show’s genrelessness, conceptualizes identities of Britishness while working to create an imagined global community both among the audience and between the audience and the characters. The argument will be made that the genrelessness of the show allows for nuanced characterization that conceptualizes the multiplicity of British identity to the global audience while simultaneously humanizing the characters in a way that allows them to fold into the imagined global community. This ultimately demonstrates Appadurai’s theory of imagination as social practice which allows us to understand the negotiation between the individual, the local, and the global. (Appadurai, 31) While this essay will discuss what genre certain elements have been pulled from, the goal is to approach the show in its appearance of genreless. This is best exemplified through the main techniques of the performance of language and performance of humor. This paper will examine how the appearance of genrelessness and techniques work together in the show to tell both a British story and a human one.

Performance of Language

The show uses the performance of language in a way that characterizes both specific

British identities and an imagined global humanity. While the show seems to have done away 58 with stock characters it does seem to retain several aspects of the sitcom genre. The semantic element that is the catchphrase has a special, if not inventive, place in the series. One of the main things that the two characters repeatedly say is the question “What?” or perhaps more accurately

“Wot?” One of the most obvious ways in which this show is marked as British is through the performance of accent. This repeated word of “Wot?” establishes a marker of Britishness for the rest of the world. Although the two main actors are using what is most recognizably a

Manchurian English accent, there are several different accents from throughout the United

Kingdom displayed throughout the show. The Manchurian accent is evidenced by the vowel sound they make when changing from a short ‘a’ sound to the broad ‘a’ sound; what, to the

American Listener, might sound like a short o. It is also marked by their sing-song speech patterns and hard annunciation of consonants (Baranowski, Turton, 297).

This type of speech pattern forces a clear association between the characters and British

English. Several studies have linked cultural identity formation to accents which indicates that not only do viewers outside the British context associate a culture with accented speech patterns but that the people who speak a given accent also form identity based off accent (Aydemir 2013;

Gatbonton, Trofimovich, & Magid, 2005). By having the main characters speak in this specific

Manchurian English accent, they become markers of that culture, even to those already within that culture. In a study of American, Japanese, and French cultures, Fabienne Darling-Wolf found that “globalized ‘non-native’ cultural forms can even contribute to the imagination of one’s own ‘native’ environment” (Darling-Wolf, 6). This especially interesting when considering the dynamic between the global audience and the specificity of the British accent. The global audience will certainly view this as a marker of Britishness but is less likely to understand or care that the specific accent is Manchurian. In this way, the accent is played up as a specific 59 signifier that ques the audience in that they’re watching a portrayal of British identity. This causes the global viewer to understand that they are watching something that came from outside their context and must then use their imaginations to mediate this.

In this way the performance of the Manchurian accent acts as a marker of a specific local, yet their use of the language itself is rather globally recognized. This expression of “What” or

“Wot” here is a way of connecting with the global audience on a human level. In many different cultures the expression is used to ask for points of clarification, signify incredulity, and escape uncomfortable topics. This is true of a whole range languages and cultures from Arabic to

Spanish, from Japanese to English. Similarly, in the show it is used in this way during points of tension and in a way that allows the viewer to both understand the signification of Britishness with the accent, but it also highlights the common human tendency to use the word ‘what’ in similar ways. For example, at the end of episode two Alyssa realizes that she cannot go home after talking to her stepdad on the phone.

Alyssa: I can't go home, like, ever. You can.

James: I don't want to.

Alyssa: Do you want me?

James: What.

Alyssa: Do you want me, or do you just go along with things? (S1E2, 19:20)

The “what” here does not indicate his lack of hearing her question or incredulousness. Rather,

James is attempting to evade the conversation entirely and in response, Alyssa makes a point of clarification anyways. This point of tension is also noticeably uncomfortable for both the audience and James. The line also gives both the audience and characters pause and allows a second more for contemplation about the discomfort James is feeling and Alyssa’s struggle to 60 find any semblance of belonging. The “What” acts as a means by which the audience can process the complexities of the characters on screen, leaving us to be endured to Alyssa’s struggle and better understand her characterization. By using this language in a similar way to other cultures, the show characterizes James and Alyssa both as relatable and therefore spreadable.

