Hi everyone, I’m looking forward to this conversation. I’ve been attempting to work through my ambivalent response to the Veronica Mars kickstarter for the past few days, particularly where it bumps up against my unadulterated fannish glee that Netflix Saved Our Bluths. Two of my favorite cult TV series are being revived. It should feel like a win-win, but I can’t shake this sense that the Veronica Mars Kickstarter (or fan-ancing generally) sets a problematic precedent for what constitutes fan “participation.” Or, to AJ’s point, my concern doesn’t stem from the kinds of value producers and fans generate from television, or even the value that fans are generating from this kickstarter campaign, but how producers are increasingly and strategically generating value from fans.
My work broadly engages with industry-fan relationships within convergence culture, and how those relationships are gendered. In particular, I’m interested in which types of fans and modes of fannish engagement are valued, normalized, or incorporated, and which remain marginalized or are subject to containment. I’ve written in the past about how industrial efforts to engage fan culture often function as re-gifting economies, or planned communities that strive to “repackage fan culture, masking something old as something new, something unwanted (or unwieldy) as something desirable (or controllable, or profitable).” I’ve also blogged about the problematic legitimization discourses that surround industrial efforts to co-opt fan practices and retain ownership over fan texts. Many, myself included, are inclined to view the Veronica Mars Kickstarter as a prime example of fan empowerment (or, in Henry’s terms, as a techno-realization of a longstanding fannish frustration with audience measurement metrics, and a desire to revive media properties that were cut down in their prime). But, I still worry about what it means to discursively celebrate fans’ power in purely economic terms.
I’m a frequent donor to Kickstarter campaigns, especially those like Womanthology or Tropes Vs. Women in Video Games that are attempting to make a transformative intervention into media industries and fannish subcultures that can be unwelcoming to women. I’m also all for using Kickstarter to launch creator-owned projects. For example, I get why Batgirl writer Gail Simone, who was recently fired and rehired by DC Comics after a massive pushback from fans, would want to kickstart a graphic novel where she’ll have full control over the creative direction and, more importantly, the intellectual property rights. I’ll probably pull the trigger and donate to the Veronica Mars movie before the days tick down to zero…or, let’s be realistic, probably before the end of this conversation. But it’s not because I want a t-shirt, or a digital download of the finished product from Flixter, Warner Bros.’ proprietary video platform. What I want is information, however filtered through Warner Bros. publicity brass that it might be, about how this grand experiment is playing out, and to see if fans are addressed primarily as partners, or promotional agents.
As AJ rightly notes above, crowdfunding may not be the great equalizer, but it is a vital emergent tool that allows minority voices and audiences that are too often underrepresented by media industries to carve out a space to be heard. The figures that you’re tracking on your blog are vitally important. They aren’t just dollars, they’re pointed messages sent to media industries by media audiences. Can we view the massive success of the Veronica Mars Kickstarter as a call to television executives that there’s a market to be tapped for programs with compelling, complex young female protagonists? Hopefully. Would I feel better if Rob Thomas had Kickstarted an original web series, where the profits would be funneled into developing the next Veronica Mars, rather than into Warner Bros.’ coffers? Absolutely. It's the slippage between crowdsourcing and outsourcing financial risk here that I find troubling.
Mauricio Mota:
Ok, here comes the black sheep-capitalist storyteller from Brazil ;-)
I was born - literally - at the intersection between Academia, Commerce, Storytelling and Marxism. While my parents were academics and Marxists during the 70-80's, my mom was a fiction writer trying to figure out how to keep working, teaching, studying, paying bills and finally get picked by a publisher to bring her words to the world. The funny thing of that intersection is that till I was 8 I thought one of my grandfathers was Karl Marx - because of a picture my parents had in the home office. But actually my grandfather was considered the Latin-American Shakespeare.
That mix of backgrounds, struggles and opportunities trained my eyes and perceptions (with some scars and learnings) to always pay deep attention to the relationship between Creators (Storytellers), Distributors (Storysellers) and Readers (Story…buyers?) and to keep on the pace around one of the most fascinating dynamics ever. In the past, the roles were so clear, the imposed status quo was so comfortable/a given and people in general were just having fun with their stories that the Veronica Mars/House of Cards models were impossible to imagine.
Kickstarter didn't invent crowdfunding for storytelling. Neither did Felicia Day or Joss Whedon. The most efficient systems of crowdfunding for storytelling that I ever seen in my life are the Catholic and the Evangelical Churches. People have been funding saints, bibles, sagas, music concerts, souvenirs or tokens for more than 2000 years. In Brazil, the evangelicals own one of the top three tv channels (where they air religious programs, produced telenovelas and bought series from the US like Veronica Mars). So the whole conversation about "exploring" fandom or using fans to fund a movie owned by a big studio is a little bit strange for me because generally people want to watch and share an experience around a story: be it that story about a guy who could regenerate fast (no, I'm not talking about Wolverine, I'm talking about Jesus), Veronica Mars or about an elite group that uses people's trust to do whatever they want (I'm talking about House of Cards).
The line between owning something and owing was completely blurred when the Veronica Mars kickstarter campaign started. Many fans donated something because they feel such an emotional connection to that cannon that gave them so many good times that they feel the owe something to it and they want more of the pleasure that story gives -- with or without having something material back (a shirt or equity). It is the difference between Profit Sharing and Sharing Collective Value.
The roles are also blurred, thanks G'd -- both on Veronica Mars and House of Cards. And today I'm able to fund the stories my company creates from different sources: fans, non-profits, global advertisers, studios, networks or a toy company.
Because the Veronica Mars campaign is like advance money given by fans to the creator that implicitly says: "Hey, here is the money I would already buy for this and that, so now go make that extension so I can have the storytelling experience that no money nor a shirt can give me. Oh, I can also make it with my Mastercard and don't need to wait for someone to decide to fund it?". Instead of investing money on the IP after it airs, fans are doing it before.
Everyone, on the House of Cards case, was mesmerized by two things: launching 13 episodes at once on Netflix and the fact that some of the decisions to produce were based on algorithms. In the end of the day, the "series marathon" culture is something that is part of the fabric of pop culture consumption; Kevin Spacey is a great actor and amazing villain; politics brings eyeballs, fans add value whenever they watch something and the British version was already really good. If we build it, they will come. And with David Fincher behind, maybe (just maybe), the execution will be good. ;-)
By the way, The funders behind House of Cards are also "outside" the regular model as the Kickstarter examples: Goldman Sachs, WPP Group (one of the largest advertising groups in the world) and AT&T.
Netflix move to offer exclusive content at once was brave and risk taking strategy in a town where networks kill shows on episode 3. VOD changes the importance of focus groups and research to a level that makes me love where all this is going. Because so many amazing pilots or shows would have survived if Netflix, Amazong, Hulu and Kickstarter existed and gave that opportunity to fans, creators and last but not least, studios to make a decision.
Yes, studios.
Because everybody loves to blame the Studios for Hollywood's lack of innovation. Being a Studio is HARD. Crowdfunding is also hard. But what happens next is the point I'm trying to make.
The Veronica Mars case will show how sending the gifts and tokens for all the 50k+ backers (including movie sessions into remote cities) is really, really, really hard to accomplish but a Studio knows how to make something like this happen. And before the tomatoes come, the discussion is not if the studios do it well or not, but they make it and they have a system. If fans, indies, academics and writers believe there are improvements to be made, fight for it or kickstart a project and start your own Studio. It is about re-allocation of power and responsibilities and not resetting a whole organism that has brought to the world amazing stories - including Veronica Mars.
The Studios used to have the formula of success. Using Henry's recent book as a reference, the formula was "If doesn't get picked by studio it is dead". Now it probably would be "If doesn't get picked, lets talk to the fans and other distribution channels" (not so charming as "If it doesn't spread, it's dead" but really fascinating).
Now nobody has is total control, decision-making power is more shared. But Studios/Networks still have the most efficient marketing and logistics machine in the world and they deserve their share. Fans and storytellers that know how to build their own micro-networks also deserve a share.
Fans are now Studios. Advertisers are Studios. Amazon is a studio. Netflix too.
So, the roles are not only changing, they are blurred and the winner is the story. Because generally we don't know what we want until a story is in front of us and we say: I want more of that. And I will pay with my time, my emotions, my network of friends and my money.
Aymar Jean “AJ” Christian is an assistant professor of communication in the Media, Technology and Society program at Northwestern University. His manuscript, tentatively titled Off the Line, Independent Television and the Transformation of Creative Economy, explores the politics and value of the web series market. He edits a personal blog, Televisual, has been published in the academic journals Continuum, Transformative Works and Cultures, First Monday and Cinema Journal, and in the popular press in Slate, Indiewire, The Wall Street Journal and The Root, among others. For more information, visit his site.
Suzanne Scott is a Mellon Digital Scholarship Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center for Digital Learning + Research at Occidental College. Her work on fandom within convergence culture, transmedia storytelling, and fanboy auteurism has been published in the anthologies Cylons in America, The Participatory Cultures Handbook, and A Companion to Media Authorship, and the journal Transformative Works and Cultures. She blogs at Revenge of the Fans and tweets @iheartfatapollo.
