Everybody wants to know what happened to Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, and because they do, it’s being covered nonstop by the news media. Now, even the coverage itself is becoming news. As talking heads ruminate over what might have happened to the ill-fated aircraft, the theories grow more and more surreal, from burning tires to stowaways to circumstances straight out of a “Twilight Zone” episode.
One pundit (can’t remember which channel) was asked recently why people are so fascinated by the event, and he posited that the story is compelling because it has the elements of so many different types of popular fiction classics, like an Agatha Christie novel, “Lost Horizon,” and the latest political thriller, all rolled into one.
He has a point, but it’s not just the “genre” of the story that compels us; it’s the lack of resolution, which virtually always accompanies genre fiction.
Why do most of us read genre fiction (as compared to so-called “literary” works), anyway? To escape? Yes—that’s a big part of it. A while back my pastor (bless his heart) gave a sermon in which he gently chastised readers for reading “happily ever after” type stories, because they didn’t reflect reality. I found myself thinking, “Yes, but that’s precisely why people read stories like that, because they have enough conflicts in their real lives and they need a break.”
But genre fiction (I’m talking about pretty much all categories, not just romance, which is my specialty) is more than just an escape. It’s a way for us to bring some order to our world. We want to know that in the fictional universe the author has created for us, the murderer will be caught, the bad guys won’t succeed in blowing up the world, and the right two people will overcome their obstacles to find love with one another.
Flight 370 is a story that has all the hallmarks of genre fiction, except that it just won’t turn out the way we want it to, no matter how patient we are, no matter how vigilant. We are anxious for resolution—any resolution—because that will help us establish equilibrium in our own universe, at least until the next event happens to turn us upside down. So we stay glued to our media sources, hoping for the “smoking gun” (no pun intended) or the theory by some expert that will neatly fit all the pieces of the puzzle together and bring us closure.
We may be waiting a long, long time, maybe forever, for that closure. And if we find it, it probably won’t be the kind of resolution we were hoping for. Which means this story isn’t anything like genre fiction after all.
