March 10, 2024

OSCAR WATCH 2024 — Feminist Frankensteins

March 10, 2024/ Henry Jenkins and Kris Longfield

This piece is part of a series of critical responses to the films nominated for Best Picture at the 96th Academy Awards. In this dialogic post, Henry Jenkins and Kris Longfield dissect three recent feminist re-tellings of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: Lisa Frankenstein, The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster, and Poor Things. By centering women in traditionally male roles, these newer Frankenstein films ask different kinds of questions, renewing the story by mapping alternative meanings onto its core figures.They're continually asking “what are we taking from the past and what are we taking from the present?” so their leading ladies can solve problems.

March 09, 2024

OSCAR WATCH 2024 — “Based on ‘Barbie’ by Mattel”: Adaptation, Franchising, and 'Barbie' (2023)

March 09, 2024/ Tara Lomax

This piece is part of a series of critical responses to the films nominated for Best Picture at the 96th Academy Awards. Barbie is nominated in eight categories in the 2024 Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay. This critical response has been provoked by the discourse surrounding its eligibility in the Adapted Screenplay category, rather than Original Screenplay, and explores questions of adaptation and franchising in Barbie. The Barbie doll’s perceived lack of story or character suggests that Barbie is an original screenplay, but it is still based on a pre-existing intellectual property and an opening title card recognizes that Barbie is “Based on ‘Barbie’ by Mattel”. As an adaptation and a franchise Barbie draws from a material, industrial and historical story that works in concert with the polysemic, ambiguous and open nature of Barbie as a toy. Barbie is therefore shaped by the creative interpretation of Barbie as a culturally iconic toy and ‘Barbie’ as a franchise property owned by Mattel.

March 08, 2024

OSCAR WATCH 2024 — 'The Holdovers': A Crash Course on Using Vintage Sensibilities the Right Way

March 08, 2024/ Matt Severino

This is the latest in a series of critical responses to the films nominated for Best Picture at the 96th Academy Awards. It is unbelievably easy for a film to come across as corny when attempting to put on the vintage aesthetic—also known in some fan circles as nostalgiacore. The term “nostalgia bait” has even been coined in recent years to signify works of new media that maraud retro sensibilities for the sheer sake of suckering audiences into a hollow experience. As frustrating and soulless as instances of nostalgia bait are, films that pull off the vintage look with purpose have the potential to be something quite special. Alexander Payne’s new witty coming-of-age drama, The Holdovers (2023), serves as a crash course in how to answer the crucial question every nostalgically aestheticized film must be asked: what’s the point?

March 06, 2024

OSCAR WATCH 2024 — 'Killers of the Flower Moon' (2023)

March 06, 2024/ Sebastian Wurzrainer

This is the latest in a series of critical responses to the films nominated for Best Picture at the 96th Academy Awards. It often felt to me as though Killers of the Flower Moon was being treated in press coverage like a referendum on the history of Indigenous representation in Hollywood cinema. Can a filmmaker with Martin Scorsese’s clout return to traditionally the most fraught genre vis-à-vis Indigenous representation (the western), tell a particularly devastating true story in the history of Indigenous-settler relations, and finally get it right? And, even if the film did “get it right” (which is destined to be a contentious claim no matter the outcome), would the industry at large recognize and celebrate it? Either way, the impending ceremony feels like an auspicious occasion to revisit precisely the way in which Killers of the Flower Moon actually structures its own approach to representation. Because, quite frankly, that might be the most interesting aspect of the film.

March 04, 2024

OSCAR WATCH 2024 — World on Fire: Reflections on 'Oppenheimer' (2023) and Contemporary Hollywood

March 04, 2024/ Peter Krämer

Welcome to the first of a series of critical responses to the films nominated for Best Picture at the 96th Academy Awards. This piece explores the timeliness of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer (2023), a biopic about the so-called “father of the atomic bomb”, by relating the film’s story and imagery to the contemporary threat of nuclear war, judged to be greater than at any time before by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists setting its Doomsday Clock to 90 seconds to midnight. In addition to indicating the film’s impressive success with critics, the piece explores the film’s chances at this year’s Academy Awards with regards to the Academy’s love of biopics and of Nolan. Oppenheimer’s surprising commercial success is situated within decades-long trends at the global box office. The film marks a triumphant return to the tradition of blockbusting historical epics, combines talking heads with spectacular visual effects imagery, places 20th century science and engineering within a mythological framework, and raises many questions about its protagonist, steadfastly refusing to provide clear cut answers.

February 19, 2024

Immersive Ways of Live Storytelling Through Challenging Transmedia Universes: Rodrigo Terra Interviewed by Renata Frade and Bruno Valente Pimentel

February 19, 2024/ Renata Frade and Bruno Valente Pimentel

Scholar Renata Frade interviews transmedia and AR/VR creator, scholar, and entrepreneur Rodrigo Terra and mobile apps developer and VFX editor Bruno Valente Pimetel. They share insights on the history and future of transmedia and AR/VR work in Brazil as well as internationally, with examples like VR immersive narrative The Line and game universe Pixel Ripped.

January 29, 2024

Serial Killers and the Production of the Uncanny in Digital Participatory Culture

January 29, 2024/ Laura Glitsos and Mark Deuze

Everywhere you look, the serial killer looks back at you. Streaming services finance endless documentaries about notorious killers, broadcast networks greenlight miniseries telling similar stories, podcasters jump in, social media debates ensue, amateur content proliferates – around the world. There seems to be an uncanny alliance between participatory digital media culture and the mythos of the serial killer. The serial killer, we argue, is not an accidental exemplar of contemporary digital culture—it is a totem upon which people can project their anxieties about dehumanisation uniquely experienced in a digital environment. For our argument, we consider what people – professionals and amateurs alike – do online with the serial killer as practices that function to (re-)appropriate existing serial killer discourse into a new media language that belongs to the Internet.

