April 24, 2013

Comics as Poetry: An Interview with David Mack (Part One)

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The following interview with the comic book artist David Mack appeared in a special issue of the journal, Amerikastudien American Studies, focused on “American Comic Books and Graphic Novels.” This special issue was edited by Daniel Stein, Christina Meyer, and Micha Edlich. Other contributions to the issue include discussions of Grant Morrison and Dave McKean’s Arkham Asylum (James F. Wurtz), Arab and Muslim Superheroes in American Comics after 9/11 (Fredrik Stromberg), David Small’s Stitches (Astrid Boger), Howard Cruise’s Stuck Rubber Baby (Simon Dickel), focalization in comics narrative (Kai Mikkonen), and teaching graphic novels in the ESL classroom (Carola Hecke). This interview is being reprinted here with the special permission of the editors.

Most comics are written in prose – more often than not purple prose. They are telling us larger-than-life stories that draw us into close identifications with their characters and immerse us in their world. David Mack (best known for his creator-owned comic series, Kabuki) creates comics that are much closer to poetry. As he suggests later in this interview, the difference has to do with the process of compression on the production side, trying to pack as much meaning into his images as possible, and decryption on the reception side, inviting us to scrutinize the complexly layered images in search of hidden meanings which may emerge only upon the second or third readings.
As an artist, Mack is surprisingly self-conscious about the reading process and about what his fans bring to their experience of his work. In some cases, he draws materials directly from his fans, which he integrated into his collage-like designs. In every case, he argues that the alchemical process of creating meaning through the juxtaposition of words and images is not complete until the page has been processed through the eye and mind of the beholder. For him, the comics page is both raw material out of which the reader produces meaning and a byproduct which can be appreciated on its own terms only after the story has been consumed.

Mack began publishing Kabuki in 1994 while he was still completing a BFA in Graphic Arts at Northern Kentucky University. His close association with Brian Michael Bendis, the award-winning author famous for his work on the Ultimate Spider-Man series, opened up opportunities for Mack at the industry heavyweight Marvel Comics, where he drew covers for Bendis’s Alias and contributed as both a writer and artist to the popular Daredevil series.

What strikes one about David Mack’s career is his ability to move between mainstream and independent comics, often creating surprising hybrid forms where avant-garde practices are applied to the superhero characters who are Marvel’s cash cow. His own Kabuki comics are dazzling in their innovative use of techniques , including the incorporation of everything from tea stains to toy train tracks, into his visual collages, and in his exploration of complex ideas, including those about subjectivity and the experience of mediation. Over the course of the story, his protagonist, a Japanese woman, is a paid assassin in a criminal network, the fictionalized character in a mass media franchise, a prisoner trying to survive, a children’s book author, and a leader in a resistance movement. Each volume introduced new genre and narrative elements, while encouraging us to reread what came before through new conceptual lens.

However, Mack seems equally at home working for Marvel, collaborating as consummate a mainstream craftsman as Joe Quesada (who is now Editor-in-Chief at Marvel) or as commercial a comics author as Bendis. Sometimes, Mack’s interventions into the comics mainstream strike controversy because he is asking readers to embrace a style that takes them out of their comfort zone. Behind these interventions, however, there is a deep respect for the pulp traditions out of which these characters and stories have emerged. Many experimental comics creators seek to escape from the superhero tradition, while Mack hopes to bring something back to it from his own independent practices, adding new layers to our understanding of its iconic characters and expanding its visual vocabulary to create new kinds of emotional experiences for the reader.

I was lucky enough to snag some time with Mack in the aftermath of 2010 San Diego Comic-Con. Sitting in my hotel room in San Diego, Mack shared with me his reflections on everything from his first experiences with comics (and the childhood stories which have shaped his imagination) to his creative process and aesthetic practices. What emerges is a complex picture of a comics artist and storyteller of the highest caliber, someone who is constantly pushing beyond the conventions and limitations of American comic’s dominant genres, experimenting and innovating inside the commercial mainstream and on the fringe, trying to expand the expressive vocabulary of his medium and, in the process, to use the corporate machine to deliver his own distinctive perspective on American culture.

Comics, the Subversive Art

HJ: In Kabuki: The Alchemy, the writer Kabuki meets on the airplane notes that “most widely distributed media tend to be decision by committee. They are beholden to the various interests of a conglomerate umbrella company…Comics are a subversive medium capable of great communication and cultural influence. The format affords an individual to voice a singular vision on an international scale under the radar of big business interests and federal regulation.” Does this reflect your own thoughts about how comics function as a medium?

DM: I’m able to put into the book characters that have strong points of view. You can put one character with a strong view next to another, and you get to have them brush up against each other. Some people think this character is my definite point of view, but it allows me a playground to let these points of view go against each other. When I say it’s a subversive medium, I mean it in two different ways. One has to do with the comics industry as a distribution system, and the other has to do with the way comics work as a medium and how people read them.

As a distribution system, comics are unlike radio or TV where you have a license and regulations and people overseeing you or film distribution where there is a certain amount of money and system involved before you can do anything. One person in their basement can have an idea and immediately make a complete story and reach a pretty fair amount of people through comics – whether the kind you print off and staple together at Kinko’s or the kind you make and distribute through the web. Comics are one of the last pirate media. One person can go and immediately just have an idea in his attic and make a book, and it can be out there. This is why some of the other media, like film and television, use comics as a research and development platform to a degree. I just started making mini-comics and showing that to publishers. I don’t even know if a lot of times what I’m doing can even be classified as comics. I let other people decide what the category is, but I have been able to infiltrate the delivery system that’s there.

And the other way I think comics are subversive has to do with the nature of the medium of comics. Comics start with two images, each slightly different from what came before, but, when you put these two images together, it’s just human nature to construct a dialogue between them. We construct a continuity: whatever happens in this image was before in time, and this happens after it. Nothing’s moving at all; nothing’s said in between. Even if things are completely different from this panel to that panel, our natural instinct is to construct order out of that juxtaposition and to create a narrative in between those images. So what I love about comics is that the readers themselves are really making what’s happening in comics in their own mind. When comics are done right, when they meet the reader halfway, when they don’t give too much… I think if they give the reader too much information, the readers don’t have to use their minds as much. But, if you finesse it and give them just the right amount, the readers then really start actively completing everything inside their minds. This makes the reader an active participant in what’s happening.

HJ: There is an ongoing concern in Kabuki about corporate-controlled media, with entertainment as a form of propaganda, yet you have also chosen to work often for Marvel – one of the two biggest publishers in comics, a company now owned by the Disney corporation. How do you reconcile these two positions?

DM: Kabuki itself is published through Marvel. I started Kabuki as a series of mini-comics, and then I started doing it at a small publisher called Caliber Comics in the early 90s that had published The Crow, and I moved to a larger company (Image) in 1997. And then Brian Bendis, Mike Oeming, and I formed an imprint at Marvel Comics called Icon in 2004 to bring our creator-owned comics to Marvel. Marvel Comics has now been bought by Disney. We were able to carve out a niche at Marvel–a little compartment for creator-owned comic books. We’re given complete autonomy in terms of what we do.

People ask me, “Are you concerned with giving up your rights?” You don’t have to give up any rights–you only give up rights that you agree to give up. And, so we made a contract where we weren’t giving up any rights, and Marvel worked with that. Marvel provides us with distribution and access to their readership and their delivery system, and I guess Marvel felt like us being there was some advantage to them as well. But people ask me that a lot: “Is there some editorial control because it’s a bigger company?” In fact, I don’t think they care. I do a complete Kabuki story. I turn in a finished book. They don’t look at it ahead of time, and they don’t look at it afterwards. Some editors look at the finished story itself, but they don’t give any suggestions at all for creator-owned comics.

I like the idea that you’re living inside a system whether you like it or not. So you have to cohabitate with that system, and hopefully you can meet halfway at certain times, and, hopefully…maybe…you can even influence it to a degree or at least influence the people that are part of its delivery system.

HJ: As The Alchemy continues, it is clear that you also see popular culture as a site of potential resistance to corporate and governmental control. Can you speak to the ways you see popular culture as a potential resource for the people who consume it? Where do your theories of media and cultural change come from?

DM: One of the major themes of the story is that we don’t just have to consume the culture that we are offered, we can create our own culture.
I’m not as interested in consuming a culture that is offered to me and made by someone else for me to buy. I’m much more interested in works and literature, and culture that inspires me to create my own offerings that will be useful to others, and to be an active and meaningful participant in cultural creation.

The Alchemy story deals with two issues of resistance. The external resistance
from an outside power as you mentioned, but also an internal resistance that we face whenever we try to create something. There is a kind of self-censorship people sometimes have built into them. And an “object at rest, tends to remain at rest” force that offers a lot of rational reasons of why not to create what you think of creating, why not to fulfill all of your best and wildest dreams.

Before you ever get the external part, you need to overcome all of these internal walls to actually begin, complete, make real, or share all of your best ideas.
The Alchemy chronicles characters dealing with both of these internal and external battles of control and influence.

As for your question about external media influence… I don’t self-analyze that a lot, but, if I were to…I should say, first of all, I grew up without any television. When I grew up, there was no television in my home. I didn’t get my first television until I got my first comic book paycheck. I was in college the first time I started seeing television a lot. Even when I was in first grade, I felt like I was missing out on some culture that all the other children were talking about. “Oh, did you see that show last night? This happened.” I never knew what they were talking about all the time. So, I did feel a certain distance from other people when they were constantly referencing things and I had no idea what they were talking about. On the other hand, I didn’t have that built-in acceptance of what television and TV commercials are when I started seeing more of television when I was in college.

When I was in college, the first Gulf War was starting, and it was on CNN all the time. There was a TV in the lounge in my building in college, and I would see all these television shows I was fascinated with. I remember I was fascinated with this TV show called Cops that was big at the time. Here’s a television show that we considered entertainment, but we’re also seeing first-person points-of-view of the legal system in action. I wasn’t sure if I was comfortable with the legal system being a form of entertainment and being strictly from one point of view. It made me feel very strange. Then, it cuts to a commercial and sells you something. Other people seemed to be a little more used to the commercials, but the commercials were really strange. Watching this many commercials on TV was a little weirder to me than other people seemed to think.
As the Gulf War was launching, there was this big build-up through CNN. The next thing you would see was a very similar show to Cops, but now it was first-person point-of-view of the world police. You see all these first-person point-of-view bombings and, at times, the war even felt like a video games. I was fascinated, but I was also outside my comfort zone.

I don’t know if I was conscious at the time of the connection, but certainly a degree of that experience went into the early books of Kabuki. Where the Kabuki books began, there’s an inter-dependence between a criminal element and a government element, and there’s an agency that polices that independence, but they are also part of the television and media conglomerate which shares a first-person point-of-view television show on their criminal activities. Kabuki was very consciously inspired by George Orwell and 1984, but I probably could not escape the effect that CNN and the Cops TV show and my introduction to more television and commercials were having on the way I saw the world. Comics were my playground to sort through all of that stuff.