Another way in which the show uses language to both amplify the characters’ specific

Britishness and humanize them for a global audience is the inclusion of local vernacular. This shows up in the characterization as it happens through the genre of melodrama and is especially true of secondary characters and tertiary characters. For example, the two cops trying to find

Alyssa and James, Teri and Eunice, stop by Alyssa’s house to question her parents. After realizing how terrible both parents are to Alyssa, Eunice jokingly whispers to Alyssa’s infant step siblings, “I can recommend Childline or the NSPCC” (S1E5, 8:45). Both of these are notably British institutions; Childline is a free counseling service provided to children and young people up until their nineteenth birthday and NSPCC stands for the National Society for the

Prevention of Cruelty to Children which is a non-profit organization specializing in preventing harm to children. Again, these things signify the setting of the show within UK and a certain sense of Britishness. For example, from the American perspective this is interesting because here an officer might suggest Child Protective Services which is a very different system from that of

Childline or NSPCC in that CPS often ends up subjecting the child to what Americans would call

“the system” and this is often seen as negative. In this way, suggesting counseling or a nonprofit is a uniquely British reaction to what is going on in the scene and marks the characters as such.

It is also true that inherent in this scene is the recognition of the empathy displayed by

Eunice. The performance of the lines in this scene ques the viewer into the humanity being displayed. Eunice’s performance is in interesting contrast to the other officer, Teri, in that Teri 61 intentionally tries to remain distant, emotionally detached, and professional throughout the show.

However, in reaction to Eunice’s recommendation, Teri makes a facial expression as though she’s trying to keep from smiling, then smiles slightly, looks down, and breathes through her nose indicating a knowing laugh. Even the character who actively attempts to remain professional can’t help but empathize with Alyssa’s situation. Again, this works to unite the audience and the characters of Eunice and Teri in shared empathy for the damaged main character. In this way, the language here both marks the character of Eunice as British and displays our shared humanity in a way that allows for an imagined connection between the audience and the fictional characters on the show.

In these ways, the mixing of sitcom genre and melodrama allows the characters to perform the language in a way that signifies their British locality while also creating a more shared sense of global humanity. The mixing of genre allows the audience room to use their imaginations as a way of mediating the local and the global.

Performance of Humor

One of the show’s main goals is humor – a pull from several genres including sitcom, melodrama, romantic comedy, and even action adventure. This often occurs through humorous performance, comedic timing, and, in traditional British fashion, monotoned lines performed with a perfect deadpan expression. Because the show uses humor from several different genres, humor is used in multiple ways – to the effect of satire, for relief, to upset current hegemonic structures, or comment on our own mortality. One of the ways in which the humor in this show stands out is when it is used to make light of cultural taboos, serious, and painful subjects – including things like death and crime. This type of humor is called dark humor or gallows humor and is often associated with the same type of critical distance that satire is associated with. Dark 62 humor is often used to create critical thought about a topic and comment on a difficult situation.

It can also be used to make sense of feelings of hopelessness (for example the feeling of facing human mortality) – both shared and individual (Colletta 2003; Freud 1927). The show uses it in this way frequently. The genrelessness allows the show the freedom to use this type of humor alongside more traditional tension-punchline humor. The way in which the show calls upon different genres to use humor in multiple ways because it creates different effects and allows the show to discuss the many facets of the human condition. Yet no matter how it is being used, the dryness so characteristic of the British humor remains present. In this way the genrelessness of the show allows for the global audience to negotiate themselves with the locality of the text and imagine a global human community where the commonality of the themes presented is present.

The humor used in TEOTFW is marked as British largely because of the way in which the humor is performed by the actors. In episode five, Alyssa (Jessica Barden) gets caught stealing underthings from a store and is taken to the back with the security guard, Emil (Leon Annor).

Emil asks Alyssa to spread her arms so he can pat her down, which she does after some resistance. After he gets done patting her down, Emil scratches his head indicating that he genuinely doesn’t know what to do with her.

Alyssa: I don’t want to have sex with you.

Emil: Wait, What?

Alyssa: I don’t want to even if you pay me.

Emil: I don’t want to have sex with you! [pause] I have sex with my wife. [Emil sighs]

Alyssa: Shit. (S1E5, 13:30)

Jessica Barden delivers Alyssa’s lines here with a blank expression looking up at Emil with her neck jutted out slightly from the rest of her body as if to say that she finds the whole affair utterly 63 pointless. Her dry performance in this scene adds to the absurdity of the monotoned lines. Emil, on the other hand, is incredulous – his face scrunches up, eyes become more shut and his mouth purses slightly as he says, “I don’t want to have sex with you!” Leon Annor puts emphasis on the word you. He returns to a neutral expression as he adds “I have sex with my wife,” and sighs, exhausted by Alyssa. Jessica Barden shows a clear marker of British identity here by excelling in her deadpan humor. The way she performs forces the audience to come to terms with the stylistic features of what’s known as British humor.

