It’s the bold new trend in marketing the homosexual: incidental gayness. It might even be the new party line. “I didn’t want to play a gay doctor,” an actor might say. “I wanted to play a doctor who just so happens to be gay.” After so long spent fighting for the right to live openly as LGBTQI people — a fight which in so many ways has only just begun — our representatives in media are suddenly defining themselves by their ability to be backgrounded. Is this progress, or just the new shame?

“[His sexuality is] just part of his identity and is assumed. We wanted to make a film about a mathematician who happens to be gay — not the gay mathematician. That was always the goal.” That’s screenwriter Graham Moore talking about his script for The Imitation Game, the slick Alan Turing biopic. Moore — who identifies as straight — here spouts a line that has become remarkably common as more and more actors, writers and directors are called upon to explain why their gay characters should matter.

In his 2014 book Neil Patrick Harris: Choose Your Own Autobiography, Harris includes a letter written to him, purportedly, by Perez Hilton. Hilton writes: “You are a successful and extremely talented actor, singer, father, and lover — who just so happens to be gay.”

In 2013, when it was announced he had been cast in HBO’s now-cancelled Looking, Russell Tovey said: “I really want to do it properly… Not someone who’s gay and miserable, dying of AIDS, secluded, a bit weird. I want to play someone who’s normal and just happens to be gay.”

None of these people have anything but good intentions. But the fact that they are all men — Harris and Tovey both gay — indicates that there’s a certain level of reflexive shame to these comments. For a long time, when LGTBQI people turned up on television or in film they were purely tragic characters, often winding up evil, dead, or both because of their sexuality (the gay villain archetype was perfectly skewered by comedian James Adomian on his album Low Hangin Fruit). The last 20 years have proven television to provide the most egalitarian form of populist queerness, with portrayals of gay people advancing via flawed but significant stepping stones like Ellen and Queer as Folk.

It’s important that the wider public know that many LGBTQI people live or desire to live their lives together just as any other couple would. But it’s just as important — perhaps even more so — that portraits of our lives exist beyond that.

This line of incidental gayness feels like a backlash against the negative portrayals of the past. As the gay rights movement has locked its sights on achieving marriage equality — a victory more or less in motion, at least in countries politically stable enough for it to be a possibility — it has also had to double down on the post-AIDS crisis marketing of the mid-nineties. A lot of this has involved putting the gay characters of the past at a kind of ironic remove; indulgence and mockery of stereotypes has become the same thing as being forced into them. The Jacks of Will & Grace and Stanfords of Sex and the City have been supplanted by the Connors of How to Get Away with Murder and Kevins of Looking; the Elton Johns and Carson Kressleys pushed aside in favour of Neil Patrick Harrises and Matt Bomers.

Whether or not this is a good thing is, in part, a matter of perspective. To many, this shift will likely appear as a much-needed sorting out of priorities in relation to gay presences in the media. What it is, in fact, is a narrowing of the field of vision. The march towards marriage equality has been a popularity contest, the crux of which has amounted to Gays: We’re Just Like You!-style relational politics. It’s important that the wider public know that many LGBTQI people live or desire to live their lives together just as any other couple would. But it’s just as important — perhaps even more so — that portraits of our lives exist beyond that. If the fantasy endgame of gay rights is legal equality and something resembling the end of discrimination based on sexuality, then the assimilationist approach is never going to be enough. It can be useful to ‘pass’ as straight for various reasons (most often safety), but it shouldn’t be anyone’s goal.

This is where things get tricky. The LGTBQI banner is often criticised for its unwieldiness, but it shows just how broad a church the queer community truly is. It also proves that the image of two-dads-two-kids/two-mums-two-kids is not the beau idéal it might have seemed to be, say, at the height of the debate over Prop 8. The desire to construct a picture of gay normality is exactly that: a level of artifice LGBTQI people are ultimately trying to escape. That this normality is usually presented as white, gay, cisgender men who generally adhere to traditional notions of masculinity adds several extra wrinkles to this discussion.

This extreme swerve away from effeminate gay men in particular seems to be a fairly standard overcorrection. The most prominent gay characters at the turn of the millennium were Will Truman and Jack McFarland of Will & Grace. In recent years, the character of Jack has frequently been decried as a negative, stereotypical portrayal of gay men on the grounds that his camp, theatre-fanatic femininity amounted to caricature. Will’s general goal to pass for straight — occasionally necessary in his career as a lawyer — is part of the foundation for the dominant vision for what gay men should look like in pop culture and beyond. Jack’s waywardness and aspiration to be an actor, combined with his over-the-top, energetic femininity, became a negative image by presenting gay men as something that couldn’t be taken seriously: unaccomplished, silly, and worthy of ridicule. But the show is underestimated; it takes both Will and Jack’s personalities and behaviours and supports them entirely. The series’ humour utilises their sexuality as a point of difference, but ultimately laughs at the way the heteronormative society they live in fails to accommodate them on their own terms.