MORE TO COME

Filed Under: book shelf, Comics Culture, interviews
April 15, 2013

Thinking Critically About Brand Cultures: An Interview with Sarah Banet-Weiser (Part Three)

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Your chapter on YouTube has been the focus of some very productive debates between the two of us, often having to do with the relationship between collective engagement and “self-branding.” In the published chapter, you acknowledge that various forms of collective action are possible through social media (citing, for example, the Arab Spring movement), but for you, “narcissism is part of the very structure of online technologies,” (p.88). I could argue the opposite is also true — that networked communication is by its very definition networked, which involves some kind of set of social relations between individual participants. So, how do we as theorists reconcile the individualistic and collectivistic dimensions of digital culture?



It’s a very good question, and at the risk of being repetitive, I think our responsibility as theorists is to engage how these dimensions of digital culture—the individualistic and the collectivist—operate simultaneously and often in contradiction with each other. In terms of narcissism, I am responding to Jean Twenge, who has argued in her book on youth and media that narcissism is a problem for the younger generation. My critique of this argument is that rather than understand youth and media as discrete, separate realms, we need to think about the deep interrelations between and within youth culture and media spaces. That is, I said here that online technologies enable a kind of narcissism, and this (at least to me) is surely true, in the context of self-branding, personal profiles, the genre of “selfies” for young people, the isolation that can happen in digital spaces. The fact that this context exists doesn’t mean that networked communication is not enabled by digital culture, but it does mean that we have to think about what the categories of “individual” and “networked” are in relation to each other, rather than as each other’s opposite. To say that digital spaces are often individualistic, and that we should be more critical of this as these spaces are often touted as democratic, doesn’t mean that no other politics exist online.

I also think that we need to think of this digital dichotomy as something that also finds purchase in off-line spaces. So, there is some similarity between the notion that, say young women in digital spaces often self-present according to familiar gendered scripts, and the fact that these same scripts are reinforced in celebrity culture, everyday practices, policy and legislation. And, networked communication online might energize and organize a kind of democratic participation that then takes place off-line. What I hope to do in my work is not give the impression that I don’t think democratic participation is possible, but rather that in order for us to understand what something like democracy looks like in the current moment means that we need to engage cultural spaces in their relation to each other, rather than as discrete realms.

You end the book with a really provocative section which at once critiques the possibilities of a politics grounded in critical utopianism (you talk about “utopic normativity”) and yet also holds open what you describe as “the generative potential of ambivalence.” What would you see as some real world examples where groups or individuals have built in meaningful ways on the “generative potential of ambivalence” and how might we distinguish them from the kind of utopian thinking which simply reinscribes existing norms and values?


Well, I think perhaps the most obvious recent example is the various Occupy movements around the globe. Surely, brand culture is part of the context for Occupy—even as it is also part of the movement’s critique. So while Occupy might be called a “branded” movement—through design, logos, the use of social media, the Guy Fawkes mask you mentioned, etc—it is also about challenging existing norms and values.

Another example of how ambivalence is generative can be found in the branding of Wikileaks. A marketing company was hired to brand Wikileaks, as a way to raise funds for Assange’s legal fees. Did branding Wikileaks mean that the politics behind it are rendered obsolete, or does it make Assange a “sell-out”? The WikiLeaks website challenges the history of “official” information and the public’s right to access this information; the leaked documents have already disrupted routines of national security around the globe. Regardless of its ultimate impact, WikiLeaks is subversive. Because WikiLeaks is an affective sentiment in the sense that it inspires affect and emotion from individuals, the branding of it invokes ambivalence. The traversing of boundaries involved in branding WikiLeaks is not about whether Assange is “selling out,” but is an articulation of a politics of ambivalence.

The branding of feminism (as opposed to the branding of post-feminism) might be yet another example. For instance, last year’s “Binders of Women” could be understood as embodying part of brand culture in the way it was circulated, distributed, and engaged by consumers. Yet it also brought critical attention to the patriarchal discourse of politics, and worked to remind women of the importance of voting, etc.

Importantly, to traverse boundaries of different economies, market and non-market, profit-oriented or reciprocal, means not to jump from one “side” of a neoliberal divide to the other, one a space of authenticity, the other one of complicity as the discourse of “selling out” implies. And this is the ambivalence that I think is generative, that challenges a utopic normativity.

Sarah Banet-Weiser is a Professor in the School of Communication at USC Annenberg and the department of American Studies and Ethnicity. She had two books published in 2012, most recently Authentic™: The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture (New York University Press), which examines brand culture, youth, and political possibility through an investigation of self-branding, creativity, politics, and religion. Also published in 2012 was Commodity Activism: Cultural Resistance in Neoliberal Times (New York University Press), co-edited with Roopali Muhkerjee. Her first book, The Most Beautiful Girl in the World: Beauty Pageants and National Identity (University of California Press, 1999), explores a popular cultural ritual, the beauty pageant, as a space in which national identities, desires, and anxieties about race and gender are played out. She has also authored a book on consumer citizenship and the children’s cable network: Kids Rule! Nickelodeon and Consumer Citizenship (Duke University Press, 2007), in addition to her co-edited book, Cable Visions: Television Beyond Broadcasting, co-edited with Cynthia Chris and Anthony Freitas (New York University Press, 2007). She co-edits, with Kent Ono, a book series with New York University Press, “Critical Cultural Communication,” and is the editor of American Quarterly.

Filed Under: book shelf, branded entertainment, interviews, University of Southern California
April 10, 2013

Thinking Critically About Brand Cultures: An Interview with Sarah Banet-Weiser (Part One)

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Transmedia Hollywood 4: Spreading Change is coming up on Friday of this week, and in anticipation of that event, which is scheduled to have some substantive discussion about the intersection between brand cultures and political activism, I wanted to share this interview with my USC Annenberg School colleague Sarah Banet-Weiser. Banet-Weiser will be speaking at the event, drawing on her two recent books, the single-authored Authentic(TM): The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture and her anthology, co-edited with Roopali Mukherjee, Commodity Activism: Cultural Resistance in Neo-Liberal Times. I anticipate Banet-Weiser bringing a very needed critical perspective to our discussions, one which is skeptical of the claims of some of our corporate participants, but one which is also open-minded and curious about their visions of political change.

I have come to develop enormous respect for Banet-Weiser during my time at USC. She is beloved here as a teacher and mentor who is incredibly dedicated to her students. We often find ourselves closely aligned on departmental policy concerns and she has in some ways been a mentor for me as I have adjusted to a new institutional setting. Our work seems to have paralleled each other — starting with her early work on children’s culture and media, which emerged at about the same time I was publishing The Children’s Culture Reader. More recently, her Authentic (TM) book was released just a few months before Spreadable Media. Both represent attempts to come to grips with the contradictions and challenges of our current moment of media change. And I have found her collection on Commodity Activism very important as we are thinking through my current research on youth, new media, and participatory politics.

I think it is safe to say that most of the world, reading our work in isolation from our institutional context, would see us as representing very different theoretical and ideological perspectives on some of these same issues. It is difficult in the current climate to describe these differences in language that is not already over-determined by culture wars and conflicts, rifts in our field that go back at least to the 1980s, if not earlier. Banet-Weiser’s work is grounded in a very strong critique of neoliberalism and a strong emphasis on structural constraints on our capacities for individual and collective action; my work has been strongly grounded in an advocacy for participatory culture as a central tool for bringing about greater diversity and democracy and has tended to place a strong importance on the concept of collective agency within a networked culture. Often, our respective intellectual allies do not play nicely with each other, and we’ve both been concerned by the sharp language through which these issues have often been contested in recent years.

Yet, I have enormous respect and affection for Banet-Weiser and have always learned a tremendous deal from her work, and as friends and colleagues, we have become important thinking partners for each other. We read and responded extensively to each other’s book manuscripts. Such exchanges were especially valuable at moments where we were in the sharpest disagreement, where our world views clashed in ways that prove generative for both of us. Some of these core disagreements surface in the following interview. My hope is that these disagreements prove generative for my readers also.

As I have written often of late, there’s an urgent need for these perspectives to be speaking with each other. I see more and more scholars talking about the need for a frank critique of what’s happened with digital culture and especially with Web 2.0. Many are calling for us to move beyond utopian or dystopian perspectives and deal realistically with what has and has not been achieved in terms of a vision for meaningful social and political change. One side has perhaps articulated most fully the promises and potentials of that change,the other has developed the strongest critique of the structural constraints on reforming or transforming the current system and the mechanisms by which participation has been manipulated and exploited by corporate interests towards its own ends. One side has pushed an agenda of media reform focused around corporate concentration, while the other has stressed the importance of insuring the broadest possible access to the skills and tools required for meaningful participation. These two sides too often speak past each other, distrust each other. We lose sight of our shared goals. I am determined to seek common ground between these perspectives, and I hope that this exchange will represent one step forward in that process.

Banet-Weiser writes with enormous clarity in her new book about a theoretical and political stance grounded in “ambivalence,” a term I also think might describe what I am seeking right now in my own work. Too often, we’ve ended up with a divide between those of us who see the world as a glass half full and those who see the world as a glass half empty, without noticing that both of us agree that it’s only half a glass. Our points of disagreement may make us stronger if they force us to examine our core assumptions and sharpen our analysis, but they should not come at the expense of our recognition of our shared commitments and our collective stakes in insuring a more just society.

You write, “Terranova’s idea of compromise, between creativity and capitalism, between affect and profit, requires that we understand what exactly is being compromised, and what consumers gain as well as lose through such transactions.” On this point, we totally agree though there’s much more work to be done before we can fully address this question. My own sense is that critical theory has been better, by far, at describing what consumers “lose” and less effective at describing what consumers “gain.” So, from your point of view, what do consumers “gain” under the neo-liberal terms you are describing in your book? And what do they “lose”?




Well, as you say, it is somewhat easier to describe what consumers “lose” within brand culture, so I’ll address that first. I describe in the book how, in the current moment, brands, and branding strategies, have expanded beyond selling actual products or companies, and are an integral part of culture. We are witnessing the expansion of brand language and logic to our personal selves, where individuals often feel obliged to not only construct, but to understand themselves as brands. This is a problem, I think, because branding is, at the end of the day, about selling and marketing things. So, for instance, when we create a self-brand, we embark on a process that packages, designs, and markets us—human beings—just like other products and commodities. To think of ourselves as things or commodities devalues the self.

Another thing I think consumers “lose” when we are not critical of, or do not challenge the normalization of self-branding, and brand culture more generally, relates to the economies of visibility that support and validate branding. Branding, and self-branding in particular, is about making the self visible (through a variety of media platforms), and I think we need to be critical of not only cultural imperatives to be visible, but also the structural inequalities that organize visibility in the first place: who can be visible? Who is seen as “worthy” of visibility? How does visibility work in different ways depending on gender, race, class? Within this context, brand culture, as both an economic and cultural formation and dynamic of power authorizes some things as “brandable,” while others are unbrandable, or are in excess of the brand, or remain in search of “brandability” if they want to be visible.