Mauricio Mota is one the founders of The Alchemists, Entertainment Group responsible for building original transmedia narratives and content for studios, publishing companies, fans and brands. Some of their clients include Coca-Cola, Petrobras, TV Globo, CW, Elle Magazine, NFL, Nextel and the Brazilian Ministry of Education. He was responsible for bringing the concept of transmedia storytelling to Brazil and implemented the Transmedia Communication Department for Globo Television (4th largest network in the world).
Henry Jenkins:
When I was writing Textual Poachers in the late 1980s, I stumbled across a fascinating scheme being floated by fans of George R.R. Martin's fantasy series, Beauty and the Beast, a series with a very committed audience, but one that was small enough that the program was always in danger of being canceled. The fans were suggesting a plan where fans would pay into a fund that would cover the cost of the series production and then would received VHS tapes of episodes once they had been made. The fans rightly recognized that the Nielsen Ratings measured the scope of viewership but not its intensity, and that the scale of success demanded to stay on network television was considerably lower than what would be required to cover the costs of production. At the time, such plans were unlikely to succeed, given the nature of the media environment: they really did not have a robust method for collecting funds from dedicated fans, the producers would not have had a viable business model for proceeding under this unstable system, and the distribution of episodes via VHS was going to be clunky at best.
We flash forward two decades and recent events suggests we have moved dramatically closer to making such a scenario possible. First, we have seen Netflix become a producer and distributor of original television content -- programs that look and feel like network television (actually like HBO or AMC programming) but which are distributed digitally without ever being broadcast. Netflix's first venture in this direction was House of Cards, which seems to have attracted a very solid audience, and their second will be the relaunch of Arrested Development, a fan favorite series that Netflix has brought back after several years in limbo. We are seeing similar moves by Hulu and YouTube, both of which would like to get into the business of producing and distributing web-based television content.
And, then, we have seen Kickstarter emerge as a platform that, with the example of Veronica Mars, has demonstrated the possibilities of fan support pushing a once canceled program back into production -- in this case for the big screen. And for the Veronica Mars scheme to work, we have to assume there were behind the scenes discussions between Rob Thomas and Warner Brothers (which still owns the rights to Veronica Mars) that would allow them some basis of proceeding. We now are hearing that a range of other producers and show-runners are starting to explore whether they might deploy similar tactics to gain a second chance for their passion projects.
This week, I have gathered together three friends, who bring different kinds of expertise to thinking about the short term and long term implications of these developments.
Aymar Jean “AJ” Christian:
Hello!
It’s been fascinating to see relationships between producers, fans and distributors reconfigured in digital marketplaces!
About a year before Kickstarter launched, I was drawn into the world of crowdfunding through Felicia Day. Day was a working actress with credits on shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer when she decided she wasn’t ever going to get a leading role and showrunner status unless she did it herself. Intermittently unemployed as so many workers in Hollywood are, she wrote a pilot for The Guild, about a group of gamers, based on her experience playing World of Warcraft in between gigs. She and a skeleton crew produced most of the first season on a dime and then came to place a lot of indie producers find themselves: without funds to continue. But those few episodes had built a fan base, and, through a Paypal link on the show’s active website, she raised thousands to kick-start the rest. That early fan interest shocked the industry, distributors came calling, and The Guild found distribution through Microsoft, who was/is trying to build an entertainment platform outside of television. Day is now a huge source of inspiration within and outside the web television industry and a key brand ambassador for MSN.
In my years researching the “web series” or independent television market I’ve seen crowdfunding take a central place in show development (so much so I’ve tried to track it on my site). Series that built communities of fans early and quickly inevitably turned to crowdfunding. Soon shows targeting all sorts of groups dissatisfied with legacy television used sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo to keep indie brands alive. Lesbian web series Anyone But Butraised over $30,000 for its third and final season; The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl ($56,000, nearly twice the ask) for its second; The Outs (over $20,000, many times the ask), a gay-led show, did it in two rounds; last year brought Black & Sexy’s The Couple ($32,000) and Latino-focused show East WillyB ($51,000), not to mention the prodigious work of Freddie Wong, whose canny, Asian-American-led Video Game High School has crowdfunded over $1 million to date (season 1, season 2).
Raising money not only gave them funds to survive, and extra opportunities for press and marketing, they also let creators build a database of their strongest fans and supporters, who would then proselytize the show on social networks. This sometimes led to distribution and development deals with both online and on-air networks.
In short, crowdfunding causes us to rethink relationships in media industries, and think very specifically about the kinds of value producers and fans generate from television, as a number of scholars are exploring, from Jason Mittell, to Michael Newman, to your work in Spreadable Media. For independent producers, crowdfunding rewards creators with a clear pitch to specific communities, who are in turn rewarded with a show conglomerates might be reluctant to green light. Of course, this kind of value is hard to sustain in our media landscape, and the fact that Veronica Marsraised several times more than most projects before it in 24 hours speaks to the kinds of value conglomerates are able to generate when they have already invested in marketing properties.
Aymar Jean “AJ” Christian is an assistant professor of communication in the Media, Technology and Society program at Northwestern University. His manuscript, tentatively titled Off the Line, Independent Television and the Transformation of Creative Economy, explores the politics and value of the web series market. He edits a personal blog, Televisual, has been published in the academic journals Continuum, Transformative Works and Cultures, First Monday and Cinema Journal, and in the popular press in Slate, Indiewire, The Wall Street Journal and The Root, among others. For more information, visit his site.
Suzanne Scott is a Mellon Digital Scholarship Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center for Digital Learning + Research at Occidental College. Her work on fandom within convergence culture, transmedia storytelling, and fanboy auteurism has been published in the anthologies Cylons in America, The Participatory Cultures Handbook, and A Companion to Media Authorship, and the journal Transformative Works and Cultures. She blogs at Revenge of the Fans and tweets @iheartfatapollo.
Mauricio Mota is one the founders of The Alchemists, Entertainment Group responsible for building original transmedia narratives and content for studios, publishing companies, fans and brands. Some of their clients include Coca-Cola, Petrobras, TV Globo, CW, Elle Magazine, NFL, Nextel and the Brazilian Ministry of Education. He was responsible for bringing the concept of transmedia storytelling to Brazil and implemented the Transmedia Communication Department for Globo Television (4th largest network in the world).
He began his career as an entrepreneur at the age of 15, when he developed a story-creation platform with writer Sonia Rodrigues. Used in over 4000 schools, it was licensed 8 times and used as a tool to facilitate innovation and creativity for many top 500 companies and the UN.
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.
***********
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.
************************
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.
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.
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.
Today, the Annenberg Innovation Lab at USC and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center announced the release of "T is for Transmedia: Learning Through Transmedia Play." The report is written by Becky Herr-Stephenson and Meryl Alper, under the supervision of Erin Reilly. This paper provides a much-needed guidebook to transmedia in the lives of children age 5-11 and its applications to storytelling, play, and learning. Building off of a review of the existing popular and scholarly literature about transmedia and children, this report identifies key links between transmedia and learning, highlights key characteristics of transmedia play, and presents core principles for and extended case studies of meaningful transmedia play experiences.
"We really have two goals for the report," says co-author Becky Herr-Stephenson. "Our first is to get educators thinking about how they might incorporate transmedia play into activities, lesson plans, or projects. Our second goal is to put the design recommendations before media makers in the hopes that the principles will reinforce the good work people are already doing as well as encourage others to bring play and learning to the forefront of their transmedia projects.”
“T is for Transmedia” is embedded below and is also available for download here.
I know that this report is going to generate a lot of interest from the transmedia enthusiasts and new media literacy educators who constitute this blog's most loyal readers, so to give you a taste of what to expect, I am sharing with you the introduction I contributed to this project.
There's a Monster at the End of This Report
There is a monster at the end of this report (well, maybe there is, but you won’t know for sure until you turn all of the pages and read what we have to say).
But, it is telling that most of you probably recognize this phrase as a reference to a classic children’s book, written by Jon Stone, illustrated by Michael Smollen, released in 1971 just a few years after Sesame Street debutted on PBS, and “starring lovable, furry old Grover.” Much has been made of the ways that Sesame Street reinvented children’s television, embracing rather than running away from the properties of its medium, incorporating tricks from advertising, parodies of popular culture, songs and skits, into something which encouraged the active engagement of its young viewers. Yet, far less has been made of the fact that Sesame Street from the very start encouraged its young fans to follow it across media platforms - from television to records, books, stuffed toys, public performances, feature films, and much more. Certainly, the then-Children’s Television Workshop’s steps in that direction were cautious, given the anxieties many parents have about the commercialization of children’s culture. But, over time, much of the American public came to embrace those experiments in transmedia storytelling as part of what made Sesame Street such a powerful learning system. In a 2007 online poll, the American Education Association voted The Monster At the End of This Book onto a list of “Teachers’ Top 100 Books for Children,” and a few years later, the School Library Journal gave it a prominent spot on its list of the Top 100 picture books.
