Gray, Jonathan
2010
Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts
2
“Film and television shows, in other words, are only a small part of the massive, extended presence of filmic and televisual texts across our lived environments.”
3
“Decisions on what to watch, what not to watch, and how to watch are often made while consuming hype, synergy, and promos, so that by the time we actually encounter “the show itself,” we have already begun to decode it and to preview its meanings and effects.”
“Today’s version of “Don’t judge a book by its cover” is “Don’t believe the hype,” but hype and surrounding texts do more than just ask us to believe them or not; rather, they establish frames and filters through which we look at, listen to, and interpret the texts that they hype. As media scholars have long noted, much of the media’s powers come not necessarily from being able to tell us what to think, but what to think about, and how to think about it.”
4
“Charles Acland writes that “the problem with film studies has been film, that is, the use of a medium in order to designate the boundaries of the discipline. Such a designation assumes a certain stability in what is actually a mutable technological apparatus. A problem ensues when it is apparent that film is not film anymore.” This is also a problem with television studies, for, I would quibble with Acland, film has never been (just) film, nor has television ever been (just) television. Thus, while “screen studies” exists as a discipline encompassing both film and television studies, we need an “off-screen studies” to make sense of the wealth of other entities that saturate the media, and that construct film and television.” This is all bs. There needs to be a reset of thinking -> EA!
5
“Within the entertainment industry, it refers to a strategy of multimedia platforming, linking a media product to related media on other “platforms,” such as toys, DVDs, and/or videogames, so that each product advertises and enriches the experience of the other.” Disney’s total advertising or whatever it was called?
7
Definition-storyworld: storyworld = the whole text, not just the film, etc.
“a film or program is but one part of the text, the text always being a contingent entity, either in the process of forming and transforming or vulnerable to further formation or transformation. The text, as Julia Kristeva notes, is not a finished production, but a continuous “productivity.” It is a larger unit than any film or show that may be part of it; it is the entire storyworld as we know it. Our attitudes toward, responses to, and evaluations of this world will always rely upon paratexts too.”
8
“And yet media, film, television, and cultural studies frequently stick solely to the films and television programs with a loyalty born out of habit. John Caldwell notes the film and television industries’ widespread devaluation of “below the line” workers as lesser than the “above the line” directors, producers, writers, and actors. Media studies, too, often risk a similar devaluation of those whose labor and creativity can be just as constitutive of the text as that of the above-the-liners.”
11
“in this book I will argue that paratexts play as much of a role as does the film or television program itself in constructing how different audience members will construct this ideal text.”
22
“While paratexts can at times be seen as annoyances, as “mere” advertising, and/or as only so much hype, they are often as complex and intricate, and as generative of meanings and engagement, as are the films and television shows that they orbit and establish. To limit our understanding of film and television to films and television shows themselves risks drafting an insufficient picture not only of any given text, but also of the processes of production and reception attached to that text. Paratextual study, by contrast, promises a more richly contextualized and nuanced image of how texts work, how and why they are made, and how and why they are watched, interpreted, and enjoyed.”
23
“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.” -> The glue! The glue!
30
“One can hold a roll of film or a tape of a television program, but that is the work alone—the text is only experienced in the act of consumption. However, Barthes defines this act of consumption as one of production because no text can be experienced free of the individual reader. In effect, all of us bring to bear an entire reading and life history to any act of textual consumption, so that each one of us will find different resonances in the same text.”
“Thus, while the work consists of letters on a page or images on a screen, the text comes alive in the interaction between these letters or images and the reader.”
30f
“The magic and majesty of art rely upon the individual spark that occurs between work and reader as the reader participates in the birth of the text.”
32
“Iampolski (echoing Barthes) notes, “only the viewer or reader can unite the text, using his [sic] cultural memory to make it one.””
33
“When a text seemingly has one meaning, to Fish this only means that one interpretive community is dominant, effectively controlling the context of reception, setting the terms by which any reader will approach the text.”
34
“via the pre-existing para-/inter-textual network of Bond, we will always arrive at any new Bond text with a sense of what to expect, and with the interpretation process already well under way.”
40
“Brooker proposes the notion of “overflow,” evoking an image of a text that is too full, too large for its own body, necessitating the spillover of textuality into paratexts. As much as synergy attempts to capture audiences’ attention and bring them to the show, much modern synergy is best understood as offering value-added, rather than simply announcing the show’s presence.” -> EA effectively already exists.