Now, what do consumers potentially “gain” within the neoliberal context? While I’m critical of many brand cultures in the book, the cultures and practices I examine are only a small element of broader brand culture. There are historical ways in which, for example, making the self visible through consumer and brand culture has been linked to a politics of freedom and emanicipation, and I think we need to pay attention to those histories. This is a contradictory formation: brand culture provides the context for struggles over visibility and recognition. Yet it simultaneously provides the context for the commodification of people as visual objects. The contradictory spaces of brand culture provide opportunities for acting on these contradictions, and thus potentially locating political possibility and critique within brand culture.

But brand culture, or any kind of culture for that matter, is not an either/or context, where it is either liberatory or oppressive, because the production of meaning is always collective and contingent. Certainly the kinds of access and disruptions of power we witness in, say, social media contexts, can lead to a more democratic idea of resistance and identity, and dynamics of power can be re-contextualized in ways that offer space for shifting norms.

What I trace in the book, and this is particularly true when we are talking about gender norms and practices, is that these media platforms may be disrupting conventions of power in some ways while also relying on familiar scripts and narratives that have proven successful in capitalism.


These questions are intended to get to the heart of what your book is describing as “ambivalence.” It is a word which does a great deal of work in your argument. In what sense do you think our relations to contemporary consumer culture are “ambivalent”? What is the role of the critic in dealing with this kind of ambivalence?



I think that a great deal of scholarship approaches consumer and popular culture within the framework of a familiar binary: it is either authentic or commercial, it is about real politics or corporate appropriation. For me, brand culture is neither a historical inevitability, nor is it uncontested. Rather, brand cultures emerge from the deeply interrelated discourses and practices of capitalism, history, culture, technology, and individual identity formation. Because brands form culture, they are—like culture itself—often unstable and precarious. The argument I’m making in the book is that consumer capitalism is a nuanced, multi-layered context for identity formation—as such, it is an explicitly cultural space. And, because I’m writing about culture, I think we need to carefully attend to the ways in which the production and consumption of culture within the logic of branding involves not only those practices that are easily branded, but also those who are left out of brand culture because they are not easily branded. So, we need to think about why certain politics or lifestyles are incorporated into brand culture, as well as why others not immediately amenable to branding are left out.

This is where ambivalence comes in, in those spaces of culture that are not easily determined by either commercial culture or individual resistance. But, connecting ambivalence to actual praxis is a difficult thing, and has no guarantees. For one thing, most elements of culture are not seen as ambivalent. Ambivalence, its lack of certainty, its inconsistency, the way it both harbors and is defined by doubt, is generally understood as a problem, something to avoid. Yet, I’m arguing that it is important to take seriously the cultural value of emotion and affect and the potential of ambivalence, its generative power, for it is within these spaces that hope and anxiety, pleasure and desire, fear and insecurity are nurtured and maintained. Brand marketers realize the potential of ambivalence, and capitalize on it. But their strategies do not in turn mean that affect, or ambivalence, are simply, or only, spaces of corporate manipulation. Rather, affect and ambivalence can be utilized in different ways.

The ambivalence of brand cultures, then, is about incongruity—all brand cultures do not mean the same thing, either culturally or individually. If consumer capitalism demands that we live our lives within brand spaces and subjectivities, we need to think carefully about what this kind of life looks like, and conversely, what potential spaces and actions threaten to disrupt the expected flow of consumption.

To theorize ambivalence as a structuring element of brand cultures means that not all cultural practices are spaces of possibility, but rather that some carry more potential than others, that some cultural practices are easier to brand than others. Those practices that can be integrated within brand relationships, such as girls’ self-esteem, or environmental politics, or street art, are not empty of political possibility, but that possibility itself takes shape within a branded space and under branding rubrics. When a brand, a genre, or a product circulates in culture, its meaning is ambivalent. In other words, the fact that a brand circulates in culture is not a guarantee of its meaning; rather, the circulating brand is constantly under the threat of breakdown and destabilization. Within brand culture, this threat forms a crucial contradiction: brands are designed for stability, and their logic is based on regularity and singularity. Yet they are ultimately precarious, and are subject to cultural misunderstanding. For me, to theorize brand cultures as subject to misunderstanding and misrecognition is to deliberately hold on to the generative potential of brand cultures.

Sarah Banet-Weiser is a Professor in the School of Communication at USC Annenberg and the department of American Studies and Ethnicity. She had two books published in 2012, most recently Authentic™: The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture (New York University Press), which examines brand culture, youth, and political possibility through an investigation of self-branding, creativity, politics, and religion. Also published in 2012 was Commodity Activism: Cultural Resistance in Neoliberal Times (New York University Press), co-edited with Roopali Muhkerjee. Her first book, The Most Beautiful Girl in the World: Beauty Pageants and National Identity (University of California Press, 1999), explores a popular cultural ritual, the beauty pageant, as a space in which national identities, desires, and anxieties about race and gender are played out. She has also authored a book on consumer citizenship and the children’s cable network: Kids Rule! Nickelodeon and Consumer Citizenship (Duke University Press, 2007), in addition to her co-edited book, Cable Visions: Television Beyond Broadcasting, co-edited with Cynthia Chris and Anthony Freitas (New York University Press, 2007).
She co-edits, with Kent Ono, a book series with New York University Press, “Critical Cultural Communication,” and is the editor of American Quarterly.

Filed Under: book shelf, branded entertainment, interviews, University of Southern California
April 8, 2013

As the World Stops Turning: A Conversation with Lynn Liccardo about Soap Operas (Part Three)

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Much of your writing has focused on parallels between daytime serialized drama and the rise of “quality” shows, primetime dramas which marry serialized storytelling with higher budgets, deeper production values, and much shorter, season-based dramas which pack intense meaning into typically between 10 and 20 episodes in a season, as opposed to 260 episodes per year. What do you feel is the nature of the connection between today’s critically acclaimed dramas on FX, AMC, HBO, Showtime, and elsewhere and the daytime serial drama?

 

The success of early primetime serials like Dallas (1978) and Dynasty (1981) redefined the public perception of soap opera. Larger-than-life, over-the-top characters like J.R. Ewing and Alexis Carrington, who more resembled stock characters from the commedia dell’arte, than ATWT’s Hughes family, were enormously entertaining to watch, but not because viewers found “meaning and resonance through a deeper connection.”  And while Larry Hagman’s (J.R) called Dallas as a cartoon rather than a soap opera, to the media and public these guilty pleasures were soaps simply by virtue of their seriality. The popularity of these primetime soaps coincided with Gloria Monty’s transformation of General Hospital,, and had at least as profound an impact on daytime soaps. The spirit of Dallas and Dynasty continues in current primetime soaps Revenge and Scandal, and for the teenage demo, Gossip Girl and Pretty Little Liars.

The Best of J.R. Ewing from Dallas

The true heirs of ATWT comprise a long list of often critically-acclaimed, always ratings challenged, and ultimately short-lived serial dramas.  While thirtysomething may not have looked anything like ATWT, the the day-to-day lives of two baby boomer families, the Stedmans and Westons, mirrored those of the Hughes and Lowells 30 years earlier. Thirtysomething ran from 1987-91 and never rose above 40th in the ratings. Its very ordinariness (tensions between career and family, visiting parents, finding a babysitter) made it, and similar shows that followed (My So-Called Life, Joan of Arcadia, Jack and Bobby, Friday Night Lights, Men of a Certain Age, to name but a few), a challenge to promote effectively.

How networks schedule these quiet, slow-paced shows creates another obstacle. Broadcast network programmers, under pressure to win time slots, often shuffle their lineup, making it difficult for viewers to find these shows, which, unlike episodic television, need to be watched in order. Sometimes networks cancel them after a handful of episodes, creating a self-fulling prophecy when fans hear about a promising new serial drama, but fearing yet another heartbreak (not being hyperbolic here:), decide not to watch.

Since cable networks rarely pull a serial drama before the first order of episodes has aired, and are able to place the show in a fixed time slot followed by multiple repeats (sometimes even daylong marathons), viewers have ample opportunity to connect with these quiet, slow-paced shows. But there are still issues beyond the obvious disadvantages shorter seasons create for serial dramas: less time to fully develop characters and their relationships means less time to fully engage viewers. When networks pick up serials dramas, the creators face uncertainty about the number of episodes that can undermine the pace of the storytelling. After a 13-episode first season, Parenthood was picked up for 22 episodes, then renewed for a 18-episode third season and 15 for the fourth. Since the season often ends before the network has announced that the show has been renewed (or not), the season finale could well be the series finale.

Sometimes, scheduling uncertainty can cause a show’s demise. When the first season of TNT’s Men of a Certain Age ended in February 2010, the show was averaging 2.6 million viewers per episode, enough for the network to order an additional 12 episodes. After the episodes were completed, TNT decided to air them in two batches.  The first set of six episodes ended in January 2011, and the show was holding its own, averaging 2.4 million viewers. But TNT held the second set until June, when average viewership dropped to 1.5 million and the show was cancelled, a fate that might well have been avoided had all 12 episodes aired as the writers intended when they laid out the second season.

The real challenge is how to describe these quiet, slow-paced shows, which, by their very nature, defy brevity, and struggle even on premium cable, where In Treatment lasted three seasons on HBO and Enlightened is currently fighting to be heard over the noisier Girls and Showtime’s Homeland. When Ray Romano pitched Men of a Certain Age to FX, he was told it “wasn’t loud enough.” The show wound up on TNT, where it never really fit in with the network’ s other original programming, procedurals like The Closer, and the light-hearted Franklin and Bash. When Men… was cancelled, critic Alan Sepinwall admitted , “I don’t always do the best job of articulating the greatness of this series, but it’s there in those moments I described above, and so many more. It is a series about small details, and those details add up into big things: big laughs and big emotion; big pain and big joy.”

Edie Falco (Carmela Soprano) has said that she always saw The Sopranos as a family drama. She’s right; but take away the mob and what are the odds that The Sopranos would have been picked up, much less become a cultural phenomenon? Peter Horton (thirtysomethings’s Gary) perfectly articulated the situation, describing how networks, cable and otherwise, are driven to create shows where something stands out: “‘I’m a mother who sells pot,’ (Weeds); ‘I’m father, but I’m a meth dealer,’ (Breaking Bad); ‘I’m a gangster, but I have therapy,’ (The Sopranos). There’s always a but, whereas thirtysomething is about people,” which is exactly how Irna Phillips described As the World Turns.

“Quiet” shows with no “buts” are the 21st-century manifestation of  the “your mother’s soap opera” dilemma that ultimately doomed ATWT. The challenge facing today’s vertical storytellers and programmers is to develop a brand evoking the appeal of “quiet” and the missing “but,” that will stand out in an ever more crowded media landscape without compromising the integrity of the vertical storytelling axis. Developing that brand demands a more precise description and definition of vertical storytelling. That means first breaking down the characteristics of these shows at the elemental, even molecular level, a task hampered by the ambiguity of language that so flummoxed Alan Sepinwall. Virginia Heffernan’s insightfull 2008 observation that Friday Night Lights “ferociously guards its borders, refines its aesthetic, defines a particular reality and insists on authenticity,” which limits “platforms for supplemental advertising” also applies to these shows, and adds to the challenge, and urgency, of developing a brand for them.

