The Frodo Franchise: An Interview with Kristin Thompson (Part Two)

Yesterday, I began a three part interview with Kristin Thompson, noted film scholar and author of the new book, The Frodo Franchise: Lord of the Rings and Modern Hollywood. For those of you who would like to learn more about Thompson and her work, here are some relevent links:

The publisher's website about the book.

Observations on Film Art, the blog which Thompson runs with David Bordwell.

What can you tell us about how the Lord of the Rings films were conceived?

According to Peter, it happened in the wake of his making The Frighteners. Although that film was not a success--in part due to a bad release date--it had a huge number of CGI shots for its day and allowed Weta Digital to build its computing power up considerably. Peter says that he was looking around for another effects-heavy film to make, and he and Fran came up with LOTR. It's quite a leap from a relatively modest ghost film to an epic trilogy, but that's basically what launched the project.

How was it possible for Peter Jackson, a then little known New Zealand filmmaker, to get control over such a large scale media franchise?

I go into the convoluted history of the filmmaking rights for LOTR in the book, and I don't want to give too much away. But basically Peter had a Miramax connection, because they distributed Heavenly Creatures in the U.S. Saul Zaentz, who owned the LOTR rights at the time Peter got interested, had a Miramax connection because they had rescued his English Patient project when Fox pulled the plug on it. It was far from a speedy process, but Miramax eventually bought the rights for Peter to make LOTR.

Eventually the project went from Miramax to New Line, which had relatively little choice but to take Peter as part of the package, for reasons that I'll leave for people to read in the book.

What long term impact has Jackson's success had upon the film industry in New Zealand? What does this suggest about the impact of globalization on media production?

When I made my first research trip to New Zealand in late 2003, the issue of how LOTR was affecting the country's own small film industry was a somewhat tense one. Some local filmmakers claimed that having a huge production like LOTR and perhaps other epics to follow (at this point the final decision to film The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in New Zealand hadn't been made) would drive up the costs of labor and supplies. Another fear was that the industry would become too dependent on these big films coming in from outside the country, a flow which could dry up abruptly if the exchange rate changed or sophisticated post-production facilities were built in other small producing countries.

It was also not clear whether Film New Zealand, the agency that works to bring productions in from abroad would be funded adequately. The scheme for tax rebates for foreign productions hadn't been passed, and so on.

By my next trip, only about seven months later, it was a whole new situation. Film NZ was funded adequately, the Large Budget Screen Production Grant had been approved, and the mood was generally much more upbeat. The large pool of skilled labor left behind by LOTR was also recognized as an enormous asset.

It's a bit soon to gauge the long-term effects, but New Zealand's national feature-film production is probably healthier than it has ever been. Many of the Kiwi directors and other personnel who went abroad for work returned during the making of LOTR. Enough large-budget productions have decided to film in New Zealand and use its state-of-the-art post-production facilities that "Wellywood" seems well-established. I think James Cameron's decision to make much of Avatar in New Zealand was like the final stamp of approval. If one of the top effects-centered directors chooses Weta Digital, surely others will follow.

As to the impact on international media production, The Frodo Franchise ends with a discussion of the growth of these technically sophisticated filmmaking centers in small producing countries. A big complex is being built in South Africa, for example. I'm not sure that the films, commercials, and TV shows that will be made largely abroad will be all that much different from what we're familiar with. Did being animated in Korea for years affect The Simpsons?

On the other hand, I definitely think one reason why Peter had a relatively high level of control over the making of LOTR is that the production was happening in a country that's a 12-hour flight from Los Angeles. Some directors may opt to make their films in remote locations for precisely that reason.

Previously Hollywood studios sent filmmakers abroad for principal photography to save money. Now post-production work, even sophisticated special effects, can increasingly be done overseas for the same reason. The result may be that less of the work of actual filmmaking will be done in Hollywood, which, along with New York, will become more a center of film financing and distribution.

We have seen a dramatic increase in the number of fantasy films being produced in the wake of the success of Lord of the Rings and the Harry Potter film franchise. Do you think the film industry has taken the right lessons from the success of these two series?

The industry has taken the lesson that fantasy sells--for now, anyway. Genres go in cycles, and sci-fi films seem to be in decline as fantasy films rise. The question is whether Hollywood executives will continue to make fantasies if a few of them fail. Eregon was a potential franchise that fizzled, despite the popularity of the book--but the critical consensus was that it was a pale imitation of LOTR. Will Hollywood blame the genre rather than the film? I suppose a lot is riding--certainly for New Line--on The Golden Compass. I think Phillip Pullman's trilogy is fantastic, but in a way even more difficult to adapt than LOTR. And even if it's a hit, there just aren't that many literary fantasies out there on that level. Still, there are two more Harry Potter films to come, and I just read that the third Chronicles of Narnia film is going into pre-production.

So fantasy might have staying power, as other genres have had. 2001 gave sci-fi films respectability, and Star Wars gave them popularity. Sci-fi films have been a prominent Hollywood product until very recently. The Godfather gave gangster films both respectability and popularity, and gangster films are still with us. Now thatLOTR, and to a lesser extent Harry Potter, have given fantasy respectability and popularity, it may also be a genre that remains important for decades.

We have seen a dramatic increase in the number of fantasy films being produced in the wake of the success of Lord of the Rings and the Harry Potter film franchise. Do you think the film industry has taken the right lessons from the success of these two series?

The industry has taken the lesson that fantasy sells--for now, anyway. Genres go in cycles, and sci-fi films seem to be in decline as fantasy films rise. The question is whether Hollywood executives will continue to make fantasies if a few of them fail. Eregon was a potential franchise that fizzled, despite the popularity of the book--but the critical consensus was that it was a pale imitation of LOTR. Will Hollywood blame the genre rather than the film? I suppose a lot is riding--certainly for New Line--on The Golden Compass. I think Phillip Pullman's trilogy is fantastic, but in a way even more difficult to adapt than LOTR. And even if it's a hit, there just aren't that many literary fantasies out there on that level. Still, there are two more Harry Potter films to come, and I just read that the third Chronicles of Narnia film is going into pre-production.

So fantasy might have staying power, as other genres have had. 2001 gave sci-fi films respectability, and Star Wars gave them popularity. Sci-fi films have been a prominent Hollywood product until very recently. The Godfather gave gangster films both respectability and popularity, and gangster films are still with us. Now thatLOTR, and to a lesser extent Harry Potter, have given fantasy respectability and popularity, it may also be a genre that remains important for decades.

One of the accomplishments of LOTR is that it overcame critics perceptions that fantasy films were "overly reliant" on special effects and achieve recognition for its performances and scripts. Do you think critical hostility to special effects has been misplaced? Are digital effects simply one new technique among many by which filmmakers shape our experience of their work?

I think it's absurd to make sweeping claims about computer effects, whether for fantasy or other types of films. People still care about character, as witnessed by the huge popularity of Jack Sparrow in the Pirates of the Caribbean series or of many of the characters in the Harry Potter films. If critics don't like a big fantasy film, they often focus the blame on the special effects, even though other techniques and the script may be equally to blame.

It would be interesting to turn the critical eye back on the critics and look at all the clichés they resort to. I've become distinctly cynical about popular press and TV coverage of films since researching my chapter on modern publicity methods--press junkets, electronic press kits, and the whole rise of infotainment. Critics devise a shared story that is easy to write. If an animated film flops, it's "Is there a glut of CGI animated films this season?" Never mind that four of the ten highest grossers of the year turn out to be CGI animated films. "Too much dependence on special effects" seems to be just one of those convenient tropes that critics have in their limited repertoire. It's a tired argument by now, but it's easier than actually thinking about a film on a tight deadline.

How do you think the emergence of digital effects is impacting film production today?

Digital technology as such is affecting films in subtle but pervasive ways. Mixing digital soundtracks allows a minute attention to details and the use of dozens, even of hundreds of tracks to create the finished product. The result, in some cases at least, is a new density and complexity of sound. Digital means are used in editing, design, storyboarding, and a whole variety of phases of filmmaking.

In terms of digital special effects, there is currently a sort of race to use the highest number of effects shots and the most complex technology. Large numbers of effects shots are touted in publicity. It has to end somewhere, since, as Variety recently pointed out, effects houses are being stretched and some films risk missing their release dates because their effects are being done up to the last possible minute.

And, while digital technology is a money-saver in some areas, CGI shots and things like color grading on digital intermediates have become some of the highest cost factors in filmmaking, alongside burgeoning stars' fees. If studios seriously want to cut budgets (which they so far talk about but don't do), rationing digital effects would be one key way to do it.

Critics have historically been disdainful of sequels or franchises, yet the general perception is that the three films here formed an integrated whole.

That's partly because LOTR was exceptional. Tolkien conceived his novel as a single book, and it was published in three volumes because the publishers thought it was the only way they could recoup their costs. (The editor thought that the book might well lose money anyway and yet went ahead and published it. Those were the days.) As I've mentioned, Peter approached the film in the same way, treating it as one continuous story. He even refused to have summary crawl titles at the beginnings of Films 2 and 3. Now, with DVDs, one could watch the films back to back, skipping the end credits and head logo and title, and they would flow together reasonably well. (The Two Towers would flow on quite nicely from Fellowship's ending, though the opening of Return, with its flashback to Gollum's downfall, would be a little jarring after Towers' end.)

That kind of coherence was possible because of Bob Shaye's decision to make the three parts simultaneously. They were shot out of continuity in one giant period of principal photography. Apart from the fairly evident growth in the number and complexity of the special effects from part to part, there's not much that would go against that feeling of the films being an integrated whole.

So far no studio has had the nerve to do the same thing. The first Pirates of the Caribbean ended with the filmmakers not knowing what would happen in part 3, for example. The Chronicles of Narnia series, New Line's His Dark Materials trilogy, and others all wait for the first film to succeed before moving on. Still, presumably films based on existing literature can have a sense of coherence somewhat comparable to LOTR. It will be very interesting to see what happens with The Golden Compass. Can New Line manage to create a unified trilogy, as Pullman's novels do? From the start they have modeled this new potential franchise on LOTR--except for making the first film separately.

What steps did the producers take to insure the integrity of the series as a whole? How central do you think this more integrated approach is to the public perception of this series?

One thing that I find remarkable about LOTR is how quickly these three long films were released--almost ten hours of effects-heavy film in a two-year period. When you think of the years it took Martin Scorsese to makeGangs of New York, with its many delays, Peter really achieved a feat. When the film was announced by New Line in August of 1998, the press release said, "The company may release the trilogy as a Christmas-summer Christmas event during the 2000-2001 calendar year." That was obviously a little too ambitious, and once the full scope of the project became apparent, the three-Christmas release was settled. Even that is ridiculously ambitious by the standard of modern Hollywood, and I can't think of another case where three release dates were announced at once and so early. (Return's release date was committed to about four years in advance!) How many directors could make those deadlines and create an epic set of films this polished?

(Of course the extended DVD versions contain a full 120 minutes of additional footage, much of which was shot during principal photography, so the whole thing is even more amazing.)

Again, compare this with the slower release of the Harry Potter films. Those are very ambitious films, but they're shorter than the installments of LOTR. I can't think of any series of comparable size that has come out that fast. The second and third Pirates of the Caribbean films were released a year apart, but that's largely because the producers imitated the LOTR production and shot them more or less at the same time.

So that's one reason I think LOTR was perceived as an integral film. The release dates were announced long in advance, and the parts came out at almost exactly the same time each year, mid-December. Knowing in advance that all three were coming probably played a big part in making fans not perceiving films two and three as sequels. Also, the extended-version DVDs of the first two films were timed to come out shortly before the next part's theatrical release, so the rush to watch them presumably made the three films flow together in an atypical way.

The regularity led to a sense of Christmas being LOTR time. During the 2004, 2005, and even the 2006 Christmas season, I read comments in the popular press about what a pity it was that no new LOTR installment was appearing. Earlier this year Entertainment Weekly, which assigns grades to trailers, gave the one for The Golden Compass a B+, remarking, "points off for so shamelessly trading on our Lord of the Rings nostalgia"--more than three years after the trilogy ended!

Another reason would be that in the publicity, Peter and others of the filmmakers stressed that this was one long film, so a lot of people presumably thought of it that way as well.

Thinking about it now, it occurs to me that the first two parts don't end on the traditional cliffhanger that one associates with serials. Both end with Frodo and Sam trudging along on their trip to Mordor, where we can glimpse Mt. Doom in the distance. Despite what critics might claim about LOTR being a succession of battles and action scenes, it's the journey of those two Hobbits that gives the narrative its shape. As so often happens in classical Hollywood films, goal orientation is a major unifying factor.

