Read outside your genre...or else

One weird trick

People We Meet on Vacation, the Netflix movie adaptation of the novel by contemporary romance phenomenon (no, not that one) Emily Henry, has a problem. Not a unique problem, it turns out. In fact, the problem is so emblematic that one can also see it play out in many of the recent entries in the Star Wars Cinematic Universe, a franchise that otherwise has nothing in common with the EmHen Pocket Dimension.

What is the problem, then?

Call it the Dogfood Diet.

‘Dogfooding’ is a tech term that describes the practice of software companies (as in Microsoft, where it originated) using their own products in-house before releasing them to the public. The companies, in the parlance, “eat their own dog food.” Meaning, they use the very products they sell, better knowing how to deliver them to the public. In the tech world, it’s a generally positive term.

But what happens when you only eat dogfood? What does that do to your digestive system?

That’s where the Dogfood Diet comes in.

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People We Meet on Vacation attempts, in a highly self-conscious manner, to revive the romantic comedy. So self-conscious, in fact, that it actually reenacts scenes from famous romantic comedies of the past, including none other than the restaurant scene from When Harry Met Sally. And it’s not even a parody! It’s sincere homage-as-content, one of the worst aesthetic modes that exists.

What really rankles about the copy-and-paste nature of such a scene is the way it misses the point, the strategy, of the very romantic comedies it supposedly lionizes. Filmmakers like Nora Ephron, Nancy Meyers, Rob Reiner—these people knew their way around the canon. They read Austen, they watched old screwball comedies. They consumed a wide range of social and romantic comedies, then applied what they had learned to their particular stories, set in particular places, concerning particular people. They did not stage When Harry Met Sally Epic Tribute OMG!!!!

It’s the same with Star Wars. Whether in the hands of George Lucas, or later artisans like Tony Gilroy, Star Wars stories are at their best when they draw on genres that have seemingly nothing to do with space opera. Lucas loved samurai movies, old Saturday afternoon serials, even experimental movies that never would have gotten anywhere near a multiplex. The basic narrative structure of the original Star Wars owes a lot to The Hidden Fortress, directed by master Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa. Lucas read, watched, and searched widely, and brought back what he found to his universe far, far away.

He had a varied, well-balanced diet, to shift metaphors back to an earlier register. But so many of the filmmakers he’s influenced—well, they just eat dogfood. And not much else.

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“Know your genre!”

You hear that constantly from people in the publishing industry. Exhorting aspiring authors to know their genre inside and out, top 20 titles of the last five years, a dozen tropes on my desk first thing in the morning! And yeah, know your genre, know how to find your place in it.

But the way writers bring something to their given genre, no matter what it may be, is through reading outside of it. Way, way outside.

One of my favorite novels of the 21st century is White Tears by Hari Kunzru. Kunrzu gets categorized as a literary author, of the post-DeLillo/Wallace variety, and not without reason. White Tears, though, is a ghost story, and something of a thriller, one that achieves a mastery of tone and pacing. And it does so precisely because Kunzru hit every aisle of the supermarket, reading up on ghost stories like M.R. James to better inform his own take on the story. He sampled widely from the buffet table during the process of creating his own unique dogfood. We’re talking gourmet here.

You get that kind of tastiness through having, well, taste. Across a wide variety of styles and genres. And you don’t get it by slurping from the same bowl over and over again.