 

What are the most interesting experiments with soap opera storytelling that you feel are capturing the unique nature and potential of the “U.S. soap opera format” of storytelling?

 

And therein lies the fundamental (and vexing) question: what exactly is the unique nature of the “U. S. soap opera format?”  There’s a vast difference between the public perception of soap opera as a melodramatic guilty pleasure populated with campy, over-the-top, plot-driven characters motivated by agendas rather than emotions, and mine. I would argue that soaps’ unique nature lies in a narrative structure that emphasizes storytelling’s vertical axis, revealing characters’ interiority, their emotional and psychological back stories, and providing time for viewers to fully absorb that information. All of which creates the opportunity for viewers find meaning and resonance through a deeper connection to characters.

A conversation to be continued. But first, the economic realities and the toll they’ve taken on soap opera’s unique nature.

From the time soaps moved from radio to television, the genre expanded: first adding the visual element, then growing from 15 minutes to a half hour, and in the late 1970s, to an hour . At the time, soaps were still a profit center for networks, and their budgets, while paltry compared to primetime shows, were sufficient to hire large casts with which writers wove rich, densely interconnected stories. After O.J., ratings took a hit from which they never recovered. Networks reduced the licensing fees they paid to the production companies, who cut the shows’ budgets. There are a number of ways for producers to reduce the cost of on-screen talent (shifting highly-paid veterans to recurring status and reducing the guarantees for contract players), so smaller budgets didn’t necessarily translate into fewer characters. What did happen was that there with fewer actors populating each episode, characters interacted less frequently, which limited opportunities for viewers to experience the full pleasure of the vertical axis. So, what had been a rich storytelling tapestry frayed and eventually shredded into the fragmented storytelling discussed above.

In July 2011, Prospect Park announced that they had acquired the online rights to two cancelled ABC soaps, All My Children and One Life to Live, and planned to launch the shows in early 2012. Grateful fans cheered and the mainstream media took note. But, PP’s announcement was premature: they had not yet negotiated contracts with the unions, and their business plan, which retained the shows’ hour format, failed to attract sufficient financing. When PP said they were suspending their efforts a few months later, most observers believed the deal was dead.

Fast-forward to last December: PP announced that they had negotiated collective bargain agreements with the guilds and secured sufficient financing to begin production in February. PP had lost a credibility with many fans when they suspended their initial effort, and not surprisingly, the reboot’s reboot was met with skepticism (and barely a mention in the mainstream media). Initially, PP took a lot of heat on the boards, but as their plans solidified, veteran actors signed on and distribution deals were struck with Hulu and iTunes, fans began to believe (the mainstream media silence continues). Production began on February 25th.

What PP’s done over the the past 18 months is what the networks and Procter & Gamble Productions ought to have been doing before soaps’ economic model, so successful for so long, was no longer viable. It took PP to recognize that for soaps to survive into the 21st-century, the Web would have to be more than just an additional platform for showing and promoting shows, then come back from an initial failure to make it happen. Perhaps the most important aspect of this resurrection is that the online reboot streamlines the format: 30, rather than 60 minutes; four episodes a week, rather than five. No doubt scaling back helped to convince investors, but will PP recognize the opportunity it has to exploit the shorter format and recapture the unique nature of soaps that has been lost over the years? I’m encouraged by the relatively small, multi-generational (of the 14 contract players, eight are over 40; of the eight, two are over 50, four past 60) cast that’s been assembled for One Life to Live. All of the characters are deeply-connected, with long histories between and among them, so the elements are in place for PP to turn economic necessity into the mother of reinvention. The rebooted AMC and OLTL are slated to premiere some time in April.

When Irna Phillips blazed the trail for serial drama in the 1950s, the television landscape was minuscule, three networks, and relatively expensive to enter — the $10,000 cost of the ATWT pilot was twice the median household income at the time. Today, as the price of technology continues to drop, anyone can make and upload video to a media landscape incalculably larger than 60 years ago.  Since the mid-1990s, the Web has been flooded with mostly free content of varying quality, including an ever-increasing number of online serials designed to appeal to soap fans. Like their primetime counterparts, these Web-series are most often considered soap operas only by virtue of their seriality.  Despite barebones budgets and minimal monetization, many of these series, juggle large casts of characters squeezed into short (7-12 minute) episodes, limiting possibilities for deep viewers engagement. Only a handful have fully engaged my inner soap fan. My favorite, the critically acclaimed Anyone But Me, premiered in 2008 and ran for 26 episodes over three years before the series finale in January 2012.

Last May, while Prospect Park was off the grid getting its ducks in a row, there was a small news item on the We Love Soaps site announcing a new YouTube channel, WIGS: Where It Gets Interesting. The channel promised “high-end, original, scripted series, short films, and documentaries, all starring female leads.” WIGS co-creator, Rodrigo Garcia, had long plumbed the vertical storytelling axis in films like Things You Tell Just By Looking At Her, Ten Tiny Love Stories and Nine Lives, along with  HBO’s In Treatment. He brought the same sensibility to the work he created for WIGS.

Blue

Serena

 Celia

 

WIGS co-creator, filmmaker Jon Avnet, shares his partner’s storytelling sensibility, but even more important is how the two men went about creating the channel. With first-round seed money from Google, WIGS  became an official YouTube channel, making the project attractive to media partner, News Corp, and advertisers, AMEX and Unilever. As the pieces fell into place, including collective bargaining agreements with the entertainment unions, Avnet and Garcia invited more than a dozen writers and directors to create projects built around a female lead. Established actors, aware that their industry is in flux, were eager to participate even if it meant working for scale.

Before WIGS went live on May 14, Avnet and Garcia had produced enough content to run three episodes a week for almost seven months. Enough time to build an audience: more than 25 million views and 110,000 subscribers. The first season of WIGS included a few documentaries and short films, but the channel’s foundation was13 scripted serial dramas made up of 2-15 episodes running 7-10 minutes with small casts — sometimes as few as two characters.

Last month, FOX Broadcasting signed a multi-year deal with WIGS “to expand the breadth of offerings through the WIGS channel, and test and nurture dramatic concepts and talent in the digital realm..with an eye toward building content that can be programmed on FOX and/or other channels.” On March 15th, WIGS returns with a second season of Blue, followed later in the spring by the next installments of Lauren, and a new series Paloma.

Avnet and Garcia created WIGS specifically with women as the target audience. So, what to make of one commenter’s question, “what does it say that I, a 35-year old man, find myself addicted to WIGS?” What to make of the substantial number of women who were (and are) deeply engaged fans of Friday Night Lights and Men of a Certain Age, both shows ostensibly for and about men? The appeal of vertical storytelling clearly transcends gender; what about other demographic markers? What are the characteristics of viewers drawn to the vertical storytelling axis?

These questions, and others yet to be articulated, need to be explored before vertical storytellers can identify and maximize their potential audience. The data generated by the 110,000+ WIGS subscribers contain essential information for brand development, which, properly analyzed, can also inform the qualitative insights necessary to fully identify viewership.

 

Where has this project led you? Now that you’ve put together a personal reflection on your relationship to As the World Turns, what’s the next step in your ongoing research about the soap opera’s place in our cultural history and in our contemporary culture?

Probably the most frustrating part of writing about soap opera has been the lack of a framework within which to consider soap opera’s place in our contemporary culture. Identifying the underlying factors has been challenging because there’s no hierarchical relationship among them. Over the past several years, I’ve posted over 100 short articles on my blog. This piece represents my first effort to begin crafting those pieces into a larger context; I’ve barely scratched the surface.

I first began writing about soaps as a fan. And it’s as a fan, saddened and angered with the premature demise of show after show carrying on (consciously or not) the legacy that Irna Phillips began when she created As the World Turns, that I began exploring what it would take to carve out a place for this kind of storytelling in today’s rapidly-shifting media landscape. Personal as my efforts have been, this work can only continue with the collaboration of media scholars and professionals along with institutional support.

On related fronts, I’m currently completing the syllabus for a class, “The Influence and Evolution of the American Soap Opera, I’ll be pitching to Boston area schools, and considering the possibility of a book to follow.  Also in progress: a proposal for an Irna Phillips biography.

Lynn Liccardo is a longtime soap opera journalist and blogger. Her critical observations on soaps – their content, the industry that produces them, and the culture that both loves them and loves to ridicule them – connect soap opera’s past and present with its future and begin to form a larger framework within which to more fully examine the genre. She released an ebook of essays detailing the final years of As the World Turns, entitled as the world stopped turning… Among her other publications are “Who Really Watches the Daytime Soaps” (1996, Soap Opera Weekly); “Irna Phillips: Brief life of soap opera’s single mother 1901-1973″ (2012, Harvard Magazine). Her essay, “The Ironic and Convoluted Relationship between Daytime and Primetime Soap Opera,” was published in The Survival of Soap Opera: Transformations for a New Media Era (co-edited by Futures of Entertainment Fellows Sam Ford, Abigail De Kosnik and C. Lee Harrington).

Sam Ford is co-editor (with Abigail De Kosnik and C. Lee Harrington) of The Survival of Soap Opera: Transformations for a New Media Era (2011, University Press of Mississippi) and co-author (with Henry Jenkins and Joshua Green) of Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture(2013, NYU Press). He is also Director of Digital Strategy with Peppercomm, an affiliate with both MIT Comparative Media Studies and Western Kentucky University’s Popular Culture Studies Program, and a frequent Fast Company contributor. Sam serves on WOMMA’s Membership Ethics Advisory Panel and was named 2011 Social Media Innovator of the Year by Bulldog Reporter. He is a Kentucky Press Association award-winning journalist and has written for Harvard Business Review, Wall Street Journal,BusinessWeek, The Huffington Post, Portfolio, Chief Marketer, The Public Relations Strategist, PR News,Bulldog Reporter, The Christian Science Monitor, and CommPRO.biz. Sam lives in Bowling Green, KY, with wife, Amanda, and daughters, Emma and Harper.

Filed Under: book shelf, fan culture, interviews, television
April 5, 2013

As the World Stopped Turning: A Conversation with Lynn Liccardo on Soap Operas (Part Two)

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You provide a very personal account of your own gradual disconnect from enjoying and having an emotional engagement with As the World Turns. How would you describe your relationship to the show, both as a fan and as a critic, and how did that relationship evolve over time?

It’s ironic, and no small testament to the power of its storytelling, that I became so deeply involved with ATWT: Since it aired on the East Coast at 1:30, while I was at school, I was far more familiar with, and have far more vivid memories of, Search for Tomorrow and Guiding Light, which were on when my sister and I came home for lunch in grammar school, and Another World, which I could see if I came straight home from junior high school.