Part of what makes The Monster so compelling is that it is as reflexive about the nature of the printed book as a medium as Sesame Street was about our experiences of watching and learning from television. Reading this book becomes a kind of play as children scream with a mixture of fear and delight as we turn each page, wondering when the scary monster is going to appear, only to discover that it is “lovable furry old Grover” who is the monster we warmly welcome at the end of the book. Grover tries to do everything he can to block us from turning the pages, from tying knots to constructing brick walls, from begging to harranging us, yet the desire to read overcomes all of the walls he might try to erect. The children’s book has long been a site for domestic performance, as parents and children alike try out different voices, make sound effects, respond with mock emotions, to the pictures on the page.
This book had effects which go beyond the printed page: Grover emerges as an early fan favorite on Sesame Street as his personality took shape across platforms. When young people pick up The Monster, they already know who Grover is, they know his back story, they understand his motivations, they identify with what he is feeling, and as a result, there is an immediacy about our experience of this book.
Predictably enough, Monster has in recent years evolved into a digital book, an interactive experience children on their iPad. We certainly do not want to exclude adults from the fun - reading books together across generation is perhaps the most powerful way to foster a deeper appreciation of the pleasures of reading. But, Sesame Street has always understood that children do not enjoy equal opportunities to learn. Some children are left on their own while their parents work long hours. Some parents do not have good models for active reading with their children and look for prompts that might allow them to learn how to play and perform and speculate around the printed page. The experience of an e-book version of Monster will ideally supplement and scaffold the experience of reading the traditional picture book, not replace it, but it also adds a new layer to the ever expanding “supersystem” which constitutes the world of Sesame Street. So does The Putamayo Kids Presents Sesame Street Playground, a CD/DVD set which shares with children songs from the many versions of the program which have been localized to languages and cultures around the world, and video clips featuring the original casts in India, Mexico, Russia, or South Africa. And Sesame Street, the longest street in the world, just keeps growing.
Today, we might describe Sesame Street as a transmedia experience - that concept did not exist in 1971 when Monster was first published. Transmedia is an idea that has come into sharper focus over the past decade, having emerged from active conversations between academic researchers, creative artists, policy makers, fan communities, anyone and everyone interested in the future of entertainment and storytelling. Transmedia, by itself, means “across media” and it describes any number of possible relationships which might exist between the various texts that constitute a contemporary entertainment franchise. Marsha Kinder (1991), a media scholar who has written extensively about children’s media, coined the term, “transmedia,” to refer to the “entertainment supersystem” which had emerged around characters such as the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Muppet Babies, or the Super Mario Brothers, as personalities and characters that move across media platforms, encouraging their fans to follow them where-ever they appeared. In my own work (Jenkins, 2006), I extended her concept to talk about transmedia storytelling, which refers to the systematic unfolding of elements of a story world across multiple media platforms, with each platform making a unique and original contribution to the experience as a whole.
Monster at the End of the Book builds off what we know of Grover on television but it creates a new kind of experience that takes advantage of the distinctive affordances of the printed book, which is designed to be read aloud in the child’s bedroom or playroom. Follow that Bird expands upon the time we get to spend with Big Bird while watching the television series in order to flesh out his backstory, situate him within a quest narrative, and suggest how much he means to the larger Sesame Street community. Neither example builds on extensive narrative information that must be remembered across different texts -- that would not necessarily be appropriate for younger viewers -- but it does reward fans who apply what they learned in one context to each new appearance of the characters.
Each of these texts, thus, contributes something to our knowledge of this fictional realm, and each takes advantage of those things their respective medium does best. We want the depiction of Oscar or Cookie Monster or the Count in a Sesame Street game to be consistent with what we see on television, but we also want the game to provide us with an interactive experience that is only possible in digital media. By combining media with different affordances, we create a more layered entertainment experience. Or at least, that’s the theory. A good transmedia narrative uses these various cross-platform extensions to flesh out the world, to extend the time line, to deepen our familiarity with the characters, and to increase our engagement.
With an educational property like Sesame Street, transmedia does something else - it reinforces the learning both by encouraging us to reread and re-experience a particularly pleasurable narrative (something, as we all know, kids are often inclined to do with little or no adult encouragement) and because they are invited to connect together pieces of information across multiple installments. In his book, The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell (2000) describes the original Sesame Street as “sticky,” suggesting that young people become so drawn to its vivid characters that they keep coming back for more and in the process, these repeated encounters reinforce what they learn from its curricular design.
Transmedia encourages additive comprehension. We learn something new as we follow the story across media. This distinguishes it from cross-media, which refers to the use of these other media platforms as simple delivery mechanisms for the same old content. So, if we watch Sesame Street online or on a DVD and change nothing else about the content, that’s cross-media. We might also distinguish transmedia from multimedia. Multimedia might use multiple kinds of media - words, pictures, sounds, videos - which are brought together in a single package: so, in the old days, there might be a CD-ROM developed around Sesame Street, where clicking a button opens us up to a range of different kinds of media. In transmedia, there’s something powerful about how the reader is incited to search out dispersed content and reassemble it into a meaningful mental model.
In a hunting society, children learn by playing with bows and arrows. In an information society, they learn to play with information. That’s part of why we think transmedia learning is such a potentially transformative concept. A science fiction writer has to construct a world which can extend across media platforms, but there already exist many rich worlds - the world under the sea, the universe beyond the Earth, the ancient world, the people who live on the other side of the planet -- which are central to our desired curriculum. Perhaps, the best way to learn about them is to explore their stories, their environments, across media platforms, much as we acquire a deeper affection for Grover through repeated encounters.
Like any other kind of storytelling, transmedia is something which can be done well or badly. You can be attentive to the possibilities of expanding a story in new directions or you can simply slap a logo on something and pretend like it’s part of the same franchise. Transmedia can be enriching or exploitative, can be motivated by the crudest of economic motives or shaped by the most cutting edge learning science. But, when transmedia is done well, it creates a deeply engaging, immersive experience, which multiplies the number of learning opportunities.
Young people do not simply consume transmedia narratives; rather, transmedia encourages playful participation. In my book, Convergence Culture (2006), I talk about attractors (things that draw together an audience) and activators (elements which give the audience something to do, especially in a network society, ways to interact with each other around the shared content). Narrative-inflected play is hardly new. Go back and reread the great children’s books of the 19th century. There’s Meg in Little Women developing a backyard game based on Pilgrim’s Progress. There’s Tom Sawyer in Mark Twain’s novel pretending to be a pirate or Robin Hood. There’s Anne, she of the Green Gables, who re-enacts the story of the Lady in the Lake. Each of these books remind us that children before the era of mass media actively engaged with stories told to them by adults and transformed them into resources for their own creative play.
In the 20th century, mass media displaced many traditional forms of storytelling, but children’s play with narrative remained meaningful as a way of trying on adult roles and expanding core stories that matter to them. And this is what this report means by transmedia play. Certainly, adults have some legitimate worries about commercial media “colonizing” their children’s imaginations, but keep in mind that the human imagination feeds upon the culture around it and children show enormous capacity to re-imagine the stories that enter their lives.
Transmedia encourages this kind of creative reworking. The scattered fragments of a transmedia story are like pieces of a puzzle; they encourage curiosity, exploration, experimentation, and problem solving. Transmedia’s process of dispersal creates gaps which require our active speculation: some call this negative capability. Transmedia processes show us that there are more than one way to tell story, that there is always more we can learn about the characters and their world, and that represents a provocation to imagine aspects of these characters that have not yet made it to the screen. Young people make these stories their own through their active imaginations. The stuffed toy becomes their avatar: they use it to work through their problems; they use it as a vehicle for their emotions; they project their own personality onto the plush or for that matter, they use it a a stand in for some other powerful figure in their life. For a short moment, as they are reading about or manipulating Grover, they become the monster, and again, that’s a valuable experience. The child psychologist Bruno Betellheim (1976) tells us that young people need to read stories which acknowledge the darker sides of life, because children know that they are not always good and they need resources for thinking through how they should respond to the things that frighten them in the real world.
So, there you have the core concepts of this report - transmedia stories, transmedia play, transmedia learning. Put them all together and something magical happens.
Transmedia is not the monster at the end of the book; it’s not something you need to be afraid of encountering. So far, we know more about transmedia in entertainment and branding contexts than in relation to learning. That’s not a reason to take off running down the street. That’s a reason for people who care deeply about insuring the most diverse learning opportunities for our children to take transmedia seriously, to try to understand how to link multiple media together to create new pedagogical experiences, to be ready to explore how we might play together around the materials of a transmedia franchise, to invite children to explore what it means to read a story across the borders and boundaries between different texts and different media. This report offers some rich exemplars of groups who are doing well by children through their creation of powerful and transformative transmedia experiences, and it offers some design principles so that educators and producers might generate more meaningful, even mind blowing, transmedia experiences for the coming generation.
What does it mean to play a game?
