first being those that we encounter before watching a film or television program, the latter those that come to us in the process of watching or at least interpreting the film or program. All successive chapters examine a few central case studies, so that the depths of paratexts’ meanings, and of audiences’ interactions with them, can be examined up close. However, throughout chapter 1, in order to set up exactly why paratextual study might be necessary in the first place, I offer a wide variety of examples from film and television and from existing scholarship that further excavates the importance of paratexts.
Chapter 2 offers several examples of how paratexts work as gateways into the text, establishing meanings and frames for decoding before the audience member has even encountered the film or television program. The iconic examples here are movie posters, trailers, and advertising campaigns that surround films and television programs, not only encouraging us to watch the shows, but also establishing the frames through which we “should” interpret and enjoy the shows. Through examining first several movie posters, and then the promotional campaign in New York City for ABC’s Six Degrees (2006–7) and its official website, I argue that hype can determine genre, gender, theme, style, and relevant intertexts, thereby in part creating the show as a meaningful entity for “viewers” even before they become viewers, or even if they never become viewers. I then turn to trailers, examining the starkly different trailers for Atom Egoyan’s film The Sweet Hereafter (1997)—one American, one Canadian—and arguing that the difference resulted in the sale of, effectively, two different films. Finally, I maintain an interest in paratexts’ abilities to create “proper interpretations” that audience members are encouraged to adopt, by discussing television opening credit sequences and their roles as both mini-trailers for new viewers and ritualistic anthems for returning viewers. Ultimately, chapter 2 takes several examples of producer-created paratexts to study the degree to which producers can proffer interpretations and readings of their texts even before they begin.
If chapter 2 is about how paratexts create meaning for texts, chapter 3 is about how they create scripts of value for them. In particular, the chapter examines how author, aura, and artistry—all qualities often said to be lacking in the age of big-budget blockbusters and for-profit art—are hailed and awarded to texts by their paratexts. I begin by examining how reality makeover shows’ promise to serve society is given weight by their webpages’ attempts to code them as philanthropic, community-generating programs with considerable civic value. Much of the rest of the chapter examines the particularly important role that DVDs play in giving value to fictional texts through their bonus materials such as commentary tracks, making-of documentaries, special effects galleries, and alternate scenes. I turn to the prominent example of the Platinum Series Special Extended Edition DVDs of The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, a four-disc set replete with various bonus materials. I argue that these materials richly layer the text, paralleling the cast and crew’s travails in making the film to the epic campaign against the ultimate evil depicted in the tale. As a result of these materials, the DVDs posit the film as above the mundane products of a commercial industry, and as a crowning aesthetic achievement that represents an “older,” nobler form of art. Part and parcel of this process, too, is the lionization of Peter Jackson, the film’s director. Thus, I will also examine the role of DVDs, both The Two Towers and numerous DVDs for television shows, and of podcasts and other sources of authorial interviews, in attempting to resurrect the figure of the author that literary and cultural studies theory has long thought dead. My argument is not that television or film have improved with DVDs and podcasts, but rather that the DVDs and podcasts repeatedly insist that their shows are better, becoming a key site for the construction of discourses of value.
Chapter 4 focuses both on how paratexts manage a broader system of intertextuality and on how grouped, sequenced, or otherwise related films and television programs can become paratexts themselves, their decoding processes so intricately intertwined with those of their related films or television programs that we might regard them as occurring under the long shadow of former texts. My first case study draws on work conducted with Bertha Chin into online would-be audiences’ reactions to the Lord of the Rings films before they had even been made. Chin and I found not only enthusiastic discussion of the films, but actual early interpretation and evaluation of them, and thus this case study examines the degree to which their proposed frames for making sense of the films had been inherited from the Lord of the Rings books by J. R. R. Tolkien, and how audience discussion managed this system. Continuing the story, I then look at how the Lord of the Rings films, after release, became their own paratexts for would-be viewers of Peter Jackson’s next outing, King Kong (2005), and for the adaptation of C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (2005). Next I turn to Batman Begins (2005) to see how the film’s plot and casting seem to have been guided in large part by an awareness of the dark shadow cast over the Batman franchise by the previous Batman film and cinematic atrocity, Batman and Robin (1997). Finally, I turn from films as paratexts to the author as paratext, examining online postings from the early days of television producer J. J. Abrams’s Lost and Six Degrees that suggested fans were using Abrams’s previous work and their constructions of him as artist to make sense of and predict plot threads in his new work. Through these various examples, chapter 4 aims to analyze how dependent all interpretation is on various other films and television programs, on audiences’ varying levels of familiarity with those films and programs, and on how the paratext of audience discussion circulates and coordinates intertexts.
Chapters 2, 3, and 4 all take products of the entertainment industry as their topic. Given Hollywood’s huge coffers, its intense need to make each of its films and programs stand out in a media-saturated environment, and its success in turning many paratexts into revenue-generators, a large proportion of the paratextual world is commissioned into existence by Hollywood. However, it would be a grave mistake to consider audience-created paratexts as lesser in potential importance or complexity. Thus chapter 5 studies numerous examples of audience-created paratexts. Much has been written elsewhere on how fan fiction and mash-ups can be used to contest the “official” meanings proffered by Hollywood, but the chapter’s first two case studies instead examine how paratexts can be used to intensify certain textual experiences, less working against the industry’s version of the text than cutting a personalized path through it. First, I draw on work conducted with Jason Mittell into Lost fans’ consumption of spoilers (advance information of what will happen in the plot) to study how this consumption shows a move away from the strict plot-based mode of engaging with Lost and toward a more puzzle-, character-, and/or experiential-based mode. Second, I examine “vids,” fan-made videos that splice and edit together multiple scenes from a film or television program with a piece of music. While, again, vids have been studied within the framework of fan rebellion and critique, this section instead concentrates on how character-study and relationship vids can be used to examine a particular character’s or theme’s path through an otherwise busy film or program, thereby allowing time for the viewer to pause and reflect. Finally, I turn to press reviews as audience-made paratexts that do battle with Hollywood’s own paratexts, usually before the film or television program has even aired, and I focus particularly on reviews of NBC’s Friday Night Lights (2006–) as an example of a show whose reviewers engaged in a concerted effort to reframe NBC’s own publicity for the show. This final example grows from a discussion of the ways in which various audiences have differing levels of power and privilege to frame or reframe films or programs.
Many of the book’s examples are of paratexts that have been appended to a text, either before or after the fact, but in