 

I only got to watch ATWT on holidays, vacations and sick days, a pattern that continued after I moved to Boston in 1973, found a full time job and worked on my undergraduate degree at night. In those pre-VCR days, what I remember more than specific stories is the familiarity of the characters, who were always there when I was able to watch. That was until I took a year off (1982-3) to complete my degree.  While I had been peripherally aware of the General Hospital phenomenon, I had  no idea that GH’s success was why the ATWT on my screen was so different from what I remembered.  But, I actually enjoyed what I saw and never considered abandoning the show. At the time, I was in advertisers’ target demo, so from that perspective, the change in direction was a success.

 

But, while I was enjoying the ATWT’s new direction, my mother was not. She missed the show she had loved for 25 years and eventually stopped watching. She wasn’t the only one; the show lost more viewers than it gained and a couple of years later (1984-5) the Calhoun-Marland team righted the ship and the show rose in the ratings. But, without my mother, although she continued to watch GL.

 

After college, the combination of a flexible job and a VCR allowed me to become a serious fan. I was writing about nursing (like soaps, strongly associated with women and thereby marginalized. Also, like soaps’ “not your mother’s soap opera,” nursing had internalized the belief that to be valued they had to become something else: “professional” nurses who didn’t want to be seen as “that kind of nurse,” dealing with bodily fluids at the bedside.”)  While writing an article for Soap Opera Weekly on how nurses were portrayed on soaps I interviewed Doug Marland. A few months later, what was supposed to be a short news piece about CBS ending its head writer training program morphed into a longer article about the paths of three head writers (including Marland), which got me thinking seriously about soaps.

 

In 1995, I began pitching a piece to coincide with ATWT’s 40th anniversary in 1996 to Smithsonian Magazine; it took over a year to convince the editor. By the time I arrived on the set in mid-March when the anniversary episode was taped, there was a new production team in place (see above) and the mantra of the executive producer, head writers and publicist was “we’re not 40 years old, we’re 40 years young.”  I could see that things were falling apart, and while I could identify bits and pieces of what was wrong, I couldn’t figure out how those pieces fit together (even if I could, I’m not sure Smithsonian would have been the right place), so I was forced to abandon the piece. I wrote one more article analyzing the demographics of soap opera audience, then turned my attention to writing a screenplay (isn’t everyone:) and short plays.

 

It wasn’t until Sam Ford asked me to be on his thesis committee in 2006 that I was able to begin identifying the “bits and pieces” that had undermined the Smithsonian piece. The task now is to integrate those elements into a cohesive framework within which to consider the full impact of soaps — a task made all the more challenging since there is no obvious hierarchical relationship among the elements.

 

The book begins with a deep look at Irna Phillips and how the details of her own life so intensely shaped many aspects of As the World Turns. You also recently published a piece about Irna for Harvard Magazine. What do you believe Phillips’ place is in the history of the soap opera in particular, and in the greater landscape of U.S. television?

 

Irna Phillips was a risk taker who, rather than fear failure, learned from it. In 1948, she wrote to P&G’s William Ramsey that she had doubts about televising soaps, suggesting that it would be some time before a televised serial could succeed. (She doesn’t explain why, but at the time there were roughly 100,00 television sets in the country, most concentrated in the New York area, up from 44,000 the previous year. As the post-war economy expanded, the number of sets increased exponentially; by 1953, over half of US household had a television.) Yet, just a few months later, in January 1949, Irna approached NBC about creating what many consider the first television soap, These are My Children. Accounts vary (some say the network pulled it after five weeks; Irna says she pulled it after 13 weeks when the network shifted its time slot), but by any measure, the television’s first soap opera was a failure. Whether the show failed because it was bad (according to Television World) or because the low viewership was a function of too few households with televisions is impossible to determine.

 

The success of two early television soaps on CBS (Search for Tomorrow and  Love of Life), convinced Irna that the time was right to move Guiding Light from radio, where it began in 1937, to television. But GL’s owner, P&G believed that only serials created specifically for television would succeed.  Undaunted, Irna revised two GL “highly dramatic” radio scripts (it’s not clear if she secured P&G’s permission), then spent more than $5000 of her own money (in 1952, the median household income was $3900) to tape the episodes and the show premiered on CBS in June, while remaining on radio until 1956 (when 71% of households had at least one television).

 

When Irna first floated the idea of a half-hour soap the suits were again skeptical. One executive told her, “we don’t believe in investing in a possible failure.” But, as with GL, Irna persevered, this time collaborating with longtime colleagues, Agnes Nixon and Ted Corday, to write and finance ($10,000) a pilot for ATWT. According to Irna, the nine cast members were so impressed, “they agreed to hold themselves available for six months” until the pilot was picked up.

 

In the early 1960s, Irna became a consultant for what would become the first successful primetime soap opera, ABC’s Peyton Place (1964-1969). She then created a primetime ATWT spinoff, Our Private World, which ran for 19 weeks (38 episodes) from May 5 – September 10, 1965. CBS’s decision to air the show over the summer, rather than launching it as part of the new fall season, likely contributed to its short run, and may also have reflected a lack of confidence in Irna. Since her unfinished memoir, All My Worlds, ends in late 1963 with her creation of Another World, if Irna had any thoughts about All My Worlds and the two shows she later created, Love is a Many Splendored Thing and A World Apart, they would be in her papers at the Wisconsin Historical Society archives.

 

Much of your book focuses on the ways in which management practices and corporate structure in the last 15 years of As the World Turns‘ 54-year run damaged both the quality of the story and the relationship the show maintained with its fans. In the course of your research and writing, in what ways were soap opera fans drawing these connections between industry news and what played out on their screens on an everyday basis? And what can media scholars and those who work in or study other media industries learn from studying the ongoing relationship between longterm viewers and a media property like ATWT?

 

When fan magazines covering soaps first appeared in the late-1960s, soaps had been on television for almost 20 years. Those early publications consisted mainly of interviews with actors and features that took fans behind-the-scenes of the shows. It wasn’t until Soap Opera Weekly came on the scene in November 1989 that fans had timely access to industry news and serious criticism. In addition to episode recaps, Weekly published spoilers that let fans know what would happen when. According to founding editor, Mimi Torchin, fans welcomed information that allowed them to prioritize. Of course, in a extreme example of unintended consequences, spoilers have become a vexing challenge for all serialized storytelling in the digital age.

Both Weekly and its sister publication, Soap Opera Digest, included “Comings and Goings” and “The Revolving Door,” features that alerted fans when actors left roles, or were cast as new characters. This information became a form of spoiler that allowed fans to speculate outside of what they saw on the screen. Producers and writers exacerbated this phenomenon by sharing information about who the new (or recast) character would be paired with, and the direction the story would take.  With the final years of ATWT  characterized by a seemingly endless array of new characters, few of whom were connected to the core Hughes family, when fans heard the news online, many were not inclined to give the show the benefit of the doubt and wait to see how stories played out before passing (usually negative) judgment.

Another factor to consider: the unintended consequences of rebranding, which requires a willingness to to alienate, and even lose, existing customers to attract desired customers. This worked brilliantly for AMC when the network shifted its focus from showing old movies to become the HBO of basic cable. But movie buffs had plenty of options; not so with soaps. Whether it was articulated or not, when ATWT shifted the show’s focus in the early-1980s to capture younger viewers, the show seemed willing to lose its existing viewers, like my mother, who left and never returned, even when the show corrected course a few years later. But, with all soaps trying to recreate General Hospital’s success, there was no place for disaffected fans to turn. So many stayed, and with the remote controls that came with their new VCRs in hand,  fast forwarded through many of the new characters that populated the ATWT canvas, contributing to the show’s increasingly fragmented storytelling. One consequence  of fragmented storytelling is a fragmented audience, with each segment expressing its own spin on the genre’s aesthetic. The result: divergent and often conflicting comments that made it difficult to interpret and apply fan feedback.

In 1996 P&G set up a toll-free number to provide viewers with inside information about the ATWT. At the end callers were asked who they wanted to see the troubled Emily Stewart paired with: “press 1 for Diego, 2 for Jeff.” Since “other,” “none of the above” or,”in the case of this particular character, “a good therapist,” were not among the choices, the results were  meaningless. And the way in which the question was posed (the only option to bypass the question was hanging up) made clear that this was not a serious effort on the part of PGP to engage viewers, but rather a ham-handed token.

Another example of the show’s tin ear was someone’s (probably not the executive producer or head writer, both of whom had worked in soaps long enough to understand the subtle intricacies of how time unfolds on soaps; depending on the circumstances, sometimes compressed, sometimes extended.) literal interpretation of a frequent complaint about soaps: “the stories move too slowly.” In 2008, ATWT abandoned soap opera’s traditional narrative structure and began a series of short-term story arcs, some of which wrapped up in a single episode. The combination of self-contained episodes and spoilers made at least one fan happy: “Not sure how or why TPTB have come up with this new concept, but is sure is working well. I think I’ve watched a total of one or two episodes in the last two weeks.” An unintended consequence that inflicted considerable damage in ATWT’s final years.

Without an understanding of not just what’s being said, but what it means, soliciting feedback is at best, futile, at worst, damaging. When it came to soap opera, however, there was no guarantee that those who were conducting the research had ever watched soaps. According to one former network executive I talked with, it was the rare researcher who even took the time to familiarized themselves with the show for which they were collecting feedback. So, while their empirical observations may have been accurate, without a shared experiential frame of reference with their subjects, researchers often lacked to tools to infer, then accurately interpret and apply how fans experience soaps.

When it comes to suspending disbelief, the very nature of daytime soaps demands more of viewers than other dramatic media. But as the genre’s scope expanded over the years, traditional elements — intimate relationships between family, friends and lovers — began to share space with time travel, the supernatural, omnipotent villains and characters whose repeated returns from the dead often defied both logic and the laws of physics. When ATWT’s James Stenbeck first reappeared in 1986 after being presume dead, he provided a simple explanation: “I had a parachute.”  But as explanations for his subsequent resurrections became more and more preposterous, some fans were angry, feeling that the writers were taking advantage of their willingness to suspend disbelief — even insulting their intelligence. Others chalked it up to a “it’s a soap opera. No one gives a shit if it makes sense” mentality on the part of writers and producers. By 2009, when Stenbeck returned from the dead for the fourth and final time, the writers didn’t bother to even go through the motions. And rather than get angry, those fans still watching responded with detached bemusement.

The number of serialized dramas has exploded in the past 15 years, so dominating television programming that a recent piece in TVGuide suggests that serial dramas may be reaching the saturation point. The challenges facing these shows — maintaining the integrity of the storytelling in the face of network interference and the shuffling of show runners, spoilers, time-shifting, and more recent additions to the lexicon, binge watching and, perhaps most important, hate-watching — all have their antecedents in soaps. Current and future storytellers facing the challenge of attracting viewers in a media landscape drowning in serial drama have much to learn by understanding how soaps and their fans have dealt with these issues.