The “just like everyone else” notion is a fantasy, just like the world we all envision where coming out is a thing of the past. Such a thing just isn’t within reach.

What criticism of Will & Grace tends to ignore is that both Jack and Will were fully-formed people, with dreams and desires and varied emotions. Yes, Jack could be bitchy and effete, but his performance of his sexuality was very much in line with reality just as Will’s was. It’s not untrue that effeminacy is a stereotype, but simply labelling a character stereotypical on this basis is incredibly superficial. There’s a lingering, often misogynistic desire to judge or shame other men — gay or straight — for a perceived inability to live up to essentialist masculine ideals. These judgements are helpful to no one. The stereotype that gay men are effeminate came about because for so long the feminine has been codified as weak and other; it’s only reinforcing that kind of archaic thinking to dismiss gay characters — and gay people — for their effeminacy. With the steady march of diversity on TV and in film continuing, we’ve moved past the point of needing to see every portrayal of a gay man as representative of all homosexuals. You can have an artistic, flamboyant gay man like Felix on Orphan Black as well as a rugby-playing aspiring entrepreneur like Dom on Looking, and neither is any less valid a depiction of gay life for being different from one another. Representations are complementary, not oppositional.

What the “happens to be gay” line does is assume that sexuality has ceased to be a performative part of LGBTQI people’s lives, when that remains incredibly far from the truth. Fear of public affection remains ingrained, while a European advocacy group recorded roughly 226 reported murders of trans people between October 2013 and September 2014. The “just like everyone else” notion is a fantasy, just like the world we all envision where coming out is a thing of the past. Such a thing just isn’t within reach.

The desire to construct a picture of gay normality is exactly that: a level of artifice LGBTQI people are ultimately trying to escape

This kneejerk assumption that effeminacy is only a stereotype keeps rearing its ugly head. For all of Modern Family’s problems, that Desperate Housewives actor Tuc Watkins recently called Mitchell and Cameron “a little bit like the gay equivalent of ‘blackface’” is both an offensive falsehood and a startling accusation. A recent episode of sitcom Fresh Off the Boat, which featured its lead female character being visited, and unable to detect, the obvious gayness of her college boyfriend (played by gay actor Rex Lee), received criticism for the character’s feminine qualities. As Louis Virtel smartly put it:

I think slamming gay characters as “stereotypical” is a coward’s way of saying, “I’m uncomfortable acknowledging that many gay people have specific personality traits in common.” Well, guess what? Many gay people have specific personality traits in common. Some of us think that’s a great, life-affirming thing. We’ve fought for gay characters on TV to be out and real, not just strategic avatars designed to feel “cutting edge.”

If I had to pathologise complaints like Watkins’, I’d say that it’s perhaps the lingering spectre of the closet we all struggle to shake off. Many gay people spend the first long chunk of their lives denying or suppressing their sexual desires and grappling with their sexual and gender identities, such that by the time they finally overcome the external pressures that create those conflicts, their freedom manifests itself as a desire for social distance from their sexuality. But as popular as the “being gay doesn’t define me” line is, it also misses the point. Gay people have never gone unrecognised as something other than a walking avatar of their sexuality; the challenge has been expanding what those other traits could be.

This is the beauty that being LGBTQI offers: the freedom of self-identification. The reality is that for decades, gay stereotypes were defined solely by conspicuous behaviour. The stereotype of the effeminate gay men with sibilant speech patterns became a stereotype because less overt performances of sexuality weren’t as visible. Nowadays, these less visible personae have drifted towards a middle-point labelled ‘normal’, when really they’re just part of the larger tapestry of notions of gender and sexuality. For all this fighting to be able to live openly as who we are, it’s strange to turn around and say that sexuality isn’t one of our definitional components.

The aim of LGBTQI representation in media is not to create an appealing, hetero-centric notion of what non-normative sexuality is. The idea of “good gay representation” is increasingly defunct, hinging on an antiquated dichotomy of stereotype versus reality. When Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt depicts a black, gay, aspiring musical theatre actor, it’s showing us reality. When Faking It portrays a popular, intersex girl in high school, it’s showing us reality. When Sirens writes one of its characters to be an asexual woman EMT, it’s showing us reality. An African-American trans woman in prison on Orange is the New Black and a middle-aged Jewish trans woman in Transparent both show us reality. These sexual identities don’t reflect stereotypes because they’re essential parts of the rounded, human characters these shows have put forth; none of them “just so happen” to be who they are.