The audience must then negotiate this marker of British culture with the more broadly applicable content of the joke which contains themes of rape, pedophilia, and child prostitution.

The audience’s attention is notably called to the fact that this scene takes place chronologically after a stranger has attempted to rape Alyssa. The joke, while humorous, forces the audience to come to terms with the uncomfortable characterization of Alyssa as a damaged young girl. Much of the characterization in the show stems from the genre of family drama. For Alyssa, this is the relationship she has with her stepfather who repeatedly sexually harasses and assaults her. In this way, the audience is forced to empathize with her through the critical distance the joke allows.

Joking about the content is also a clear way that both the character and the audience can make the dark themes seem less-than. Humor creates a mode by which one can upset power structures by laughing at a theme or person. Johnathan Gray states:

Bakhtin staunchly denies that humor and laughter are not serious—or, rather, that

such a hard binary exists—as he sees the continual reflection, analysis, and

ridicule of social norms as enacted by humor as a necessary device warding off

the entrenchment of any norm into becoming wholly acceptable and beyond 64

rebuke. As should be evident, Bakhtin thus regards humor and laughter in terms

of the power they allow the laugher vis-à-vis the laughed-at object. (Gray, 10).

Here, we see Alyssa dealing with the content of her life by attempting to regain power over it through the use of dark humor. The laughed at object being the very concepts of rape and pedophilia. The audience then follows her example by going through this process with her on a human level. Once again we find ourselves with a uniquely British performance that we must negotiate against a more common human story.

Humor is also used to upset not just the difficult situations of the character’s lives, but the broader hegemonic structures within the British culture, and within the global culture. Many cultures struggle with similar hegemonic structures but perhaps in different ways. When the show deals with these topics, it does so within the British context, using British humor to upset them, but a similar struggle can be recognized globally. A great example of this in the text is the idea of teen sexuality and sexuality at large. One of the main struggles in British culture, specifically, is that difficult or uncomfortable topics rarely get approached in everyday conversation and especially in face to face communication. Cultural Atlas, a nonprofit Australian organization that seeks to promote cultural understanding through providing a well-researched education on “cross-cultural attitudes, practices, norms, behaviors and communications,” gives a list of do’s and do not’s for British communication. On the list of do’s they state that one should,

“Keep a balance on how direct you are and be careful not to introduce difficult topics bluntly.”

(Evason, 2016) On the do not list, “Do not be overly critical in public. The British like to minimize confrontation, so complaining loudly while in their company will most likely embarrass them.” (Evason, 2016) It is common for British television to take on this cultural norm by using humor, “British sitcom repeatedly focuses on characters who are incapable of 65 communicating and for whom relationships and family are problematic and stifling.” (Mills, 41)

So it is no surprise that the show comedically does the exact opposite of Cultural Atlas’ advice.

For example, the scene in which Alyssa meets James’ dad, Phil, for the first time goes something like this:

Phil: Well, this is nice.

Alyssa: What is?

Phil: This. You two. Eh? [laughs] What a relief! I tell you what. I've never been

sure if he even, you know... I always thought there was something wrong with

him! I thought probably he was gay. Which is... That's fine. Like... Obviously.

But, uh, here you are. [Gesturing to Alyssa]

Alyssa: Maybe I'm gay. Maybe he's asexual. We're dealing with a really broad

spectrum these days. (S1E1, 10:09)

This scene is revealing in multiple ways. It is clear the Phil is eager to cast both Alyssa and

James along the heterosexual and gender conforming hegemonies. He wants to see his son as a heterosexual, confident, masculine and this is defined by Phil as not homosexual. He quite literally says, “I thought there was something wrong with him. I thought probably he was gay,” which is undeniably calling out an entire group of human beings as ‘wrong.’ Immediately after this he states, “which is… that’s fine… like… obviously” with a side of nervous laughter to indicate how fine it is. The line, “but here you are” as he gestures to Alyssa indicates that she is not a person to Phil, but rather a symbol of his son’s heterosexuality. In return she uses the opportunity to go directly against what is considered normal communication decorum in the