The trailers played up the journey aspect of the plot. The Fellowship one is most concerned with setting up the basic core story element, the destruction of the Ring, and it ends by simply saying, "The legend comes to life." But the Towers trailer ends, "The journey continues" and near the end of the Return trailer, we hear "The journey ends."

On the lack of cliffhangers. There's a promise of considerable action ahead in the first two films' endings, but Sam and Frodo aren't in imminent danger in either case. In the novel, Fellowship ends in the same way, with the hobbits in the Emyn Muil making their way toward Mordor. Tolkien's Towers, though, has one of the killer cliffhangers of all time. After following Frodo and Sam for the second half of the volume as they slowly progress toward Mordor, Tolkien ends with the aftermath of the Shelob episode with one terse, powerful sentence: "Frodo was alive but taken by the enemy." The filmmakers were no doubt right in moving that episode into the third part, but they lost a great moment.

Contrast that with the Harry Potter series, where there's a continuing goal across the seven books (though it develops and becomes focused slowly), but they are structured around the cycle of going to Hogwarts at the beginning and returning home at the end. They're more self-contained than LOTR. Spider-man has continuing elements, but a new villain or villains each time, while LOTR has Sauron from start to finish (and Saruman to link films one and two).

As a production, the film itself has a built-in unity, of course, and I think that shows in the final product. The same crew worked on all three parts, and bringing in Tolkien illustrators Alan Lee and John Howe assured that all the design elements worked together seamlessly. One crucial factor was Howard Shore's music, which was conceived as a single piece with leitmotifs running through all three films. All in all, I think it would be hard to point to a single factor that would encourage people see these as three self-contained films. Again, that sets LOTR apart from other franchises, where for the most part the individual films are self-contained to a considerable degree. At the end of the X-Men films, for example, we know that tensions between the two mutant groups has the potential to lead to further conflicts and adventures, but we don't know what those will be.

The Frodo Franchise: An Interview with Kristin Thompson (Part One)

For those of you in and around film studies, Kristin Thompson requires no introduction. Her historical research and close formal readings of film have helped set the agenda for our field for the past several decades. For many of us, Film Art: An Introduction and Film History: An Introduction, both co-authored with David Bordwell, represent a first introduction into core concepts in the field, yet both books are more than the usual textbook rehashing of familiar content, managing to be groundbreaking work in their own terms. Also with Bordwell and with Janet Staiger, she wrote the monumental Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960, a book which became the focus of debate for the better part of a decade, pushing for a new paradigm which fused close stylistic analysis with institutional and cultural history. As a solo author, she has expanded upon that argument with Storytelling in the New Hollywood, a book which explores what does and does not change about the structure of narrative in contemporary films, and Breaking the Glass Armour, which is a book I push upon any CMS student whose thesis work requires close reading. Thompson, thus, is one of the most established scholars in our field. She is also, though she sometimes contests the word, a fan. When I was in graduate school in Madison, she took me to some of the meetings of the local Tolkien Society and introduced me to some of the leaders of the city's fan community. Her newest book, The Frodo Franchise: The Lord of the Rings and Modern Hollywood, brought her roles as fan and scholar together. There are few books that take us as deeply into the thinking behind a major motion picture as this one does. Thompson seems to have talked to literally everyone involved with this production and distilled it all into the epic story of how one of the most important film franchises of recent years came to become the phenomenon it is today. This is so much more than a really literate Making Of book, though, given her ability to place what occurred on the set in New Zealand into a larger picture of global trends impacting the film industry. And, for once, what fans create -- their fan fiction, art, and online discussions -- are treated seriously and alongside what was generated by the Powers That Be. I have argued that two media franchises have transformed the relations between Hollywood and its fans: the first, Harry Potter, has been discussed here a lot lately, Lord of the Rings is the second, and Thompson helps to explain the strategies by which Peter Jackson won over skeptical fans and brought them into the center of the production process. For those interested in transmedia storytelling, there is also a lot to like about this book which takes us deep into the production of the LOTR computer games and the development of the DVD package, among other topics.

Today, I begin the first of a three part interview with Thompson about her experiences writing the book, about her relationship to fandom, and about the things Lord of the Ring might teach us about branded entertainment in our transmedia and transnational era.

Can you tell us something of your own personal stakes in this project?

What led you to do a book about the Lord of the Rings films in the first place?

Like so many people of the Baby Boomer generation, I had read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings when I was in high school. The Ballantine editions came out in 1965, and I read them right away. So I was there when a book that had mainly been popular in the U.K. suddenly became a campus craze in the U. S.

I loved the books, of course, and I have re-read them at intervals thereafter. Being of a scholarly bent, I read some essays about the books, as well as a biography of Tolkien, the volume of his letters, and the various drafts that his son Christopher has published at intervals.

In fact, when the films were being made, I was in the early stages of writing an analytical study of The Hobbit and LOTR. I had amassed quite a few notes by the time the films started coming out. Writing literary criticism may sound odd for a film historian, but it isn't as implausible as it might seem. I've written a book on P. G. Wodehouse, and I have one published essay on The Hobbit that gets cited occasionally.

When New Line announced news of the film project in 1998, I, like many long-time fans of the books, was highly skeptical that an adaptation could do the books justice. Still, I had no doubts at all that the film was going to be hugely successful. (I won a $20 bet that Fellowship would gross more than $600 million internationally.) Still, I didn't pay much attention to the film until the spring of 2001.

That was when New Line showed a twenty-six minute preview of the film at Cannes, including much of the Mines of Moria segment. I read about the rapturous reception of the film and how it was changing people's doubts about LOTR into enthusiasm. That Cannes event fascinates me because it was such a dramatic turning point. For my book, I managed to interview ten people who were there in a wide variety of capacities, and there's a section on it in the opening chapter.

At that point I started clipping material related to the film from trade papers like Variety and pop magazines like Entertainment Weekly. I didn't have any idea what I might do with them.

Then Fellowship came out and was such a tremendous success. It was like the 1960s craze all over again, but now on a huge international scale. It was amazing to watch something that I had loved suddenly have this international reception.

Still, it didn't occur to me to write a book. It was really during 2002 when I started realizing that so many aspects of the franchise were cutting-edge and successful. New Line's official website attracted so much attention, the selling of all three parts of the film to international distributors was unprecedented, and so on. That was when I realized two things. First, one could learn a lot about how franchises work by studying all the main aspects of LOTR--not just the film, but the DVDs, the internet, and so on. (The videogames as well, of course, but the first one hadn't been released when I was pondering all this.) Second, LOTR was rapidly becoming one of the most important films ever made. Its impact on New Zealand, for one thing, affecting a whole country's economy and international image. The elaborate DVD supplements, the internet buzz. I decided that someone should try to capture all that before it slipped away and people's memories faded.

I should stress that writing the book was my own idea entirely. Neither New Line nor the filmmakers knew anything about it until I contacted them. I have no license or any other legal relationship to either group, and it's certainly not a tie-in book. It was a purely free-lance project, and I wrote it without having a publisher lined up.

Your project has depended on building close relationships with many of the key production people involved in the films and the related products (the game company, for example). Can you share with us some of the process by which you built these relationships? What has been involved in an academic getting inside the production process to this degree?

I knew from the start that I couldn't write the book I wanted to without interviewing many of those involved. So little of what happened was reported in print or on the internet, and most of its never would be. I also believed that I had to begin the interviewing process while the film was still being made. Once everyone had scattered, it would be impossible to talk to as many of them as I could in Wellington. My ideal would have been to go to Wellington while the main pick-up filming was going on during April to July of 2003.

I started out not knowing any of the people involved directly or indirectly with the films. My assumption was that I would have to get in touch with one of the key people. There were only three of them who seemed powerful enough to make the decision to cooperate with my project: Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh, and Barrie Osborne.

In late 2002 I was still wondering if I could manage that. Fortunately I happened to be at a film conference in Adelaide, Australia, and met a film editor named Annabelle Sheehan. She was familiar with my work, and she said she could put me in touch with Barrie. (Shortly after that Annabelle became an executive at a talent agency in Sydney, a company that represents, coincidentally, Cate Blanchett.)

I don't know exactly what she told him about me, but clearly she vouched for me as a serious, well-established scholar. That probably wouldn't impress a lot of Hollywood producers, but Barrie is a very smart and well-educated man. He went to Carlton College here in the Midwest, and I think he had some idea of what I was proposing. (I was always afraid that I'd be taken for someone like Peter Biskind, looking to dish the dirt on the production.) Barrie gave Annabelle permission to give me his email address. Once I had sent a description of the project to him, he said he was interested but would have to run the idea past Peter and New Line.

That happened in mid-January of 2003. My hope at that point was to go to Wellington during the time the cast was back for pick-ups and additional shooting, which would mean roughly April to July. Most of the main crew members would be reassembled at that point, so I figured getting a lot of interviews would be relatively easy.

Establishing contact with Barrie turned out to be the perfect first step. I have to admit, however, that I was very naive at the beginning. I figured that Barrie's interest would be enough to get me access to the filmmakers for interviews. It didn't occur to me that everyone involved had of course signed confidentiality agreements with New Line, which had to OK that sort of access. I gather those agreements were particularly strict for this film. Barrie said he'd need to clear it with Peter and with them before we could proceed.

I never heard that Peter OKed the project, though I assume he must have or it would never have gone forward.

I won't go into the lengthy negotiation process that I went through with New Line, but it lasted from February to August, scotching my chances of being in Wellington during pickups. In late August I got the word that New Line was probably going to cooperate. That was enough for me to decide to go to New Zealand if possible, and witness some of the post-production, tour the facilities, interview people, whatever. I contacted Barrie about it, and he said I could come down. I booked my flights, bought a really good digital audio recorder, and by the end of September I was in Wellington.

Those two moments--Barrie's decisions to cooperate and to let me come down before the film was finished--were the crucial points, and I must give Barrie enormous credit for trusting and supporting me. I doubt that the book would exist if I hadn't had that support.

I went to Wellington not having any interviews with filmmakers lined up, though people at various government agencies--Tourism New Zealand, Film New Zealand, the New Zealand Film Commission--had agreed to talk with me. Of course Return of the King was still being worked on, but by then that involved mainly the computer animation, the color grading, and the sound mixing. The designers and various other people I wanted to interview had moved on to other projects, but most of them were Kiwis, so I hoped they would be in the area and accessible.

Barrie assigned me a point person, Melissa Booth, the main publicist at that time. She and I sat down on my first day, and she was terrific. She picked up right away on what I needed and made up a list of people and made the first appointments for me. After that I had the contact information and mainly made the appointments myself. Basically, once Barrie had made it known that I was doing the book, virtually everyone involved in the filmmaking whom I wanted to interview cooperated and indeed were very friendly and open about the whole thing. I talked with Ngila Dickson (costume designer), Richard Taylor and two of his designers (Weta Workshop), Matt Aitken (in charge of model scanning at Weta Digital), and others.

One stroke of luck was that I ran into Michael Pellerin, producer/director of the supplements for the extended-edition DVDs. I interviewed him and watched him at work for an afternoon. Although Peter obviously didn't have time to be interviewed at that point, he did let me watch him supervising some of the final sound mixing on the Shelob sequence.

Despite the fact that I was there at the very end of the filmmaking, everything that was going on was fascinating to witness. They were even still doing some pickups, though not involving the stars. It was mainly orcs being filmed against a blue screen to be jigsawed into special-effects shots. I got a tour of the Stone Street Studios and stayed to watch about half an hour of the filming.

Everyone was trying frantically to finish Return by the deadline, and there was a sense of excitement--and a bit of panic--everywhere. The whole interviewing process went so well that my planned three-week stay was too short, and I added an extra week.

After that first visit, I returned to New Zealand for two more rounds of interviews. The next was in June of 2004, and things were much quieter. King Kong was in the writing and pre-production stage, and there was activity, but nothing like the frantic rush of the first time. Peter was working very hard, of course, but he managed to squeeze in an hour to talk with me. I also got to interview Philippa Boyens, Grant Major, some of the tech people, and so on. A third trip, in November/December 2004 was partly to finish up the round of interviews I had planned and to update with some of the people I had previously talked to.