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 Lynn Liccardo is a longtime soap opera journalist and blogger. Her critical observations on soaps – their content, the industry that produces them, and the culture that both loves them and loves to ridicule them – connect soap opera’s past and present with its future and begin to form a larger framework within which to more fully examine the genre. She released an ebook of essays detailing the final years of As the World Turns, entitled as the world stopped turning… Among her other publications are “Who Really Watches the Daytime Soaps” (1996, Soap Opera Weekly); “Irna Phillips: Brief life of soap opera’s single mother 1901-1973″ (2012, Harvard Magazine). Her essay, “The Ironic and Convoluted Relationship between Daytime and Primetime Soap Opera,” was published in The Survival of Soap Opera: Transformations for a New Media Era (co-edited by Futures of Entertainment Fellows Sam Ford, Abigail De Kosnik and C. Lee Harrington).

Sam Ford is co-editor (with Abigail De Kosnik and C. Lee Harrington) of The Survival of Soap Opera: Transformations for a New Media Era (2011, University Press of Mississippi) and co-author (with Henry Jenkins and Joshua Green) of Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture(2013, NYU Press). He is also Director of Digital Strategy with Peppercomm, an affiliate with both MIT Comparative Media Studies and Western Kentucky University’s Popular Culture Studies Program, and a frequent Fast Company contributor. Sam serves on WOMMA’s Membership Ethics Advisory Panel and was named 2011 Social Media Innovator of the Year by Bulldog Reporter. He is a Kentucky Press Association award-winning journalist and has written for Harvard Business Review, Wall Street Journal,BusinessWeek, The Huffington Post, Portfolio, Chief Marketer, The Public Relations Strategist, PR News,Bulldog Reporter, The Christian Science Monitor, and CommPRO.biz. Sam lives in Bowling Green, KY, with wife, Amanda, and daughters, Emma and Harper.

Filed Under: book shelf, c3, fan culture, interviews, television
April 3, 2013

As The World Stopped Turning: Lynn Liccardo Talks About Soap Operas (Part One)

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I have often acknowledged that fans are the true experts on popular culture: their passionate relationship with a favorite series or franchise often motivates them to research it more deeply, read it more closely, and interpret it more richly than an academic would be able to do. Not all fans know how to articulate their findings in ways that move beyond the particular details and speak to the larger context and implications of their objects of study, but those who do have much to teach us about their particular corners of the popular culture universe.

Lynn Liccardo is an extraordinary soap opera fan, who over the course of her life has moved from a passion for As the World Turns and its creator Irma Phillips, towards more and more active engagement with the soap opera industry (such as it has become) and who has written professionally about soaps for a number of years. I was lucky to meet Liccardo when she served on the thesis committee for one of my MIT graduate students Sam Ford, now co-author of Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Network Culture; she has been coming to our Futures of Entertainment conferences ever since; she contributed to Sam’s book on the future of soap operas; and now, she has an e-book of her own, As the World Stopped Turning, which shares some of what she knows about the history, aesthetics, production, and reception of soap operas.

I am the first to admit that soaps are a blind spot for me as a fan and as an academic, though I also would acknowledge that those of us who care about transmedia storytelling and contemporary primetime drama have much to learn from the soap opera tradition about expansive storyworlds and long-form serials in particular. So, I asked Sam Ford if he would interview her for the blog. Below aresome of Liccardo’s thoughts connecting As the World Turns to some of the industry trends and developments over the past six decades that have impacted serialized television storytelling.

As the World Stopped Turning is a full ebook of your essays dedicated to the soap opera As the World Turns. Why is this particular daytime serial drama so important to study, in your opinion? What is As the World Turns‘ particular place in our cultural history?

 

As The World Turns was the first 30-minute serial, doubling the standard 15-minute episode. But  it was more than its length that contributed to the show’s impact on the genre and cultural history. When creator, Irna Phillips, conceived the show, she wanted the additional time not to tell more story, but to develop “better story and characterization.” Before ATWT debuted in 1956, serials concentrated on a single family; in her new creation, Irna contrasted the stories of two families, one united and solidly middle-class, the Hughes, the other, wealthy and divided, the Lowells, “because by the 1950s divorce and separation were becoming a more pronounced element in our social structure.” Irna also believed (more than 30 years before GH’s Luke and Laura), that including teenagers as a major part of the story, “added the valuable asset of longevity to the serial.”

But what set ATWT apart from earlier soaps was Irna’s skillful juxtaposition of vertical and horizontal storytelling axes, with her emphasis on the former (character), which slowed the latter (plot), sometimes to a seeming standstill.  In fact, the first year of the show there was virtually no plot, just these rather ordinary characters going about everyday lives that resembled those of many viewers. The intimacy of the connection between viewer and character was reinforced as the camera moved slowly over actors’ faces, laying the groundwork for future audiences to recognize what a character in Ron Howard’s film, Frost/Nixon, called “the reductive power of the close-up.”

Irna gave voice to her deeply-held belief that “nobody is all good or all bad and each human being can exhibit all of these elements, often at the same time,” through stories that gave equal weight to the conflicting emotions within each character,  forcing viewers, in the words of critic Robert LaGuardia, “to grieve over the heartbreak of the human condition rather than to hang on to a fixed value judgement.”  In her outline, Irna was emphatic that ATWT “not a melodrama,” but rather “a show about people.” That ambiguity deeply permeated the cultural ground water and became the foundation of what’s now called quality television and complex storytelling, although, as I discuss below, for viewers who only know daytime soaps after Luke and Laura, the connection is not at all clear.

The episode below aired about a year into the show’s 54-year run. While it contains none of ATWT’s trademark closeups, it is an elegant example (one of the few still available) of how soap opera historically used character to move plot: a narrative structure that ties current stories to back stories and uses history and memory to contextualize current plot and character development. The power of this episode lies in its four deceptively simple scenes, each a conversation between two of the episode’s four characters. While almost nothing happens in the episode, when it’s over viewers understand the relationships, not just among the characters in the episode, Chris, his father, Pa, and sister,, Edie, who was involved with his law partner, Jim, but between every character on the show: Chris’s wife Nancy, his daughter, Penny, who became estranged from her aunt Edie when Penny’s best friend, Ellen, revealed that her father, Jim, was involved with another woman, Edie. Even a character who never appeared on the show, Chris and Edie’s brother, John, was fully contextualized.

As the World Turns #268 Part 1 

 As the World Turns #268 Part 2

 

What do you believe were the biggest factors in the demise of As the World Turns?

The demise of ATWT actually began in 1978, when Gloria Monty’s was hired to fix a show on the verge of cancellation, ABC’s General Hospital. At the time, most soap operas followed the model Irna Phillips had created on ATWT: intergenerational families made up of rather ordinary characters living rather ordinary lives that resembled those of most viewers.

 

Monty altered that model by speeding up the pace of the storytelling by shifting the focus from the day-to-day lives of the doctors and nurses of General Hospital to the young, Laura, and the hip, Luke, who, in the process of saving the world from being frozen by the Ice Princess, also saved General Hospital, thereby forever altering the public’s perception of soaps. As college lounges  filled with students following the adventures of Luke and Laura, for the first time it was cool for kids to watch soaps.

 Luke & Laura – Lover’s on the Run Volume 1

But GH wasn’t their mother’s soap opera; ATWT was. How CBS and Procter & Gamble responded to the end of ATWT’s 20-year reign at the top of the ratings is a lesson in what not to do. Rather than take a deep breath and think about ways to exploit the perception of ATWT as “their mothers’ soap opera” to the show’s advantage, the new executive producer, Mary-Ellis Bumin, approached her task from what, in light of GH’s explosive success, seemed like a logical assumption, but ultimately proved deeply flawed: the only way to attract the younger viewers advertisers coveted was by excluding older characters. So, what had been the ATWT’s  greatest assets — its 20+-year history and the multi-generational Hughes family — was seen as its greatest weaknesses. Soon after Bunim took over familiar characters were pushed to the sidelines and viewers found themselves watching Tom and Margo (Oakdale’s Luke and Laura) chase a dwarf named Mr. Big — ATWT’s version of the Ice Princess.

 As the World Turns: Vintage Tom and Margo

But what had worked so brilliantly for GH never caught on with ATWT’s core audience. When Laurence Caso took over CBS’s New York daytime operation in 1983, he realized that ATWT would never succeed by continuing to copy what the ABC soaps were doing. He pushed Procter & Gamble to replace Mary-Ellis Bunim with Robert Calhoun, then hired head writer Douglas Marland, who rebuilt the show around Hughes. ATWT thrived until Marland suddenly died in 1993. A year later, the show was still in the process of rebuilding as the country obsessed over the O.J. Simpson murder trial.

ATWT’s missteps of the early 1980s have to be understood in the context of GH’s unprecedented success, which threw all soaps into uncharted waters. But CBS and P&G had clearly failed learn from history when, in 1995, a new regime once again distanced the show from its history and the Hughes family. As the show floundered until its cancellation in 2010, no one even tried to right the ship by reestablishing the centrality of the Hughes. Even if they had, it might well have been too late. P&G’s other two shows, Guiding Light and Another World, were in even worse shape than ATWT. In 2005, P&G eliminated the position of executive in charge of production and subsequently transferred the shows’ day-to-day operations to a subsidiary, TeleNext Media. Then, in 2008, the TeleNext logo replaced P&G’s in the show credits, sending a clear message that P&G was content to let the clock run out on their soaps.  

 

Lynn Liccardo is a longtime soap opera journalist and blogger. Her critical observations on soaps – their content, the industry that produces them, and the culture that both loves them and loves to ridicule them – connect soap opera’s past and present with its future and begin to form a larger framework within which to more fully examine the genre. She released an ebook of essays detailing the final years of As the World Turns, entitled as the world stopped turning… Among her other publications are “Who Really Watches the Daytime Soaps” (1996, Soap Opera Weekly); “Irna Phillips: Brief life of soap opera’s single mother 1901-1973″ (2012, Harvard Magazine). Her essay, “The Ironic and Convoluted Relationship between Daytime and Primetime Soap Opera,” was published in The Survival of Soap Opera: Transformations for a New Media Era (co-edited by Futures of Entertainment Fellows Sam Ford, Abigail De Kosnik and C. Lee Harrington).

Sam Ford is co-editor (with Abigail De Kosnik and C. Lee Harrington) of The Survival of Soap Opera: Transformations for a New Media Era (2011, University Press of Mississippi) and co-author (with Henry Jenkins and Joshua Green) of Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture(2013, NYU Press). He is also Director of Digital Strategy with Peppercomm, an affiliate with both MIT Comparative Media Studies and Western Kentucky University’s Popular Culture Studies Program, and a frequent Fast Company contributor. Sam serves on WOMMA’s Membership Ethics Advisory Panel and was named 2011 Social Media Innovator of the Year by Bulldog Reporter. He is a Kentucky Press Association award-winning journalist and has written for Harvard Business Review, Wall Street Journal,BusinessWeek, The Huffington Post, Portfolio, Chief Marketer, The Public Relations Strategist, PR News,Bulldog Reporter, The Christian Science Monitor, and CommPRO.biz. Sam lives in Bowling Green, KY, with wife, Amanda, and daughters, Emma and Harper.