British culture by bluntly calling him out. Without missing a beat, she says “maybe I’m gay,” and let’s that sit for a second too long and then says, “maybe he’s asexual.” The camera goes 66 back and forth between Phil and Alyssa, his face falling, slightly dejected, and the humor in it disappears. The humor in the show, however, is clear. Phil, who just called a subset of the population ‘wrong,’ is proven to be wrong himself. This is something that the global audience would recognize and appreciate as a humorous upset of the heteronormative hegemony. Then, more specifically, Alyssa’s directness proves to highlight that underlying issue within British culture of not directly discussing the problems inherent in the given hegemonic structures. In this way, the humor of the show serves to undermine both broad and local hegemonic structures that the global audience can recognize as a broad human struggle and the local audience can recognize the struggle specific to their culture.

The show makes conscious use of the various markers of British identity and culture including the dry, deadpan delivery and the upsetting of cultural norms like indirect communication. Yet there is the broader human story that is revealed. The show allows the audience to confront Alyssa’s trauma by allowing the serious and unfunny topics of rape and pedophilia to become the laughed at objects. In this way, we all get to process and deal with these things as a global culture. It is also important that the show upsets both local and global hegemonic structures. Once again the show calls on the audience to use their imaginations to negotiate their place in the world.

Conclusion

The interplay between streaming services and globalization shows itself in two main ways. One is that it is part of what allows for genre microdosing or the overlay of several different genres resulting in a genreless show. Because of the streaming service’s inherent global context, a show can be created from a specific context but released into a global context. This goes against Tudor’s theory that genre happens entirely within and is reflective of specific 67 contexts rather than a mix between the specific and the global. The second marker of the interplay between globalization and streaming services is the display of a specific context to a global audience to the end of creating an imagined community between the audience and the characters. The End of the Fxxxing World uses genre microdosing to create a sense of genrelessness that is a direct result of the global platform on which it was released. The global distribution then forces the viewer to negotiate between themselves, the characters as human beings, and the characters as they’re marked with Britishness. We see the conception of British identity play out in nuanced ways that privileges the formation of an imagined community between the global audience and the characters in the fictive universe. 68

CONCLUSION

This project sought to address the question of genre as it exists, has been changed, and been manipulated by streaming service television. Streaming services offer entirely different rules for television that has led genre to become something altogether seperate from the way it appears on syndicated television. The idea behind this project was to understand genre as it operates within streaming service television and give language to the new ways in which it appears or fails to appear. Streaming services are notoriously unbound by the traditional constraints of time and location. Shows can run for hours or minutes and can be released one season at a time or one episode at a time. Shows often premiere internationally and are dubbed or subtitled in several languages, this means that they are produced for an international audience – one that either has a common understanding of genre or one in which the boundaries of genre are undefined. This study identified all these things and more that distinguish streaming service original shows from traditional television. Genre and storytelling naturally operate with more freedom in the less constrained platform. Still with the basis of capitalism, these shows must appeal to the familiarity the audience is expecting, I suggest this happens through a process called genre microdosing. This study explores the theory of genre microdosing through a textual analysis of the show The End of the Fxxxing World. However, there are multiple unexplored avenues of study that this project did not cover.

Chapter one explains that are several factors that make streaming services different and allow for genre microdosing to exist. First, streaming services are built on an entirely different capitalist model than syndicated television. Streaming services are selling content directly to viewers, rather than selling the viewer to an advertiser. This means that artful, entertaining, original, out there, and new are all qualities that streaming services actively strive for in their 69 storytelling. Next, it is important to recognize that these companies can rely on algorithms to suggest content to viewers. Recall that when Netflix began it had few ‘new release’ titles, but it didn’t need them in the same way Blockbuster did because instead it had an algorithm that would suggest lesser known and more avant guard stories to viewers. The algorithm often acts as a way in which viewers can set up expectations outside of genre. This combination of the algorithm and selling content direct plays into the next factor that makes streaming service different: streaming services rely on media spreadability. Netflix is both an internet platform and a film producing company. In order to make media spreadable, again, they must have content that appears to be new. However, it is also true that people crave expectation fulfillment. In addition to the algorithem, expectations on streaming services can be set up by autoplay trailers or blurbs.

