the binary of paratext and film or program, forcing us to wonder exactly what is “primary” or “the original” and what is “secondary” or “peripheral.” Star Wars action figures feature first, as I examine their significant imprint and impact on the films, and on both public and fan understandings of them. Whereas cultural critics have long seen licensed toys as a particularly egregious instance of mindless and manipulative consumerism, I argue that the toys became a viable source of the text, framing and intensifying many of the film’s themes, while also allowing the Star Wars universe to be inhabitable. This concern with making storyworlds accessible and inhabitable then extends into a discussion of various forms of film- or television show–related games that allow players into a text to explore, sample, and/or create parts of the storyworld interactively. In particular, I explore licensed videogames that place the player in control of an avatar situated in the storyworld, enabling a limited set of interactions with characters and places within the broader text. I also examine an increasingly popular form of game, the alternate reality game (ARG), focusing on the What Happened in Piedmont? ARG that preceded the broadcast of A&E’s Andromeda Strain (2008), and that opened up significant room for audiences to learn about, engage with, and “taste” the storyworld independent of the mini-series.
Finally, since the book argues that paratexts create texts, in the Conclusion I discuss examples of the entertainment industry ignoring this logic and producing facile paratexts of little to no value or intelligence, or, alternately, embracing this logic and surrendering parts of their texts to their paratexts, often producing fascinating and significant results. Drawing from numerous interviews with paratext creators, conducted by myself and others, I briefly address the practical issue of how film and television creators can more meaningfully integrate paratexts into the storytelling and production process. To be of value or impact, and to be worthy of close study, paratexts need not be integrated, but by ending with a discussion of integration, I hope to highlight several key issues involved in the production and study of paratexts and their worlds.
Ultimately, through the book’s multiple examples and through its theoretical wrestling with concepts of paratextuality and textuality, I hope to illustrate how vibrant and vital a contribution to meaning-making and the development of storyworlds paratexts offer us. 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.
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From Spoilers to Spinoffs
A Theory of Paratexts
Paratexts surround texts, audiences, and industry, as organic and naturally occurring a part of our mediated environment as are movies and television themselves. 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. Thus, paratexts’ relationship to industry and audience is most obvious. However, the secret to understanding paratexts lies in working out their relationship to textuality: What is the paratext in relationship to the text? How does it contribute to the process of making meaning? And how does it energize, contextualize, or otherwise modify textuality? This chapter attempts to answer these questions by presenting a theory of paratextuality. To do so, first we must examine the nature of this relationship. I will then offer a definition of textuality that accounts for the paratextual, examining multiple instances of paratexts at work in the interpretive trenches. In particular, I will distinguish between paratexts that grab the viewer before he or she reaches the text and try to control the viewer’s entrance to the text (“entryway paratexts”), and paratexts that flow between the gaps of textual exhibition, or that come to us “during” or “after” viewing, working to police certain reading strategies in medias res (“in medias res paratexts”).
Watching on a Hope and a Prayer
Let us begin by asking how one makes sense of a text. A simple question, this has nevertheless challenged artists, scholars, politicians, and everyday readers for centuries and has yet to yield anything close to a simple answer. Throughout humankind’s long history of debates over what and how texts mean, and hence what they “do” to us and what we can “do” to them, the most common method of analyzing a text has been close reading. The intuitive purchase behind such a method is obvious: if you want to understand a finely crafted machine, you look at it and take it apart; so it would seem that if you want to understand a book, a film, or a television program, you could similarly look at it and take it apart. However, especially if we care about social meanings and uses—what place a text has in society—close reading does not suffice. Whether of machines or texts, close reading fails to reveal vital aspects of the object under analysis. In particular, just as taking apart a machine would not necessarily explain why a given person chose that machine over another tool or machine, close reading may tell us little about how a viewer arrived at a text. Why view this program, or this film, as opposed to the many thousands of other options?
Sometimes our consumption choices are motivated by previous consumption: “I loved it the first time, so let’s watch it again.” Thus, in such cases, the issue of context may seem rather trivial. But a great deal of our textual consumption instead involves new texts. When faced with a multiplex full of unwatched movies, or an extended cable television package full of unwatched shows, one must engage in speculative consumption, creating an idea of what pleasures any one text will provide, what information it will offer, what “effect” it will have on us, and so forth. As such, with all the hype that surrounds us, announcing texts from subway cars, website margins, or highway roadsides, we can spend a surprisingly large portion of our everyday life speculatively consuming new texts. Especially with film, as Thomas Elsaesser notes, buying a movie ticket is an “act of faith,” in which we pay for “not the product itself and not even for the commodified experience that it represents, but simply for the possibility that such a transubstantiation of experience into commodity might ‘take place.’”1 If we do not like the film, we cannot get our money back, since we paid for the chance of entertainment, not necessarily for actual entertainment. Even watching television, though sometimes less deliberative an experience than going out to the movies, still requires an investment of time, and amidst channel-surfing, many of our decisions to watch are still based on prior speculative consumption, and hence on the hope, the possibility, of transubstantiation. Or, as Roger Silverstone notes, “We are drawn to these otherwise mundane and trivial texts and performances by a transcendent hope, a hope and a desire that something will touch us.”2 Much of the business of media, in both economic and hermeneutic terms, then, is conducted before watching, when hopes, expectations, worries, concerns, and desires coalesce to offer us images and scripts of what a text might be.
Synergy, paratexts, and intertexts are responsible for much of this faith in transubstantiation—the high priests of and for much of the textuality that allows speculative consumption. To choose to watch a movie, for instance, we may factor in any of the following: the actors, the production personnel, the quality of the previews, reviews, interviews, the poster, a marketing campaign, word of mouth, what cinema it is playing at (or what channel it is on), or the material on which it is based (whether prequel, sequel, or adaptation). All of these are texts in their own right, often meticulously constructed by their producers in order to offer certain meanings and interpretations. Thus, in effect, it is these texts that create and manage our faith, and we consume them on our way to consuming the “film itself.”
Gerard