At first glance, the question is simple, straightforward, and rather mundane. But, in this piece of experimental game criticism, USC iMAP student Adam Liszkiewicz pushes us to think deeper about the range of different encounters and experiences we have with games in contemporary culture. Liszkiewicz was a student in my "Medium Specificity" seminar last fall, and he wrote this essay as part of working through his responses to Ludwig Wittgenstein's writings about defining games in Philosophical Investigations. I found this response provocative and wanted to share it with my regular readers. It's taken me a few months to pry it from Adam's fingers, but here it is. I'd love to know what you think.
For me, the essay marks the logical next step in what has been called "the new games criticism," a mode of analysis which owes much to the "new journalism" movement of the 1960s, especially in its reliance on first person perspectives and evocative rather than descriptive prose. From the start, game critics have struggled with their object of study. Some wrote about games as texts, yet it was clear that each player had somewhat different experiences with the game depending on the choices they made. We got into hot water when we tried to describe games in terms of narrative or game play mechanics. We've tried to talk about the affordances of platforms. For the New Games critics, the key concept is experience. Each player has a different experience with the game, and so we might best start by offering as detailed and as informed an account of what happens when we play a game. This route led for example towards Drew Davidson's outstanding series of Well Played anthologies, which has smart players describe their process of working through key games. But, the key idea in this essay is that the same player might have multiple experiences of the same game and that the process of discovery and experimentation is ongoing, even when we think the game is played out.
When Did You First Play The Binding of Isaac? by Adam Liszkiewicz
*
A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably. [Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philisophical Investigations, 115]
*
I first played the game The Binding of Isaac sometime during the winter months of 2011. This is to say that I watched one of its trailers, a short cinematic animation which explained the videogame’s backstory. Which is to say I watched the introductory cinematic cut-scene of The Binding of Isaac and mistook it as an advertisement. I have no memory of this viewing; it is merely implied by other memories, and other images. Perhaps these images are inaccurate?
*
No, that is not what it means. And I should not accept any picture as exact, in this sense. [PI 70]
*
I first played the game The Binding of Isaac in late January or early February 2012. My two best friends were visiting from Buffalo, NY, and both had become enamored with the game. I remember glancing at their computer screens from time to time, while they sat playing on my couch, each on their own laptop. The game looked interesting, by which I mean I largely ignored it and focused on schoolwork. (My spring semester had already started.) Then my friends showed me the opening cut-scene again. I remember feeling stunned: someone had remixed Chapter 22 of Genesis as a videogame about child abuse, evangelical Christianity, and schizophrenia. The game looked fantastic. I knew I had seen the opening cut scene before, but had no memory of its content. But how could this be true? How could I have seen the trailer but been entirely unaffected by it?
*
In the sense in which there are processes (including mental processes) which are characteristic of understanding, understanding is not a mental process. (A pain's growing more and less; the hearing of a tune or a sentence: these are mental processes.) [PI 154]
*
I first played the game Binding of Isaac on Friday, May 18th, 2012 at 9:55 PM PST. My wife and I went with some friends to a theater in North Hollywood, and caught the premiere showing of Indie Game: The Movie. The film follows Edmund McMillen, the designer and artist behind The Binding of Isaac, as he and his friend prepare to release their game Super Meat Boy to the XBox platform. I cannot remember if the film mentions or depicts The Binding of Isaac at all. But as I watched the film, I thought, “Oh yeah, The Binding of Isaac!” I believe I bought the game soon thereafter. Thanks to my email, I am certain of the date and time of the film.
*
What is common to them all? Don't say: "There must be something common, or they would not be called 'games'", but look and see whether there is anything common to all. For if you lookat them you will not see something that is common to all, but similarities, relationships, and a whole series of them at that. To repeat: don't think, but look! [PI 66]
*
I first played the game The Binding of Isaac on Tuesday, September 25th, 2012 sometime between 1 and 5 PM PST. I was attending a session of “CNTV 600: Medium Specificity,” a graduate-level course taught by Prof. Henry Jenkins in the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. The theme for that class session was “Medium Specificity in Game Studies,” and as a student who studies and designs videogames I was asked to introduce a few notable contemporary games to the class. I began by screening the opening cinematic from The Binding of Isaac. When the clip was finished, someone asked me a question about what the game was like. I remember thinking: “How the hell should I know?”
*
But have you a model for this? No. It is just that this expression suggests itself to us. As the result of the crossing of different pictures. [PI 191]
*
I first played The Binding of Isaac on two separate occasions between early October and mid-November 2012. During that period of time, I was preparing three new videogames for a gallery show at USC; I worked long hours most days. I hadn’t played a new videogame in months, and I needed to try something new so I could write a short paper for CNTV 600: Medium Specificity. Twice, I tried to take a break from design work, and I launched The Binding of Isaac. I don’t recall what happened the first time, but the second time I fell asleep on my keyboard during its opening cinematic.
*
The fundamental fact here is that we lay down rules, a technique, for a game, and that then when we follow the rules, things do not turn out as we had assumed. That we are therefore as it were entangled in our own rules. This entanglement in our rules is what we want to understand (i.e. get a clear view of). [PI 125]
*
I first played The Binding of Isaac in late November 2012. My gallery show had just ended, and it was time to take a short break from work. I remember sitting down at my desk--it must have been Sunday, November 18th--and playing Team Fortress 2 for about ten or twenty minutes. I have played over 800 hours of Team Fortress 2 over the course of the past four years; it is a kind of habitual action, a comfortable pattern of thinking, like shooting baskets alone at a park. This is why my wife told me to stop, when she came into the room. She said it was time for something new. So I launched The Binding of Isaac.
*
What is your aim in philosophy?—To shew the fly the way out of the fly-bottle. [PI 309]
*
I first played The Binding of Isaac on Sunday, November 18th, 2012. I was hooked almost immediately.
*
What I do is not, of course, to identify my sensation by criteria: but to repeat an expression. But this is not the end of the language-game: it is the beginning. [PI 290]
*
I first played The Binding of Isaac on Monday, November 19th, 2012. I’d played the game for hours the day before, but somehow it felt like I was playing a new game again. In part, this is because of the freshness and volume of the game’s content, much of which cannot be accessed until it is unlocked through successful gameplay. Different content appears in different playthroughs, so you never know what you’ll encounter in a given level. Moreover, the game’s levels are procedurally-generated; they are created algorithmically, via a set of instructions, rather than being pre-designed and static. This means that each playthrough of The Binding of Isaac happens in a substantially new space, with unpredictable configurations of content. This also means that there is no one version of the game world. Instead, the game reveals itself as a kind of mindset one brings to bear on arbitrary content in an unstable architectural configuration.
*
As is frequently the case with work in architecture, work on philosophy is actually closer to working on oneself. On one’s own understanding. On the way one sees things. (And on what one demands of them.) [BT, 300e]
*
I first played The Binding of Isaac throughout late November 2012. The game remained surprisingly fresh, despite hours and hours of gameplay. Each time I played, I saw new configurations of space and content. Too, I saw that space and content offer new configurations of the game’s central character. The Binding of Isaac is a “roguelike,” a colloquial term for a videogame featuring randomization in levels and content, as well as permanent character death. This means that roguelikes usually afford opportunities for character progression through a random distribution of power-ups and magical items. These items traditionally increase (or decrease) the underlying statistics that govern your avatar’s attributes, and thus its relationship to the surrounding level environments. The Binding of Isaac takes this an unconventional step further: the items Isaac picks up also change his physical appearance. Isaac is routinely changed by objects in strange and often profound ways. His body grows, shrinks, and changes color and shape; his costumes change him from Cain to Judas and back to Isaac again; sometimes he cross-dresses and becomes Magdalene or Eve; other times he is deformed by reactions to pills; he sprouts wings, becomes a cyclops, or grows a tumor on his head. In these and other ways, The Binding of Isaac becomes an ever-changing game defined in part through an unstable character, and it follows that the meaning of the game becomes equally unstable.
*
Let us say that the meaning of a piece is its role in the game. [PI 563]
*
I first played The Binding of Isaac in late November 2012. I can’t remember the exact date, but it occurred when--for no apparent reason--I felt like watching the opening cinematic again. To this point, I had always interpreted this introductory cut-scene quite literally: Isaac’s mother was an evangelical Christian who one day started to hear God’s voice; this voice instructed her to discipline Isaac for his sinful behaviors; eventually, the voice commanded her to kill Isaac, as a demonstration of her faith, and in true Abrahamic fashion she picked up a kitchen knife; Isaac fled to his room, and then to the basement through a trap door hidden beneath his bedroom’s carpet. This had long been my reading of the opening cut-scene. But the longer I played the game, the more troublesome my interpretation felt. When I watched the cut-scene, I noticed something new: Isaac’s thumb in the bottom-left corner of the frame. And then I saw the shadow of Isaac’s head, looming over his thumb. Suddenly, a cartoon fly buzzed through the frame. I was dumbfounded: how had I never noticed these things before?