Streaming services also make use of autoplay trailers and blurbs that again allow the viewer to set up expectations. In this way, expectations do not have to be related to genre, meaning that a text can appear as though it is without genre and still meet expectations. The last factor that was discussed as contributing to genre microdosing and narrative complexity is that streaming services make television for the purpose of binge watching. This changes the outcome of the narrative because in order for something to be ‘binge worthy’ it must have a certain degree of narrative complexity. In these ways we can understand how the television created by streaming services has strayed so far from what we understand ‘genre’ to be.

While the goal of this project was not to interrogate a taxonomical structure that we know to be inherently problematic, this remains central to any discourse concerning postmodernism and language. This project is one that rests on the idea of postmodernism which in this case can be thought of as a tool for understanding social change through the questioning of metanarratives. Postmodernism rejects the idea that we must think in binary and in this way 70 makes space for new identities, new language, and new spectrums with which human beings can then understand not only each other, but the world around them, better. While we need metanarratives because they are entirely necessary to the way in which the human brain works to organize things, at the same time we must recognize that they are all man made constructs that hold little meaning in the working universe. While this idea is far from new, I have yet to come across a name for it and so I have named it the metanarrative paradox. This new language is meant to help others understand that it is acceptable and even necessary to hold space in our minds for such a paradox.

The rest of chapter one goes on to suggest that we look at the metanarrative of genre as it is seen in small doses. Many streaming service original shows appear as though they are without genre all together. One watches a show such as The End of the Fxxxing World or Daybreak and genuinely not know how to classify it – this is highly profitable for Netflix despite the lack of familiarity that comes with a clearly discernable genre. This is because, the show is never entirely unfamiliar. These shows have traces of familiarity because, although it may appear genreless, the genre is microdosed into the show in such a subtle way that it gives the audience enough familiarity while allowing the show the full freedoms of postmodernity. The genres used in the show include romantic comedy, action/adventure, thriller suspense, britcom, family melodrama, and film noir. The mixing of these genres creates a playful refusal to conform to traditional narrative standards.

Because the show is more often being binged watched for pleasure (and significantly less often being broken down into its parts by academics), it is important to meet the show where it stands for most of the audience: in the ‘in between.’ Not only is the show itself attempting to appear without genre, but it also stands as a coming of age story which is itself an ‘in between.’ 71

Chapter two attempts to meet the show where it stands by showing how defying categorization effects the representation of gender. I argue here that the show’s postmodernity allows the creators to make expert use of a wide range of theoretical tools, but most importantly abjection.

Abjection is a theory of identity formation that itself exists without borders or clear definition, yet it helps us to form the borders of our identities. Abjection a great reflection of the shows form in that both things defy categorization. I argue that the very nature of being able to mix genres such as horror, comedy, and drama allow the creators to more skillfully and precisely use more abstract theories such as abjection.

The show uses the idea of abjection loosely in the characterization of the female lead

Alyssa, who is consistently disgusted with the way in which the world treats her, but is bored by one of the most abject experiences a female can have, menstruation. As a result, she is constantly removing her physical body from the situations which she finds disgusting, or abject. This is in stark contrast to most media which is often still subject to the male gaze in such a way that the female body is often the abject thing, the monsterized thing, the disgusting. Alyssa gets to be the disgusted, rather than the disgusting and in this way the show uses abjection in such a way as to upset the patriarchal norm. This was evidenced though the use of dark humor, melodrama, and horror in the show.

The show goes on to use abjection more literally in the characterization of James who vomits at the sight of a cadaver and it is in this moment that he rejects the ideas of masculinity he’s been taught and instead decides to more toward feeling and expressing emotion. The scene analyzed used the horror of the cadaver and blood alongside music that is simultaneously humorous and melodramatic which reflects not only the genre blending but the structure of feeling that is adolescence and identity formation. Through James abjection at the sight of the 72 dead professor Koch, the show makes a statement in which James rejects the idea that he is a psychopath and chooses instead to become a full human being. In these ways we can understand how the show reflects its postmodernity into theoretical tools it uses and can then upset hegemonic norms.

Chapter three focused on how the global aspect of streaming service original shows impacts the way in which we understand genre and how this creates a chance to display localized and specific identities while also creating a global audience that can feel united as human beings.