I did many interviews elsewhere, of course--Peter's agent in LA, the producer-director of the making-ofs for cable TV, the Danish distributor of LOTR, Ian McKellen in London, etc. Basically the fact that Peter and the other filmmakers were cooperating was enough to convince them to talk with me. One thing that came through time after time was how excited all these people were that they had been involved in this unique enterprise. It was like an era coming to an end, and I think most of them were happy that someone was recording it for posterity.

At first I thought I would be able to interview heads of departments at New Line, but in the summer of 2004 they informed me that they had decided against it. I don't know why. Maybe they still thought of me as a sort of glorified journalist snooping around for secrets to do a Biskind-style hatchet job on them. I was disappointed about that at first, but now I think it was probably better this way. I got to talk with the filmmakers, but I never had to sign a confidentiality agreement with New Line--or with anyone. My relationship with my interviewees was always on the basis of trust, and all of them had the option of reading the drafts of chapters where I quoted them and requesting that I change passages. That didn't happen much, but I felt it was only fair to these people to make that offer--plus I hope it made them feel freer to say things without having to be overly cautious about violating their own confidentiality agreements.

I think it was really only after the first trip to New Zealand that I started trying to think of any comparable book that had appeared: a study of an entire film by a film historian, as opposed to a journalist. I couldn't think of any.

Now that the book is coming out, I can see why. I look back and think that getting the access I needed for my research was so close to impossible that I wonder if another such book can ever be written. The thing depended so much on some incredibly lucky coincidences, on dogged determination, on Kiwi friendliness and hospitality, and certainly on Barrie's support. That complex set of circumstances is so unlikely to come together again. I'm convinced that if I had tried to undertake a comparable project relating to one of the big franchises that are made in Hollywood or London, it wouldn't have gotten to square one.

On the other hand, if people in the industry read The Frodo Franchise, maybe some will recognize that it's really great publicity for them. I would like to think that it would inspire studio officials to give greater access to bona fide scholars. It would be somewhat like the studios' learning curve on how to deal with fans on the internet, I suppose.

What did you learn through this front-line perspective about how contemporary films are being produced that complimented or expanded what you had come to understand through other methodologies (close reading, studying the trade press and production manuals, etc.)?

The stages in production are so familiar that in a way I didn't learn an enormous amount about that side of things. Certainly I saw techniques being used that I had only written about. Peter Doyle, who was one of the inventors of the digital color-grading system used on LOTR and other films, sat down with me for 25 minutes and demonstrated how the grading had been achieved on a few shots from the trilogy. It's a surprisingly beautiful process to watch.

But I learned more about some of the activities around the filmmaking that have never been studied. Certain aspects of the publicity, for example. How do making-of films get onto cable stations? It happens all the time these days, but when I asked, nobody could tell me, and there's nothing written about it. I was quite curious about that and finally found out through some of the interviews. We all know about press junkets in general, but when did they start? When did they become as big and elaborate as they are now? Again, the history of press junkets hasn't been written, so I sat down with Roger Ebert, who has been in movie journalism during that entire period, and he gave me enormously helpful information.

So this was the first project I've done that depended really heavily upon interviews for material that couldn't be gotten any other way. It was also the first project where I used the internet. (My previous book was on Ernst Lubitsch's silent features, and despite the fact that lots of people think everything is now on the internet, it isn't. I didn't learn a single thing for that project on the internet.) In part it was a research tool, but the internet's relationship to LOTR is the topic of two chapters.

This project has involved vastly different sorts of research and topics than I had dealt with before. I think coping with the wide range of topics that the franchise entailed was possible due to that basic historical approach that you and I and all the other film graduate students all learn at the University of Wisconsin: start out by formulating your core topic as a small set of questions. Then you just have to figure out what you need to do to answer them.

Manufacturing Dissent: An Interview with Stephen Duncombe (Part Two)

Yesterday, I ran the first part of a two part interview with Stephen Duncombe, author of the new book, Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in the Age of Fantasy. What follows is the second installment. I am being pressed for time this morning but hope to add a few comments to this post later today about last night's debate. You only briefly touch upon the rise of news comedy shows like The Daily Showand The Colbert Report. Do you see such programs as a positive force in American democracy? How do you respond to those who feel that the blurring

between news and politics trivializes the political process? What role does

comedy play in the kinds of popular politics you are advocating?

I love The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. As someone on the Left it is refreshing to see a progressive viewpoint expressed (even if only expressed ironically) in a way that makes me laugh and gives me pleasure. I also think that Stewart and Colbert's use of humor can be deeply subversive: they use ridicule to show how ridiculous "serious politics" is, much in the same way that Jonathan Swift's "modest" proposal in 1729 made the "rational" case for solving the problem of the poor in Ireland by eating them. The political process is already a joke, these guys are merely recognizing it for what it is.

In doing this they hold out the possibility of something else, that is, they create an opening for a discussion on what sort of a political process wouldn't be a joke. In doing this they're setting the stage for a very democratic sort of dialogue: one that asks questions rather than simply asserts the definitive truth. However, it's still unclear that ironic joking leads to the sort of popular response I'm hypothesizing above. It can, just as easily, lead into a resigned acceptance that all politics are just a joke and the best we can hope for it to get a good laugh out of it all. To paraphrase the philosopher Walter Benjamin: we can learn to find pleasure in our own destruction.

However, I think we need to take Stewart at his word: he's just an entertainer. It's really up to the rest of us to answer the questions he poses. Sometimes I think we ask too much of culture: we expect it to solve our political problems for us. I don't think it can do this. It can create openings, give us insight, provide us with tools, but the rest is a political process that counts on all of us.

You contrast the ways that FDR spoke to the American public with the ways that George W. Bush addresses us during his weekly radio-casts. What do you see as

the primary differences? Most contemporary politicians who attempt to

"explain" complex policy issues in the way FDR did get accused of being

"wonks." What steps do you think could be taken to create a new political

rhetoric which embraces the ideal of an informed public but doesn?t come

across as patronizing or pedantic?

The brilliance of FDR is that he and his New Deal administration, like King and his fellow organizers, recognized the necessity of spectacle in politics. Because of this they worked hard to re-imagine spectacle in a way that could fit progressive, democratic ends. The 1920s were an era much like our own in its worship of celebrity: a mediated world of movie stars on the silver screen and sports heroes in the new photo-tabloids. But instead of merely condemning this state of affairs, New Deal artists and administrators re-imagined it, using photographs sponsored by the Farm Securities Agency and murals painted by artists of the Works Progress Administration to recognize and display a different sort of American: the dust bowl farmer, the southern share cropper, the factory worker, the rootless migrant. By creating these counter-spectacles they tried to turn the public gaze from stars to everyday (albeit romanticized) people, essentially redefining "The People" in the popular imagination. Make no mistake, this was a deeply political move, as valorizing everyday people was essential for garnering political support for New Deal political and economic programs.

Roosevelt's "fireside chats" also put the lie to the myth that spectacle has to run against reason. Over thirty times during his presidency FDR addressed the American public on the radio. He would always begin these speeches with a warm "My friends." But what followed this simple greeting was a sophisticated explanation of the crises the country faced: the banking collapse, currency concerns, the judiciary, world war. This was propaganda. The speeches were scripted by playwrights who dramatized the case for the president's politics, and FDR spoke to people's fears and desires in a folksy, personalized language, but these fireside chats also took for granted that citizens could be reasoning beings with the ability to understand complex issues. In other words FDR believed that rationality and emotion could exist side by side.

I wish contemporary politicians would learn from this. Instead, we get the "man of reason" like John Kerry, or the "man of fantasy" aka George W. Bush. Politicians need to understand - in a way that I think many producers of pop culture already do - that you can speak to reason and fantasy simultaneously. It's an Enlightenment myth that truth is self-evident: that all you need to do is lay out the facts of your argument and immediately people will acknowledge and embrace it. What FDR and King understood is that the truth needs help. It needs stories told about it, works of art made of it, it needs to use symbols and be embedded in myths that people find meaningful. It needs to be yelled from the mountaintops. The truth needs help, but helping it along doesn't mean abandoning it.

You discuss the public desire for recognition as the flip side of their

relationship to celebrity culture. What lessons might progressives draw from

reality television about this desire for recognition?

If there are two things that those on the Left love to hate (while secretly enjoying) it's celebrity culture and reality TV. These play to the our most base political desires: celebration of an ersatz aristocracy and cutthroat competition; the driving fantasies of Feudalism and Capitalism respectively. True, true. But it's a mistake to write them off as just that, for they also manifest another popular dream: the desire to be seen. What do stars have that we don't? Wealth and beauty, yes, but also something more important: they are recognized. What is reality TV about? The chance for someone like us to be recognized.

What sort of a politics can be based in a recognition that we desperately what to be recognized? First off, policies that make it easier to be seen and heard. Community TV, micro radio, free internet access, net neutrality, and so on. If the populist Huey Long once called for a "chicken in every pot," in the mass mediated age our slogan ought to be "every person an image." But it goes deeper than this, for the popular desire is not just about being seen as an image on a screen. This, in some ways, is just a metaphor for a far deeper desire: being recognized for who we are and what we are, our opinions and our talents -- and this is the core of democracy.

The democracy we have today has little place for our opinions and talents. Our opinions show up as abstract polling data, and the only talents our political process asks for is our skill at forking over money to professional activists and campaigns or our dexterity in pulling a voting lever. This professionalization of politics, whereby democracy becomes the business of lobbyists, fund raisers, and image consultants, has fundamentally alienated the citizenry from their own democracy. It's no wonder that we turn to culture to find these dreams of recognition expressed.

This issue really gets to the core of my Dream. My book is about learning from popular culture and constructing ethical spectacles, but the lessons that I hope are learned will lead far further than making better advertisements or staging better protests for progressive political causes (though that wouldn't hurt). What I'm arguing for in my book is a reconfiguration of political thought, a sort of "dreampolitik" that recognizes that dreams and desires, ones that are currently manifested in pop culture, need to be an integral part of our democratic politics.

What Makes Japan So Cool?: An Interview with Ian Condry

From time to time, I have shared with my readers some of the podcasts being generated by the Cool Japan Project, a joint research effort at MIT and Harvard, focused on understanding more fully Japanese popular culture -- especially anime and manga but also the culture around popular music and toys/collectibles. The project is sponsored by the MIT Japan Program, Harvard's Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, the Harvard Asia Center, MIT Foreign Languages and Literatures, and MIT Comparative Media Studies. Today, I thought I would introduce you to the man behind the Cool Japan Project -- one of the coolest guys I know at MIT, my colleague Ian Condry. I had the good fortune to go on a tour of the Japanese media industry a few years ago along with Condry and it certainly opened my eyes to the richness and complexity of what's going on in that part of the world. Now a junior faculty member in the MIT Foreign Languages and Literatures program who is affiliated with CMS, Condry was trained as an anthropologist and so his research into Japanese popular culture is shaped by extensive field work at sites of both production and consumption. His first major book, Hip Hop Japan: Rap and the Paths of Cultural Globalization came out earlier this year and is highly recommended to anyone who wants to better understand contemporary hip hop music, the globalization process, or the links between Japanese and American popular culture. He is now hard at work on a second book project, Global Anime: The Making of Japan's Transnational Culture, which has taken him behind the scenes into some of the key studios producing contemporary anime and has brought key players in that space to MIT to speak as part of the Cool Japan program. In this interview, he talks both about Japanese hip hop and about the process which has brought anime and manga to the attention of American consumers.

If American youth are drawn to Japanese popular culture, your book explores the opposite phenomenon -- hip hop culture in Japan. Why were the Japanese drawn initially to this form of American popular culture?

Hip-hop music and breakdance were mind-blowing to youth audiences worldwide when both appeared overseas in the early eighties. The sound was so different (where's the band? why isn't he singing?) that it drew many people who had grown tired of rock and roll. So too with breakdance which had a competitive energy that was impossible to miss. Both offered the promise of liberation into an uncharted realm. The dynamics have changed, now that hip-hop is bona-fide pop music, but the transformative impact was unmistakable. Interestingly, the first audiences in Japan didn't understand what was going one, but they saw it was something different, and that sparked curiosity that kept growing. The early days of transformative early cultures are a mysterious and wonderful thing.

In your book Hip-Hop Japan, you suggest that the Japanese use this musical form to explore their own themes. What kinds of topics does hip hop address in the Japanese context?

Some of the most interesting recent rap songs in Japan are addressing America's misguided "war on terror," and the complicity of the Japanese media and the national government. The group King Giddra, for example, has a song called "911," which uses images of Hiroshima's ground zero after the bombing as a way of rethinking ground zero New York. The group Rhymester raps about America's hypocrisy in always telling Japan to "follow the path of peace" but then starts bombing Baghdad. By the same token, they see the Japanese government as little more than "yellow Uncle Sam."