*
It can be seen that there is a misunderstanding here from the mere fact that in the course of our argument we give one interpretation after another; as if each one contented us at least for a moment, until we thought of yet another standing behind it. [PI 201]
*
I first played The Binding of Isaac in late November 2012. I still can’t remember the date, but it was the day I realized that the game’s introductory cinematic was drawn by Isaac himself. The opening cut-scene was the same story it had always been, but the author and narrator had changed. And as I watched the introduction all the way through--perhaps for the first time ever--I saw Isaac hang his drawing on the fourth wall, as an invisible barrier separating him from me. It was then that I realized The Binding of Isaac is not a remix of Chapter 22 of Genesis; neither is it about child abuse, evangelical Christians, nor schizophrenia. In fact, it is not “about” anything. It is an habitual action, a commonplace pattern of thinking. The Binding of Isaac is drawing.
*
But when one draws a boundary it may be for various kinds of reason. If I surround an area with a fence or a line or otherwise, the purpose may be to prevent someone from getting in or out; but it may also be part of a game and the players be supposed, say, to jump over the boundary; or it may shew where the property of one man ends and that of another begins; and so on. So if I draw a boundary line that is not yet to say what I am drawing it for. [PI 499]
*
I first played The Binding of Isaac in early December 2012. Already, I had logged more than forty hours of gameplay. I had watched and listened to interviews with Edmund McMillen; I had read reviews and interpretations of the game; I had talked extensively with the two friends who had introduced me to Isaac. I had even played (and beaten) McMillen’s other big game, Super Meat Boy. In short, I had been a diligent graduate student, preparing to write a short seminar paper. My view remained that the game was best understood as a habit of drawing, and when I situated that habit in relation to the game’s imagery and cut-scenes (of which there are currently 14), that habit could be interpreted as a troubled child’s means of escaping reality. It was an interesting reading of the game, and I’d even found a blog post expressing a similar view, which McMillen himself described as “by far the most mind blowingly accurate breakdown of the over-arching meaning behind the Binding of Isaac’s ending”. Everything seemed to fit together. Unfortunately, I hadn’t yet purchased and installed the game’s expansion, The Wrath of the Lamb, which adds 80% more content to the original game. McMillen has recently described the expansion as a continuation of Isaac’s adventure, including “dream ideas” that didn’t appear in the original game. I had turned into a serious fan of both Isaac and Isaac; how could I not complete the adventure?
*
The problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have always known. [PI 109]
*
I first played The Binding of Isaac throughout early to mid-December 2012. I installed The Wrath of the Lamb expansion pack, consumed as much new content as possible, and diligently worked toward some fuller understanding of the game. I found spare moments, in breaks between work projects; I slept a little less. I played for twenty more hours, bringing my total above sixty hours played. And after all that, I still wasn’t anywhere close to unlocking the true, final ending of the game. I was exhausted and running low on time, so one afternoon I decided to end the game right where it began. I gave up trying to win the game myself, and instead I simply watched the game’s final ending on YouTube. My intent was to finish playing The Binding of Isaac and start writing an interpretive essay about the game. Instead, the game’s final cinematic cut-scene revealed an entirely different game, and I had no idea how to play it.
*
A philosophical problem has the form: "I don't know my way about". [PI 123]
*
I first played The Binding of Isaac on an afternoon in mid-December 2012. I had just watched the game’s final ending on YouTube, and in a flash it had changed my understanding of the entire game. I tried to regain perspective, and replayed the game in my mind. The Binding of Isaac begins in Isaac’s bedroom, where the young boy is drawing pictures and telling himself stories about his impending death at the hands of his crazed mother. Isaac is constructing an adventure through his drawing practice, and that practice takes Isaac and you down through his home’s basement, down through caves and into depths where he must fight and defeat his mother. When she is defeated, the player unlocks a cut-scene (drawn by Isaac) showing Isaac’s victory over his mother. But this victory is short-lived, and Isaac must then continue “down” into his mother’s womb, where he must defeat his mother’s heart. Once he has beaten both his mother and her heart ten times--while inhabiting a number of biblical characters, each receiving their own unique “ending” cinematic scenes--his mother’s heart is replaced by a giant fetus. Concurrently, Isaac must travel down again into Sheol to fight the Devil, and then down (or up?) to a cathedral where he fights himself, and after these battles even more “ending” cut-scenes are unlocked. These scenes depict Isaac standing over his open toy chest, the chest in which Isaac has found rewards in previous “endings”, but this time Isaac is rewarded with perspective: he sees that he has been playing all of the characters in a fantasy world, and in reality he has been in his bedroom the entire time. Reeling and conflicted, Isaac steps into his toy chest and closes it. This chest constitutes the final level of the game, and once you beat the final level of The Binding of Isaac for the seventh time (at minimum), you are rewarded with the game’s final “ending”. And this ending completely changed my perspective on the game, as well as on my own perspective.
*
Thus I might supply the picture with the fancy that the smiler was smiling down on a child at play, or again on the suffering of an enemy. This is in no way altered by the fact that I can also take the at first sight gracious situation and interpret it differently by putting it into a wider context. [PI 539]
*
I first played The Binding of Isaac on an afternoon in mid-December 2012, while watching the game’s final ending. In a game dominated by grotesque cartoon imagery, this cinematic is startling in its simplicity and plainness: it is a sequence of polaroids, found by Isaac in the chest in this room. This sequence of snapshots depicts a loose retelling of important moments in Isaac’s life. The player is shown Isaac standing between his mother and his now-absent father; this constitutes his father’s first appearance in the game, and the entire trio is smiling in an outdoor setting. The next image shows Isaac’s mother with what looks like a young girl, in the same outdoor scene, again introducing a new character (a sister?) or a new perspective on old characters (mother and cross-dressing Isaac?) who are, again, smiling. Next, a few particularly open-ended images: Isaac photographing himself, unhappy, with a shadowy figure behind him; Isaac’s parents, looking happy together outdoors; Isaac alone outdoors, looking sad; Isaac leaning back against his chest, head hung down, hands covering his face. And then, the sequence ends with two stark, powerful, and totally ambiguous images. Next to last, an action shot of Isaac’s mother brandishing a knife, with absolutely no context in the image. Finally, a view from behind Isaac and his mother, as they watch what can only be the father walking down a road, and off into the distance. The plainness of these images contrasts powerfully with the game’s dark and disturbing comic-book aesthetic, lending an unprecedented feel of resolution to the game. That said, the ambiguity of the final images completely upends that resolution: At whom was the Mother brandishing a knife? Was she the monster we’ve seen depicted throughout the game? Or could she be a misunderstood, exaggerated fabrication of her son’s troubled mind? We are left with one strong clue: in the center of the final frame, Isaac’s arm is extended toward his mother, and his hand rests on her back. This opens up the game to an entirely different perspective, of a mother and son in a single-parent household, where Isaac has been struggling to understand what has happened between his parents, and who he and his mother have become as a result. Moreover, it presents the possibility that The Binding of Isaac was a powerful re-imagining of the original Genesis text all along: the Mother as heroic, knife-wielding defender of her son, who expels Abraham from their home. Here at the end, I felt another beginning, another game waiting to be played.
*
No; my description only made sense if it was to be understood symbolically.—I should have said: This is how it strikes me. [PI 219]
*
I first played The Binding of Isaac while I was writing this essay. The act of writing about the game has, in retrospect, presented itself to me as a kind of unwriting, an unraveling of the bindings of a videogame text. And I see my unwritten text as a parallel to Issac’s drawings: both are practices of composition oriented toward a kind of therapy. For Isaac, drawing was a therapeutic practice of assuaging pain; for me, composing this essay was means to break free from the hold of the game’s opening cinematic. For both of us, our therapeutic practices helped us to expose fallacies in our thinking, and to better understand our worlds and our places in them. Of course, Isaac is a conceptual container, a drawing that draws. For whom was he doing therapy?
*
But don't you feel grief now? ("But aren't you playing chess?") [PI, Part 2, i]
*
I first played The Binding of Isaac at 9:18 AM on Thursday, December 20th, 2012. That was the moment I wrote this question: if videogames can promote a love of knowledge, are videogames philosophy?
*
The real discovery is the one that makes me capable of stopping doing philosophy when I want to.—The one that gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions which bring itself in question. [PI 133]
Adam (A. J. Patrick) Liszkiewicz is a media artist and activist who designs experimental and socially conscious games. He is a co-founder of the award-winning game design collective RUST LTD., and a Provost's Fellow in the interdivisional Media Arts and Practice PhD program at the University of Southern California. He is also the author of AFEELD, a collection of playful intermedia compositions that exist in the space between poetry and videogames. Beginning in Fall 2013, he will be the Game-Designer-In-Residence at Strategic Actions for a Just Economy, and a Social Justice Research Fellow at USC's Program for Environmental and Regional Equity. You can reach him through twitter (@afeeld) or e-mail (liszkiew AT usc DOT edu).
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.
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.
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!
I am just back from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference, held this year in Chicago, where for the first time, we were able to display on the New York University Press table the books which we are publishing as part of the Postmillenial Pop book series, which I co-edit with my USC colleague Karen Tongson. Here's how we describe the series on its website:
This series strives to publish work that reimagines scholarship on popular culture in the age of transnationalism, convergence and globalization. How does “spreadable” content, as well as media innovations and practices still in formation, reanimate critical approaches to a vast array of popular forms like music, television, video games, comics and movies, as well as emergent forms of popular discourse like blogs, micro-blogs and social networking sites? Conversely, how does the analog (in form and concept) persist, resurface and reinvent itself despite the fascination for “the new” or the “not yet”?