The idea of the international platform goes against existing genre theory in that several existing theories suggest that genre is more or less culturally specific. The argument here is that perhaps streaming service original shows have the opportunity to be genreless precisely because they have taken into account that the platform itself must, on some level, take into account the existence of multiple cultures. When it comes to the streaming service, we are no longer creating content from a singular culture with that culture mind – original shows must be created with the intention of an international audience. Even more than this, some shows are even created under the influence of multiple cultures. Daybreak illustrates this globality though its use and explanation of Samurai culture as it effects African American culture. The End of the Fxxxing

World, for example, was originally a graphic novel written by an American author and set in a nondescript location. Even from a show’s creation, it may have multiple cultural influences in addition to being created for multicultural viewing. In this way, the nature of the international platform forces us to rethink the ways in which we talk about genre and is likely part of the reason why streaming service original shows participate in this kind of genreless.

All together the chapters attempt to create new language for the phenomena that is genre in streaming service original shows. This study was largely based in textual analysis and 73 centered around only one text. This means that there are many unexplored avenues of research to be done. Another study could be done looking in depth at other texts that appear without genre and examining how often, to what extent, and when this began happening. The advantages to studying more texts like The End of the Fxxxing World include the ability to understand the extent to which genrelessness and genre microdosing are changing television as whole. More broadly, this can be examined in terms of storytelling and how we understand the ways in which mass communicated stories are told. Storytelling has always been classified into what we call genre, and this classification has in turn changed the way in which stories are then created. Moving on from the endogenous relationship between classification and storytelling has many implications including extending the shift in narrative form that Jason Mittell terms “complex tv.” In this respect, this study could be taken much further in terms narrative theory.

This study relies heavily on textual analysis to understand the shift that’s happening within streaming service television. However, it is also true that the audience plays more of a role than ever in the content that gets created. This is particularly true of streaming services who rely on algorithmic data to determine whether or not a show gets extended into a second season.

This data is also used when deciding what new projects to take on. In this regard, the audience gets a say in what is being produced. More than this, there is something to be said for the way in which this reliance on algorithmic data does not entirely reflect audience feelings. In Mittell’s work Complex TV he speaks of the strength of audiences that are small but cult-like in their fandom. He points out that these audiences are not to be ignored, they have immense buying power, and (coupled with Henry Jenkins’ idea of spreadability) influence. Algorithms cannot measure the strength of fandom. This has resulted in serious problems for streaming services.

Netflix notoriously knows which shows to cancel or renew within four days of releasing a new 74 series or season. For example, the Netflix original show One Day at a Time was cancelled after its third season on Netflix, despite critical acclaim and award nominations. The algorithm had deemed it not financially tenable. As soon as news of the cancellation spread on social media, however, the #saveodaat began trending on twitter. The audience was outraged, and perhaps more importantly, loud. Netflix held fast to its refusal to renew but did sell the rights to the

POPTV network. Season four of One Day at a Time aired on March 24, 2020 to great success.

This idea of audience participation in production and reproduction merits further study. It’s multifaceted and important in understanding streaming service storytelling and streaming service industry moving forward.

It would perhaps be interesting to ethnographically study audiences and get their take on these shows in terms of what categories they would put them in. This would be interesting internationally because it would be one way to test whether genre has become, in our short time with the internet, internationally constructed. This type of study would also tell us whether or not genrelessness is a tenable idea that could help us classify in its own right. The idea that a show can exist outside of genre or that genre has changed so much that we need new language to discuss it, is disruptive thinking. Communications scholars have built an entire cannon around the idea of genre and how we think, discuss, and create based off of it. The only way to even begin to objectively verify that a show exists outside of genre would be to do an ethnographic study of the audience of a text such as The End of the Fxxxing World and determine audience perception of genre in these narratives. Such a study would help determine the future of genre theory as well as open new avenues of study.

This study used methods of textual analysis to better understand the ways in which genre operates in terms of streaming service original shows. Streaming service original shows are 75 different from that of syndicated shows for many creative, capitalist, and medium standpoints.

They therefore merit a different type of study, one that allows for the nuances of storytelling that can take place within such different mediums. This study is meant to be a jumping off point for where scholars can take genre and narrative studies in the future. The idea of the audience in gene studies is particularly underdeveloped. As communication between producers and audience becomes easier, this becomes increasingly relevant. The audience could be studied in terms of how it participates in reproduction, or perhaps the audience could be studied in terms of how they perceive genre. There are endless opportunities for growth in studying texts that are genreless. It is also true that we can study other streaming service original shows that appear without genre or participate in genre microdosing. This study points out several such shows but fails to fully consider the multitudes within each of them. In this way, we can see that while this study gives new language to the way in which genre operates in streaming service television, there are many other avenues for exploration.

76

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