Many rap artists are addressing other aspects of Japan's changing society, from women trying to find a place in a patriarchal society, to rappers questioning the failure of the economy, to criticism of the pornography industry, youth violence, and drug abuse. There is plenty of Japanese rap that tends to light and poppy, or even pseudo-gangsta and tough, but there are also some of the most striking alternative voices in Japan appearing in Japanese hip-hop music.

Can you describe something of the research process that went into this book? How

were you able to get such access to the Japanese hip hop world?

Fieldwork is an amazing thing. Going to the nightclubs week after week, month after month, over a year and a half (1995-97), formed the basis of my research. There I met the musicians, record company reps, magazine writers, organizers, and all manner of fans, from the deep b-boys and b-girls, with their hair and clothes just so, to the "first-time checking out a club" kids. It was clearly the interaction among these groups that built the hip-hop scene, from the largely underground scene it was then, to the expanding underground and mainstream elements that have developed today.

Hip-hop clubs in Japan are active from midnight to 5 a.m., with the live show happening around 2am, well after the trains have stopped running for the night. That means everyone is stuck at the club to the first trains around dawn. This turned out to be a boon for fieldwork. By 3am, most of the people had told all the jokes and stories and gossip they had to tell to their friends already, and many people were willing to come up and find out what this gaijin (foreigner) with a notepad was doing there.

Access to the hip-hop in Japan kept developing over the years following during periodic trips to Tokyo once or twice a year. Over time, I got to know some of the artists more personally. Watching their careers change and develop over almost the 10 year span of the book's research meant that I could see the struggles of artists coping with a quixotic pop world, where youthfulness is highly valued.

Something curious must be going on with race as an African-American music form gets taken up in an Asian culture where there are relatively few black people. What do you see as the racial politics of Japanese hip hop?

Race is very important for understanding hip-hop in Japan. Young Japanese (and many white Americans, too, I would add) are drawn to the "blackness" of hip-hop, most visibly in the clothing styles, hair styles, but also in a widening sensibility towards a particular musical style, born of verbal dexterity and polyrhythmic nuance, as well as the creativity involved in sampling and remixing.

The images of African-Americans in Japan tend to reinforce stereotypes, and hip-hop can be viewed as one of vehicles for these stereotypes. But at the same time, the fans who get more deeply into the music and culture are forced to deal with questions of race, questions of where Japanese fit into the matrix of white and black, questions of how Japanese racial nationalism still influences the ways resident Koreans, Ainu, and Okinawans have been treated historically, and how they are treated today. In these ways, the impact of hip-hop on racial attitudes has been complex, at times contradictory, but, I believe, generally among hip-hop fans, moving in some right directions.

Your next project has you examining anime and manga more directly. What can you tell us about this new project?

My new book project is called Global Anime: The Making of Japan's Transnational Popular Culture. I'm interested in "the making of" anime culture as an entire global circuit of media production. I spent the summer of 2006 in several Tokyo animation studios, primarily Gonzo and Aniplex, but also with visits to Ghibli, Sunrise, Aniplex, Studio 4 Degrees C. and others. I observed the collaborative creativity that goes into anime production, how they divide the process - characters, premise, worldview - and how the ideas about creativity become enacted, actually made real, through the daily practices of making anime, frame-by-frame.

To me, Japanese anime provides an important, non-Western case study of the ways media goes global, both by speaking across cultural boundaries while retaining a kind of cultural difference (have you ever seen so many giant robots or transforming schoolgirls?). Anime's connection to the world of Japanese comic books, woodblock prints and ancient picture scrolls is often deemed sufficient to prove a kind of cultural particularity, but at the same time, the development of Japan's anime industry was closely linked to American comics, Disney and other pioneering cartoon creators.

I also explore the ways anime fans, first in Japan and then overseas, have been integral to the expansion of anime culture. Too often we are told to "follow the money" when we analyze media production, but what I see is that the money follows the creativity of artists who are able to capture audiences, and, at the same time, audiences can rescue lost gems in ways that many entertainment companies seem not yet to recognize. By looking at the case of Japanese anime, I believe we can come to a deeper understanding of national differences and global synergies, the evolving worlds of media, digital technology, and the ways artists, fans, and businesses interact.

How has this growing interest in "Japan Cool" impacted the study of Japanese

language and culture in the United States?

The idea of "cool Japan" really took off with the publication of journalist Douglas McGray's 2002 article "Japan's Gross National Cool" in Foreign Policy magazine. He argued that Japan had become a "cultural superpower," despite a decade-long recession that began in the early nineties. It has also changed the attitudes of American's interested in Japan

In the eighties, when I began studying Japanese language in college, my classmates tended to be Economics majors who planned to make a killing in international trade. They wanted to know how to bow and hand over business cards, but seldom seemed interested in Japanese history or culture Today, the majority, though not all, students of Japanese language and culture are drawn to Japan because of their experience with anime and manga. They are more interested in the culture, history, religion, and educational system of Japan. To me, it's a much more interesting group, more broad-minded, socially aware, and intellectually curious.

Some Japanese policy makers view the overseas interest in manga and anime as a vehicle for "soft power," political scientist Joseph Nye's term for political power that follows from the attractiveness of a nation's culture and ideals. I think the effect is in fact different. Manga doesn't convey "power" so much as it provides an entryway to a larger world, but one that is clearly conflicted and contradictory. The real power of popular culture is make stereotypes seems less compelling, and to force us to ask more complex questions about cultural differences.

Why do you think anime and manga have succeeded here while Jpop has largely

failed to generate the same level of interest?

I give American anime fans a lot of credit for driving the interest in anime through devoted, unpaid efforts to make the media available. In the eighties, they used VCRs, and today it's fansubs online through sites like www.animesuki.com.

Manga in Japan are such a powerful media because of the intense competition among manga artists. The largest weekly magazines carry about 15 serialized stories. Each week the publishers received about 3000 postcards, which list three most interesting and three dullest stories. A few weeks' of poor grades, and dull stories get cut. The manga stories that have survived for years are the ones that have maintained their edge. The fact that it is easy to read manga for free in convenience stores or borrowed from friends also means that fans are exposed to a lot of different manga and thereby become more sophisticated judges as well.

I think record companies in Japan haven't made much effort to break into the US market in part because US prices are about half that of Japan's, so they feel they won't make money. From the American perspective, Japanese CDs are simply too expensive, running about double the price of US albums. Both sides of the equation limit the flow.

How Computer Games Help Children to Learn: An Interview with David Williamson Shaffer (Part Two)

Yesterday, I introduced blog readers to my former student, David Williamson Shaffer, and his new book, How Computer Games Help Children to Learn. This book is a must read for anyone who is invested in the concept of Serious Games or anyone who wants to have a better understanding of what games might contribute to the reform of the educational process. In yesterday's post, he walked us through his roots in Seymore Papert's notion of hard fun and his concept of epistemic games. Here's a bit more background on David taken from his blog:

Before coming to the University of Wisconsin, Dr. Shaffer taught grades 4-12 in the United States and abroad, including two years working with the Asian Development Bank and US Peace Corps in Nepal. His M.S. and Ph.D. are from the Media Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and he taught in the Technology and Education Program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He is a founding member of the GAPPS research group for games, learning, and society. The group recently received a $1.8 million grant from the MacArthur Foundation to study games and media literacy in the digital age. Dr. Shaffer has a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award for his work on Alternate Routes to Technology and Science and was the recipient of a Spencer Foundation National Academy of Education Postdoctoral Fellowship.

Dr. Shaffer studies how new technologies change the way people think and learn. His particular area of interest is in the development of epistemic games: computer and video games in which players become professionals to develop innovative and creative ways of thinking.

Today, I asked Shaffer some of the hard questions which all of us who are promoting games and education are facing. He offers some candid and compelling responses.

You describe powerful activities which certainly require students to deploy a rich array of school content. But by classical definitions, not all of the activities you describe are games. And many teachers remain resistant to the concept of games in school. So what value do you see in referring to these experiences as games?

This is a great question, and I'm glad you asked it. Part of the problem with the word "game" is that there isn't a single agreed-upon definition. The definition I use in the book is closer to some than others--and as you know, I talk about this very issue and how my use of the term compares to others in the book.

A major point of the book is that digital technologies force us to reexamine and rethink a number of concepts whose original definitions come from an age of print literacy: things like games, learning, thinking, innovation, professionalism, school, and so on. It is an argument that I know you are quite familiar with, since you similarly argue that new media force us to reconceptualize the nature of concepts like production and consumption, genre and medium, and so on.

The argument I make in the book is that in the digital age there is a new set of relations between games and school--and school and learning, professional practices and academic disciplines, innovation and education--and this reorganization of how we think about thinking and learning, play and education, creativity and rigor is an essential step in thinking about the future of learning.

Some skeptics have argued that the serious games movement is imposing a utilitarian logic on play (making it into something serious) when in fact, the value of play as a form of mental recreation may come from the fact that it invites us to suspend real world consequences and constraints. How would you respond to this argument?

I've heard that argument, of course, but honestly I think it is a bit of a straw man. First of all, no one (that I know) is arguing that *all* play should be "serious" in the sense you describe here--that is, devoted to some larger purpose. Second, for all the reasons that Seymour and others (and I) have talked about, there is such a thing as "hard fun"--that is, the fun of doing something difficult but worthwhile. It is an important and legitimate part of fun, and of learning, and of being a well-adjusted and happy person. Finally, and perhaps most important, serious games do suspend some real world consequences and constraints. Any game imposes some constraints and relaxes some, abates some consequences and introduces others. Different games have a different balance, and serve different functions. But I don't think there is some form of pure or idealized play (except as a theoretician's fancy) which games that serve some larger purpose somehow "pollute." Any game is played in some social context, and therefore serves some larger purpose.

Other critics of the serious games movement have argued that we are moving too quickly from ethnographic evidence that some kids learn well through games to larger claims that all youth can/should learn through game play. How would you respond to this argument?

Well, not all the evidence is ethnographic. My work is based on experimental studies: we design a game based on a specific set of hypotheses about what players will learn and how they will learn it; then we study the experiences of players to see whether that's what happens. Others in the field have done similar studies, some at quite large scales.

No one would deny that there has been a lot of enthusiasm in recent months and years about the potential of games, and some claims have no doubt been inflated, or premature, or speculative. But that doesn't mean that all claims are suspect: it depends on the claim and the evidence.

I will say that this form of argument (games for learning are all hype) is a little ironic, in the sense that the other major criticism of games is that they will teach kids the wrong thing: that playing violent games will make them violent, and so forth. We seem to think it is easier to learn bad things than good--which is, at the very least, a very Hobbsian view of the human condition.

I do think that an important part of any game is the context in which it is played. So you can take a good simulation and make it part of a game that leads to the development of useful skills, knowledge, values, and identity in service of a useful way of thinking about the world. You can also set up the conditions of play in such a way that the outcomes are quite different.

So I am skeptical of any claims about what "games" in general do or don't do for kids. That's why my book is titled "HOW computer games help children learn" and not "DO computer games help children learn?" We know that children learn from all of their experiences. The question is whether and how we can design experiences that will help them learn things we think will help them become better citizens, happier individuals, and more productive members of society.

You end your book with some speculations on the future of education. How would schools change -- for the better or for the worse -- if various kinds of game-like activities were to displace some of the activities that currently constitute the "game" of schooling?

I don't know what the ultimate shape of schools will be in the digital age. It took decades to design the modern industrial schools we have now, and they look very different from their predecessors. Schools right now focus on standardized tests of basic facts and skills for a paper and pencil world. They need to become more about learning to use sophisticated technologies to find creative and innovative solutions to real problems. I think well-designed computer games can, should, and ultimately will play a large role in that process. But to get there will mean redesigning almost everything about schools in the long run: the architecture of the buildings, the content of the curriculum, the schedule, and perhaps most important, the means of assessment.

This is going to be a big change, and a big task. But as I argue in the book, wise, well-educated, and affluent parents are already using new technologies to help their kids prepare for life in a complex world. If schools don't keep up, they risk becoming at best a footnote in the real process of education in the digital age, and in the worst case, a road to failure and an impediment to educational opportunity for those who can't afford access to the tools and pedagogies for success in a world of global competition.

