Cover

Title Page

Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts

Jonathan Gray

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York and London

www.nyupress.org

© 2010 by New York University

Dedication

This book is about where value and meaning come from. Therefore, I dedicate it to my wife, Monica Jane Grant, for constantly giving my life so much of both.

Contents

Acknowledgments

This book examines how meaning and value are constructed outside of what we have often considered to be the text itself. Thus, in its writing, I have constantly been aware of how often my own arguments, and the meaning and value of this text, have come from colleagues and friends whose sage counsel, astute criticism, and warm offers of assistance have considerably refined and advanced my thinking about paratexts. With this in mind, I offer thanks to a small band of friends who never seem to tire of discussing texts and paratexts with me, and who have shared their own thoughts on the topic so readily and generously: Ivan Askwith, Will Brooker, Kristina Busse, Derek Johnson, Derek Kompare, Amanda Lotz, Jason Mittell, Cornel Sandvoss, and Avi Santo. Will’s comments on the manuscript were particularly invaluable and warrant especially profuse thanks.

Introduction: Film, Television, and Off-Screen Studies

Film, Television, and Off-Screen Studies

A common first line for books on contemporary media, and for many a student essay on the subject, notes the saturation of everyday life with media. Certainly, my list of available cable channels seems to grow every month, while the list of movies in cinemas, on television, for rent, or available for purchase similarly proliferates at a precipitous rate. However, media growth and saturation can only be measured in small part by the number of films or television shows—or books, games, blogs, magazines, or songs for that matter—as each and every media text is accompanied by textual proliferation at the level of hype, synergy, promos, and peripherals. As film and television viewers, we are all part-time residents of the highly populated cities of Time Warner, DirecTV, AMC, Sky, Comcast, ABC, Odeon, and so forth, and yet not all of these cities’ architecture is televisual or cinematic by nature. Rather, these cities are also made up of all manner of ads, previews, trailers, interviews with creative personnel, Internet discussion, entertainment news, reviews, merchandising, guerrilla marketing campaigns, fan creations, posters, games, DVDs, CDs, and spinoffs. Hype and synergy abound, forming the streets, bridges, and trading routes of the media world, but also many of its parks, beaches, and leisure sites. They tell us about the media world around us, prepare us for that world, and guide us between its structures, but they also fill it with meaning, take up much of our viewing and thinking time, and give us the resources with which we will both interpret and discuss that world.

1 From Spoilers to Spinoffs: A Theory of Paratexts

1

A Theory of Paratexts

Paratexts surround texts, audiences, and industry, as organic and naturally occurring a part of our mediated environment as are movies and television themselves. If we imagine the triumvirate of Text, Audience, and Industry as the Big Three of media practice, then paratexts fill the space between them, conditioning passages and trajectories that criss-cross the mediascape, and variously negotiating or determining interactions among the three. Industry and audiences create vast amounts of paratexts. Audiences also consume vast amounts of paratexts. Thus, paratexts’ relationship to industry and audience is most obvious. However, the secret to understanding paratexts lies in working out their relationship to textuality: What is the paratext in relationship to the text? How does it contribute to the process of making meaning? And how does it energize, contextualize, or otherwise modify textuality? This chapter attempts to answer these questions by presenting a theory of paratextuality. To do so, first we must examine the nature of this relationship. I will then offer a definition of textuality that accounts for the paratextual, examining multiple instances of paratexts at work in the interpretive trenches. In particular, I will distinguish between paratexts that grab the viewer before he or she reaches the text and try to control the viewer’s entrance to the text (“entryway paratexts”), and paratexts that flow between the gaps of textual exhibition, or that come to us “during” or “after” viewing, working to police certain reading strategies in medias res (“in medias res paratexts”).