While the series focuses on contemporary popular cultures, the designation “postmillennial” is not meant to be a historical proscription. Instead, Postmillenial Pop encourages approaches that considers contemporary forms and popular practices within a broader matrix of political, cultural and affective histories of race, sexuality, gender and class. Furthermore, the series seeks to publish work that engages the ephemeral and interstitial archives of previous forms of global “re-structuring” and domination, including work that contextualizes the effects of empire, immigration, diaspora and labor movements on popular cultures.
For us, Post-millenial refers to a specific moment in time (and the cultural materials that come out from that moment) but it also describes an intellectual stance -- one which is conscious of the multiple identities that we occupy as critics at this particular cultural moment, one which is committed, for example, to bridging across media and across disciplines, one which sees the importance of engaging in conversations that extend beyond the academy, and one which is aware of the importance of linking together different cultural communities in a conversation that looks towards future possibilities.
As the series has taken shape, it has come at the intersection between the different networks through which Karen and I travel, and as such, it is marked by what we hope are provocative and unexpected juxtapositions of different critical and theoretical traditions. We have, as of now, four books published in the series with more coming out in the current year. I hope to feature interviews through the blog with the series contributors as their books start to appear. Today, we are featuring an interview that Karen did with Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns, the author of the series's first book, Puro Arte: Filipinos on the Stage of Empire.
The other books in the series so far are:
Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green, Spreadable Media: Creating Meaning and Value in a Networked Culture.
Michael Serazio, Your Ad Here: The Cool Seel of Guerilla Marketing
Derek Johnson, Media Franchising: Creative Licensing and Collaboration in the Culture Industries
And forthcoming books include:
Aswin Punathambekar, From Bombay to Bollywood: The Making of a Global Media Industry
Mark Anthony Neal, Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities
And there are more in the pipeline.
Puro Arte explores the emergence of Filipino American theater and performance from the early 20th century to the present. It stresses the Filipino performing body's location as it conjoins colonial histories of the Philippines with U.S. race relations and discourses of globalization.
KT: First and foremost, we're thrilled to have published Puro Arte: Filipinos on the Stages of Empire as our debut title in the Postmillennial Pop series at NYU Press. I think the book does tremendous work in reconfiguring how we define "performance" in a contemporary, purportedly "post-imperial" age, at the same time that it taps into archives that may be more broadly understood in Filipino Studies, American Studies and Filipino American Studies, but not as widely considered when it comes to discussions of representation and embodiment in other popular and national contexts--though they are most certainly relevant to other transnational notions of "theatrics," as you call them. I'm wondering if you could begin our conversation by sharing more about the origins and different implications of the book's organizing phrase "puro arte" (literally, "pure art," but in Tagalog, used as a way to describe "putting on a show" in many senses of the expression)?
LB: Thank you for having the vision to include this book as part of the new book series. I didn’t realize this book is the first in your series. I feel honored.
The book’s organizing concept, “puro arte,” finds its inspiration in several sources: through vernacular usage, through creative interpretations of Filipino languages by Filipino artists, and last but not least, through the tireless work of Filipino American artists struggling to create a community for themselves. I draw also on a poem by joel b. tan that plays with a series of Spanish words, including “puro arte” and “seguro,” whose meanings shift as they became part of spoken Filipino. From Spanish puro arte’s pure art moves to Filipino’s pure theatrics; from Spanish “seguro’s” surely shifts to Filipino’s “maybe.” I was really inspired by this creative “flippin” (to reference a collection of Filipino creative writing anthology Flippin, specifically as it foregrounds the play of the vernacular even as it embodies colonial histories.
I also owe much to my co-organizers of Puro Arte, a gathering of artists, community organizers, and academics in San Francisco focusing on the relationship between artists and community-based organizations. Alleluia Panis of Kul Arts, Inc, Professor Christine Balance (UCI, Asian American Studies), joel b tan (community liason, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts), and Olivia Malabuyo (Gerbode Foundation), were my kulaborators back in 2003 and have since then continued to help me explore these linkages.
Most importantly, I am particularly drawn to the worlds of potentiality within forms of puro arte, as places of radical transformation and creativity, despite or because of colonial/postcolonial histories of violence..
KT: You do some wonderful work with photographs of Filipinos taken for, and made available on display at, the 1904 World's Fair and other "exhibition" contexts. I've always been very moved by the work you've done with Filipino Taxi Dancers in central California and beyond, most noticeably as a means of crafting a historical genealogy for why Filipinos are regarded as "splendid dancers" specifically, and as consummate entertainers in a more general sense. Of interest to various media scholars who read this blog will be how you, as a scholar, transpose these images that proliferated globally in various mediated and colonial forms into an account of the "Filipino performing body's" status as a moving archive of colonial relations, influence and discipline. Could you tell us more about your own process in choosing theseimages, and reconsidering them through the trope of "puro arte?"
LB: You’re right that the US colonial archive is replete with such provocative images. Equally invested in archiving these materials are Filipino/American communities. The images I discuss in the book are in some ways hegemonic images. The spectacularized photographs of Filipino performing bodies, of Filipino men dancing with white women in the chapter you’re referring to, have been made to represent this kind of social contact as one that transcends colonial violence and racism. I was definitely interested in choosing iconic images because part of what I work through in the book are the ways in which Filipino Studies/Filipino American Studies grapple with the rich afterlife of U.S. empire. Specifically, the images of white women and Filipino men at the 1904 World’s Fair are reproduced (in function and performance) in the photograph of a Filipino taxi dancehall patron and a white taxi dancer. By staging these two sets of representations side by side, I was attempting to gesture to the connections between the project of Filipino masculinity and the struggle for suffrage and emancipation of white women and migrant women.
KT: Martial Law was such a defining event for the production of Filipino art and performance; paradoxically, as you argue, the regimes of discipline and control that emerged in that dictatorial moment of Marcos' extended reign became an incredibly generative, oppositional one, for numerous artists in literature, performance, and digital art. In this chapter, you also tackle the stage adaptation of Jessica Hagedorn's celebrated novel, Dogeaters. Could you tell us a little more about how you decided to re-frame previous discussions of Martial Law and art through an adaptation like Dogeaters? What were your own encounters with the different productions of Dogeaters like? And to what extent did you, as a dramaturge as well as a scholar, become involved in that process or other productions related to this topic?
LB: Where to begin with Martial Law? It’s probably one of those moments I’ll keep returning to since I’m one of those Martial Law babies—I was born just as Marcos was conceiving Martial Law and I left the Philippines just as the Marcos regime was desperately crumbling, and the martial regime was lifted.
Here, I wanted to put in conversation theatrical projects that engage robustly and even belligerently with the violence of Martial Law. The chapter first looks at the social protest plays staged by a U.S.-based radical Filipino American political organization, the Katipunan ng mga Demokratikong Pilipino (KDP/Union of Democratic Filipinos). Through plays performed in various community settings, KDP grappled with its anti-Marcos political agenda and its anti-racist politics in solidarity with other people of color in the U.S. By juxtaposing the work of Sining Bayan with Dogeaters, I wanted to highlight histories of anti-Martial Law activism by Filipino Americans through cultural work, especially because culture was such a battleground during the Martial Law.
Salamats to Jessica Hagedorn’s generosity and friendship, I had the opportunity to sit in on the first (and only thus far) production of Dogeaters in the Philippines, in Manila, in 2007. Because I was able to sit in during the creative process through the opening performances, I had the privilege of talking with the cast and the rest of the creative production team. I asked them directly what they thought of the play, what they think it brings to stories about the Martial Law. Some of them have created their own Martial Law performances, including a performer who is an Imelda impersonator. Of course all of them lived through the Martial Law. In many ways, it was these difficult and yet energizing conversations as well as the experience of going back to the Philippines through the writing of this book that compelled me to ask questions that push from a different set of concerns than ones that have previously framed Dogeaters productions in the U.S.
As I mentioned earlier, this is a period in Philippine history I will keep returning to, for personal reasons. Just this past summer I co-curated two nights of performance for Kul Arts, Inc. entitled “Make Your Own Revolution.” This event featured staging fiction and performance works engaging with state violence. I had the opportunity to translate a Martial Law classic protest performance, Ilokula II,, a Filipino street play written by UP Peryante (anti-Martial Law theater group in the Philippines).
KT: Finally, I think one of the signature "crossover" chapters of your book is the final section on the musical smash, Miss Saigon, especially with all of they hype and hullabaloo surrounding the cinematic adaptation of the same French songwriting duo, Boubil and Schoenberg's best known musical, Les Miserables. Audiences will be keen to learn more about how something like a stage musical fostered an entirely new set of economies, as well as performance practices in the Philippine provinces[lb1]. Could you share more with this audience about the "Saigonistas" and "Saigonista" training programs in the Philippines, and perhaps even speculate, at the end of your comments about how we might contextualize what happened with and through Miss Saigon in the Philippines, as a potential transmedia phenomenon now?