Some have argued that we necessarily distort the real world phenomenon we are representing when we reduce them to the structures of a game. Do you agree with this concern? If so, how might educational game designers address it?

As Don Norman points out in his wonderful book Things That Make Us Smart any representation of reality is a simplification, leaving out details that are not relevant to solving a particular problem or accomplishing a particular task. Moreover, all of our thinking takes place through representations--whether external representations like diagrams, pictures, or spreadsheets, or internal ones, such as memories, words, or images.

So all thinking is a deliberate distortion of reality in this sense.

The power of epistemic games is that they are based on a specific theory of how you determine what it is safe to leave out in designing a game that models professional training as a way of teaching innovative thinking. The book describes that process in more detail, but the specifics aside, the point is that epistemic games are based on a specific pedagogical theory--a theory about what is worth learning and how people learn it.

There are other theories one might use, of course. But in the end, I think that any good educational game has to be based on a corresponding theory of how learning takes place. The theory might work or not--which is why we test the games we build. But it is that theory that tells you which simplifications you have to make (and which ones you can not make) in re-presenting real world phenomena in game form.

How Computer Games Help Children Learn: An Interview with David Williamson Shafffer (Part One)

I've known David Williamson Shaffer for more than a decade. I was lucky enough to have him as a student in my media theory and methods proseminar back when he was finishing up his PhD at the MIT Media Lab. where he was doing work with Seymor Papert. I've reconnected in recent years with Shaffer through his work on games and education. Shaffer has come out this month with a very important book, How Computer Games Help Children Learn. A colleague of James Paul Gee, Kurt Squire, and Constance Steinkuehler at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Shaffer has long contributed to our conversations about the pedagogical potentials of computer and video games.

He has especially promoted the idea of epistemic games, which he discusses at some length, in the interview that follows. He is interested in the ways that we can use computer-based games (including games that involve interacting with real people in real spaces) to introduce children to the basic conceptual frameworks that govern various professional practices. For him, this is the most powerful aspect of games-based learning.

His new book makes a powerful case for this mode of teaching, including detailed case studies of games he has developed to cover a range of different professional contexts and academic disciplines and drawing parallels to commercial games already on the market. The writing is accessible and engaging, driven by his own experiences as a classroom teacher and his own passion for helping to reinvent American education.

Over the next two days, I am going to be running this interview with Shaffer. In the first part, he lays out the book's core premises and in the second, he addresses the debates around serious games more generally.

Your biography in the back of the book lists one of your titles as "game scientist." So, I suspect the readers might be interested to know what a game scientist does and how you train for such a position. The cynic in me wants to know what the implications are of using scientific language to describe what is essentially a position in the humanities.

There are a few different ways of explaining where the title "Game Scientist" comes from. The most superficial answer is that as we were founding the GAPPS (Games and Professional Practice Simulations) Group here at the University of Wisconsin Advanced Academic Distributed Learning CoLaboratory, we needed to decide what members of the group would be called. The title "Research Scientist" is often used for appointments in research labs that do not grant tenure, so given that we were all studying games someone (I think it might have been me) suggested that Game Scientist would be an appropriate title.

So originally the term was something of an historical artifact.

But I do think that there is some value in referring to the work I do as game science. Games are, as you point out, a forum of human expression, like books, movies, and other things that are studied as "humanities." But it is also possible to ask scientific questions about books: to study, for example, how people read, or to study the social, economic or psychological impact of a particular kind of book. So we can ask scientific questions about games and peoples' experiences with them.

In using the term "scientific" here, of course, I am making a statement about research methods, not values. By "scientific" I only mean asking questions that can be answered with empirical data, which can be quantitative data (surveys, brain scans, and the like) or qualitative data (like interviews and observations).

In truth, though, I am not sure that drawing explicit distinctions between the sciences and the humanities is actually all that productive. Nelson Goodman made a strong case decades ago that the similarities between the two are more striking than the differences on a philosophical level: both try to warrant claims about phenomena in the world. This is a point I have made in some of my own writings as well.

All of that having been said, I am a game scientist because the work that I do uses methods of the field of psychology, which is a form of social science.

As a graduate student, you worked with Seymor Papert, among others, at the Media Lab. Papert has written about "hard fun." In what ways is your new work a theory or application of this concept of "hard fun?"

There are a lot of connections between Seymour's work and my own. The concept of "hard fun" is one that I talk about in the book, but there are others as well.

Hard fun is, of course, the idea that we take pleasure in accomplishing something difficult: the joy in meeting and mastering a challenge. As a result, when someone is doing something that it hard fun, moment by moment it looks more like "work" than "fun," but the net effect is pleasurable overall.

The concept is certainly one that applies to almost any good game--not just the games I work with, or games for learning in general. I make this point in my book, and Steven Johnson talks about it in Everything Bad is Good for You as well. Jim Gee talks about the games that work have to be pleasantly frustrating. Good games require a lot of work.

What makes hard fun valuable from an educational point of view is when the challenge you face is worthwhile in some context beyond the game itself. In Seymour's work, kids who used Logo had to solve problems in differential geometry and computer science to build things they thought were interesting and exciting.

In my work, the challenges are the kinds of problems that professionals face in the real world: engineering design, graphic design, mediation, urban planning, and so on. The games are hard because the problems are hard. But they are fun because it is fun to solve difficult problems that matter, that have no right answer, and that give you a chance to see what it would be like to run the world--or at least some part of it.

So, let's get to the heart of the matter. What are epistemic games and what value do you think they bring to education?

Simply put: Epistemic games recreate in game form the things that people do in the real world to learn to think in innovative and creative ways about problems that matter.

They are, in other words, role-playing games where players take on the role of being a professional in training--where "professional" in this sense refers not to so-called white collar professions, but to any kind of work in a complex domain that requires the exercise of autonomy and judgment.

Professional training is based, for the most part, on professional practica: times and places where professionals-in-training do supervised work, and then talk with their peers and mentors about what they did and why. Think about internship and residency for doctors, moot court for lawyers, the design studio for architects, capstone courses for engineers and journalists, and so on.

These repeated cycles of action and reflection create a particular kind of professional thinking that Donald Schon (also at MIT, as you know, before he passed away some years ago) characterized as "reflection-in-action": literally the ability to think and to work at the same time, and thus to do work that requires constant evaluation of the situation and adjustment of the work plan in order to solve non-routine problems.

So epistemic games give players a chance to work on simulations of real problems, and to think about what they are doing--to debrief, if you will--the way professionals do when learning to solve those problems.

The games are "epistemic" because any professional practice has a particular epistemology: a way of justifying actions and warranting claims. To be a professional of some kind means you solve problems in a particular way, and you accept some kinds of solutions as legitimate and not others. The way a doctor argues that removing a patient's spleen is the "right" thing to do is different than the way a lawyer argues about it. If you're in the hospital, you probably want to go with the doctor's way of thinking. If you're in the courtroom, stick with the lawyer--assuming, of course, that you have both a good doctor and a good lawyer.

Put another way, practica are where new professionals learn the epistemology of their chosen profession--along with the skills, knowledge, and values they need to put that epistemology into practice. Epistemic games recreate those practica in game form so players can learn to think like professionals who solve non-routine problems.

The point, as I emphasize in the book, is not for players to become professionals, but rather to have innovative and creative ways of thinking about real problems as part of their intellectual toolkit.

You discuss a number of these epistemic games in the book. Can you pick one of them and describe how it might contrast to existing school practices in this area?

As you know, the book has two chapters that look at this very question. One chapter looking at history and what it means to think about history--in school, as a real historian, and in a game called The Debating Game. Another chapter looks at mathematics as it is learned in school and in a game called Escher's World.

I think the history example is an interesting one because the differences are so clear. Sam Wineberg at Stanford University did a lovely study comparing how graduate students in history and high school history students evaluated a collection of historical documents.

What Wineberg found (and here I'm summarizing from my book, which summarizes Wineberg's study) is that what distinguished the high school students from the historians was not the number of facts that they knew about the American Revolution. Instead, the difference was in their understanding of what it means to think historically. For the students, history is what is written in the textbook, where "facts" are presented free of bias. For the historians, historical inquiry is a system for determining the validity of historical claims based on corroboration of sources in conversation with one another rather than an appeal to a unitary source of truth--it is a way of knowing based on using specific evidence to support claims rather than trying to establish a set of facts that exist without bias.

In the same chapter, I describe a game--The Debating Game--that asks players to think about historical evidence the way historians do... or at least more like the way historians do. The game is described in more detail in the book, but basically in the game players compete in a debate over whether the actions taken by some historical actor or actors were good or bad, selfish or public-spirited, constructive or destructive.

To win the debate, they have to convince the judges of the debate that their interpretation is better than their opponents' interpretation. To do that, they have to find specific pieces of the historical record to support their position: they have to argue, as Wineberg suggests professional historians do, for the validity of historical claims based on corroboration of sources in conversation with one another rather than an appeal to a unitary source of truth.

The kinds of things that players of the game do are very different than what happens in most high school history classes. (The game has been played by middle school students as well, and there the contrast is even more striking.) Players in the game (debaters and judges) have to write essays where they defend a point of view, rather than take tests where they remember facts or recite received interpretations of events. They work with primary and secondary sources with conflicting viewpoints, rather than a text with one point of view. They make their own interpretations and judgments about arguments and evidence, rather than trying to decode and remember some canonical interpretation. And so on.

So the differences are quite striking: the game is about learning to use the "toolkit" of historical analysis to think for yourself; the class is about learning to give the right answers for a test. Thus the game is more realistic, in a sense, than class is.

A recurring emphasis in your discussion is on the movement from abstract school subjects towards school subjects framed around specific real world professions -- the difference between studying math, say, and studying accounting. What's the case for the use of these professional categories for secondary school education?

As I point out in the book, school is organized around a set of things that are supposedly fundamental ways of knowing--the building blocks of all thinking if you will--which in the case of school are the traditional academic disciplines.

This is a very old view of thinking, going back to ancient Greece. The disciplines were organized a little differently then, but the basic idea was the same: education is about learning some basic ways of thinking out of which all more advanced thinking is formed.

The problem is that a century of study in the psychology of learning suggests that this just isn't how it works. Complex thinking of the kind that characterizes expertise isn't simply lots of basic pieces put together. You can't teach a bunch of facts and skills and then expect that people will reassemble them as needed.

Expertise--indeed anything beyond rudimentary skill--is based on experience working with real problems, and usually quite a lot of experience. So if we want people to learn to think about problems in the real world, they need experience learning how experts solve those problems.

I should add that there isn't anything wrong, in principle, with having school focus on learning to think like historians or mathematicians, if we decide that these are the kinds of problems kids will really face later in life. But if that's what we want to do, then we should build games (and by extension design curricula) where players meet simulations of real historical and mathematical problems the way historians and mathematicians do--which is a far cry from what they are doing now.

I'd also want to see the argument made that teaching everyone to be 5 or 6 different flavors of academic is really more useful than learning to think as professionals. What, for example, would our health care system look like if everyone who went to a doctor's office understood the kinds of questions that the doctor should ask, and the kinds of answers that she or he would use to make decisions? What would our body politic look like if everyone who read a newspaper or listened to talk radio understood how a journalist thinks about stories--and thus what makes it into the news and what doesn't, and why stories get reported the way they do? How would that kind of education compare to what we have today--or to doing a better job of teaching students to think like biologists or historians?

The Beauty of Brian Michael Bendis

For several posts now, I've been running an interview with Alan McKee, the editor of Beautiful Things in Popular Culture, a book designed to focus attention on the ways fans and consumers evaluate different forms of popular culture. McKee asked his contributors to do several things at once: first, to choose the "best of class" within a form of popular culture which we had deep investments and then to set about to justify that choice in terms of the criteria which consumers most often use to evaluate good and bad work in that space. I used the invitation as an excuse to write about superhero comics. From the start, it was clear that my preferences in comics have as much or more to do with their authors as with their artists. In many cases, I read pretty much everything published by certain writers: favorites include Robert Kirkman, Alan Moore, Warren Ellis, Mark Waid, Greg Rucka, Neil Gaiman, Ed Brubaker, and Brian Michael Bendis. Already to focus on superhero comics is to navigate between two fairly strong taste communities around comics:

Comic fans are sharply divided into two camps: on the one side, there are fans of comics as popular culture (with a focus on the creative reworking of genre elements and plays with continuity) and their voice is perhaps best represented by Wizard; on the other side, there are fans of comics as art (with a focus on aesthetic experimentation and unconventional content) and their voice is perhaps best represented by Comics Journal. At my local shop, the two types of books are divided off from each other by a partition designed to keep the kids from mangling the adult books, but also working to signal a certain cultural hierarchy at play. To praise Bendis as one of today's best writers is already to take sides since the Comics Journal crowd will look down their noses at you if you admit to reading superhero comics.

