Pondering Recategorization

I just found this article, which presents the simple idea that the way stores categorize things is stupid. It's extremely short and I'd encourage you to read the examples. I also like John Klima's comments on the article, highlighting its possible strong and weak points and applying it more to entertainment fields.

It's something to think about the next time you browse your favorite multimedia store: why are Britney Spears and Megadeth in the same musical category? Why are Science Fiction and Horror the same category in the movies section? Why is Cormac McCarthy's The Road placed in the same section as Hemingway and Jane Austen, rather than Pat Frank, Ray Bradbury, and other books that are actually similar?

I don't know about the rest of their stores, but my local Hollywood Video is a paradise in this regard. A few months ago, my girlfriend and I were looking for A Clockwork Orange until we talked to a clerk and were told that it was classified as "Drama." A Series of Unfortunate Events is placed under "Horror." Alien and Aliens are both under "Action/Adventure," whereas Alien 3 and Alien Resurrection are "Science Fiction."

I've been thinking about this: do we need to recategorize our industry? And if so, how?

I agree with Klima: when I'm looking for something specific in my reading/viewing/listening experience (which I almost always am), I don't want to have to slog through mounds of unrelated stuff. For that reason, I'd like to propose that all bookstores, video stores, etc. implement whichever of these new categories apply to them, and move all the appropriate materials to those sections immediately:

1. Anthropomorphizing
Think pet-related humor (e.g. How to Live with a Neurotic Dog), the majority of nature documentaries, Redwall books, and any other products whose appeal relies on erasing distinctions between homo sapiens sapiens and every other animal on Earth. Same basic thing.

2. Branded Authors
John Grisham; Stephen King; Anne Rice; Danielle Steele; Janet Evanovich; Sue Grafton; any author whose name on the covers of their books is way bigger than the title or the artwork. Many of their fans don't read anything else anyway, so let's just give them their own section and eliminate those massive blocks of Stephen King et al books from the middle of the Fiction section.

3. Don't Go There
There's sitcoms, and then there's Don't Go There sitcoms; so many, in fact, that they deserve their own category, especially onwards from the 1990's, at which point they began to comprise at least half of the shows on television.

4. The DaVinci Code
I'm actually serious about this one. The DaVinci Code has enough related nonfiction and rip-off novels to qualify as its own genre; I'm just not sure what to call it other than Modern-Classical Cataclysmic Ancient Mystery Thriller. Seriously, there's a friggin' ton of them now.

5. Tie-Ins
Again, really could be its own category (and sometimes already is, depending where you go).

6. Roman a Clef
They're not exactly memoirs, but they're not exactly fiction. They're just these kind of nebulous, deliberately ambiguous based-on-real-life-except-not kind of stories, usually dealing with coming of age or some other period of extreme angst. They're extremely widespread, and for some reason I can't figure out, some people love them.