LB: Like any colonial undertaking, the search for Kim is well-documented, and ironically by the (colonial!) enterprise itself. The search for the lead Kim brought out many Filipino musical performer hopefuls not just in the Philippines, but also in cities in Canada and the U.S. The training programs, in varying formal and informal capacities, were set up to prepare Filipinos for the performance demands of a eight to nine shows per week, including two shows on some days. Though the Philippines has a long history of theater-making, it does not have the same economy that can support 8-9 performances per week, in a run that could last for ten years.
Miss Saigon produced a community of performers, who refer to themselves as Saigonistas, those who have been part of Miss Saigon productions world-wide. They attribute their skills that cross over to the global entertainment complex to their training as Saigonistas. In puro arte fashion, I consider this phenomenon as a site where dreams of the Filipino nation and dreams of the Filipino people converge and diverge.
Charice Pempengco, Arnel Pineda, and others may be more recent “discoveries,” but like any other “discovery” narratives, once you look into them, it’s not quite as original and isolated as claims make them out to be. I imagine such kinds of phenomenon will continue as various technologies of social media provide more opportunities to come into being, to seek out intimacy, and to express one’s dreams. Our friend Christine Balance’s forthcoming manuscript (Tropical Renditions) is really the source to go to for the kind of speculation of transmedia phenomenon you are looking for.
What is most interesting to me about these artists are the choices they make after having been a part of the global entertainment complex. I think about someone like Monique Wilson, one of the first Saigonistas, who has been head of an acting training program in England, who started New Voices, a feminist theater company in Manila, and is a vocal advocate of Filipina women’s rights. She comes to mind because even though she is not visible in the mainstream entertainment industry as some of her peers and even those who came after her, the choices she continues to make as an artist I find refreshing and inspiring.
Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns is the author of Puro Arte: Filipinos on the Stages of Empire. She is an associate professor in the Asian American Studies Department at UCLA. She is also a dramaturg.
Karen Tongson is a cultural critic, writer and associate professor of English and Gender Studies at USC. She is the author of Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries (NYU Press, August 2011), co-editor of the book series, Postmillennial Pop (with Henry Jenkins), and co-editor-in-chief of The Journal of Popular Music Studies (with Gustavus Stadler). She is also the events editor for the journal, American Quarterly. Tongson's latest book project, Empty Orchestra: Karaoke. Critical. Apparatus. offers a critique of prevailing paradigms of originality and imitation in aesthetics and critical theory, while exploring karaoke cultures, technologies, techniques and desires.
Two decades ago, many of us were pushing for a more historically grounded account of film comedy, one which moved beyond the texts themselves to focus on the contexts of their production and consumption, one which might be grounded in notions of historical poetics. What progress has been made towards these goals in recent research on film comedy?
Rob King: I never fail to remind my students that the history of laughter is the history of the changing social patterns that produce and permit laughter. This to me is a watchword.
Still, if we are to insist on the value of historicization, we need to be aware of what that value is. Nothing is to be gained simply by insisting on history for history’s sake, nor in turning historicization into an exercise in comedic relativity (i.e., the banal lesson that what people laughed at then is different because society was different then).
To my mind the value of history is this: that it is only through a close, historical analysis of the contexts of comedy’s production, circulation, and reception that we approach a sense of comedy’s promise as a mode of social and cultural practice. That it is only through a historical reading of the whos, wheres, and whys of comedic expression that we can understand humor a mode of innovative reasoning that tends to thrive in conditions of social crisis. Comedy’s transformative promise is not often realized, true; but, without history, we can’t even begin to comprehend its conditions of possibility.
Leger Grindon: I applaud the effort to offer a more historically grounded understanding of film comedy. I have tried to contribute to such an understanding in chapter 2 of Hollywood Romantic Comedy, “History, Cycles and Society” pp. 25-66 in which I argue that the Hollywood romantic comedy genre can be understood as going through 9 cycles or clusters from the coming of sound until the present. These cycles and clusters are grounded in the particular historical circumstances, both in the film industry and society at large. For a further consideration of such an approach see my essay, “Cycles and Clusters: The Shape of Film Genre History” pp. 42-59 in Film Genre Reader IV (2012) edited by Barry Keith Grant.
I noticed across a number of these essays an increased emphasis on the impact of the soundtrack (both dialogue and noise) on the nature of film comedy. The term, slapstick, itself, refers to a noise-making device. So, how central is sound to film comedy?
Celestino Deleyto: Obviously very important, but I also think that we are also learning to accept the importance of dialogues in comedy. In the past, purist film critics and theorists would discard anything that was not visual as “uncinematic” and this attitude did a particular disservice to comedy. The combination of the scripted dialogue and actor performance is central to any account of comedy and it seems to me that we have moved a great deal in that general direction, a shift that can only be welcome.
Leger Grindon:Sound is very central to film comedy and has been since sound film was introduced. Obviously dialogue is central to the romantic comedy genre. Before Sunset, for example, is nearly one long conversation. Of course, noise and music are also key factors.
David R. Shumway: It is odd that the name we give to the dominant genre of silent comedy comes from a device that makes noise. Of course, sound, in the form of musical accompaniment was essential to silent comedy, but the coming of recorded sound changed film comedy radically, ushering in the dominance of romantic comedy, including its subgenres, screwball and farce. At this point, dialogue is much less often the chief source of laughs in film comedy, but sound remains indispensable, if only because the we no longer have performers who are able to carry the film by their physical performance alone the way Chaplin and Keaton could.
How do you assess the current state of screen comedy? Who do you see as important contemporary figures working in this space and why?
Rob King: I think we’re currently experiencing one of the most significant upheavals in comedy as a mode of representation in some time. The odd thing is: none of this is really originating in film, at least not in English-language film comedy.
In my opinion, all of the truly significant transformations in comedic representation seem to be generated either online or in the continuing mutations of the twenty-first-century sitcom. Take such “comedy verité” sitcoms as The Office (UK and US) or Curb Your Enthusiasm; or consider the new “auteur” sitcom, as spearheaded by Louis CK’s Louie and subsequently Lena Dunham’s Girls. These are shows that refuse the “vaudeville aesthetic” that has defined the sitcom since its earliest days in favor of a more realist mode - including some notable examples of shows that exploit the docusoap as a new comedic format, e.g., The Office and Parks and Rec.
On many fronts, there is, then, an impulse these days to relocate comedy within reality. In fact, this is true not only of the changing aesthetic of the sitcom, but also of all those shows in which the comedian stages direct interventions in reality: the interviews of an Ali G or a Borat, of a Stephen Colbert or Jon Stewart; c.f., also the reenvisioning of Candid Camera in the UK’s Trigger-Happy TV or, more recently, NBC’s Off Their Rockers. Viral humor counts here, too, since virality more readily accrues to a kind of “found-footage” sensibility (e.g., “Charlie Bit My Finger,” “Double Rainbow,” etc.) than to the more formalized sketches circulated at funnyordie.com.
These, at any rate, seem to me the really interesting trends in contemporary comedy. And they’re really not happening in film.
Leger Grindon: Certainly film comedy remains one of the central contemporary genres both in terms of box office income and critical attention. Talent discussed in this book like Woody Allen, David O. Russell and Charlie Kaufman are good examples of important filmmakers working in this genre.
Claire Mortimer: In Britain Chris Morris made a searing satire of post 9/11 British culture in Four Lions - this low budget film was radical and provocative in terms of balancing empathy, horror and stupidity. It seemed an incredibly brave attempt to take on the taboo and actually engage provocatively with the issues faced by our society. This was brave and intelligent comedy, which really challenges the audience.
David R. Shumway: The current state of Hollywood comedy is very bad. While the occasional well-made comedy still appears--e.g., Friends with Benefits (2012)--most of the stuff released by major studios is designed to capture the same mentality as most other Hollywood product, that of the 14 year-old male. Even apparently intelligent filmmakers such as Judd Apatow still have to build their laughs around bathroom humor and adolescent attitudes toward sex.
Despite some work that deals with the movement of stage performers into film or more recently, the interplay between live action and animated comedy, we still have limited amount of scholarship that looks at comedy across media. What impact do you think television, recorded sound, or digital media, to cite a few examples, have had on contemporary screen comedy?
Celestino Deleyto: Apart from input from all these new media, contemporary animated comedy has not received much serious scholarly attention, in spite of its obvious cultural and industrial importance. Even though comedy theorists are well used to working with a frowned-upon genre, it seems that we ourselves still frown upon certain popular comic forms.
Leger Grindon: I would draw attention to the influence of stand-up comedy and stand-up comics on motion pictures. Certainly I’m one of many to note this influence which must go back at least to Woody Allen if not to Bob Hope and W.C. Fields. But it seems one of the most important cross media influences on contemporary film comedy.
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."
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."