44
“”There is neither a first word nor a last word. The contents of dialogue are without limit. They extend into the deepest past and into the most distant future. Even meanings born in dialogues of the remotest past will never finally be grasped once and for all, for they will always be renewed in later dialogue. At any present moment of the dialogue there are great masses of forgotten meanings, but these will be recalled again at a given moment in the dialogue’s later course when it will be given new life. For nothing is absolutely dead: every meaning will someday have its homecoming festival. The intertextual dialogue and life of texts remains perpetually open.“”
45
“there is never a point in time at which a text frees itself from the contextualizing powers of paratextuality.”
46
As analysts, we might be tempted to think of the paratexts here as mere residue, or a long shadow, of the show, but individual audience members may not care to make the distinction between paratext and show. Precisely because the language of “paratextuality” is absent from everyday talk of film and television, and because the desire to delineate exactly what is and is not “the text” is often an analyst’s alone, not an average audience member’s, frequently we may find that audience talk of and reaction to a text may have originated with the paratext, yet been integrated into the individual audience member’s conception of “the text itself.”” -> EA has already been delivered for a while, from the audiences point of view. Even if producers didn’t see it that way.
“since paratexts have, as I have argued and as the remaining chapters will show, considerable power to amplify, reduce, erase, or add meaning, much of the textuality that exists in the world is paratext-driven.”
50
“the trite opening common to many trailers: “In a world where . . .”” Movies try to establish a storyworld in a very short time. Trailers even quicker.
70
“When we speak of authors, [...] we often speak of what Michel Foucault dubs the “author function”—not a real figure but a projection, “in more or less psychologizing terms, of the operations that we force texts to undergo, the connections that we make, the traits that we establish as pertinent, the continuities that we recognize, or the exclusions that we practice.””
75
“Opening credits help to transport us from the previous textual universe to a new one, or out of “real life” and into the life of the program (even if a growing number of shows are opting for cold starts to throw the viewer right into the action).”
79
“Working in medias res, paratexts also attempt to police proper interpretations, insisting on how they would like us to read the text.” -> If everything advertises everything (Disney’s total merchandising/advertising), every EA chunk is in effect advertising for every other EA chunk, then the entarch is able to convey a more coherent (auteur) message!
86
“The “old sense of broadcast media” they allude to is, I would pose, that of the show-based model. In the “new” model, the text is now dispersed across not only the show, but also its multiple paratexts.”
97
“while Benjamin writes of aura as though it is born with the text, aura must be assigned with paratexts; his concern lies with the degree to which aura and value can be reassigned with different paratexts.”
“while Benjamin focuses on how reproduction can lessen aura, surely we might explore ways in which reproduction might change the text, add context, “tradition,” and “presence,” and thereby increase aura.”
108
“For television in particular, the explosion of websites, the increase in entertainment news magazines and programs, and the advent of DVD bonus materials and podcasting have made executive producers/showrunners considerably more visible than in earlier years of the medium. With this visibility, these individuals are more and more able to add their voice to the audience’s understanding of their products, and thus are increasingly able to construct themselves as authors, televisual counterparts to Peter “Frodo” Jackson.”
-> Entarchs can become stars!
“Barthes’s essay was more of a strategic, rhetorical killing than an actual obituary. He saw the study of texts “tyrannically centred on the author, his [sic] person, his life, his tastes, his passions,” thereby neglecting the fact that “it is language which speaks, not the author; to write is, through a prerequisite impersonality [. . .] to reach a point where only language ‘performs,’ and not ‘me.’””
“Barthes closed his article, “the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author.””
108f
Foucault argues that “it is not enough to declare that we should do without the writer (the author).” People still talk about authors, he notes, not necessarily as real people, but as projections of our hopes, expectations, and established reading strategies for texts. In particular, the author—or “author function,” as Foucault calls it—takes on the role of being classificatory, indicating “a constant level of value,” “a field of conceptual or theoretical coherence,” “a stylistic unity,” and “a historical figure at the crossroads of a certain number of events.”
109
“Playing off this last use for the “author function,” and following from the above discussions of DVDs, aura, and value, we could add that the value function of authorship can more generally lend weight and substance to an entire medium.”
112
Good references/concepts for author-audience-relationship:
- Lotman sees winners and losers.
- Barthes asks for an expected practice of “practical collaboration” of the reader with the text.
113
“we might regard television authors as mediators between the industry and audiences, and the author function as a discursive entity used by the industry to communicate messages about its texts to audiences, by the creative personnel often conflated into the image of the author(s) to communicate their own messages about these texts to audiences, and by audiences to communicate messages both to each other and to the industry.”