Filed Under: book shelf, fan culture, interviews, television
March 25, 2013

Comics, Comics, Comics…

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A while back, I announced that alternative comics creator C. Tyler was coming to USC to give a talk about her life and work. Tyler was part of the group of women who contributed to the important Twisted Sisters anthology series; she worked closely with Aline Kominsky-Crumb (not to mention Aline’s husband, Robert) and has been married to Justin Green (another key figure in the underground comics movement) for several decades. She has always produced bracingly honest, beautifully crafted, autobiographical stories, often centering around her experiences of low-paying jobs and the challenges of motherhood, but deeply embedded in a sense of family and gender politics. Tyler has justly gotten new acclaim and interest as a result of You’ll Never Know, a three volume series of graphic novels focused on her father and mother, who were World War II veterans, and what they passed down to subsequent generations.

People who attended her talk at USC found it a remarkable experience: she was so fresh and authentic and down to earth about herself and her art; she shared enormous insights into her tools, her raw materials, and her process, and she was so generous in engaging with our students, many of whom were young women who want to make their own creative contributions to the world. The program flew by with never a dull moment. So, I am very proud to finally be able to share the video of this event with my readers.

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On other fronts, I’ve wanted for a while to do a shout-out to the wonderful work being done on a new web comic series, My So-Called Secret Identity.

Here’s some of the background about the project they provide online:

My So-Called Secret Identity is what happened when internationally-acclaimed Batman scholar and popular culture expert, Dr Will Brooker, decided to stop criticising mainstream comics for their representation of women, and show how it could be done differently; how it could be done better. Working with professional illustrator Susan Shore and PhD in superhero art, Dr Sarah Zaidan, Brooker assembled a team to build a new universe, close enough to the familiar capes-and-cowls mythos to offer critical comment, but distinct enough to strike out in a whole new direction and offer a story unlike any other superhero title. The costume designs and character sketches for My So-Called Secret Identity were created by established names and fan favourites, from Lea Hernandez to Hanie Mohd. These very different artists offered very different takes on the characters and their styles, but they had one thing in common. In a deliberate reversal of mainstream industry conventions, almost all the creative team behind MSCSI are female.

And here’s a bit about the series’ main character:

All her life, Cat’s been taught to be little, learned to keep herself small, tried to avoid attention. Don’t be too full of yourself. Don’t show off. And most of all, don’t let people know how smart you are, because they don’t like it. But Cat really is someone special. Cat is the smartest person in Gloria City. She remembers everything she reads; she knows how everything connects. And she’s getting tired of pretending, of hiding, of acting dumb to save other people’s feelings.

My So-Called Secret Identity is, to put it in technical terms, wonderful. You can tell from the first page how much thought has gone into this story, the development of its protagonist, the visual treatment of the material, and the way to share this tale with readers. Brooker brings to this project a life-time of thinking deeply about the genre conventions of the superhero comic, but he also brings with it a sensitivity to the many different ways where the world strips young women of their self-esteem and teaches them that they should not be so “confident” in the ways they speak about themselves and their work.

Cat, she of many names and many identities, she of great power and intelligence, is struggling to figure out who she is and where she belongs. She is working to piece together her mission and to come to grips with her power.

Susan Shore and Sarah Zaidan’s visual style is warm and soft, standing in contrast with the garish look we associate with superhero comics, and there is a strong sense of place here as Cat shares with us some of her favorite nooks and crannies in Gloria City. This is one of the strongest first books in a new comics series I have read in a while and I can’t wait to see more. The creators are raising funds as they go,so if you like what you see, make a contribution.

cat_cover_text

 

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I also wanted to give a shout-out to a new blog, started by William Proctor, a comics scholar at the Center for Research in Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Sunderland, who was nice enough to play host to me this summer when I was visiting his city. His blog, Infinite Earths, intends to bring together a community of academics, fans, and artists, who want to talk seriously about comics, especially British comics, and so far, it has lived up to any expectations. So far, he has published an autobiographical essay by the above-mentioned Will Brooker discussing his childhood fascination with some of the ground-breaking Vertico titles and the first part of an extended rumination by Bryan Talbot, one of my favorite British comics creators, about the thinking that went into his now classic A Tale of One Bad Rat, as well as Proctor’s own notes about a recent Talbot lecture on the history of anthropomorphic animals in comics. I have already promised Procotor an interview about my own current comics research, but regardless, I plan to keep close eye on this blog in the months ahead.

 

Filed Under: book shelf, Comics Culture, favorite things, University of Southern California
March 20, 2013

Kickstart This!: Is The World Ready For a Nigerian Superhero?

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Like many of my readers this week, I am enormously excited about the ground-breaking success of the Kickstarter campaign to get Veronica Mars into production as a feature film and what this means about the future relations between fans and producers of cult media. Next week, I am planning to run a extended conversation with some key thinking partners placing the Veronica Mars campaign (and Netflix’s venture into original television content) into some perspective.

But I don’t want us to forget that Kickstarter has been as powerful if not more so in helping to provide seed funds for independent artists of all kinds and as such, it has become a key vehicle for increasing the diversity of cultural production. My co-authors Sam Ford, Joshua Green, and I discuss Kickstarter in our book, Spreadable Media: Creating Meaning and Value in a Networked Culture, alongside a range of other developments which are creating stronger bonds between independent artists and their supporters — from pre-production through release.

Today, I want to put my weight behind an independent media property — Spider Stories — which was brought to my attention by a USC undergraduate, Charles Agbaje. The Agbaje Brothers (Charles and John) have been publishing independent comics under the Central City Tower label for several years now, and they are seeking funds to take their efforts to the next level — developing a cartoon series which has its roots in traditional African folktales and myths, but which speaks to the genre expectations of our current pop cosmopolitan generation.

Here’s how they describe the basic premise:

Spider Stories follows the tale of Princess Zahara who is thrown into hiding after the royal family is overthrown by a corrupt neighboring kingdom. While traveling with a misfit caravan of merchants she meets a wandering drummer griot who introduces her to the spirit world. Armed with a mystical staff, the fearless princess embarks on quest to reconnect with the spirits, reunite her homeland, and reclaim the throne.

We are developing an 11 minute animated pilot for a fantasy adventure series called Spider Stories. Your pledges will go towards funding a team of animators to get it done at a professional level of quality.

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 They argue that fans of superhero comics have grown up on Norse myths (Thor) and Greek myths (Hercules); we are starting to see Japanese and Chinese folktales making their way into anime and manga, but that comics and animation have so far done  little to tap into the rich cultural traditions of Africa (with the possible exception of the recent revamp of The Black Panther at Marvel). The Agbaje Brothers have expressed concern with the fact that African-American youth are often cut off from their own cultural traditions and all of us receive a single-dimensional understanding of Africa (which many westerners see as a country rather than a continent with many diverse national traditions). However, they are also concerned that so often stories by and for African-Americans get cut off from the cultural mainstream and thus do not reach the largest possible audience. So they very much want to create something that speaks across racial and cultural divides.

If the art work and proof of concept videos they share on their Kickstarter page are any indication, this has the potential to be a spectacular project, and it is precisely the kind of production that Kickstarter was designed to support — one which is unlikely to get very far with mainstream animation or comics producers unless they can demonstrate a broad range of support and can show the world what they can do. Let’s see if we can give them their chance.

In some of their promotional materials, the brothers talk about how their experiences growing up together had shaped the kinds of stories they want to share through their work. I asked Charles to tell me more about these formative influences on their work:

The stories we made growing up span all kinds of sci-fi, fantasy, and superhero tales. We were first inspired by the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon, and you can see early on we invented several mutant animals of our own. Later we were influenced by the wide variety of anime that hit in the late 90s, particularly shows that made their way onto Toonami. Dragonball Z, Gundam Wing, Tenchi and more were among our favorites. As video games became more sophisticated RPGs and Adventure game story-lines such as The Legend of Zelda also influenced our style. Throughout, the complexity and action in the DCAU such as Batman: The Animated Series, Batman Beyond, and Justice League also contributed to our sensibilities.

We have our fair share of costumed superheroes such as the Storm Surfers, mutant animals like The Frogs, and classic swords and sorcery in Crimson Knight. Even though a lot of these characters started off fairly simple, some we’ve had in our minds literally since we were 5 years old, and the stories have since grown and matured.

Starting with Project 0 in 2010, we moved away from our old ideas and began to synthesize them into new properties that couldn’t be so easily labeled. This also helped us as story tellers. In creating new stories we were able to critique them objectively without the nostalgia lens that would only really make sense to us. Project 0 is a mix of fantasy, sci-fi and adventure taking cues from a lot of our previous original properties, to as diverse sources of inspiration as Digimon and The Matrix.

Though we still plan to revist several of our age old stories, we are now moving forward with another new series called Spider Stories.

Spider too takes cues from a lot of our old ideas, and then more modern fantasies such as Avatar The Last Airbender or Nintendo’s Fire Emblem. It takes the same grand scale epic appraoch to world building and story telling that fans around the world love to see. But it does it in an African inspired backdrop which, while there are a few out there, have never really been acknowledged by mainstream audiences. We’re doing a lot of homework on African mythology and history. And we are always sure to consult our cultural experts, our parents, to make sure it stays authentic.

So often the depiction of blacks and Africans in the media is one of poverty, corruption, or ignorance. At its most positive, black characters are often sidekicks or best friends to the lead, and black culture is typically framed through an other-ed lens. Even when it isn’t, such shows and movies are often relegated to niche markets and targeted so narrowly as ‘black entertainment’ that it may be alienating to non-black audiences.

We want Spider to really be a universal story. While it takes on African aesthetics and sensibilities, it is written to be accessible to all audiences regardless of ethnicity. It’s pure fantasy, not historical fiction or an adaptation of an existing myth. We hope audiences will be able to relate to the characters as people first. The nods to culture and history should spark interest in fans to seek out and learn more about Africa on their own. Art is often a launching point for cultural exposure, and the more it’s seen, the more normalized it becomes.

Filed Under: book shelf, branded entertainment, Comics Culture, transmedia entertainment, University of Southern California
March 13, 2013

Videos, Videos, Videos….

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Today, I wanted to share with you some videos from recent events where I have participated as a speaker or moderator.

A few weeks ago, I took the stage at the Tim O’Reilly Tools for Change conference in New York City with two amazing thinkers and good friends — Cory Doctorow, science fiction and Young Adult writer and digital advocate and Brian David Johnson, the man behind the recent book, Vintage Tomorrows: A Historian and a Futurist Travel Through Steampunk into the Future of Technology (for which I wrote an introduction).  Inspired by the Three Tenors, we jokingly billed ourselvesas the Three Geeks. In the conference context, the exchange — which spanned across everything from digital publishing to science fiction — was frustratingly short. We were just getting started, really, when the timer went off. We are hopeful we can bring a much longer conversation to some other venue before much longer.  But, in the meantime, we hope you will enjoy this video of the exchange.