The most interesting contemporary comics fall somewhere between these two extremes - including work published by smaller companies like ABC, Oni, Image, Dark Horse, or Wildstorm which put their own spin on the superhero genre or works published by the boutique labels, such as Vertigo at DC or Max at Marvel, which are maintained by the mainstream publishers. Increasingly, the lines between mainstream and indie comics are breaking down. Much as indie filmmakers are getting a shot at directing Hollywood blockbusters, indie comics creators (such as Gilbert Hernandez, John Strum, or Peter Bagge) are venturing into the mainstream without risking their street cred.

I ended up choosing Bendis in part because he represented so many of the trends reshaping contemporary comics -- not the least of which was a the tendency discussed above to blur the lines between indie and mainstream comics. Bendis came from alternative comics and brought some of that sensativity to the mainstream.

My essay tries to determine what made Bendis a unique voice in the superhero genre (despite some profound differences in theme and audience across his various books) and also what made him exemplary of contemporary comics production. What follows are a few excerpts from the essay.

The Ultimate

In Ultimate Spiderman 28 (henceforth U.S.), M.J. comes racing into the Midtown High School library and asks her boyfriend, Peter Parker, whether he brought his costume. Rhino is smashing up downtown Manhattan and no one has been able to stop him. Asking M.J. to cover for his fourth period French class, he races to his locker and grabs his Spider-man costume (hidden in his knapsack), only to run into his Aunt May who is at school for a parent-teacher meeting. As Peter squirms in his chair, the teacher accuses him of being 'distracted' and 'unfocused' in class. Begging off, he races for the door, only to spot the school principal, and then spin off down another hallway. He cuts through the school cafeteria where he catches the lunch lady grumbling that the Rhino coverage is interrupting her soaps, then out the door, where he runs into his friend, Gwen, who is sobbing that nobody cares about her. Extracting himself from this emotional crisis, Peter races out of the school, stopping long enough to shout to M.J. to go see after Gwen. A few seconds later, Peter gets clocked by a football and chased by the school bullies, before scaling over the walls, scampering across rooftops, and riding on the tops of cars, arriving just in time to see Iron Man taking kudos for stopping the Rhino's rampage.

Whew! We've all had days like this.

I always wondered how even an ultra-nerd like Peter could manage to skip classes so often (all in the call of duty, of course) without ending up flunking out or spending the rest of his life in detention. From the start, Stan Lee and Steve Ditko conceived Spider-man as sharing the flaws and foibles of his teen readers . Forget Metropolis and Gotham City: Marvel set its stories in actual locations in Manhattan. They relied on the sudden introduction of real world problems, such as not having enough money to buy a new costume or not knowing how to explain why you just stood up your hot date, to increase audience identification. What counted as comic book realism in the 1960s doesn't necessarily work for contemporary kids. Through the Ultimate Spider-Man series, Brian Michael Bendis retools Ol' Spidey for a generation that has grown up on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, creating a comic that is as hip and 'postmodern' as it gets.

Bendis has fleshed out the core characters, changing the way they dress and talk to reflect contemporary mallrat culture, but not altering their core. In this case, the supportive M.J., the concerned Aunt May, and the 'drama queen' Gwen are used as comic foils to amplify Peter's struggle to escape the gravitational pull of his high school. Bendis also reconceptualized some members of the Spider-man rogue's gallery to up their 'coolness' factor - turning the usually dorky Rhino into a powerful mecha-man who tosses city buses through Starbuck's windows. The well-crafted issue maintains a frantic pace that keeps you turning pages. It contrasts with previous issues, coming right after an angsty story arc that took us inside the head of the Green Goblin and almost cost M.J. her life. It builds on evolving character's relations, such as M.J.'s new involvement in Peter's superhero life; and it prepares for future plot developments, such as the growing rift in Gwen's family. Artist Mark Bagley distills the essence of the characters into telling gestures, such as M.J. waving frantically from an upper window for Peter to get moving, Peter staring off into space during the parent-teacher conference, or a frustrated Spider-Man watching as Iron Man throws his hands up in victory.

The Bendis Moment

Film critics used to write about 'the Lubitsch touch' . Ernest Lubitsch melded European sophistication with classic Hollywood storytelling, adding one more layer of suggestion to the basic building blocks of the romantic comedy. Today, comics fans might talk about the 'Bendis moment'. Bendis always adds his own distinctive twist to the familiar characters and situations of the superhero genre, creating 'memorable moments' which will be discussed, debated, and savored by the fan boys. Half the time Bendis infuriates us by doing the unthinkable; the other half, he rewards us by taking us places we never imagined we'd get to go; but no matter what, he produces comics we want to talk about. A Bendis moment can be as innocent as Peter Parker, sprawled on the floor cradling his crumpled Spider-Man costume and sobbing over his breakup with M.J. (U.S. 33) or as crude as the controversial sequence in Alias (1) (henceforth A), where it is implied that the protagonist, Jessica Jones is having anal sex with Luke Cage, one of the few African-American characters in the Marvel universe.

One of the most memorable Bendis moments came when Parker gets rescued by three of the hotest mutant 'babes' from the Ultimate X-men cast. As Spidey 'fans,' they are just tickled to death to meet him. The telepath Jean Grey gushes that he's the first guy she's met in months that hasn't tried to imagine her naked (U.S. 43). Across fourteen awkward panels, Bendis and Bagley cut between Peter and Jean, as he tries, without success, not to think of her naked and as she waits impatiently for him to get over it. Any guy who has wanted desperately to be 'better than the others' and has had their hormones get in the way must surely feel for Peter's predicament confronting a girl who can read his every conflicted thought. Such moments grow organically out of the interplay between characters we know and love and exploit the juxtaposition between the fantastical situations we associate with superhero comics and a much more mundane reality we live in most of the time.

Bendis, Who?

Bendis writes what industry insiders call 'buzz books,' managing to be a critical darling who racks up awards and a commercial success who tops the charts. Bendis has won both the Wizard award (from fans) and the Eisner award (from fellow pros) for best writer for the past two years. Most months, he writes four or five of the twenty five top-selling comics. Wizard has called Bendis the 'Michael Jordan of Marvel,' citing this most valuable player as one of the key factors behind the company's commercial and critical revival over the past few years . (Somewhere around here, I keep wanting to toss off a 'Bendis like Beckham' pun.) As Marvel president Bill Jemas explains, 'Brian delivers hundreds of thousands of fans every month. He makes all of those fans happy and brings them back'. Wonder Woman scribe Greg Rucka praises Bendis as the consummate professional, 'He has a complete command of the art. Every aspect of the writer's job, he can do it well, and understands it intuitively. He's got every trick in the toolbox and god knows, he knows how to use them.'

And to top it all, he is amazingly prolific, cranking out five to eight different titles every month over the past several years. Ultimate Spider-Man alone adds up to eighteen issues a year. When Marvel needed a pinch hitter for Ultimate X-Men, Bendis crossed over and added another biweekly title to his workload, even as he was helping to launch Ultimate Fantastic Four and knock off the Ultimate Six mini-series.

His commercial success and professionalism has earned Bendis the creative freedom to take risks and the power to reshape the Marvel universe. As Bendis notes, 'I get paid whether I kick ass or phone it in. Why not kick ass?'. And kick ass he does, month after month....

Bendis has said that his greatest excitement as a writer comes when he paints himself into a corner and then has to figure out how to get back out again. Bendis constantly takes risks that a lesser writer would avoid and then makes them pay off for the reader, inviting us to think about the superheroes, their rogues galleries, their supporting characters, and their worlds in fresh new ways. Sometimes that pisses off the old-timers. Bendis sparked controversy with some of his earliest work for Marvel from fans who felt that he was putzing around with Elektra, a character introduced by Frank Miller during his acclaimed run of Daredevil . ...

The recent history of the superhero genre has been marked by several movements between deconstructionist writers (such as Frank Miller, Alan Moore, Rick Veitch, or Grant Morrison) who critiqued the genre's fascist fantasies, and reconstructionist writers (such as Mark Waid, Kurt Busiek, Mark Millar, Jeph Loeb, or Greg Rucka) who have sought to put the 'Wow!' back in the genre . Bendis's deft writing allows him to move back and forth between the two camps, chipping away at clichés, critiquing underlying assumptions, while at the same time offering the kind of slobberknocking fight scenes and high flying adventures that make comic fans grin. Each Bendis book offers a different angle on the superhero genre: depicting a young man learning the ropes and facing adult dismissals (Ultimate Spiderman), a more mature superhero whose world seems to be coming apart before his eyes (Daredevil), a former B-level superhero who sometimes has trouble getting the A-listers on the telephone (Alias), and a bunch of beat cops who have to unravel the scandals and conspiracies celebrity superheroes hope to hide from their tabloid-reading public (Powers). Bendis clearly loves the genre, but he's more than willing to take the piss out of it....

Dialogue

Wizard praises Bendis for 'dialogue that pops and snaps more than a fresh bowl of Rice Krispies.' ...

Superhero comics are notorious for their clunky or over-inflated dialogue, dating back to a time when the pictures were crude and the writers sometimes had to fill in plot information the artist never got around to drawing. So, you have the situation where characters describe things that would be obvious to anyone standing at the location or where villains spell out their entire plans. Sometimes the entire book is nothing but exposition as the writer tries to cram an ambitious story into far too few pages. Only belatedly did comic writers see dialogue as a means of defining the characters or setting the emotional tone. When Peter Parker first realizes that he has spider strength, Stan Lee has him exclaim, 'What's happening to me? I feel - different! As though my entire body is charged with some fantastic energy,' and then has him go into a long wonkish discussion of how his various powers parallel those of the common spider . (Come to think of it, maybe that is how the geekish protagonist would react!) Bendis deals with a similar discovery in Alias in a far more down to earth manner. An angry adolescent is trudging along through a city park, her mind million miles away, and then, suddenly, realizes that her feet are no longer touching the ground and that she has no idea how to land again. Her: 'Shit! Oh Shit!' economically expresses her shift between giddy excitement and gut-wrenching terror....

Bendis adopts more naturalistic patterns of communication, including a focus on the various ways people struggle, in real life, to adequately express their ideas. A recent anthology, Total Sellout, shares a series of his monologues, some autobiographical, others based on things he overheard on the street, which shows his early fascination with human speech patterns. Bendis loves to weave complex layers of word balloons across the page, allowing well-drawn character study to hold our interest in the absence of more visceral action sequences. This technique came into its own in Jinx, which includes rambling debates between various lowlife characters on such issues as the letterboxing of movies that recall the debate about Madonna videos that opens Reservoir Dogs or the famous Le Cheese Royale exchange in Pulp Fiction. ...

Critics accuse Bendis of being verbose and he certainly uses more words per page than anyone else. Yet, Bendis knows when to pull back and let his images speak for him, making effective use of wordless montages which convey the character's thought processes. Consider the moment in Ultimate Spider-Man 14 where the meat-headed Kong almost discovers Spiderman's secret identity but is unable to hold all of the pieces of information together in his mind; or the scene in Alias 21 where we see a teen-aged Jessica's thoughts as she masturbates to a pinup of Johnny Storm (ending with a close-up of her curling toes). Perhaps most spectacularly, an entire issue of Powers (31) includes only the grunts of subhuman apes as Bendis traces the origins of the superhero back to prehistoric times. Throughout Alias, Bendis contrasts the information-dump that Jessica receives from her clients with wordless shots showing the detective absorbing and reacting to the information....

A Bastard Art

Bendis himself sets the terms by which we evaluate his work. He told interviewers at Write Now!: 'I heard a quote from Sting, that rock-and-roll is a bastard art form. That there is no one thing that makes rock-and-roll, rock-and-roll, that it only really succeeds when somebody makes the conscious personal decision to pull something new into it from outside like jazz, country, or opera. Something vital happens then. I think comics are the same way. There is no one thing that makes a great comic. Each time someone's gone outside of comics and pulled something into it. For their own reasons, something really exciting happens. A lot of artists have done that, but not a lot of writers.'