-> They turn JJ Abrams, for example into a superstar.
“Paratexts carry these messages, and thus frequently serve as both the words and the content of discussions among text, audience, and industry.”
114
“With more than half of the average foreign film’s domestic box office coming from New York City alone, as Michael Wilmington has noted, the New York Times has “veto power” over a foreign film’s future.”
115
“All shows have paratexts, and all require their paratexts to create frames of value around them, but different genres will favor or disfavor different types of paratextuality.”
117
Definition-paratextuality:
Definition-intertextuality:
“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,” 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.
140
“as was seen with the Six Degrees hype and the American Sweet Hereafter trailer in chapter 2, paratexts can often lead audiences down blind alleys, and should by no means be considered inherently helpful, just as not every clue that detectives find at a crime scene will aid their investigation.”
-> EA elegance versus EA shit!
“paratextuality and intertextuality are not always self-motoring systems.”
-> In EA elegance consumers are led to the next granule. In EA shit consumers are lost.
-> EA helps in achieving this elegance!
141
“once one consults audience discussion, one starts to see both how radically and how subtly it can toggle, dismantle, or revise the careful planning of Hollywood’s textual systems.”
-> That’s because Hollywood does not have an integrated approach like EA. Still, an entarch needs to remember he can only steer so much.
146
“Fan creativity can work as a powerful in medias res paratext, grabbing a story or text in midstream and directing its path elsewhere, or forcing the text to fork outward in multiple directions.”
““A marked or annotated book,” Jackson notes, “traces the development of the reader’s self-definition in and by relation to the text. Perhaps all readers experience this process; annotators keep a log.”” -> If somebody sees my annotations to a book, he knows to some degree how I think.
160
“Fan fiction, writes Coppa, “is community theatre in a mass media world,” a staging and therefore a reading of a text.”
165
“rather than see media firms’ paratexts and fans in competition or contrast, we [academics] should also acknowledge the increasing incidence of media firms creating policed playgrounds for fans, setting up fan sites that invite various forms of fan paratextual creativity and user-generated content, yet often imposing a set of rules and limitations and/ or claiming legal rights over the material.”
166
“a text is always already a collaboratively created entity, and regardless of how media firms rewrite copyright law to give them power of attorney over a text, the only texts incapacitated enough to be ownable are those that have absolutely no social relevance or audience attention.” Fucking A!
174
Definition-storyworld:
“All [spoilers, vids, recaps, wikis, reviews, websites, campaigns, viewing parties, etc.] underline the considerable power of viewer-end paratexts to set or change the terms by which we make sense of film and television, and, hence, to add or subtract depth and breadth to a text and its storyworld.”
177
“Writing in 1992, before the franchise’s proliferation of videogames, and before the second trilogy opened the floodgates for yet more merchandise sales, Stephen Sansweet noted that Star Wars had amassed over $2.5 billion from merchandise alone.”
187
“Buoyed by the invitations of licensed toys and other childhood merchandising, film and television narratives are open for business—or, rather, for play—and have been for many years, whether media firms and their legal teams like it or not. Paratexts have extended this invitation to play, as they have contributed to the text with their own suggested meanings, and have offered consumers opportunities to contribute further to the text themselves.”
192
According to Linda Hutcheon, “the process of adaptation frequently moves a story across different modes, opening up new possibilities for both the storyteller(s) and the audiences. In particular, she notes three modes of narratives:
- telling, as in novels, which immerse us “through imagination in a fictional world”;
- showing, as in plays and films, which immerse us “through the perception of the aural and the visual”;
- and participatory, as in videogames, which immerse us “physically and kinesthetically.”
Thus, a videogame adaptation—or at least a good one—is not merely an attempt to rehash or to copy; it moves the story, its world, and its audience to a different narrative mode, wherein the audience can step into (parts of) the storyworld.”
196
“Allowing fans, and giving room to play, is often of vital importance, but requiring that all viewers be fans is an immodest and potentially destructive move, even for sequels of cult properties such as The Matrix.”
202
“the What Happened in Piedmont? puppetmasters regularly received posts from readers who clearly did not understand that this was fictional, and from many others whose in-frame postings made it unclear whether they believed in the conspiracy or were simply playing along.”
205
“this chapter has argued that for some viewers, the text is at its most interesting, engaging, and/or meaningful at the outskirts.” -> The glue! The glue!
