Allen is hyperbolically fatalistic in declaring that cinema has died and that “it is now time to write the last chapter of the history of Hollywood cinema and its audience,”39 but the Disney hype and synergy machine nevertheless illustrates the increasingly hazy boundaries between primary and secondary textuality, or between text and paratext, boundaries that we will return to in chapter 6.
Disney is quite exceptional in the degree to which its paratexts fill stores and lives, but many other companies have followed its lead, resulting in the heavy population of the world with paratexts. Quite simply, in a cluttered media environment, all texts need paratexts, if only to announce the text’s presence. Thus, media corporations are investing ever more time, energy, and capital into producing previews and spinoff merchandise, into public relations tours that get their cast and crew on anything from Entertainment Tonight (1981–) to The Late Show with David Letterman (1993–) to guest appearances on reality shows, into creative marketing campaigns (such as when Lost announced its forthcoming arrival on television by covering a beach with ads in bottles), into inviting the press to preview screenings, into plugging their texts for Oscars, Golden Globes, or Emmys, and into various other traditional and non-traditional forms of hype and synergy. Paratextuality is a vital part of the media business, precisely because paratexts play the key role in determining if a text will sink or swim. The public, the press, and the industry regularly evaluate movies based on opening weekend box office draw alone, for, as Tad Friend notes, “If a film doesn’t find its audience the first weekend, exhibitors pull it from their best theatres, and eventual television-licensing fees and DVD sales fall correspondingly.”40 Many network heads, too, will cancel a new television show after only two episodes. As such, the industry desperately needs its paratexts to work, since both industry and audiences habitually count on paratexts’ relative success or failure as an index to the success or failure of the text as a whole. Moreover, while paratexts have surrounded all media throughout history, as Hollywood grows fonder of franchises and multi-platform brands or characters, yet more paratexts are being produced. Simultaneously, though, with all sorts of random paratextual or intertextual collisions threatening the encoded meanings of texts, and with devious and critical paratexts or intertexts working to hijack their meaning-making processes, the industry requires a strong frontline of paratexts. A continuing question for this book, therefore, will be the degree to which paratexts overtake and subsume their texts, and the conditions under which they do so.
“We Interrupt This Broadcast”: Paratexts In Medias Res
Paratexts do not merely control our entrance to texts, and thus as much as Genette’s metaphor of paratexts as airlocks is evocative of some of their functions, its utility is limited. After all, many paratexts are encountered after “entering” the text. For instance, using the term and metaphor of “overflow,” Will Brooker writes of how numerous contemporary television series are accompanied by clothing lines, websites, CDs, and fan discussion forums. Speaking of his own interaction with one such series, the short-lived BBC program Attachments (2000–2002), he writes:
After watching the episode where Soph is punished by her boss for her article “Hell is Other People Shagging,” I went to the seethru.co.uk website, which treats Soph and her colleagues as “real” people, with no mention of BBC2 or Attachments. On the front page I was able to read the full article, which could only be glimpsed in the actual episode. I then took part in a quiz compiled by Reece, the series’ womanizing programmer, and sent a semi-ironic mail to the character pointing out that he’d misspelled a Star Wars reference.41
He goes on to ask: “At what point, then, did the show ‘end’ for me? Technically, I stopped watching television at 9.45 pm, but I was engaging with the characters and narrative of the show for at least an hour afterwards, even to the point of sending a mail to a non-existent programmer.”42 As such, 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. Brooker points to the notable example of Dawson’s Creek (1998–2003), which while in active production had an elaborate official website via which viewers could navigate to the title character’s computer desktop (even reading his email) and that linked to a website for the show’s fictional university. American Eagle and J. Crew sold clothes worn by the cast. Each episode ended with information on how to buy the music played throughout the episode. And fan discussion forums ran 24/7, allowing critical, laudatory, or other talk by viewers.
Dawson’s Creek led the way at the time but has since been eclipsed by shows such as Lost with alternate reality games, podcasts, spinoff novels written by characters from the show, and “mobisode” mini-episodes filmed for mobile phone or Internet distribution, for instance, by Heroes (2006–), with a supplementary online comic book and other transmedia initiatives (see chapter 6), and by countless other shows’ variously innovative or derivative “overflow” techniques. And while Brooker’s metaphor of “overflow” might suggest a movement away from “the show itself,” Henry Jenkins refers to such multi-platformed media texts as “convergence,” suggesting a grand confluence of media texts and platforms under the broad heading of the single text. Jenkins’s recent book, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, charts the proliferation of many such franchised, convergent texts. For instance, he examines how The Matrix (1999) gave birth not only to two sequels, but to anime spinoffs (collected in the DVD The Animatrix [2003]), comic books, and a videogame that were authored either in part by or in coordination with the Wachowskis, so that the Matrix narrative weaved through various platforms. Meanwhile, fans create their own paratexts, writing fan fiction, making fan songs and films, and, as Jenkins notes, even staging fully costumed reenactments of scenes from The Matrix and other media texts in certain Japanese parks.43
Rather than choose between metaphors of “overflow” or “convergence,” I find the ebb and flow suggested by employing both terms indicative of the multiple ways in which many media texts are now both moving outward yet incorporating other texts inward, being authored across media. Between the outward overflow and inward convergence of paratextuality, we see the beating heart of the text.
What, though, are we to make of such paratexts presented in medias res, and what control do they have over the text? To answer this, we must move away from questions of textual ontology—what is the text?—to questions of textual phenomenology—how does the text happen? In particular, we can turn to the textual theory of Wolfgang Iser and to Stanley Fish’s “Affective Stylistics” period that preceded his above-mentioned theoretical excesses. Both writers insisted on the importance of studying a text as it happens, from sentence to sentence, page to page. Fish argued that we as analysts too often interpret the text as a whole, hence forgetting how it developed and took form in the act of reading.44 He wrote of literature as “kinetic,” in that it moves, and “does not lend itself to a static interpretation because it refuses to stay still and doesn’t let you stay still either.” He further reasoned that readers respond not only to a finished utterance, but rather to the “temporal flow” of a text: “That is, in an utterance of any length, there is a point at which the reader has taken in only the first word, and then the second, and then the third, and so on, and the report of what happens to the reader is always a report of what has happened to that point” (emphasis added).45 Iser too was interested in how sequent sentences act upon one another, and in how texts leave “gaps” between sentences and ideas that readers must fill in, producing an ebb and flow (a beating heart?) of anticipation, retrospection, and accumulation, an “experience [that] comes about through a process of continual modification.”46 “Every moment of reading,” he notes, “is a dialectic of protension and retention, conveying a future horizon yet to be occupied, along with a past (and continually fading) horizon already filled; the wandering viewpoint carves its passage through both