texts as within them, arguing that “we need to look outside of texts to locate the range of sites in which genres operate, change, proliferate, and die out.”28 Mittell therefore charts how advertising, policy, patterns of exhibition, public talk, and so forth all position a genre, as do “trade press coverage, popular press coverage, critical reviews, promotional material, other cultural representations and commodities (like merchandise, media tie-ins, and parodies), corporate and personal documents, production manuals, legal and government materials, audience remnants, and oral histories.”29 For instance, he notes that cartoons began their televisual life as texts that appealed to adults too; however, over time, public discourse surrounding cartoons penned them into a kids-only category that, although challenged by texts such as The Simpsons, still inflects how many people react to and consume cartoons. Elsewhere in his book, he charts how audience talk about talk shows delimits their boundaries in popular culture, especially since much of this talk originates from those who do not watch talk shows, or who watch small amounts, and is therefore not simply reactive to “the show itself.” Genre serves an important duty in the interpretive process, of course, because it acts much as I have said paratexts do, by providing an initial context and reading strategy for the text—so that, for instance, if we see cartoons as a children’s genre, we will be more startled by crude adult humor in a cartoon than in a Judd Apatow comedy. But Mittell shows that paratexts play a considerable role in establishing genre, and hence that they control our interactions with and interpretations of texts. If genres are, as Stephen Neale notes, “systems of orientations, expectations and conventions that circulate between industry, text and subject,”30 paratexts form much of this realm of the “between,” a realm through which we must travel in order to consume and make sense of a text.
Paratexts can also be seen to establish themselves around the interpretive perimeter of an entire medium. Highly illustrative here is Lynn Spigel’s examination of the role that women’s magazines played in establishing attitudes toward television in its early days. Spigel shows how ads and columns in magazines such as Better Homes and Gardens, American Home, and House Beautiful acted as arbiters of taste with regards to television’s place in the home.31 Not only would they dictate where one should place one’s television, but what one should be careful of and how one should use it. Manufacturers proposed that the television was a new member of the family, and these magazine paratexts offered instruction on how we should treat this relative. Certainly such lessons and moral guidelines remain prevalent today, as all media are surrounded by cautionary tales, “Best of” lists, enthusiastic ads, published effects studies, and a whole host of other paratexts that aim to delineate how we should or should not use such media. Whether these take the form of ads for home entertainment systems that encourage us to create a home fortress based around our televisions,32 or whether they take the form of conservative commentary on the liberal, immoral, anti–family values narratives that supposedly pervade film and television, paratexts draw many of the battle lines that surround media consumption. Beyond instruction on how to consume a given text or genre, they at least attempt to create entire interpretive communities and hermeneutic recipes for daily living in a media-saturated world.
As in the case of parody, some paratexts work as critical intertexts, actively trying either to deflect readers from certain texts or to infect their reading when it occurs. Reviews from journalists and/or religious or political figures are often obvious examples of critical paratexts. Martin Barker, Jane Arthurs, and Ramaswami Harindranth, for instance, chart the effect that British moral panic regarding David Cronenberg’s Crash (1996) had on viewers.33 Cronenberg’s film focuses on a group of individuals who become sexually aroused by car crashes, and when news of the film broke in England, several prominent politicians and newspaper columnists campaigned for it to be banned, thinking it perverse and dangerous. Interestingly, many of those who fought for a ban never watched the film; rather, they allowed the paratext of a small plot summary and/or descriptions of individual scenes to stand in for the text as a whole. But as Barker, Arthurs, and Harindranath show through careful qualitative audience research, the media circus that surrounded the text worked as its own critical paratextuality, inflecting the reading of the text for those who did watch it. Many of the research participants found it hard to look beyond the critical paratextuality, or to find alternative frames for viewing, to the point that the media circus and paratextuality virtually took over the text for many viewers. Even those who refused to precode the film as depraved often wanted to watch the film just to see what all the fuss was about, and hence still with a firm, controlled interest in the violent, sexual content. As the authors write of such a viewing position, “to go to see Crash to check if it is ‘violent’ or ‘sensationalist’ is not like looking to see if there is water in the kettle. It importantly prefigures how [viewers] prepare to watch it.”34 Similarly, we might observe that following the controversy regarding Passion of the Christ in the United States, few viewers could watch it without particular attention drawn to whether it was anti-Semitic or not, or a devotional text or not, following the critical paratextuality that, respectively, the Anti-Defamation League and prominent church figures threw around the text. Or, as Janet Staiger observes, given reviews and commentary on D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915), few viewers can approach it expecting anything other than racist propaganda;35 due to critical paratextuality, its racism has almost subsumed the text before one can even watch it.
Paratexts can also inflect certain parts of a media text or certain characters. David Buckingham notes, for instance, how the knowledge of an East Enders (1985–) cast member’s past criminal record hit the press in England. The actor played a villain on the show, but knowledge of his life behind bars contributed to the tabloid press naming him “Dirty Den” and to their construction of him as a folk devil. For any viewer aware of the press commentary, Den’s villainy was potentially amplified and made to seem all the more realistic and authentic.36 As C. Lee Harrington and Denise Bielby insist, the daytime press has long played an important role for soap operas. Soap opera magazines and news frequently announce storylines before they occur, sometimes testing the waters for fan reactions, or allowing viewers to “catch up” on what they missed. Moreover, “by rendering the subculture [of soap fandom] visible and accessible both to itself and to outsiders, the daytime press contributes in important ways to defining the boundaries of the subculture and to managing those boundaries,”37 hence playing a key role in the construction of interpretive communities for soap viewing. In such instances, paratexts can amplify and/or clarify many of a text’s meanings and uses, establishing the role that a text and its characters play outside the boundaries of the show, in the everyday realities of viewers’ and non-viewers’ lives.
Soap magazines may direct criticism toward texts, but they also provide an example of what we could call supportive intertextuality. As innovative and as semiotically active as parody and criticism may be, many paratexts reinforce a text’s meaning or otherwise set up a welcoming perimeter. Here we reach the realm proper of hype and synergy. To take the average animated Disney film, for instance, before release, the film has usually been preceded by an army of plush toys, coloring books, watches, bedspreads, and action figures. It will likely have been advertised during a hit Saturday-morning kids’ show, and McDonalds or some other fast food company will have released a specially themed “Happy Meal.” Thus, the movie suggests fun and good things to children—it is associated with cuddly toys, playtime, good television shows, and sugary food. Meanwhile, of course, the average Disney marketing campaign so heavily populates the kid universe with film-related merchandise that any given child could understandably feel as though “everyone” is watching the film. Ultimately, then, when it works, Disney paratextuality creates a well-fashioned image of all that the film represents, and it exhorts the child to watch the film. Writing of such instances, Robert Allen states that “a film is no longer reducible to the actual experience of seeing it”—as if it ever was!—as this paratextuality not only precedes the act of watching, but feeds into, conditions, and becomes part of that act. The toys, burgers, and so on are now part of the text. Allen even suggests that in such a paratextual/synergistic marketplace, films are often no longer the text in the first place, but rather “the inedible part of a Happy Meal” and the “movie on the lunchbox.”38 When Disney might make several hundred dollars’ worth of product sales off