Ode to the Sudden Tone Shift
This little blog is probably less idea-driven than usual, and more observation, but I just wanted to write a brief toast to one of my favorite writing moves: the sudden tonal shift.
I've seen this come up with the recent discussions around the excellent Parasite and its ability to capture nostalgia, grief, humor, and horror all in a single movie. There's a common—but, I think, short-sighted take—that Asian media is somehow more comfortable with huge tonal shifts. I think on the surface, at first, this makes sense. Anyone who enjoyed anime in the 90s and 2000s knows that even the most "serious" anime usually has a bottle episode that is frankly ridiculous, often drug-fueled, as a reprieve from the overall plot; Cowboy Bebop's "Toys in the Attic" immediately comes to mind, as well as "Beatbox Bandits" from Samurai Champloo, but there's many more.
However, any familiarity with the pulps of the 1920s and 30s, early magical realism from South America, and…well, as far back as Don Quixote, knows that although there is a trend for more plastic genre boundaries in certain Asian animation and film traditions, it's certainly not specific to the continent. To say that it is seems reductive at best—and, at worst, an infantilizing fetishization that seems to cast an entire continent with its own diversity as somehow existing "outside" of genre constraints.
That said, I'll admit that there can be a boring and exhausting commitment to tone in some prestige television in the Western sphere. Not to beat a very dead horse, but Game of Thrones suffered from this terribly. With GoT, it seems like the writers settled on the tone as "distressing" and diverged from the books whenever they could make it somehow more distressing, even when that didn't make sense for the characters.
What I'm really getting at here is that the ability to move across tones isn't specific any one culture or geographic area. It is, however, a feature of good long form writing.
I recently finished the 2019 Hugo-winning A Memory Called Empire and was impressed by its range. The main character, Mahit, is both an admirer of the titular empire's culture…and a diplomat trying to prevent her home space station from being annexed. The tone of the story necessarily swings between wonder and excitement and real, genuine horror at the scope of the empire's rapacious arrogance and ambition. Mahit makes dear friends, has a blossoming romance with an attaché, only for her "otherness" at the heart of the empire to come crashing back to reminder her that imperial citizens view her as a "barbarian," as someone whose culture is "less" than their own. Across a single chapter, the tone shifts from ominous, to romantic, to humorous, to outright depressing with regards to the way colonialism poisons interpersonal relations and creates walls between people who could otherwise be friends.
In other words, the tone of the novel shifts dramatically because the tenor of Mahit's experience shifts—as it does with anyone, especially somebody engaged in a clash of cultures.
I don't think this is entirely unique to long form storytelling, now that I think about it. I recently discussed Laura van den Berg's wonderful short story "Acrobat" with a writing workshop. Upon rereading the piece for the first time in years, I was struck by its use of humor at odd and unexpected moments. At a climactic point in the story, our protagonist is on the phone with her soon-to-be-ex-husband, trying to find out what he said to her that she missed during their last in-person conversation. It's a serious, vital moment. But in the middle of it, our heroine jokes that perhaps her husband said he was going to kill her for their life insurance policy. He says that it crossed his mind, but no. It's a dark, comic bit in the story—and the fact that the pair shares this minor joke perhaps gestures towards what their marriage might have been at one point in the past, when they shared more than this dark sense of humor.
Anyway, Memory rocks, and was one of my favorite SFF books I've read recently, and I think that does have to do with its range. The ability to shift tones in a story isn't just the sign of any singular cultural view, I don't think. Nor is it even a sign just of "good writing." Our lived experience is varied and complex, and good writing reflects that.