Spoilers ahead.

I haven’t had time to write a full review of this as I only saw it not 12 hours ago, but I can’t help but jot down something about Passengers’ unpleasant undercurrent. Rewatching the trailers and marketing material, I couldn’t believe how misleading they were about something very important to the film’s core premise:

Only Chris Pratt’s Jim woke up early due to a malfunction on the ship. The first solid half hour is him moping about the Avalon starship, passing a year’s worth of time. During this time he stumbles upon Jennifer Lawrence’s Aurora and seeing her hot unconscious bod decides to look into her files. He discovers she is a writer and he reads her work, later claiming to have fallen in love with her through doing so.

So after all this time with only a robot bartender to talk to (the illogic of the ship’s environment/infrastructure is absolutely wild), he gets lonely so he decides to wake up the unconscious woman he’s been projecting feelings on to. Against her will, he takes her out of hibernation 89 years before reaching their destination and then brazenly lies about it to her face just because he wants to fuck her. He is, essentially, gaslighting her. (EDIT: Miriam Bale pointed out to me, correctly, that it isn’t gaslighting at all. But given what’s at stake it has the feeling of manipulation on that level in the moment, and in Aurora’s response, as discussed below. My error as I was writing this on the fly.)

Naturally, the film insists on their soulmate status, and they happily court and bone until Aurora eventually learns the truth. But not from Jim! The escalating malfunctions aboard the ship seemingly affect the robot bartender who lets it slip to Aurora that Jim deliberated for months before deciding to effectively take control of her life.

Aurora is livid and betrayed, and it’s during this and only this stretch that Passengers is an interesting film. She storms into his room while he’s asleep and punches and kicks him, she’s that angry. It’s fascinating and dark, except for the fact that the film seems to treat her anger as an aberration, an overreaction. Laurence Fishburne’s character figures out the situation after he too is brought out of hibernation, and his response is to say, roughly, “I was going to say you’re a lucky son of a bitch to get stuck with Aurora. But…damn.” The film, otherwise, never really interrogates this creeper behaviour on any real level. She is object of desire before all else. It’s at this point that the larger concern of the ship’s deterioration takes over the narrative.

We learn that the ship would’ve eventually completely malfunctioned anyway and they all would have died, therefore arguing away Aurora’s fury on her behalf. This forces them back together, because of course it does. Throughout this Jim looks at her with puppy dog eyes and apologises over and over, as though we’re supposed to feel sorry for him in all of this. For making a simple error, instead of stealing a woman’s agency over her body and her life away from her. The film’s score pushes their romance so hard, and the shift in the middle act when they are apart is notable, as though the tragedy is their lost romance more than anything else.

It becomes so hard to invest in the film in any way after that point because it’s so unnecessary as a story choice. Nothing that happens in the broader narrative required this to be the case other than to create what I’m sure Jon Spaihts thought was tension as opposed to a romanticisation of abusive behaviour. You would also think Pratt and Lawrence would know better, or that someone working on this in development – though it’s been in hell for years – might step forward with a finger raised and say, “Are we sure this is a good idea?”

#LoveIsLove. It’s trending on Twitter, and it’s all over Facebook. Politicians have co-opted it, maybe you’ve seen it in the subject line of an email from a relative that begins with “FW: FW: FW: FW: FW: FW: FW: FW:”. It’s nice, and it’s heartening, and it should always be in our minds and will always be safe to say. But today, after 50 queer people were murdered in Orlando and 53 more injured, it’s also a clear misdirection.

This statement, and its sentiment, rose and peaked with the fight for same-sex marriage in the United States. Look at how Google searches for the phrase peak in June 2015, when the ruling came down:

You can also see the steady rise in its general popularity as public support for marriage has increased alongside it.

But ultimately, it’s only disguising the real, root cause: sex.

There’s a reason that people on social media who are endorsing the massacre are calling its victims “perverts”, “paedophiles” and “deviants”. It isn’t about the sex we love, but the sex we do — or don’t — have. Opposition to same-sex marriage is founded on a fundamental fear of non-heterosexual sex; opponents’ focus on the union itself is superficial because what they really want to prevent is our ability to fuck each other being enshrined in law and endorsed by government.

The reason many US politicians want to keep trans people out of public bathrooms is not because they’re trans, but because their trans experience implies a sex life that exists outside their conception of normality. The reason some Australian politicians are desperate to keep open and honest sex education out of schools is because they know that dominion over people’s sex practices has successfully formed the basis of fundamental religious ideology for centuries. It’s a means of control that allows them to keep society structured in a way which benefits them and only them.