January 15, 2024

Feeding the Civic Imagination (Part Four): Passing Down and Following Up: Jewish Cuisine’s Umbrella Potential

January 15, 2024/ Jana Stöxen

Jewish communities may all have originated from the Twelve Tribes of Israel, but they have transformed over time and space, moved, merged as well as diverged. So did their cuisine: Jewish cooking and eating is multifaceted and yet highly capable of dialogue. It is a marker of religious and cultural belonging, its historical and contemporary features and possesses a commendable diversity, deriving from the various patterns that form belonging to a broader Jewish sphere. Exploring the “Jewish Food Society” with its storytelling around passed down family recipes, I focus on the combination of tradition and adaption. Through a focus on the practices of cooking and eating in a Jewish context, their change overtime, for instance, concerning valorisation and trendsetting, can be traced, and tracked. This adds up to the formation of Jewish cuisine as a term with interconnections between prescribed dietary laws – the Kashrut – and local as well as global conditions, ultimately leading to a pluralistic approach to “Jewish Cuisine”. Sparking civic imagination, this can serve as a soft though powerful approach to resilient relations of inclusivity, when pictured with a certain openness for its combinability.

December 18, 2023

Returning to Tradition: Emotional Morality in Fan Fiction of 'A Dream of Red Mansions'

December 18, 2023/ Xiaoxi Zhou

Cao Xueqin's masterpiece A Dream of Red Mansions is both a model of ancient literature and the subversion of many of the conventions of its literary genre. Today, it is also a popular canon for fan fiction writers on the internet. But where the original work is renowned for its subversive nature, contemporary fan fiction for it most often returns to classic social values.

December 04, 2023

The Popularity of Cotton Dolls: The Desire to Return to Childhood

December 04, 2023/ Xiaoxi Zhou

Cotton dolls, originally of K-Pop idols, have become a favorite object of high school girls and young office ladies, a totem of "Peter Pan syndrome.” Baudrillard called non-functional goods "gadgets," meaning that they were divorced from practical value and had only symbolic meaning. The practical value of the cotton doll lies precisely in the implementation of the symbolic meaning on the concrete and perceptible material, which forms an interesting contrast with Baudrillard's "gadget."

November 10, 2023

Contemplating Molly: Notes on Pop-Mart Toys (Part Three)

November 10, 2023/ Henry Jenkins

Meet Molly. She was gifted to me during the seven weeks I spent this summer teaching, lecturing, and doing field work on fan culture in China. She is a product readily available at any of the Pop Mart stores in Shanghai. Across this post, I am going to explore some of the different ways we might make sense of Molly as an embodiment of Chinese fan culture.

November 08, 2023

Contemplating Molly: Notes on Pop-Mart Toys (Part Two)

November 08, 2023/ Henry Jenkins

November 05, 2023

Contemplating Molly: Notes on Pop-Mart Toys (Part One)

November 05, 2023/ Henry Jenkins

October 23, 2023

Into the Wild: A Reflection on Cosplay in Public Discourse: Notes on an Unfolding Semantic Shift (Part Two)

October 23, 2023/ Ellen Kirkpatrick

Cosplay is big news today. And I’m not just talking about within the realms of fandom and fan studies; cosplay has hit the mainstream hard over the last few decades. A socio-cultural evolution seeing its meaning change in ways unexpected and not yet quite understood. Once describing a subcultural, niche fan practice, cosplay is fast becoming a metonym for all kinds of dressing up practices. Forget the subtleties of masking and costuming, masquerade, mimicry, fancy dress, dressing up, or just plain old dressing, it’s all cosplay now.[1] As a natural aspect of evolving phenomena, semantic shifts are hardly surprising— that’s not the story here. Like seasoned seamsters, fans and scholars are always adjusting the meaning of cosplay, altering its pattern and form, letting it out a bit here, a timely tuck or hem there, and always embellishing our understanding of this art of making otherwise. Less important then is the idea that cosplay’s meaning is stretchable, it’s the origin, nature, and agents of this particular public amplification that I want to observe and consider, and its potential impact upon what’s rather magically called the “cosphere.”

October 17, 2023

Into the Wild: A Reflection on Cosplay in Public Discourse: Notes on an Unfolding Semantic Shift (Part One)

October 17, 2023/ Ellen Kirkpatrick

October 02, 2023

The American Key Demo Needs to Get Older

October 02, 2023/ Nicholas Yanes

With America’s Senior Citizens in control of more money than younger generations, it is time for US entertainment companies to more aggressively appeal to older audiences.

August 28, 2023

Fandom, Participatory Culture and Web 2.0 — A Syllabus

August 28, 2023/ Henry Jenkins

As regular readers of this blog know, the syllabus for my PHD seminar on fandom studies has evolved a lot through the years. The changes I have made this round mostly center on integrating a transcultural fandom perspective across the whole, with a particular emphasis on East Asian fandoms. I have lots to learn here, but there's a broad range of expertise amongst the students enrolled in the class and so I look forward to creating a context in the classroom where we can all learn from each other -- one of many reasons I am leaning heavily on the dialogic writing process for the assignments.

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