Also, this past month, I was moderator for a Google Hangout discussion of Interacting with Transmedia, part of the InterActs series sponsored by . The featured panelists were:

Marc Smolowitz, Director, Producer, Executive Producer, Documentary Filmmaker

Luisa Dantas, Director/Producer/Editor, Land of Opportunity

Jo Ellen Kaiser, Executive Director, The Media Consortium

Ingrid Kopp, Director of Digital Initiatives at Tribeca Film Institute

Danielle Riendeau, Blogger for KillScreen, Instructor of Interactive Storytelling at Northeastern University, Communications Officer for ACLU-NorCal

InterActs is a conversation series created in partnership between NAMAC and the Daily Dot. Over the next several months, these two teams will host a series of online conversations on creative expression in digital environments. Unlike many programs on transmedia that focus on Hollywood producers and franchises, this event was centered on what people have called the East Coast School of Transmedia, where there is often a strong emphasis on independent and public media production, and here, on transmedia for social change. If you enjoy this video, we hope you will consider joining us for this year’s Transmedia Hollywood event, coming up on April 12 at UCLA, where the focus will be on different models for promoting social change in a world of spreadablity and transmedia production.

This past weekend, Sam Ford, Joshua Green, and I took our Spreadable Media book to South by Southwest, where we gave a talk to a packed auditorium, but also did a range of interviews. Here are a few of the ones that have already appeared on line. We note in the introduction that Spreadable Media tries to address a range of different audiences, and these interviews give some suggestion of how these various groups are taking up our ideas.

 

Here, you can see the three authors, seated rather uncomfortably on a coach, talking to a reporter from Gen/Connect about the role of the audience in creating value in a networked culture

Here are Sam and I sitting on another coach, this time in a house set up for librarians to gather and talk about the future of media. This time, the focus is on the implications of our work for education with a strong focus on media literacy, old and new.

Part One 

Part Two

Part Three

Part Four

Part Five

Part Six

Here, Sam and I participated in a podcast interview, speaking about the book’s implications for journalists and activists.

 

And here is me on a random street corner speaking to the folks from Leo Burnett: this time with a primary focus on what Spreadable Media means for brands and advertising.

#SXLB: Henry Jenkins, Author & Professor, USC, Pt. 1: Grassroots from Leo Burnett Worldwide on Vimeo.

We are on the road a lot these days, in various combinations, talking about the book and its implications for various audiences. I expect to share more videos before much longer.

As the Scarecrow says in The Wizard of Oz, That’s me … all over!

Filed Under: book shelf, branded entertainment, c3, Comparative Media Studies, interviews, participation, Spreadable Media, University of Southern California
March 5, 2013

Make ‘Em Laugh: A Conversation about Film Comedy (Part Two)

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Historically, the study of American film comedy has been organized around the comparison and contrast between comedian/slapstick comedy and romantic comedy. Both subgenres are well represented in this book. But, are they adequate for explaining the full range of comic texts? After several decades of genre-mixing, have new configurations of comedy emerged?

Andrew Horton: I still prefer to think of the difference between “anarchistic comedy” and “romantic comedy” as being helpful in that anarchistic comedies such as the Marx Brothers and Monty Python and, yes, Aristophanes, make no compromises and fulfill every wish of their overall fantasy in ways we know are impossible in the real world. Romantic comedies on the other hand are still despite modern complexities, about two differing humans (or animals in animation with human emotions!) who finally find a way to be together. Thus a celebration of “coming together”, compromise and sharing. That the two genres can mix elements these days as in THAT IS 40 or MOONRISE KINGDOM says a lot about how today’s comedies take on a lot more diversity!

Leger Grindon: I think there is a considerable intersection of the social function of jokes and laughter in everyday life and in screen comedy. This point of intersection allows audience members to respond with great sensitivity to humor on screen. Of course, the construction and conventions of art works also make humor different as it is observed at a safe distance by the film viewer rather than having him or her become a participant in the humorous exchange.

David R Shumway: Already with screwball comedy, Hollywood mixed slapstick and romantic. But in screwball, the romantic dominates. More recently the most popular comedies, like The Hangover or Bridesmaids, have reversed the hierarchy. And at least some film comedies, such The Great Dictator, Duck Soup, or The Great McGinty are best understood as satire, potentially a third major category. Comedies like Being John Malkovich, which rely for many of their laughs on post-modernist self-reflexivity, might be regarded as fourth major genre.

Celestino Deleyto: I think the classification of U.S. film comedy in comedian/slapstick and romantic comedy has served us well and helped a great deal to organize our thinking about the genre. My own view has always been that, while both are strong tendencies within the history of the genre, they have been less separate that the traditional paradigm has made them out to be. I have been most interested in combinations of the two types of comedy and, more specifically, in the importance of jokes and gags within the structure and ideology of romantic comedy.

I do think, on the other hand, that taking into account other national comic traditions will somehow change our classification. To mention an obvious example, social comedy, and even political comedy, should come to the forefront when considering many of the European comic traditions. This would also help us reassess certain key American comedies that did not fit easily within the comedian/romantic comedy paradigm. In general terms, satirical comedy is not well served by this dichotomy.

Rob King: I think the germane distinction isn’t so much between slapstick and romantic comedy; rather, it’s between slapstick and situation comedy, of which romantic comedy is a kind of derivative. As many have discussed, the concept of situation comedy developed in the late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries to designate a form of “refined,” narrative-based comedy, typically with middle-class domestic settings, as distinct from the more plebeian, sensational style of slapstick.

Once the distinction is parsed out that way, however, it becomes clear that the division of slapstick and situation effectively corresponds to social hierarchies of taste that emerged out of the class divisions of the late nineteenth century. Put simply: the distinction is historically specific and corresponds to a specific class formation. I’m not sure I’d see it as tremendously functional in discussing contemporary comedy – any more than our contemporary social structure can usefully be described through a nineteenth-century language of class.

Leger Grindon: Sure, there are other approaches. Just to mention the obvious examples consider satire and parody or the trend William Paul has described as “animal comedy”, that is the rise of vulgar comic forms since approximately 1980. And some new configurations have emerged, such as the mix of “animal comedy” and romantic comedy in films like There’s Something About Mary or Knocked Up.

Romantic comedy has been read symptomatically as expressing shifts in gender and sexual relations. What do we learn by looking at 21st century examples of this sub-genre?

Andrew Horton: Take just a few titles of so-called “romantic comedies” of the past few years—JUNO, CRAZY-STUPID-LOVE, NO STRINGS ATTACHED, FRIENDS WITH BENEFITS, an 500 DAYS OF SUMMER and you see that the “fun” of contemporary comedies is “pushing the so called envelope” of what is a romantic comedy as we’ve known them in the past.

Leger Grindon: I agree that shifts in gender and sexual relations are apparent in romantic comedy. In my book, Hollywood Romantic Comedy (2011) pp. 61-66 I characterize a current trend as “The Grotesque and Ambivalent Cycle” of romantic comedy apparent from 1997 into the present. Important films initiating this trend are My Best Friend’s Wedding (1997) as an example of the ambivalent and There’s Something About Mary ((1998) as an example of the grotesque. What gender trends are apparent, among others? Women’s ambivalence about marriage particularly as it conflicts with career ambition and male anxiety about sexuality in the grotesque. I think David Denby concept of the “slacker-striver” opposition in contemporary RC is also a useful insight.

Celestino Deleyto: Mostly that those meanings are in a process of constant change and that the genre is much more flexible ideologically that it has often been allowed to be by film theorists.

Comedian comedy has been read more formally with ongoing debates about the relations of narratives, performances, and gags. Are these still the best ways of making sense of this sub-genre?

Andrew Horton: No easy “overall observations” about strong comedians and film comedy for again, the diversity is so great. Clearly the tradition continues that many comedians cover both a life of “stand-up” comedy and role-playing in more traditional comedies, so whether you are Tina Fey, Woody Allen, Whoopi Goldberg, Steve Martin or Eddie Murphy, audiences enjoy them in either capacity. Then there are those such as Sacha Baron Cohen in BORAT and beyond who push the envelope to bring on topics traditional comedy has never seen, yes, including Kazakhstan!

Celestino Deleyto: Probably this book will help us to incorporate matters of cultural specificity within discussions of comedian comedy.

Leger Grindon: I think the relationship between narrative, performance and gags remains an outstanding way of making sense of these films. That is not to exclude the value of other approaches, but these are still central issues and important ones to address.

We’ve had a dramatic increase in our access to older comic texts thanks to the release of so many comedies within DVD boxed sets. How did this new availability impact your scholarship? What new films have been discovered, entered the canon as a result of this new access? And how do these films change our undelrstanding of the historical evolution of film comedy?

Andrew Horton: A joyful answer to this important question could easily be several books long, but I’m jumping to one example. Long live the world of “DVD Extras” that can open every viewer’s mind and heart to whatever genre we are discussing. This new world of “DVD extras” has made it possible for everyone to go beyond just watching a movie and “get” what older comedies have influenced contemporary comedies and in what ways! My example is the Coen Brothers’ O Brother Where Art Thou?

Yes, the film was simply popular all over the world when it came out, but those who enjoy doing their DVD extras work can further appreciate not only that the Coens got the Oscar for Best Adapted Script since they “loosely” based the film on Homer’s ODYSSEY, but they will learn that the Coens are winking in numerous ways to Preston Sturges’ glorious comedy, Sullivan’s Travels (1941) about a successful Hollywood director of comedies who wants to make a “serious” film about all the suffering in America called, yes, O Brother Where Art Thou?!!!

Leger Grindon: DVD extras have allowed access to filmmaker interviews and other resources that expand our viewing experience. However, I can’t think of a new film that has entered “the canon” as a result. But I would be eager to hear of such a case.

Andrew Horton is the Jeanne H. Smith Professor of Film and Media Stuies at the University of Oklahoma, an award-winning screenwriter, and the author of 24 books on film, screenwriting, and cultural studies, including A Companion to Film Comedy, which he co-edited with Joanna E. Rapf.

Celestino Deleyto is Professor of Film and English Literature at the Universidad de Zaragoza (Spain). He is the author of The Secret Life of Romantic Comedy (2009). His essay in Companion is “Humor and Erotic Utopia: The Intimate Scenarios of Romantic Comedy.”

Leger Grindon is Professor of Film and Media Culture at Middlebury College. He is the author of Hollywood Romantic Comedy: Conventions, History and Controversy (2011). He wrote “Taking Romantic Comedy Seriously in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) and Before Sunset (2004).”

Rob King is an assistant professor at the University of Toronto’s Cinema Studies Institute and Department of History, where he is currently working on a study of early sound slapstick and Depression-era mass culture. With Tom Paulus, he wrote Slapstick Comedy (2011). He contributed “‘Sound Came Along and Out Went the Pies’: The American Slapstick Short and the Coming of Sound.”

Claire Mortimer teaches film and media studies at Colchester Sixth Form College and his written Romantic Comedy (2010). Her essay is “Alexander Mackendrick: Dreams, Nightmares, and Myths in Ealing Comedy.”

David R. Shumway is Professor of English and Literary and Cultural Studies and Director of the Humanities Center at Carnegie Mellon University. His most recent book is John Sayles (2012). He contributed “Woody Allen: Charlie Chaplin of New Hollywood.”

Filed Under: book shelf, interviews
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