This is the trick that a cosmetically inclusive society plays on queer people: fooling us into thinking spaces that ‘belong’ to us are safe, from our bedrooms to our pride parades to our nightclubs. And the problem doesn’t stop at our door; there’s an unending number of queer people, and gay men especially, who will endlessly slut-shame others for their perceived promiscuity, or the fact they they — consensual adults as they are — have chosen to be in an open or polyamorous relationship.

See, love is love provided it’s exclusively between two people. That is ostensibly what marriage as an institution affords, even though it so often fails to remain so. And that’s why #LoveIsLove as a social movement fails the queer community. It’s born of a society that shames open sexuality, but openness about our sexuality is one of the only ways we can survive our own pain. Thus, an expression is love is inextricably an expression of sexuality in a way that it isn’t for heterosexual couples. We’ve already learnt that the perpetrator of the Pulse nightclub micro-genocide was enraged by the sight of two men kissing in public. As infuriating as the Kim Davises and Lyle Sheltons of the world are, their insipid, shameless bigotry is only a santised sublimation of Omar Mir Seddique Mateen’s murderous desires. Davis and Shelton are not the monsters that Mateen was, but their prejudice comes from the same place.

So realistically, the shift that needs to happen to reduce and prevent murders of LGBTQI+ people won’t come through promoting #EqualLove. It will come through normalising non-traditional sex— sex outside bedrooms, sex between the same sex, sex between trans people, sex between multiple members of both sexes, sex that involves fetish practices, sex between people of the same and differing HIV status, and so on — and better understanding people who don’t want to have sex, people who choose not to have sex, people who cannot have sex, and so on. We can’t do this without talking about sex, and the fundamental aim of the conservative right is to prevent any conversation about sex that doesn’t involve suppressing and restricting it. We also can’t do this without doing it, so get out there and have atypical, unusual, great sex with someone — whether you love them or not and whether you’re queer or not.

Because you can’t defeat illogic with emotion, and you can’t defeat puritans with platitudes.

Establishing a framework for reception of queer stories beyond political necessity

There’s been a minor key of detachment underscoring some of the response to Todd Haynes’ magnificent, involving romance Carol (2015). The film, which stars Cate Blanchett as Carol Aird and Rooney Mara as Therese Belivet, a housewife and a budding photographer respectively who slowly fall in love around Christmas of 1952. As adapted from the Patricia Highsmith novella The Price of Salt by playwright and screenwriter Phyllis Nagy, Carol is a film which favours temporality over contemporaneity.

Many of the less favourable takes on Carol — even ones which are still generally positive — cite a purported “coldness” or “emotional distance”. They say that there’s no chemistry between Therese and Carol, or at least little chemistry between Blanchett and Mara as performers. The film’s world is populated minimalistically; for the most part, the other people in the film are just heads in a room across which Carol and Therese can lock eyes. Even Abby (Sarah Paulson), Carol’s best friend and former romantic interest, is peripheral to the bulk of this story.

These interpretations of the film as ‘politely subdued’ seem to stem in part from the fact that Todd Haynes has set out to depict a queer romance using, essentially, a language specific to this particular moment in history and these characters.

As such, the fact that Carol is subdued is because it’s period appropriate. This is a story about a queer woman who has spent most of her life stifling her sexual identity in favour of constructing a typical American nuclear family, then falling in love with a young woman who is only just discovering her own non-normative sexuality.

Over the course of the film, the two women are very slowly radiating towards each other because they don’t know the language of outward expression of same-sex attraction.

It’s not instilled in them culturally or otherwise; they have no frame of reference aside, perhaps, from queer-coded characters in films who were usually villains, considered mentally ill, murderers or victims.

That’s why a moment like when Therese gets in the car with Carol to go to her place is filmed in such a transcendent, hazy way — you’re observing them observing each other as they try to figure out if investing in each other romantically is even worth the trouble it’s liable to, and eventually does, cause. In many ways, they’re like teenagers slowly stumbling into their first love.

This is what it’s like for some queer people — discovery is very delayed. Where most people are able to learn these ways of being with other people in their teen years in very natural ways, being closeted stifles this, and even still, many people don’t come out until their 20s or even much later. Our learning curve when it comes to intimacy is awfully steep.

When Therese asks her boyfriend Richard (Jake Lacy) if he’s ever been in love with a boy, she’s trying to understand whether or not it’s possible to love someone of the same gender in the same way you can someone of the opposite, like he claims to love her. Therese seems removed because, and I can say this from personal experience, awareness of your own difference makes it far easier to distance yourself from other people and from expressing an intimate humanity, because it prevents people from getting so close as to learn something about you that’s you’re not ready to share.

