The 3 that come to mind for me are Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz and The Princess Bride. All three are poking fun at their respective genres but also are great examples of the genre. I’m curious if Lemmy has other such examples.
So a deconstruction / reconstruction shuffle. A work picking apart the tropes of a genre, making you question them… and then putting them back together in ways suited to a self-aware audience.
One Punch Man looks like a decent example. The premise is a rebuke of who-is-stronger anime, like the endless power-level treadmill of Dragonball Z. The main dude is stronger. Next question. And the next question is, well, what does a setting with assorted superheroes and supervillains look like, if there’s some guy who is unbeatable 1v1, but is otherwise just some guy? Does society support him, after he’s basically relegated to an occasional “come save our asses” phone call? How do other supers proceed with their equally-cliche motivations, when SSJ4 Goku showed up in episode one?
Shaun Of The Dead is definitely a reconstruction of zombie tropes - timed right at the crest of the 2000s zombie-movie revival. But Hot Fuzz is a little odd to mention here because it’s actually three distinct genres. It goes from screwball comedy to murder mystery to blockbuster action without missing a beat. Ironically I’d say the weakest part is the screwball comedy at the beginning. It’s very sedate compared to what it almost was: there’s a deleted scene where Angel did Word-art banners for each department, ending on rainbow lettering reading “sexual assault.” The opening we got is held-back to ease the later shifts in theme. And while each of these shifts is truly masterful, I’m not sure I’d call the movie as a whole a great example of anything it riffed on.
Really - does it fit any movie marathon that would unironically include Point Break?
I like the way you’ve explained the concept! I never could find the right word for it, I always thought of it as “meta” media, though that never seemed 100% right. “Reconstruction” is much better, it implies a more thorough understanding (and appreciation!) of the source material than mere meta-jokes. My concept of meta would lump Shaun of the Dead in with shit like Disaster Movie, which are obviously leagues apart.
90s parody movies lean way too hard into deconstruction, and aren’t very good at it. They’re trying to say “here’s how that would really go” but lack the patience to be clever. E.g. Scary Movie 3 having a character square off against the scary girl from The Ring. That’s not a fully-formed joke. That’s a three-second cutaway gag in Family Guy.
The clearest line between deconstruction and reconstruction might be Neon Genesis Evangelion versus Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann.
Eva takes the cynicism and plausible physics of real-robot shows like Mobile Suit Gundam, and applies them to children piloting skyscraper-sized combat vehicles in monster-of-the-week battles. It doesn’t kill off characters left and right, and the action is rarely gory or played for shock value, but there’s a level of emotional violence that is unmatched outside of surrealism. It has an audience-insert protagonist specifically to go “this is you, and that is bad.” The last few episodes are infamously a sharp left turn into abstract philosophy and, like… giving characters therapy. On some level Neon Genesis Evangelion is a mecha anime series that actively despises its audience for enjoying mecha anime.
Gurren went “yeah that’s nice” and wrote a love letter to joyously stupid mecha anime. The universe literally runs on whatever sounds awesome. It is unselfconsciously goofy in a way that wraps back around to being cool as fuck. Now: it’s not unaware of criticism. It was made by the same studio as Evangelion. But the key figures would eventually split off into Studio Trigger, whose output is primarily reconstructions - shows rooted in asking “how would this insane premise really work?” and then building a fun story within that universe.