2 Coming Soon! Hype, Intros, and Textual Beginnings

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Hype, Intros, and Textual Beginnings

Academic and popular accounts of film and television are frequently suffused with discussion of what happens after watching, following such questions as “What did you think of such-and-such a show?”, “What effects might it have?”, and “What does it mean?” The social science tradition of studying media has also produced considerable work examining what happens before watching, with, for instance, a strand of “uses and gratifications” research that studies the motivating factors behind one’s choice to watch, and another strand of production studies and political economy that explores the creative and economic processes that go into creating media. But comparatively little work exists from within a humanistic tradition examining how meaning begins and where texts come from, suggesting by its absence that texts begin when the first scene of a film or program begins. A refreshing exception is Charles Acland’s reading of multiplex geographies, construction, and contexts.1 Exploring similar terrain for television (and for films on television), Barbara Klinger has also examined the geography of the home theater.2 As important as such work is, and as much as it reminds us of the paratexts of geography and technology, in this chapter I argue that films and television programs often begin long before we actively seek them out, and that their textual histories are every bit as complex and requiring of study as are their audience, creative, or economic histories. This chapter is thus about the true beginnings of texts as coherent clusters of meaning, expectation, and engagement, and about the text’s first initial outposts, in particular trailers, posters, previews, and hype.

3 Bonus Materials: Digital Auras and Authors

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Digital Auras and Authors

As examined in chapter 2, Hollywood and its marketers often mobilize paratexts to proffer “proper interpretations,” some preceding the show’s arrival in the public sphere, thereby setting up pre-decodings, and some working in medias res to subtly inflect the public understanding of an ongoing and open text. Many such paratexts will aim to strike a balance between simile—insisting that a show is “just like X,” or “a mix of Y and Z”—and metonym—encapsulating in microcosm the fuller diegetic world that exists in the show. In doing so, as I have argued, they are not always successful or even uniform, sometimes employing similes or metonyms problematically, and thus setting up unrealistic expectations that cannot be met, and offering various versions of what therefore becomes only nominally the “same” text. In all cases, though, they allow the text to be created in part outside of its supposed borders, so that public understanding of the film or program is generated in multiple sites by multiple paratexts. However, while chapter 2 offered numerous examples of paratexts creating or maintaining frames through which we are invited to make sense of what a text is ostensibly “about,” who it addresses, what are its basic themes, and who populates its diegesis, paratextual frames can also prove remarkably important for how they assign value to a text, situating it as a product and/or as a work of art. Tony Bennett notes that “value is not something which the text has or possesses. It is not an attribute of the text; it is rather something that is produced for the text.”1 This chapter argues that paratexts are the source of much of this production.

4 Under a Long Shadow: 117 Sequels, Prequels, Pre-Texts, and Intertexts

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Under a Long Shadow

Sequels, Prequels, Pre-Texts, and Intertexts

In chapter 1, I offered multiple metaphors by which we can make sense of paratexts—as airlocks, as high priests of textuality, as overflow, as convergence—but on a basic level, we can understand them as intertexts. Intertextuality refers to the fundamental and inescapable interdependence of all textual meaning upon the structures of meaning proposed by other texts. In common usage, intertextuality refers to instances wherein a film or program refers to and builds some of its meaning off another film or program, and intertext to the referenced film or program. For instance, West Side Story invokes the intertexts of Romeo and Juliet, The Colbert Report relies on its viewers’ intertextual knowledge of pundit shows to parody and satirize programs such as The O’Reilly Factor (1996–), and The Sopranos intertextually plays with and reworks gangster movie tropes. Intertextuality is a system that calls for the viewer to use previously seen texts to make sense of the one at hand. As Laurent Jenny notes, it “introduces a new way of reading which destroys the linearity of a text,”1 instead opening the text up to meanings from outside, so that often much of (our understanding of) a text will be constructed outside of the text. And while it is more obvious in examples such as West Side Story, The Colbert Report, or The Sopranos, no text creates its entire meaning for itself by itself, as viewers will always make sense of a new text using structures and orders of meaning offered to them by other texts, genres, and viewing experiences. Intertextuality is always at work, with texts framing each other just as I have shown paratexts to frame texts. In this regard, paratextuality is in fact a subset of intertextuality. What distinguishes the two terms is that intertextuality often refers to the instance wherein one or more bona fide shows frame another show, whereas paratextuality refers to the instance wherein a textual fragment or “peripheral” frames a show.