It’s self-preservation for her and for many of us. Rooney Mara’s china-doll performance is far from unchanging; charting the course of her emotional expressiveness tells as much about her characters as any words which come out of her mouth.

Because honestly, I find the idea that people would think this film is unemotional is truly strange. And it might honestly just be the case that a queer filmmaker making this queer story means that some people don’t really have the experiential language to see it for what it is, which to me, is an exceedingly warm and meaningful romance.

When straight directors and writers tend to make films of comparable budget, subject and ‘prestige’ — The Imitation Game, Dallas Buyers Club, or even The Danish Girl — they are fracked for their emotional portent, taking every opportunity to remind audiences that what they’re watching is a tragedy.

Look at the way The Imitation Game dramatises Alan Turing’s later life — a husk of a man, trembling and barely able to speak. This is the language of queer desire straight audiences have been taught to understand — not a lexicon of expression, but one of constant mourning. He was caught with a male prostitute (in real life, he was caught with a young man he had essentially been dating, but heterosexual screenwriter Graham Moore evidently thought this wasn’t tragic enough) and this is his penance. Any positivity in a period-set queer narrative is, by audience acclimation, obligated to be undercut.

These are rank expectations which are reinforced over and over again, and to an extent this has been condoned. And it’s not that Carol doesn’t address negative historical attitudes towards homosexuality (plot spoilers to follow).

Throughout the film, Carol is locked in a custody battle for her daughter with her husband Harge (Kyle Chandler), who invokes a “morality clause” in lobbying for sole custody when she refuses to acquiesce to his demands that she return to him. But it’s more than evident that Carol’s subversiveness has been underestimated. Not only does Carol elect to forego custody of her daughter in favour of living an authentic life, their romance is actually a path to self-actualisation for both of them.

Joe McGovern on Twitter

RooneyMara in Q&A w/ me for #SAG: "If the gun in the film had gone off, we would've been nominated for Best Picture, maybe." @CarolMovie

Therese is finally encouraged to pursue her desired career in photography, thanks in part to meeting Carol and the consequent inspiration she provides. And after leaving Harge, Carol takes a job as a buyer in a furniture store and invites Therese to live with her in her new apartment. In 1950s terms, this was massively progressive, perhaps a rough equivalent to the same-sex marriages-as-protest which occurred, and continue to occur, prior to its partial or full legalisation in various parts of the world.

The intimacy conjured between Carol and Therese is very distinctly queer. This is not to say that straight audiences will uniformly be alienated from it — far from that. But much of the response to it feels like the expectations of its story and its tone are far too modern.

It’s worth remembering that prior to the 1980s, implicitly queer narratives (not those some viewers read as queer, like classical musicals or Sirkian melodramas) were not only incredibly scarce, but almost never positive, romantic, or intimate. If queer characters were present, there would be no intimacy.

The increased presence of queer stories in the last 25 years particularly has been encouraging, but still limited, and the major exposure people now have to queer stories is through television, not film, which privilege highly modern queer narratives in shows like Sense8, Please Like Me, Orange is the New Black, Looking and Transparent. We’ve reached a point at which queer stories are expected to look like this — positive portrayals where the shows embody the progressive attitudes of its makers in literal terms.

We have a kind of cultural recency bias — that if queer art doesn’t declare and underline its political allegiance, it’s not fulfilling its primary function.

Todd Haynes, whose films have mostly been period pieces, doesn’t really do literal. His vision of Carol very deliberately elides the pandering to contemporary attitudes which tend to be expected of films classed as ‘Oscar bait’, and it is perhaps resultant of the way late-year marketing campaigns position films as ‘Oscar bait’ that some have been unable to connect to Carol.

The film is, nevertheless, political, just not overtly so. Calling it “icy”, as Wesley Morris has in a piece for The NY Times, is coded as negative, as though dogging the film for not being activist in spirit when contrasted with the buzzy Amazon series Transparent. But Transparent is a show which clamours to embody the zeitgeist just as much as Haynes shrugs it. He’s disinterested in playing the film for the people who “need” to see it, instead crafting a film which anticipates an adaptive audience rather than a reactive one.

Carol is not a film designed to be cannon fodder for same-sex marriage thinkpieces. It doesn’t exist to reinforce existing progressive attitudes.

Laurence Barber on Twitter

"CAROL left me emotionally cold." pic.twitter.com/87Ck00tTGl

Carol is about the intertwined sensations of discovery and love; how it can be formative to our identities and an explanation of our futures. Its reception is an instructive: relax cultural expectations of LGBTQIA stories. Let them breathe, and be what they need to be rather than what this particular sociopolitical moment wants them to be. Allow the broadness of stories to be found on television to permeate films of similar stature.