“Engaging with any form of entertainment, particularly of a fictional nature, is a form of play, and thus texts are essentially spaces for play and the reflection it inspires.” -> Has play also always been part of entertainment, just like story?
206
“some film and television franchises have embraced the creative and contributive capacities of paratexts and have moved toward a model of media creation that works across media, networking various platforms, styles, and even textual addresses to fashion a more developed text.”
207
3 key tasks for entarchs:
- “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.” -> Opportunity for EA!
“While I argue for the creative potential that is fostered by streamlining shows and their paratexts, and while I am critical of some instances when show and paratext work independently, by no means do I wish to suggest that all texts should reign in their paratexts. At times, the push and pull between different meanings among paratexts or between the show and a paratext will be responsible for some of the text’s vitality.”
208
There are “what we might call textually “incorporated” and “unincorporated” paratexts.”
208-210
He mentions unincorporated paratexts as a pizza branded as The Dark Knight. A branded pizza paratext might be incorporated in the case of Spider-Man or Ninja Turtles.
-> But all things that cannot be controlled, like people talking at the water cooler, are unincorporated paratexts too!!! Right?
210
“By contrast, this book has also presented numerous cases of paratexts that were “incorporated,” adding to the storyworld and allowing viewers chances to explore that world further or even to contribute to it.”
211
“some in Hollywood have started to call [EA] “360 degree” storytelling”
214
New understanding/role of marketing, it becomes part of the story:
“both producers and audiences are encouraged to look upon the paratexts as far more than just a marketing tool, though they may well be that as well. Rather, they are invited to incorporate the paratext into their text, and to see the creation of that paratext as part of the act of creating the text in general.”
“paratexts have significant value, in and of themselves, but also as components of larger units of entertainment.”
215
Definition-showrunner:
“showrunners of complex, transmediated shows such as Heroes or Lost try to coordinate and incorporate various paratexts into the grand narrative”
216
He uses “bible” in reference to the Simpsons.
“Clearly, for licensed games to work, film and television creators need to get more involved, and they need to allow game designers more freedom and more information, inviting them into the creative process of the text as a whole, while not abdicating as much of the narrative foundations to the games as did The Matrix.” -> Don’t be so normative.
217
“Heroes had a dedicated transmedia team (called this, too, following the team’s interest in Henry Jenkins’s work and use of the term “transmedia”).”
218
“While Alexander, Warshaw, and Andrade were all polite in not naming names or expanding upon other less-rewarding experiences, all three clearly felt that a commitment to transmedia must come from above.” Fucking A!
“”No one knew if it was marketing or content yet. No one knew a lot of the answers. So there were growing pains during this discovery phase. We had to figure it out along the way. When I was hired on “Heroes,” the transmedia storytelling concept was pretty foreign to the studio, network, and some parts of the show. New structures had to be built and ways of doing business defined. They literally created a transmedia production manual. Now there are templates.“” -> INTERVIEW!!!
“Andrade offered a telling metaphor in speaking of transmedia as a “three-legged stool,”:
- promoting the show while
- serving as both a vehicle for ads and a
- site for story development.
Transmedia’s success and commercial viability, he argued, relies on all three legs being strong.”
219
“Film and television have always been collaborative media, but the small, elite club of “above the line” creators may need to open its doors if its members are dedicated to integrating paratexts seamlessly and intelligently. A common complaint from transmedia creators—and one that is evident in many a paratext—is that the network or studio allowed little or no real collaboration or discussion between paratext creators and the film’s director or the television program’s writing staff.”
220
“Everything’s a jumpball right now, with all of us [media corporations] trying to invest in everything,” until the picture of transmedia’s future becomes clear. To this end, and working together, Alexander and Matt Wolf are floating the idea of creating a storyworld that precedes any of its given media iterations, rather than follow the current status quo of letting the transmedia follow the individual show.”
“All of the paid paratext creators to whom I spoke talked of fan involvement with their shows with considerable passion and enthusiasm, with Alexander stating that it shouldn’t just be the writers “who get to have all the fun, the fans should get to have fun as well.” But surely not all fan practices are equal in all creators’ eyes, and production ethnographies and histories would undoubtedly uncover the areas of tension better than have my own questions.”
221
“In the DNA”
“As paratexts, convergence, and overflow increasingly bring texts together, however, and as it therefore becomes increasingly difficult to study any one medium in isolation, paratextual study will become all the more important and all the more helpful, and paratextual creation will similarly become all the more vital for any would-be successful text or franchise.”