5 Spoiled and Mashed Up: Viewer-Created Paratexts

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Spoiled and Mashed Up

Viewer-Created Paratexts

Many of the examples and case studies presented so far in this book examine industry-created paratexts, from hype and marketing, to spinoffs, to introductory sequences. However, audiences create paratexts too, and while they commonly lack the capital and infrastructure to circulate their paratexts as widely—or at least as uniformly—as can Hollywood, their creative and discursive products can and often do become important additions to a text. In its most common form, this audience paratextuality occurs anytime two or more people discuss a film or television program, but audience paratextuality also includes criticism and reviews, fan fiction, fan film and video (vids), “filk” (fan song), fan art, spoilers, fan sites, and many other forms. Type the name of almost any popular film or television program into Google, and beyond the first two or three links for official, industry-created paratexts, one will likely find several if not hundreds or thousands of pages with various forms of audience-created paratexts. In this chapter, I turn to the role that audience-created paratexts play in challenging or supplementing those created by the industry, in creating their own genres, genders, tones, and styles, and in carving out alternative pathways through texts.

6 In the World, Just Off Screen: Toys and Games

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In the World, Just Off Screen

Toys and Games

As I have been arguing throughout this book, a proper study of paratexts and an attention to off-screen studies challenge the logic of “primary” and “secondary” texts,1 originals and “spinoffs,” shows and “peripherals” often used to discuss paratexts. That logic traditionally regards the film or television program as the center of the textual interaction and the only source of authentic textuality, while peripherals are relegated to the role of nuisances cluttering streets, screen time, cyberspace, and shopping malls, and are seen as tacked on to the film or program in a cynical attempt to squeeze yet more money out of a successful product. What I hope to have posed is that the “peripherals” are often anything but peripheral. Instead, they often play a constitutive role in the production, development, and expansion of the text. Granted, the existence of the film or program usually remains a precondition for the paratext’s existence, and thus the film or program remains important, but it does not do its work alone, nor will it necessarily be responsible for all of a text’s popular meanings.

Conclusion: “In the DNA”: Creating across Paratexts

Conclusion

“In the DNA”: Creating across Paratexts

Balancing alternate-sized textual universes is rapidly becoming a key task for media producers. Furthermore, since each paratext can toggle or even short-circuit the text (as examples throughout this book have illustrated), another key task is for media producers to streamline their various paratexts. And a third key task is to open sufficient room for storyworlds to be inhabitable, so that viewers have the interest in commandeering portions of the world, as well as the ability and freedom to create their own parts of and paths through this world. Making all of these tasks considerably harder is many companies’ and shows’ apparent lack of dedicated creative personnel whose job it is to oversee the smooth flow of textuality and meaning between films, programs, and paratexts. Many paratexts fall under a company’s marketing and promotions budget, meaning that the show’s creators may have little or nothing to do with their creation, thereby producing ample opportunity for creative disconnects, and for uninspired paratexts that do little to situate either themselves or the viewer in the storyworld. Interviews with creative personnel abound with tales of production or promotional personnel tasked with overseeing an established franchise about which they know nothing. At the level of production, relative chaos and piecemeal construction of paratexts on an ad hoc basis can often prove the norm. To conclude this book, therefore, I will now examine the issue of textual cohesion, and of how texts are variously put together.

Notes

Notes

INTRODUCTION

1. For more, see Shanto Iyengar, Is Anyone Responsible? How Television Frames Political Issues (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Karen S. Johnson-Cartee, News Narratives and News Framing: Constructing Political Reality (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004); Diana Kendall, Framing Class: Media Representations of Wealth and Poverty in America (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005).

Index

Index

The index that appeared in the print version of this title was intentionally removed from the eBook. Please use the search function on your eReading device to search for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below.

About the Author

About the Author

JONATHAN GRAY is Associate Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at University of Wisconsin, Madison. He is author of Television Entertainment and Watching with The Simpsons: Television, Parody, and Intertextuality, and co-editor of Battleground: The Media and Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World and Satire TV: Politics and Comedy in the Post-Network Era, both available from NYU Press.