Bendis has helped to revitalize the modern superhero comics by pulling into the genre a range of techniques which in other art forms insure naturalism: his reliance on fragmented and sometimes incomplete dialogue; his interest in documenting the perspectives of professional groups or youth subcultures; his attention to the mundane details of everyday life; his ability to allow characters to grow and develop over time. He talks about his comics alongside the work of writers like David Mamet or Richard Price, refusing to accept a second-class status for his own medium. Rather, his work does something theirs can not - build on a thirty or forty year history of our relationships with these characters, push these ideas into alternative realities and use them to comment on our own lived experiences, and, oh yeah, capture the hearts and imaginations of hundreds of thousands of teenagers.

For those of comics fans in the Boston area, you might be interested to know we are hosting a public lecture by Scott McCloud on his new book, Making Comics, this thursday, 5-7 pm, in the MIT Media Lab's Bartos Theater. It is a joint CMS-Media Lab event. For those outside the Boston area, we hope to provide a podcast of the event early next week.

Behind the Scenes: Beautiful Things in Popular Culture (Part Two)

This is the second part of a two part interview with Alan McKee, the editor and mastermind behind a fabulous new book, Beautiful Things in Popular Culture, which introduces what I see as a vital new approach for thinking about how we evaluate various forms of popular culture. The essays in the book combine anthropological and autobiographical insights -- both asking about their own evaluations and then reading them against larger taste communities. The result is an academic book which is fun to read and which will itself spark countless conversations as people debate what might constitute the "best of breed" in their favorite form of cultural production. The book is sure to also raise debates at academic conferences where evaluative judgements have long remained taboo (even though all of the decisions we make are shaped by often unexamined evaluations about which texts are worth studying, writing about, teaching, etc.) Early cultural studies sought to escape the shadow of high culture criteria as well as a history of insensitivity to work produced in alternative cultural traditions, yet it has in the process falsified its object of study. We ignore the degree to which evaluation and debating evaluations is central to the pleasure we take in popular culture. We ignore the kinds of popular aesthetics which shape these evaluations and allow to stand the myth of consumers as undiscriminating and popular culture as undifferentiated. And we essentially ignore the degree to which popular culture is, to borrow from my own writing, "the culture that sticks to your skin," (see my book, Hop on Pop: The Pleasures and Politics of Popular Culture) and thus can not be meaningfully understood from a traditional stance of academic discipline.

My hope is that aca/fen can, in fact, break down this inhibition about evaluation while at the same time, develop new conceptual frameworks for thinking about how evaluation works in fan communities. This is why I am so happy to see McKee and his contributors do such a spectacular job in realizing his goals for this project.

You are clearly critical of the "belief that consumers of mass culture lack the ability for discernment." What do you see as the negative consequences of this position in terms of writing about popular culture? What do we gain by looking more closely at the institutions and practices where popular evaluation occurs?

It's funny. Every Cultural Studies academic agrees theoretically now that consumers are not brainwashed, that they make active choices about what to consume, how to consume it, and that the interpretations they make of it can never be predicted by the producers. That's all common sense. But at the same time there's this Freudian disavowal going on - 'I know very well ... but all the same'. We all know very well that the masses are, like us, thinking human beings who choose what to consume ... but all the same ... Rupert Murdoch gets to decide what he puts in his papers ... and there would be a genuine demand for social debates on television, if the capitalist companies didn't control what was shown ... and there's no such thing as 'real' choice in capitalism, because the producers make sure that the range of what is available is limited, so that nothing that would genuinely challenge capitalism is ever shown .... Etc, etc etc - all the same old clichés and worries about the masses being brainwashed by the culture industry!

I had this conversation with a friend - a cultural theorist - where I was telling her about this book. I was talking about how so much cultural theory relies on the idea that audiences take whatever they're given. It's an attitude that underlies concerns about globalization, about media ownership, about dumbing down, about ideology and hegemony, and so on. And she said 'Are there really dinosaurs who still believe that kind of stuff?'. That was the word she used - dinosaurs - as though such an idea was so old fashioned that she couldn't imagine any living human being thinking in that way.

And the conversation then moved on to populist, trashy current affairs shows, and I was saying how interesting I find them as a way of understanding the culture and interests of middle aged, non-university-educated women - the demographic for those shows. Because by watching the successful, popular ones, you find out what that audience thinks is important and interesting. And she immediately disagreed - she was saying things like 'But there's no evidence they actually like the programs - they only watch them because there's no choice'. She knew very well that audiences won't take whatever they're given ... but all the same ...

I asked her which theorists she liked, and she was telling me about, I can't remember, Nancy or somebody, and I said, 'But you don't really like Nancy, you didn't make a rational decision to read him out of the theorists on offer - that's just what you've been given'. And she actually said, 'That's really rude'. And then she realized that that was exactly what she'd just said about the viewers of A Current Affair.

And so I think that this is the key thing for our cultural theorizing - this is the insight that we get from studying these systems of popular evaluation. Of course no consumer has infinite choice - just as intellectuals don't have an infinite choice about the theoretical books that they read. But that doesn't mean that there's no intellectual work involved in the choices of what to consume. At any given time in Australia, even in prime time, three quarters of the population aren't watching television. If there's 'nothing on', people will switch it off and do something else. I mean, that's so obvious it's not worth saying - and yet we forget that it's true. So we have to remember that although intellectuals may have the luxury of time and resources to communicate their thinking about culture, and that may separate us out as a class, the basic intellectual work of making decisions about culture is common. All human beings are thinking creatures. And if we can remember that, and not dismiss it with ' ... but all the same', I think our theories of culture would benefit.

The book's contributors deal with a broad range of different forms of popular culture. Do you see different criteria at work as people talk about serial killer novels, motorcycles, sports players, and running shoes, or is there such a thing as a "popular aesthetic" that shapes our response to these various

sites of cultural production?

Again, this is an interesting contrast with the tradition of aesthetic philosophy, which tends towards unitary aesthetic systems. There's a tendency for people to seek out 'the' single, correct set of criteria for evaluating culture. This ties back into the binary, of course - everything in culture can be placed within a single dualistic system - popular culture vs art - and only art has a proper aesthetic system, therefore there can (/should) only be a single aesthetic system.

But I think that's nonsense. I think that the whole popular culture/high culture binary is nonsense. The problem, as I see it, is that the way that this binary has emerged is that fans of high culture have a pretty good idea of what that is - it's the culture that's enjoyed by people with tertiary education. Having established that, the problem then is that the definition of popular culture becomes simply 'everything that's not high culture'. It's all defined in relation to high culture. Which is silly - why would you make high culture - or 'art' - the centre of your definitions and models of culture? In practice, that means that 'popular culture' then includes everything that isn't high culture - even minority cultural practices that most people would have a problem with (the casual gay sex of cruisingforsex.com); or radical cultural practices that reject and attack the mainstream (community media). It doesn't really make sense to lump together everything that isn't art as though it were all the same.

A better approach, I think, is to think lots of different 'subcultures'--including 'art' as just one more subculture - alongside mainstream entertainment as another particular subculture, alongside sexual subcultures, alternative experimental subcultures, radical subcultures and so on.

And so there are indeed multiple aesthetic systems for interpreting different kinds of culture. Even within a given community, there will be competing aesthetic systems. And I'm not sure that we can pull out any general rules about them. From reading the chapters in this book, a few things stood out for me. You can find some continuity with literary aesthetic systems, in a concern for characters which are psychologically believable. And there's an element that came through in several writers that many consumers like to find the less popular and less well known examples of their genre, the whole 'I like their early stuff' approach to evaluating culture - the connoisseurs of popular culture can be terrible snobs just as much as art fans. But I don't think there's such a thing as 'the' popular aesthetic system.

You refuse to draw sharp lines between popular and high art here. This is a conversation we've been having on the blog -- whether we can be "fans" of high culture or whether the aura and institutional practices surrounding it tends to restrict how we engage with its contents. What can we take from the study of "Beautiful Things in Popular Culture" that we might apply back to the study of traditional high culture?

I know that this is a bit controversial, but personally I don't believe there's any difference between the fans of popular culture and the fans of high culture. I've recently been doing some research into Theory fans - people who read cultural Theory for pleasure. And their practices and pleasures seem to be exactly the same as Star Trek fans, for example. Theory fans buy the books. They buy books of 'fan writing' - books written by other fans who really like Theory and want to tell people how good it is. They read all of this for pleasure. They go to conventions/conferences, to meet other fans, and argue about their favorite bits, and about the interpretation of them. It's all just fan behaviour. I found a great example recently, of a flyer advertising a Derrida conference, where the organizers said quite explicitly that the conference would 'celebrate the enduring and urgent political significance and relevance of his work'. It's celebration! You can't get more fannish than that. And you can see the same thing for Shakespeare fans, and classical music fans, and performance art fans, etc etc etc.

Of course, there are differences about how such fandoms are treated in culture. As a fan of high culture, one is encouraged to think of oneself as a 'connoisseur'. The myth is that there are real, 'rational' reasons to like high culture (because it is, 'really', 'good'), while fans of popular culture are somehow excessive or misguided in their loyalty. But I can't find any evidence to support this view - I'm pretty sure it's just prejudice.

Many of the essays in the collection are deeply personal: people dig deep into their own memories to talk about the place of these "beautiful things" in their own lives and to establish their own credentials for offering evaluations. Much academic work seeks to expel such autobiographical impulses; what do we gain by including them in the study of popular culture?

I think you're right that academic writing as a genre seeks to expel personal reactions to texts. I've worked like that for a long time myself. But I think that ultimately, it's not intellectually sustainable. For example, look at Deleuze fans. Why are they so excited about Deleuze's ideas, why do they want to write about them, and go to conferences about them? The answer can't be found just in Deleuze's writing, because there are plenty of intelligent, informed people who have read Deleuze and just shrug their shoulders and say 'Whatever'. The reason for their passion is in the relationship between them as readers and the writings of Deleuze. It's something about their own character, their intellectual and emotionalformation, their upbringing, that means that they are the kind of people who respond to that kind of writing. Again, the recent research I've done on Theory fans has been very interesting. Many of them talked about the thrill they get when they read something that's initially incomprehensible, and then finally understand it. They talk about that thrill, combined with the secret, illicit pleasure of knowing that other people don't understand it - that you're special, you've cracked the code.

And so we can't just talk about texts - any texts, Theory, popular culture, etc. We always have to talk about the relationship - between the texts, and the specific audience, or perhaps even viewer, who is interpreting them.

Behind the Scenes: Beautiful Things in Popular Culture (Part One)

A little while ago, I raised the question of whether one can be a "fan" of high culture and was pleased to see a high level of interest in this question. I am excited to report that there is a new book, Beautiful Things in Popular Culture, which pushes even deeper into the question of how we evaluate various forms of popular culture and how those evaluations do or do not connect with the ways we assess work in high culture. Alan McKee, who teaches in the Creative Industires program at Queensland University of Technology (which I increasingly think of as the sister program to Comparative Media Studies), has brought together a world class mix of academics, fans, and journalists, who share with us what they see as "best of breed" examples across a range of different sites of popular aesthetics. So we get Will Brooker on the Best Batman Story (The Dark Knight Returns), Sue Turnbull on the Best Serial Killer Novel (Red Dragon), Thomas McLaughlin on the Best Basketball Player (Michael Jordan), Simon Frith on the Best Disco Record ("Never Give Up"), Sara Gwenllian Jones on the Best Villain in Xena:Warrior Princess (Alti), and John Hartley on the Best Propaganda (Humphrey Jennings, The Silent Village).

As this sample of the categories and judgements suggest, all of these claims are open to debate and that's precisely the point. Contributors were asked to offer "defensible" but not "definitive" choices and then to deal precisely with the terms of debate that might shape the judgements we make in these particular sectors. If the categories here seem like a grab bag -- and trust me, there are some even more surprising categories here such as the Best Motorbike, the Best Australian Romance Novelist, and the Best Website for Men who have Sex with Other Men -- then it is because popular culture is not a unified field, not one thing that can be simply contrasted with high culture. (Of course, high culture is also not one thing but that's a debate for another day.)

We would never judge Lisistrada, Everyman, Mother Courage, Oklahoma, A Noh drama, and A Doll's House by the same criteria -- each gets read according to terms defined minimally by a specific tradition and historical period and in some cases, by specific artists. (I never stop laughing at the college journalist who reviewed a Brecht play and complained that he just couldn't identify with the characters.) So, why should we apply a single set of criteria to talk about popular culture and why in the world should that criteria get defined by the norms of high culture?