We expect so much of Carol because the path it follows is not the one typically laid out for something of its kind. It’s a film which takes the viewer down a road less travelled.

All the way to Waterloo, Iowa and back.

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What the response to ‘Carol’ says about expectations of queer narratives was originally published in The Outtake on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The internet has facilitated any number of insipid debates over medium superiority. For every click-baiting piece about how film is still superior to television there’s an article about TV being better than film, with neither ever managing to be convincing in any meaningful way (“Uh, they kind of do different things?” comes the usual refrain from movie/TV twitter, all while rolling their eyes).

One thing that is often present in TV criticism is praise for the “cinematic”, an increasingly dated way of damning with faint praise more suited to the mid-to-late ‘00s when people were surprised that episodes of TV were also actually, like, directed by people.

The last few years have given rise to an interesting new kind of convergence between TV and film.

There’s also the routine criticism out of film festivals — and this is the only valid one in the bunch, to my mind — that feature length documentaries are often made to look like TV specials rather than films, with little care being put into how the film will look on a cinema screen in the inevitable festival context. It’s surprising how much this can affect a documentary’s impact (take, for example, Blackfish, which is both ugly and poorly edited — issue docs are often perpetrators).

I bring these up because the usual discussion of the blurred line between film and TV tends to be on aesthetic grounds more than anything. As it stands, there hasn’t been a lot of bravery in terms of manipulation of these media’s respective formats. Netflix is often praised for supposedly revolutionising TV, but so far all it’s changed is how a growing handful of series are delivered to consumers. Arrested Development’s fourth season is the only streaming TV show to display any interest in using Netflix’s narrowcasting for experimentation, with the season focusing on individual characters and weaving the story across a number of episodes in fascinating, if sometimes frustrating ways. Recently, it was announced that creator Mitch Hurwitz was re-editing the season to be presented chronologically, a rather disappointing development that seems designed to sap the season of what was, for TV and particularly the sitcom genre, a significant formal innovation.

'Arrested Development' Creator Recutting Season 4 in Chronological Order

But the last few years have given rise to an interesting new kind of convergence between TV and film. But in this meeting of the Titanic and an iceberg, the latter seems to be winning.

Note: spoilers for The Maze Runner will be discussed in the remainder of this post.

Enfranchised Youth

Blockbusters — particularly those adapted from novels — are now planned as franchises, not as first films with potential futures based on their success. In the Young Adult category, this is likely due at least in part to the success of Harry Potter, but those films were a case of the audience’s size being definitively known; ditto The Hunger Games and Twilight, which were already phenomena, not just successes. But phenomena are few and far between, and these young adult fiction adaptations showed studios that there was a hunger for this kind of material that went beyond just the widely known quantities.

Cue the YA fiction adaptation explosion of the past year or two. From Beautiful Creatures to Divergent to The Mortal Instruments, studios have been desperate to carve out a niche in an increasingly crowded landscape. But The Maze Runner is an interesting exception to a general rule. It’s by far the most male-centric, for a start, with nary a romantic subplot to be found (mercifully). It’s also unusually divisive amongst critics, where typically these films invite either praise or derision. That disdain crops up frequently around YA fiction adaptations — and YA fiction itself, often directed at the idea that adults, god forbid, might enjoy something not specifically aimed at their target demographic. The idea that certain critics or writers would take issue with the broadness of audiences’ palates in an age of near-infinite access is stereotypical at best and insipid at worst.

The Twilight franchise never stressed the importance of narrative, more content to let its leads moon at each other and occasionally run through the woods, and therefore couldn’t upset the audience by doubling down on that very thing.

The desire to drag out YA franchises, as seen with the splitting of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Breaking Dawn, Mockingjay, and Allegiant all into two parts, shows an increasing reliance on these franchises as shoring up of studios’ bottom lines. So far, it seems, only the Potter franchise has parlayed its split into artistic success, with the final two chapters of its eight-part film series proving to be, The Prisoner of Azkaban aside, its most artistically — and financially — successful. But the universe of Harry Potter is mammoth and seemingly continuing, where the franchises which have already followed in its footsteps haven’t been able to justify their bisection as anything other than cash grabs.

The Twilight franchise never stressed the importance of narrative, more content to let its leads moon at each other and occasionally run through the woods, and therefore couldn't upset the audience by doubling down on that very thing. And with the release of Mockingjay Part 1 this week, many have cited the splitting of the last chapter in the Hunger Games trilogy as a mistake for what was previously a rather unassailably great action franchise, leading to a film that purportedly builds to a climax it has no intention of delivering on unless you pay at least another $15 to watch it happen. Ah, capitalism.

