Recently, a provoking list of movies circulated under the heading “Shoegaze Cinema”. Letterboxd user Drew Edelstein created said list, arguing that “From the mid-1990s to the early 2000s, there was a batch of films (generally focused in Asian cinema) that shared key characteristics of a new kind of genre.”

Exploring the Concept of “Shoegaze Cinema”

Collecting a short list of movies, including Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation and Wong Kar-wai’s Fallen Angels, Edelstein characterises this “shoegaze wave of film” as “indulged in major experimentation with the form of film” and as “stylistically intimate, exploring the lives of characters that feel alienated from the advances of society.” Since the publication of this list, different lists have popped up on music and film forums, demonstrating the power of such a provoking exercise, which implicitly asks if the aesthetics of music can fit into a visual medium.

Defining Shoegaze Beyond the Soundtrack

While such a batch of movies could be easily dismissed as a list of films that contain shoegaze music, Edelstein argues there is something deeper than the soundtrack at hand. Although Lost In Translation contains the ethereal sounds of Kevin Shields, notable via shoegaze band My Bloody Valentine, this shoegaze wave of film concerns the script and the formal elements of the film rather than just the soundtrack. According to Edelstein, shoegaze films need not contain shoegaze or dream pop music; the visual communication that characterises “shoegaze cinema” transcends the auditory components.

To test Edelstein’s list and lay a foundation for the theory of shoegaze, we first must reduce shoegaze to its pure aesthetic form. That is, we must figure out what shoegaze attempts to communicate. Although, perhaps a strange exercise, analogous aesthetics have been created from the culture of psychedelia, and it is perfectly acceptable to call a film, movie, or song ‘psychedelic’. Part of this discussion is whether ‘shoegaze’ must be an aesthetic based on its pure qualities, or if it in itself can be reduced to another adjective.

The Aesthetic Qualities of Shoegaze

Shoegaze as a musical genre began in the late 80s/early 90s, most clearly characterised and defined by two albums: My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless released in 1991 and Slowdive’s Souvlaki released in 1993. Just listening to a few songs from each album, the genre begins to construct itself easily; swirling superimposed guitars, ethereal lyrics and themes, a distinct focus on ‘texture’ over vocals, a sonic ‘crampedness’ and, more so with Loveless than Souvlaki, a harshness and grit.

The two albums are especially representative in how they track the threads of inspiration. Loveless carries the legacy of noise music, which you can hear in its brashness and the rough and abrasive sounds of the guitar, while Souvlaki leans into the dream pop legacy of the genre and thus yields a more unworldly and psychedelic sound. 

Already, we have highlighted a few aesthetic qualities. An extramusical shoegaze aesthetic must first be defined by a maximalist approach. By definition, shoegaze music is overwhelming, constructing a “wall of sound” with seemingly no textural gaps, owing to the eponymous production technique. Many things are happening at once, and the genre often defies traditional sensemaking in its layers of sound.

Shoegaze in Literature and Film

Secondly, shoegaze, much like psychedelia, focuses on the unreal or hyperreal. Ethereal de facto, the aesthetic stretches the bounds of reality and therefore conveys a sense of the non-real or communicates a different type of reality.

Thirdly, shoegaze, as a genre distinguished from dream pop, must be gritty, often both in thematic and sonic qualities. This third quality also distinguishes it from the psychedelic reduction, bringing with it a severity that psychedelia generally does not. In a thematic sense, grit comes in troubling topics and often a feeling of being lost within a bigger world.

Lastly, shoegaze is an inherently experimental venture by its conception, as Edelstein points out. Just as shoegaze tested the bounds of what music production can handle and how far a song can go without simply being noise, any aesthetic manifestation of shoegaze must test the limits of its medium. 

For literature, I argue that The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides, The Waves by Virginia Woolf, and All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy are the best, though certainly not perfect, manifestations of what shoegaze literature would look like.

The Virgin Suicides is constructed through a zoom-in-and-out motion, focusing both on the lives and deaths of the Lisbon sisters and the reactions of the boys around them, both as teenagers and later as adult men. The grit and the hyperreal come from the prosaic quality; Eugenides constructs a subtly magical element that contains much of the book’s beauty and transcendence, though perhaps fails slightly on not being as experimental.

The Waves, though very similar, is primarily experimental, with critics even having trouble calling it a novel at all. Six characters in layered conversations describe their shared lives to each other, focusing on the death of their other friend. Definitively experimental, maximalist, and hyperreal in its collectivism, it perhaps fails in not being gritty enough to be the exemplary shoegaze novel.

All the Pretty Horses is perhaps the best option of the three. Distinguished by a uniquely Southern Gothic grit and a devastating storyline, McCarthy focuses on the extra-reality of nature that surrounds the characters, often overpowering them and creating a paranoid atmosphere, while also containing an overwhelming, ethereal quality, as if nature has a special mystical element. All the Pretty Horses is deceptive at first, feeling more like a simple Western novel, though certainly builds to a crescendo of shoegaze proportions. 

In literature, the formal elements of shoegaze music would transfer to the formal elements of the novel. The same breakdown that characterises shoegaze music must be found in a shoegaze novel. The confusing, unceasing constriction that the layers of guitar would facilitate are communicated through overrun, long-winded, and sense-defying passages of unpunctuated prose to get lost in.

The same goes for the film: the camera must operate as a runaway guide, conveying visual, emotional and technical whiplash, swirling from character to character and plotline to plotline with little respite. Chungking Express would be my top pick for a shoegaze film, as the audience is subsumed within an atmosphere of perfectly intentioned, beautiful-as-a-whole nonsense of different parts.

The camera magically acts as a character of the movie itself, and the movie does not pretend to be anything but a film, adding paradoxically to both a very realistic sheer and an incredible, indescribably unreal quality. Even the script is maximalist, managing to fit in shades of film noir in the first part, as well as romance, drama, and comedy. Much of the grit comes in how punishing the film is, often defying meaning-making and being extremely strange; the second half of the film contains characters beautifully obsessed with pineapples and the song “California Dreamin’” by The Mamas and the Papas, which plays eight times total.

Challenging Traditional Genre Boundaries

Of course, I must acknowledge this could appear as a frivolous cultural exercise. However, I argue that there are important critical aspects to this endeavour. Firstly, I think it throws a wrench in what otherwise may appear to be a very discrete operation; genre can be generally clearcut, though the most ambitious works often disrupt this chain. Many of the works I have listed defy ordinary genre distinctions and have instead existed in a limbo of characterization. This exercise attempts to attribute them to an aesthetic source.

Secondly, this exercise imparts implications that cannot be ignored. An often-employed school of criticism judges whether a certain work succeeds at its genre, which, as they stand, are medium and culturally specific. In trying to characterise shoegaze as an aesthetic quality that surpasses music, I have attempted to circumvent this critical angle, so art can be handled simply as art and within its medium. How can we judge art itself if we so brazenly ignore its essential pieces, instead only working on medium specifications?

Edelstein’s list catalyses our discussion, pushing us to think beyond the traditional boundaries of genre and medium. By proposing shoegaze as an aesthetic category that transcends music and permeates other art forms, we are invited to reconsider how we classify and understand art. This exercise challenges the notion that genres are fixed and medium-specific, suggesting instead that aesthetics can be fluid and adaptable across different forms of expression. By reclassifying traditional options of genre, we open up new avenues for critique and appreciation, allowing us to engage with art in a more holistic and interconnected way.

In essence, Edelstein’s list is not just about labelling films with a musical genre; it’s about expanding our understanding of how art communicates mood, atmosphere, and emotion, regardless of its medium.

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