I will admit that I am biased since I have a piece in this particular collection -- The Best Contemporary Mainstream Superhero Comics Writer (Brian Michael Bendis) -- which I will excerpt here in a few days time. But I have rarely enjoyed reading any "academic" book as much as this one. McKee is an editor who values lively and personally engaged writing, someone who pushed all of the contributors to write to a general readership, and for once, they listened. I never knew academic prose could be this fun! And underlying it all are some powerful ideas about how we value the culture we consume.

I wanted to share some of McKee's own thinking on this topic with my readers, so I asked him to address some core questions about the book's premises and will run the interview here in two parts.

What constitutes a "beautiful thing" in the book's terms and how do we recognize

one when we see it?

A 'beautiful thing' is the best example of an area of culture - the best serial killer novel, pair of sneakers, disco record ... I decided to use 'beautiful' rather than 'best' because it ties us into the tradition of aesthetic judgments that has been jealously guarded by fans of high culture. And I love the idea that, in the case of the chapter on 'the best website for men who have sex with men', that webpages full of arse-fucking can be, in their own way, 'beautiful'.

And how do we judge what's 'the best' in a given area? How do we recognize a beautiful thing when we see it? The key here is that 'we' might not recognize it - 'we' - cultural theorists, researchers, academics - may in fact have to speak to the experts in the area, and ask them to explain to us what is beautiful and why it is so.

That's a challenging idea for some Cultural Studies academics. Because there's a still a strong remnant in Cultural Studies of the Literary Studies idea that what distinguishes us as academics - the reason that we're worth our salaries - is because we've learned how to 'read' texts better than other people. Traditionally in Literary Studies one learned to read more 'sensitively', to understand the art in books that common people simply couldn't see (my first degree was in Literary Studies - in fact I got a medal for the 'Most Distinguished Shakespearean Scholar' at the University of Glasgow! - so I'm familiar with this tradition). In Cultural Studies, it's a similar thing - except we're trained to think that our readings are better, not because they're more sensitive to the art, but because we can see the 'truth' of ideology, exploitation, hidden capitalist messages, that the masses don't see because they're blinded by hegemonic processes, or not fully educated ...

And so, to abandon that idea, and to think that we might actually be interested in - respectful of, and learn from - consumers talking about the interpretations that they make of texts ... well, it's a challenging idea for a lot of academics!

That of course, leads on to the question - if we're not intellectually superior to the masses, and they don't need us to lead them out of the darkness and show them the correct, 'true', anti-capitalistic interpretations of culture, then what is the purpose of academics? In brief I think that the answer lies in focusing on the 'anthropological' element of defining cultures. Nobody suggests that anthropologists should be telling the people they observe that their culture is wrong, and they're blind not to see that. Personally, I don't agree with some of the claims that anthropology makes to objectivity. But it's still acknowledged that anthropology - trying to understand how a culture operates - can produce valuable knowledge.

A central goal of this book is to revitalize the place of evaluation in the writing about popular culture. Why do you think Cultural Studies has moved so far away from a focus on evaluation and what have we lost as a consequence?

I completely understand why Cultural Studies has a problem with evaluation - I've avoided it myself for many years. It's because there has been so little awareness by academics in any area - including in Cultural Studies - of the aesthetic systems of popular culture. That meant that you could pretty much guarantee that whenever anybody said 'we have to reintroduce aesthetics/evaluation into Cultural Studies', what they meant was 'we have to reintroduce high-culture aesthetic systems into the study of popular culture - and start studying television programs in terms of literary values such as philosophical themes, and references to T S Eliot', and so on. Which is, of course, completely the wrong way to go about things.

Why have we thought that 'aesthetic systems' automatically means 'high culture's aesthetic systems?'. Well, it's been hard to get away from the idea that an aesthetic system must be unitary. The idea that we could have multiple, irreconcilable, overlapping aesthetic systems coexisting has taken a long time to get established. I suppose it's because, in order to do that, you pretty much have to throw out everything in the philosophy of aesthetics from Kant onwards and start again. Which I'm pretty happy to do, personally. But I know that not everyone is!

What has really surprised - and upset - me, working in Cultural Studies is the extent to which Cultural Studies has managed to smuggle traditional forms of aesthetic evaluation back in by the back door. We don't say that art is superior to popular culture because it reveals insight into universal truths about humanity. Oh no - we say that art is superior to popular culture because art is politically progressive, and genuinely challenges capitalism, whereas popular culture is inextricably tied up in the capitalist economy within which it is produced .... It's so depressing to hear this kind of nonsense. It really is just traditional snobbery dressed up in new arguments. And that has been the place that evaluation has played in Cultural Studies. We've kind of forgotten what we all know to be true, about the power relations and class relations involved in making judgments about what is good and bad culture - and fallen right back into lazy thinking about art being superior to mass culture. I blame Adorno. I mean, you read his work on 'The culture industry', and it's so obvious that he doesn't know anything about popular culture, he's never consumed any popular culture - in fact, it seems like he's never even spoken to anybody who's ever consumed any popular culture!

So we've thoughtlessly accepted old prejudices about cultural value, smuggled in via the back door, which is one problem. And a second problem is that by refusing to study evaluative judgments in an anthropological sense, we've actually accepted the myth, perpetuated by the snobs, that mass culture is all the same. We actually play into their hands. But you can make an anthropological, or perhaps a sociological, study of aesthetic systems - one that asks how the consumers of popular culture make these judgments. And that isn't the opposite of aesthetic thinking - it's directly linked to it. It means that you can ask people 'Why do you love this program, this book, this comic, so much?'. And then listen to their answers. It's a simple idea - and yet, it hasn't been done before.

The question you posed to your contributors -- what constitutes the "best" in class within a given form of popular culture -- is the stuff of many barroom conversations. I suppose that's part of the point: we can't talk about popular

culture without debating values and evaluation. But what do we as academics bring to that discussion which wasn't already a part of fan knowledge and expertise?

I gestured towards this question before - if we're not telling people that their interpretations are wrong, what is our function? How do we earn our hefty Professorial salaries, with associated benefits? As I said above, there is an anthropological function, trying to understand cultures better. And more than this, we can then act as translators, letting groups know about each other. The information that we gather is fan knowledge. We can bring that together, synthesise it, and put it into forms that different groups can access. Our skills here are in editing, building networks, understanding genres and communication and so on. And ultimately we can then help different parts of culture to be aware of each other. That's an extremely important - and a very political - thing to do. I'm an old fashioned utopian, and my vision of the ideal world is a soppy, hippie, love-drenched place where people actually find ways to live together. I reveal this at one point in the book where I get all misty-eyed and say "knowing that there are people who do love and think about and discuss things that don't engage me isn't a threat to my way of thinking. It's a source of delight. The more joy that's in the world, the better for all of us, I say". I know - I'm a sad old hippie. But it does seem to me that one of the most positive aspects of our mature capitalist democracies is that different groups in society are becoming more and more familiar to each other, and there's an increasing interchange of ideas between cultures - across races, genders, sexualities and nationalities. I think that pretty much everybody would agree that the average, non-university-educated white man, for example, currently knows more about Black culture, or women's culture, or queer culture, than they have at any point in the history of Western culture, simply because of the increasing visibility and recognition of those cultures in mass popular entertainment.

I'm afraid I also have to say that one of the main forces working against such cultural exchange is humanities academics and cultural theorists, who want to insist that there is only one good form of culture - rational, informed, artistic, high-quality public debate - and that other forms of culture - Black culture or women's culture or queer culture, rap, debates about body image, emotional forms of communication and so on - are worthless. It bothers me that 'my people' (academics) are struggling so hard against what seems to me to be one of the most positive aspects of our cultures.

Web Comics and Network Culture

I am participating in a very interesting conversation about digital storytelling, visual culture, and web 2.0 over at Morph, the blog of the Media Center, which describes itself as "a provocative, future-oriented, nonprofit think tank. In the dawning Digital Age, as media, technology and society converge at an accelerating pace in overlapping cycles of disruption, transition and change, and in all areas of human endeavor, The Media Center facilitates the process by gathering information and insights and conceiving context and meaning. We identify opportunity, provide narrative, stimulate new thinking and innovation, and agitate for dialog and action towards the creation of a better-informed society." The Media Center has asked a fairly diverse group of media makers and thinkers to participate in a "slow conversation" to be conducted over the next month or so about creativity in the new media age. So far, the most interesting post has come from Daniel Meadows, currently a lecturer at Cardiff University in Wales, about work he has done with the British Broadcasting System to get digital stories by everyday people onto the air. He provides links to a great array of amateur media projects. I haven't spent as much time following these links as I would like but it's a great snapshot of the work being done in digital storytelling.

What follows are some excerpts from my own first post in the exchange which uses webcomics to explore some of the ideas in Yochai Benkler's The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, a book I referenced here the other day.

I have been reading a new book by Yale Law Professor Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, which offers a pretty compelling account of the ways that the technological and social shifts wrought by the so-called digital revolution are generating new models of cultural expression and civic engagement. In the book's introduction, he writes:

These changes have increased the role of nonmarket and nonproprietary production, both by individuals alone and by cooperative efforts in a wide range of loosely or tightly woven collaborations. These newly emerging practices have seen remarkable success in areas as diverse as software development and investigative reporting, avant-garde video and multiplayer online games. Together, they hint at the emergence of a new information environment, one in which individuals are free to take a more active role than was possible in the industrial information economy of the twentieth century.

Benkler is describing a mediascape which is profoundly hybrid -- that is, communication occurs on multiple levels (some motivated by economic gain, some by a gift economy, some by a notion of reputation building or education or public service or civic engagement or fan appreciation). People create culture for many different reasons with different expectations in terms of rewards on their investment.

I am also reading alongside Benkler another new book, T. Campbell's A History of Web Comics, which describes the gradual emergence of the Web as a platform for graphic expression. At first, webcomics seemed largely fringe to the commercial mainstream of newspaper comic strips and printed comic books, a place for gifted amateurs and art school dropouts with much of the content focused on digital culture itself.

Scott McCloud's groundbreaking manifesto, Reinventing Comics (2000) made the case for the Web as an "expanded canvas" that might allow new modes of graphic expression, as a more open space for newcomers to prove their worth as artists, and as a technology which might broaden the potential public for comics by allowing writers and artists to explore themes that would never make it into mainstream publications.

All of this has proven true - at least to some degree. Today, webcomics thrive across many different communities. People are creating webcomics for very different reasons - some are trying to hone their skills, demonstrate market potential, or build a reputation before going pro. Some are moving into print once they've found their niche and others are choosing to remain digital despite offers from print-based publishers. Some have developed political communities around their web comics which take on a life of their own and, in some cases, overwhelm the comics themselves. Some have created virtual artists colonies where amateurs and commercial artists share work and give each other feedback. And a small number are generating at least modest revenues online through subscriptions, micropayments, or the sale of merchandise.

Campbell describes a moment early in the history of webcomics when Fred Gallagher, the co-creator of MegaTokyo, a man who thought he was doing amateur work on the way to turning pro, finds himself swamped at conventions by his intense fan following and realized "he had no control - no one had control -- over whether online readers labeled them 'professional,' 'amateur', 'true artist' or 'rock star.'"

The book similarly qoutes publisher Joey Manley's comments about Modern Tales, an important example of the "artist colony" model I referenced earlier: "We've got manga-styled werewolf/cop dramas butting heads (or, um, maybe some other body part) with Fancy Froglin, medieval fantasy side-by-side with 'straight' autobiography, space-opera-charged science fiction right next door to Borgesian metafiction. And we like it all (as do our thousands of subscribers.)"

Both of these comments suggest the instability which occurs when you bring together diverse kinds of media stakers working with different goals and interests for different communities but all available through the same communications platform...

These shifts in the nature of our media landscape have the potential to transform how we understand ourselves and our place in the world. Benkler writes,

They enable anyone, anywhere, to go through his or her practical life, observing the social environment through new eyes -- the eyes of someone who could actually interject a thought, a criticism, or a concern into the public debate. Individuals become less passive and thus more engaged observers of social spaces....The various formats of the networked public sphere provide anyone with an outlet to speak, to inquire, to investigate, without need to access the resources of a major media organization.

Benkler argues that the threat of fragmentation and babel on the Web has best been dealt with by harnessing the collective intelligence of Web communities -- through efforts at tagging, filtering, and blogging, which help us weigh the value of different contributions and direct them towards the most appropriate audience. At the same time, we are developing new modes of expression which do use images to encapsulate more complex bodies of knowledge.

There's more on this topic at Morph -- but I figured I'd port over the part that was most relevent to our focus here.