The evolution of a thriller

My heart can’t take this. Stress is not good for the baby, and I’m baby. In the past few decades, there have been many studies performed to show the health impact of stress in our modern lives. Or the same study referenced many times. At any rate, I’m quite convinced that stress is bad for me. The angle is that humans evolved to develop a stress response: hormones and chemicals flood various pathways in our body to prepare us for intense physical activity as a reaction to life-threatening danger. Since the danger was usually life-threatening, false positives were preferable to being eaten or killed. However, our modern environment contains a low possibility of accidental death, but a large number of triggers for our stress response. This has led to many irritable people walking around with chronic stress, putting stress on their bodies, minds, and relationships. Every Outlook ding and every Slack ping triggering the same ancestral response as seeing a tiger.

But some people like stress. They crave the excitement and adrenaline they get from it. I guess they must have quiet jobs. Some jump off planes and others bike down mountains. For the more risk-averse, there is the thriller. Thrillers have existed for as long as we have: humanities oldest stories might have been recited around fires in a way that raised their listener’s hackles. Certainly, before literary analysis and critical theory existed, it was the suspense of what came next that drew in the listeners. They grew quickly with technology, making the most of the latest and the greatest. Moving from verse to prose to the silver screen, and then finally to the television screen. Just like the period of time where humanity no longer needed the stress response corresponds to a minuscule portion of the species, the audio-visual thriller has only existed for a tiny part of the history of its antecedents, the great epic poems. Yet it’s not unfair to say that the thriller has entered a new age with the advent of video recording.

No matter the viewer’s preference, there is an appropriate thriller. In the early days, the focus was on extraordinary images, made to look as real as possible. These were the first horror movies, intent on shocking viewers with visions of monsters and beasts. Then came the detective and crime thrillers, a more realistic sort of story for those who refused to suspend their disbelief. After the industry and the viewers had time to cope with the horrors of the World Wars, it was decided that they should be appropriately commercialized and propagandized as well. This proved useful during the uncertainty of the Cold War, which also gave us the spy thriller. None of these sub-genres faded away as the next ones sprung up, but instead continued to innovate and improve. Crime thrillers added serial killers to their list of ingredients and the topic of psychology also crept into their repertoire.

The appeal of these sorts of fantastical retellings is understandable. In the case of most thrillers, it is highly improbable that the viewer would experience a similar situation in real life, thus it could be fun to imagine what it would be like, even if largely stressful. It would not only be exciting, but also vaguely educational for the curious viewer. Newsreels aren’t filmed on IMAX 65mm cameras, and often don’t have a satisfying resolution, very unlike movies and television. Furthermore, it requires less willpower compared to other genres on the medium: the suspenseful nature of the material draws the viewer in, itching for more. The excitement takes over, and the late rent payment is put off for its duration.

What I perceive to be the next stage in the evolution of the thriller is a curious onscreen shift from the survival situations to which our vestigial stress response should react, to the prosaic sort of situation where stakes are high, but certainly nowhere near life or death. Instead, there is generally a psychopathic individual obsessed with success, pushing others until they are at the same wavelength, a frenzied crescendo of sometimes the most banal. For me, this trend of lowered-stakes so to speak rose to prominence in the Safdie brother’s Uncut Gems, but has clear antecedents in Chazelle’s Whiplash and Gilroy’s Nightcrawler. Stress for the sake of stress. The routine, humdrum sort of stress that exists in everyone’s lives, but dialed up with cinematic intensity. What might have started off as an artistic challenge, to make a thriller where death and violence, and even their implication is not a necessity to the plot or the suspense.

This trend has progressed into television, the perfect medium to entertain both individuals looking for background noise as well as those looking to waste the entire weekend in front of a television. Most recent examples of this would be FX’s The Bear and BBC’s Industry. I was going to include Netflix’s Beef in this list as well, but apparently things turn a bit violent. Regardless, it’s interesting to see the mundane elevated to exhilarate: in the kitchen, in the office, and on the road. Historically, television has always played second fiddle to la septième art, but Game of Thrones and Breaking Bad have changed that: the era of prestige television is now upon us, art in the small screen no longer limited to the likes of The Twilight Zone and Twin Peaks. And with that is the “everyday thriller”, the latest in a genre that was essentially made for the serial medium.

Here, the observations end, and there are two questions to pontificate on: why do people watch these “everyday thrillers”, and what does this say about the state of our society? I postulate that the reasoning for watching these thrillers is no different from a horror movie: It’s exciting, engaging, and provides a safe release, a cathartic experience for the viewer. But the interest in the mundane as opposed to the fantastic is an interesting shift, and I have many doomer boomer explanations: the average life is so boring now that watching someone sell securities is enough to get them riled up, or that this is simply a natural extension from the slow trend towards realism that people have always preferred, from monsters to crime to war.

Or perhaps Plato has answers for us: experiencing these emotions, as close to a realistic scenario as possible, in a controlled manner provides catharsis, a release of the associated feelings without any of the danger that would typically accompany them. Still, it’s interesting that what people sought this solace from a century ago was superstition, half a century ago it was war, and now it’s a chef with a Napoleon complex. The average deepest fear has changed, and for those watching prestige television, it’s the ringing of an unexpected Teams call from your manager.