The cliche is incredibly seductive. It almost always feels like a good choice. Sometimes in fact it is the right choice. However, too often it's the first, easy choice. Why does pop music feel so banal most of the time? Why are Hollywood movies usually predictable? Because they fall back on the cliche, usually with an argument that blames the audience for such choices.
The movie Avatar, for example looked like a new kind of movie. But, and this has been pointed out so often that I don't want to say much about it, the movie was a total fucking cliche. Outsider becomes insider, saves insiders. Woohoo outsider. Making a cliche more visually stunning does nothing to remove the cliche.
Now, consider the filmmaker Jim Jarmusch's wonderful film GhostDog: Way of the Samurai. This film operates within a genre - it's a gangster/revenge film. The plot is pretty straightforward - gangsters wanna kill Ghostdog, Ghostdog has to kill gangsters. However, the film never becomes a cliche.
In the film we have an overweight black samurai, an aging Italian gangster who can quote Flavor Flav lyrics, a french-speaking ice cream man who is best friends with Ghostdog even though they can't talk to each other and the film is scored by RZA. The film takes diverse cultures and stitches them together, forming a collage, a pastiche.
The wonderful thing is that Jarmusch uses these elements to make a larger point about culture and language. For Jarmusch, culture is not a boundary - it does not seperate communities. In the same way language is not a system that needs to be shared in advance. Ghostdog and his best friend don't understand each other's language, but they communicate very successfully throughout the film.
So the difference between Avatar and Ghostdog is that Avatar lives in the box, stays comfortable in the cliche, fearful that any innovation may reduce revenues. Ghostdog exists in a genre, but it rearranges the pieces, constantly playing, showing what is possible if only a few pieces are moved.
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