Maze of Thrones

If we consider Marvel’s Avengers film and its preceding and following individual instalments as a franchise unto itself, there’s no more successful one in existence today. Marvel’s approach — creating the “cinematic universe” populated by its heroes — has revolutionised blockbuster filmmaking, leading to DC Comics own plans to mush characters together into one film, as well as a potentially ill-advised attempt by Universal to create a “monster universe”, beginning with the fun but exceedingly silly bat-flight of fancy, Dracula Untold.

The difference between these cinematic universes, so-called, and their younger franchise cousins is that the latter aren’t standalone stories being woven into the fabric of a larger one. YA series, by their pre-ordained nature, are being adapted in a way that is heavily de-emphasising the idea of film series as standalone parts of an ongoing story. Instead, they’re being adapted in a manner much more befitting of television, where serialisation is key, cliffhangers are common, and shows are forever working to ensure return business the following season.

It’s simplistic to relate TV’s influence here solely to Game of Thrones, particularly since the most popular TV franchise at the moment is The Walking Dead, and perhaps even moreso given that TV houses a few YA adaptations of its own in the form of The Vampire Diaries and Pretty Little Liars, to name a couple. But Game of Thrones is, arguably, the most culturally significant of these TV franchises, a global phenomenon at the forefront of the current wave of prestige television. It’s also an adaptation of an ongoing, beloved series of fantasy novels that has benefited greatly from the transformation of the nerdy into the badass over the past decade.

The fervent love these formative books inspire means film franchises are left with little room to move.

The reason Game of Thrones is most apropos here is because it functions the most like its source material. While it eschews the character’s perspective chapter structure of George R. R. Martin’s books, it whittles the books down into ten episode seasons, which usually run about ten hours or so in total. The seasons explicitly function as ‘part of the whole’, even though the whole isn’t yet complete, with Martin continuing work on the next book in the series. The other significant parallel between YA adaptations and Game of Thrones’ success is the magnitude of importance placed on the books in the process. Where other major book-to-TV series adaptations (as opposed to frequent progenitors of miniseries like Dickens and Austen) such as True Blood and Dexter eclipsed their sources and were able to function differently from them, Game of Thrones has struggled against the boundaries imposed on it by the books’ fans, with major deviations only really starting to creep in in the last couple of seasons.

In that sense, Thrones may not be similar in content to the likes of Harry Potter, but taking its narrative off-piste is a similar endangerment of fan loyalty. While I have no dog in the Game of Thrones vs. A Song of Ice and Fire fight, I distinctly remember the teenage rage I felt at how little Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix resembled the book I had so ardently loved, its sense of mid-adolescent cheek mixed with growing angst traded in for premature grittiness and portent that should have really only kicked in at the end of the film. The fervent love these formative books inspire means film franchises are left with little room to move, which is why the predictability of the final-chapter-in-two-parts strategy has become such a burden on audiences. Game of Thrones, meanwhile, has essentially already indulged such a thing, but given the difference in expectations the medium creates in viewers, its splitting of A Storm of Swords across two seasons has paid narrative dividends rather than sacrificing cohesion for currency.

Standalone or Serial or Both?

“I think three is the number; beginning, middle, end, that’s it. Four? I think there’s something off about four. For me, if I have any say in it, there’s three movies basically.”

That’s The Maze Runner’s director Wes Ball speaking to Digital Spy last month. Ball is returning to direct the second film, entitled Maze Runner: Scorch Trials. It’s amusing to watch these franchises juggle the obligations of titling where they don’t have them built in. Game of Thrones can just be that for the duration of the show, but The Hunger Games ends up subtitling each film with the book title, and Divergent’s sequel has recently been retitled the appropriately flat The Divergent Series: Insurgent which I suppose is less generic than Everyone Tells Shailene Woodley How Special She Is, which could honestly be the title of any film she’s starred in so far.

At the end of The Maze Runner, which had up until that point been a thoroughly tense and entertaining action thriller, is forced to explain itself. The characters spend the whole film trying to figure out the mysteries of the maze, why they have to run it, and so on. When they find out amidst the crumbling of their Lord of the Flies-esque mini-society, it becomes the first time throughout the film that the audience knows more than the characters. We see shortly after that Patricia Clarkson’s on-camera suicide was all for show, and that the grand experiment in which Dylan O’Brien et al had been participating wasn’t over, but ongoing. They get pushed into helicopters and flown out over the maze into the desert they now believe to be characteristic of the planet as a whole. They are, in fact, headed into the Scorch Trials, whatever they end up being. It doesn’t really matter. The point is this: the viewer is given a strong idea of what’s to come (mostly that it will probably resemble the film they’re presently watching, but like, it’ll look different) and assured that the story is ongoing, that there’s no danger their favourite maze runners will never show up in a cinema again. It’s comforting, but as The Maze Runner itself and not as the title of the franchise, it’s unsatisfying.

