in the act of reading, and both he and Fish point to the active nature of texts—they are experiences, not just monuments, and so our interpretation of a text must occur as itself an experience, not in a lightning-strike moment of sense-making.
For television series in particular, the ramifications of a phenomenological approach to interpretation are profound.48 Many shows take years to play out from supposed start to finish, and thus the televisual equivalent of the moment between pages in a book may be a week between episodes, or a summer hiatus. However, it would be ludicrous to think that we simply tuck away our interpretive efforts into small corners of our brains, waiting until after the series finale to make sense of a text. Rather, we constantly interpret as we go along. Furthermore, television shows give us significant time between episodes to interpret them, and so we will often make sense of them away from the work itself, in the moments between exhibition. As we have seen, though, these moments, or what Iser would call “gaps,” are often filled with paratexts: as Brooker’s narrative above illustrates, we might go online and read others’ opinions of a show, we might consume tie-in merchandise, or we might consume any number of other paratexts.49 Consequently, just as paratexts can inflect our interpretations of texts as we enter them, so too can they inflect our re-entry to television texts. For texts that destabilize any one media platform as central, each platform serves as a paratext for the others. Since our process of textual “actualization” remains open with most television series, paratexts are free to invade the meaning-making process. Especially, too, since many serial programs leave us wondering what will happen next, frustrating the narrative delivery system by dragging it out over multiple years, many viewers will actively look for clues in producers’ paratexts regarding what will happen next. Of course, a similar process occurs in serial films, so that, for instance, Brooker charts the debates and discussions among Star Wars fans about the films’ many paratexts (games, novels, comics, etc.) as to what entails the “canon,” or the accepted Star Wars universe.50
With an increasing number of television and film serial texts opening up what Matt Hills dubs “endlessly deferred hyperdiegesis”51—huge, seemingly never-ending plotlines—and set in elaborate textual universes, we might expect both the frustrations of wanting to know what will happen, and the experience of a text as comprising much more than just the show, to increase markedly. Such cult texts invite their viewers in and give their imaginations acres of space in which to roam, and it is this openness that often proves most attractive to many viewers. Thus, these texts seemingly welcome in all manner of other texts and paratexts to delineate small portions of the universe, plotline, thematics, and characterization.
Arguably the most clear-cut example of an in medias res paratext at work is the “last week on . . .” or “previously on . . .” segments that precede many television serials. Such segments usually consist of a carefully edited fifteen- to thirty-second sequence of images and plot-points from previous episodes, designed to give audiences necessary backstory. For new viewers, these segments clearly serve as entryway paratexts, but they also act as reminders for returning viewers, designed to focus attention on specific actions, themes, or issues. Thus, for instance, if two characters are best friends, and yet five weeks ago we learned that one has betrayed the other, the “previously on . . .” segment will likely replay the moment of revelation only if this information is seen as pertinent to the current episode. Should the betrayed friend return the betrayal in this episode, the absence of a “previously on . . .” tip-off may result in us judging him negatively, whereas with the tip-off, we are more likely to understand or even forgive his actions. Beyond “previously on . . .” segments, though, all in medias res paratexts work in a similar way, offering frames through which we can interpret the text at hand, and subtly or radically inflecting our reading accordingly. In effect, they build themselves into the text, becoming inseparable from it, buoys floating in the overflow of a serial text that direct our passage through that text.
Serial television programs and films are not unique in being vulnerable to paratextual influence. Rather, all films and television programs can be jostled by paratexts, whether we have “finished” reading them or not. As is especially evident in the case of serial television texts, each of us carries with us thousands of open texts that can be re-decoded and re-inflected at any point in their progression, whether this be one episode into a three-hundred-episode run or fifty years following the watching of a film. Of the latter instance, Annette Kuhn’s work with “enduring fans” of 1930s films is illustrative. Kuhn interviewed numerous women in their seventies who still enjoyed watching and talking about the films and stars of their twenties, and who still found new meanings in them. She argues, “For the enduring fan, the cinema-going past is no foreign country but something continuously reproduced as a vital aspect of daily life in the present.” As these women grew older, watched different films, and gained new experiences, they were able to return to their beloved texts with new interpretive strategies or nuances, hence keeping the texts alive and active for decades. “As the text is appropriated and used by enduring fans, further layers of inter-textual and extra-textual memory-meaning continuously accrue.”52
Since intertextuality works by placing the text at hand into a conversation with previously viewed texts, not only will earlier-viewed texts be able to talk to a current text—the current text will also be able to talk back to earlier texts. We may well find, then, that many years, months, days, or minutes after we thought we had finished with a text, it is once more active, and we are once more consuming, decoding, and making sense of it. Such is the case with, for instance, many texts that we watched as children rather naïvely, only to learn of deeper nuances later in life, and such is potentially the case with any text that we find reason to think about, rewatch, or reference “after” consumption. As Mikhail Bakhtin ended his last-known article, in words poetically befitting the close of the great intertextual theorist’s career:
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.53 The intertextual dialogue and life of texts remains perpetually open.
If the notion of a paratext changing our understanding of a text “after the fact” sounds odd, we might think again of the analogy of product branding. Throughout their lifespan, many prominent brands have engaged in rebranding attempts, so that, for instance, McDonalds’ move from their “You Deserve a Break Today” campaign to their current “I’m Lovin’ It” campaign toggles the brand’s semiotics without any discernible change in the product whatsoever: the paratext of the campaign has aimed to change the text of McDonalds. Or, for another analogy, we might think of the construction and telling of history, wherein despite the seeming immutability of a past event, each retelling of the story can ascribe different symbolic value to it. Even the day after an event, one will often find stark differences in how that event is reported and framed from, say, CNN to Fox News to Daily Kos to a non-American source. “Anniversary journalism” will later, in all likelihood, assign new meaning to the event,54 and with the benefit of hindsight, history books in years to come may reframe the event yet again: “every meaning will someday have its homecoming festival.” In other words, each invocation of a moment in history can paratextually rewrite the text of the event, since, at the moment of the telling, the “text” is only accessible through the “paratext.” The Onion humorously illustrates this process of the infinite reassigning of value in a parodic article about the sinking of the Titanic, entitled “World’s Largest Metaphor Sinks,”55 tipping its hat to the endless narrativizations of exactly what the ship and its sinking (the “text”) represented that have proliferated since the fateful event.
With texts alive interminably, forever open to toggling, paratexts may always work in medias res. Especially thoughtful reviews may cause us to reflect once more upon an already-seen film or television program; academic articles and close readings may open