Perhaps the emphasis on the origin story, where every protagonist needs the dawning of their heroism thoroughly explained, is to blame.

This isn’t to say, of course, that films haven’t done this before. But there’s a sense in these YA adaptations that closure is no longer necessary, or rather, no longer relevant to its target audience. The young people at which The Maze Runner is primarily aimed have grown up in the era of serialised television, in an age where the procedural TV show is treated as increasingly irrelevant in the television landscape. Even though shows like Supernatural sort of carry the torch for the demographic, there are even more like Buffy, Veronica Mars, and Teen Wolf, all of which emphasise or emphasised serialised narratives over procedural ones. And as ever, fantasy or sci-fi shows place a heavy emphasis on mythology and world-building, a feature which has become built-in to film franchises.

And this is what’s smart about how The Maze Runner operates: in this sense, it understands its audience. It knows that they probably torrent Game of Thrones for ten weeks a year, and that the grand, terrifying end of “Valar Morghulis”, the final episode of Thrones’ second season, in which the White Walkers and an army of raised dead march towards The Wall, is the kind of ‘ending’ they now expect from something that is explicitly part of an ongoing story. It’s an ending that brings to a close its chunk of the story, but also gestures strongly at where the narrative will be headed next. The bait is dangled for the viewer to return for Season 3, but there’s a distinct feeling that what we’ve just invested our time in was valuable in and of itself.

Films like The Maze Runner, Divergent and — though this may be controversial — The Hunger Games: Catching Fire don’t do this anywhere near as successfully, because the film medium just, well, isn’t really built to. Or at least, few people have figured out how to do it successfully. Franchises like Indiana Jones were largely self-contained romps with its hero as a throughline; the likes of Star Wars was able to juggle the push-pull of standalone and serial narratives because Lucas conceived and wrote the film as a standalone before realising that there was a bigger story to tell; The Lord of the Rings trilogy was able to encompass a massive, multi-strand narrative in wholly satisfying thirds because Peter Jackson held such expert control over the material, which he has proven unable to really do with The Hobbit which, though I defend those films as enjoyable forays back into Middle Earth, are definitely the victims of overextension.

It’s also happening at a time where big budget films are more stricken with bloat than ever.

But these YA adaptations are simply not being treated in the same way. Divergent doesn’t even bother moving beyond the confines of the city it takes place in, essentially investing 139 minutes into moribund set-up for what is to follow rather than making the film an an enjoyable story of its own accord, more interested than hooking viewers in for another trip to the candy bar than making the first one satisfying. Perhaps the emphasis on the origin story, where every protagonist needs the dawning of their heroism thoroughly explained, is to blame. Either way, that Ball would reject the notion of splitting The Death Cure into two parts to end The Maze Runner series is a good sign.

But if these YA franchises are going to continue to aim for the addictive serialisation that TV offers, they’re going to have to get better at it. The Maze Runner is a pretty good film, well-directed and conceptually engrossing, but it’s also something of a lightweight trying to punch up into a higher class. The distinct sense at the film’s end that you’re about to progress to the next level of a video game is an unhelpful one, just as Catching Fire pushed us through the thrills of the Quarter Quell only to delay any real development of the film’s world until Mockingjay Part 1 in a similar manner.

For this to mean anything, writers and filmmakers will have to start doing it well, and more innovatively. Taking a finished, three-book franchise and turning it into a TV-aping isn’t all that different or exciting, and in fact, it’s more about a shift in context than in craft. But taking a book and turning it into a four film series, as Warner Bros. is set to do with Stephen King’s The Stand? Now I’m intrigued. But the first step will be doing something out-of-the-box with its release, because once that comfort zone is breached, the rest will presumably follow. If multi-film stories become larger and larger components of studios’ box office strategies, one film a year approaches will quickly become passé. Why not film it all and release all four in one year? Take a page from Netflix’s book and step away from expected release models, at the very least.

While co-opting modes of television storytelling and trying to retrofit them to the big screen is a refreshing change from accusations of the opposite, I don’t get the sense that these films know why that might be a valuable transference between the two media, let alone how to utilise it. And since the average length of blockbusters seems only to be rising, it’s also happening at a time where big budget films are more stricken with bloat than ever. But ultimately the television and film still have a lot to learn from each other, and since television’s ascension to the pantheon of legitimate art is only recent, the lessening one-sidedness of the relationship is only encouraging.