Film comedy was one of my first loves. My passion for the Marx Brothers, W.C. Fields, Wheeler and Woolsey, and Eddie Cantor, among other great comic performers, got me through graduate school. My dissertation became What Made Pistachio Nuts?: Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic, and coming out of that book, Kristine Karnack, a graduate school classmate of mine, and I edited Classical Hollywood Comedy as part of the American Film Institute Readers series. Since then, I have dabbled in writing about the genre, but mostly as the result of the persistence of Andrew Horton, who has invited me several times to contribute to anthologies he has developed around this topic.
Horton, in collaboration with Joanna E. Rapf, recently released the comedy studies anthology to end all comedy anthologies -- A Companion to Film Comedy. The book is 571 pages long, includes 24 essays, touches on comedy in many different historical periods and from around the world. It expands the scope of previous work on film comedy and explodes or at least challenges much of what previous generations of writers have had to say about the genre/mode. This is essential reading -- not the least because it brings together the best thinkers on comedy from the past several generations of film scholars, and it pushes them to revisit and reconsider some key assumptions underlying their work. I was honored to be able to contribute an essay on Mel Brooks, which I probably owed to my high school self, and which allowed me to bring my comparative media studies perspective to bear on comedy.
When the book was released, I thought it would be fun to see if I could run a collective interview with some of the contributors to this collection, one which might tease out some of the core contemporary debates about film comedy and its various traditions, and one which might give readers a taste of the ways that A Companion to Film Comedy will expand their consciousness -- well, actually, it might make their consciousness swell up like a balloon, rise to the ceiling, then start to sputter out gas, until it swoops around the room again, and collapses on the floor in a wad of dead elastic. How's that for pushing a comic metaphor to the breaking point.
Pulling this interview together was more fun than a barrel of monkeys -- well, at least, film scholars don't fling poop at each other. OK, enough. I need to run off and watch another film comedy.
The book’s introduction states, “it has been argued that all genres can be conceived in terms of a dialectic between cultural and counter-culture drives where, in the end, the cultural drives must triumph.” Would you agree? If so, can you tell us more about how this dialectic applies to the works you are discussing in the book?
Andrew Horton: As we go on to say in the introduction, by bringing in such a diversity of comedies not only from the United States, but from around the world, we really do explore how film comedy works “its complex and often subversive purpose, commenting on the preoccupations, prejudices and dreams of societies that produce it.” Thus we are challenging the often repeated comment that cultural rather than counter-cultural drives must succeed in the end. After all, so many Chaplin films end with him walking alone down the highway. Is he part of the culture he wanders through, yes, but is he thus an example of cultural success in that American culture he wanders through? No! So is he making a “counter-cultural” statement? Well, yes and no for he doesn’t burn down the Mayor’s home or shoot capitalists, but he is making it clear he is an outsider to mainstream culture!
Celestino Deleyto: It depends what we mean by “in the end”. One of my main points in my chapter is that in comedy films the ending is not always what most counts. Gags, jokes, comic scenes and funny situations are just as important narratively and ideologically. If we take into account the importance of “the middle” of a comic narrative then those counter-cultural drives may hold the upper hand. My contention is that the ideological impact of a comic narrative doesn’t depend only on the ending.
Rob King: There’s no question that comedy can be approached in this way. The real issue is whether it’s useful to do so. The problem with framing anything in terms of a “dialectic between cultural and counter-culture drives” is that it leads inevitably to one of the familiar aporias of cultural studies - the undecidable choice between critical pessimism vs. critical utopianism. Is comedy to be dismissed as a conservative genre in which cultural drives always triumph, or is it in fact a progressive - even subversive - form that permits the staging of counter-cultural behaviors? The issue, it seems to me, is simply unresolvable; the most that can be said in the abstract is that comedy may be either or none. If there is a politics of comedy, then we need to locate that politics through material historical analyses of the contexts of production and (above all) reception. And this, of course, is where a historical poetics of comedy proves invaluable.
Leger Grindon: I would disagree. I don’t think the cultural drive “must triumph” over counter-cultural tendencies. Rather I believe that comedy and other genres have the opportunity to support or criticize orthodox values, if that is what is meant by “cultural.” In this regard I side with scholars such as Gerald Mast, Kathleen Rowe and Celestino Deleyto. For a more detailed discussion of “the politics of romantic comedy” please look at pp. 77-83 in my book, Hollywood Romantic Comedy (2011). In regards to my discussion of The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Before Sunset I think both films in general embrace what I would describe as “marginal” rather than “mainstream” traits in romantic comedy, or counter-cultural rather than cultural, if you will. One modest example is that both films present unresolved endings versus the more mainstream ending of presenting the couple as united and happy. Of course, there are many other traits in the film. Readers can look at my essay for further details.
Claire Mortimer: Comedy offers the generic space - and tradition - for the counter-culture to have its say, even to be triumphant - although only for a time, as in the tradition of the carnival according to Bakhtin, the precedent of all comedy. Comedy is a time for the people to play, and for the marginalised to take centre stage, although it is licensed freedom, which knows its space and its limits within the bounds of what is allowed by the status quo. Comedy is about energy, an energy which is often implicit in the mobilisation of subversive forces within the narrative, which may resonate beyond the diegesis.The Maggie and Whisky Galore are both about the resistance of folk culture to the innovations wrought by the modern world of business and bureaucracy, the representatives of the modern world been humiliated and repudiated by an indigenous culture which has become the counter-culture as dominant forces seek to homogenise.
David R. Shumway: I understand that this claim is rooted in the traditional conception of comedy, perhaps most familiarly articulated by Northrop Frye, who holds that theme of comedy is the integration of the social. The wedding that typically concludes a comedy represents not mainly individual happiness, but social renewal. Frye, however, is not talking about all genres we would call comedic, but specially Greek New Comedy and its successor, the romantic comedy from Shakespeare on. Frye would distinguish satire from comedy, a distinction most members of contemporary audiences would not normally make. Doubtless many comedies do affirm the status quo, but not all of those discussed in this volume do so. Woody Allen's films, for example, while hardly revolutionary, often end precisely with the opposite of social integration, the failure of the hero to find love or simply find a place.
While this collection clearly does not try to “cover everything”, there is a noteworthy move to incorporate a more global selection of film comedy rather than the more typical framing focusing on the American film comedy tradition. What changes about our understanding of the genre when we deal with greater cultural diversity in our corpus?
Andrew Horton: I truly feel that every culture has its own sense of humor and comedy and to better understand any culture more completely, we need to see those films that make them laugh. The Balkan countries, for instance, have a darker humor given their hundreds of years of conflict with Turkey than many other countries have had. Thus the humor in NO MAN’S LAND, the Oscar-winning Bosnian film about the Balkan War says a lot about their culture and seeing Taika Waititi’s BOY -- the Maori comedy that was the number one box office film in New Zealand when it came out in 2010 -- informs us a lot about New Zealand’s multi-racial culture.
Celestino Deleyto: A great deal. While there is no denying the historical importance of Hollywood comedy in film history, and its impact on other cinematic traditions, comedy is particularly receptive to cultural specificities and, further, it provides a privileged access path to other cultures. More specifically, since my work has focused mostly on romantic comedy, a more global approach to the genre helps us understand the variety of intimate protocols that we are dealing with and question the ideological inevitability and conservativeness that most accounts of the genre are based on.
Leger Grindon: First, I would consider comedy as a mode rather than a genre on the order of melodrama or nonfiction. No doubt expanding our view of comedy on an international basis is healthy trend, but I couldn’t comment in detail on how it has changed my understanding of comedy as a mode or a genre.
Claire Mortimer: In terms of writing about British film comedy of the mid-twentieth century it is clear how the Ealing comedies owed much to a heritage of British cultural forms, such as music hall and variety hall, some of which shared common ground with Hollywood, some of which are notably local, rather than transnational. Nevertheless British film comedy owes much to a silent film heritage which was truely transnational, particularly in the first decade of film as film makers quickly copied successful films in a fast moving industry which was not constrained by industrialization on a significant scale.
Post war British comedy was defined by its recognition that it could not compete with Hollywood as its own turf, being defined by NOT being Hollywood, and able to offer the local and recognisable dealing with themes, characters and issues which have a national resonance first and foremost.
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."
Today, we are going to continue this week's focus on transmedia with the following guest post by Christy Dena. Dena's PhD dissertation transmedia really put her on the map for those of us who closely follow developments in this space. Dena is a gifted designer/theorist or theorist/designer depending on one's priorities at a given moment: someone who has a deep knowledge of the historic evolutions of theories of multimedia, intermedia, and transmedia, as she aptly demonstrates in the piece below, someone who can move between avant grade experiments and the commercial mainstream in her consideration of examples, and someone who can have a model for a transmedia design document on one page and a discussion of renaissance theories of art on the next. Transmedia has become a place which attracts artists who are also theorists, designers who are also intellectuals, and it has emerged through conversation across all of these spaces. I have come to think of Dena as someone who consistently sharpens my own thinking, since she is unafraid to critique anyone but also knows of what she speaks.
You can read her PhD dissertation here.
I recently learned that she is seeking crowd funding for an exciting new project -- AUTHENTIC IN ALL CAPS -- which explores the use of sound -- including something like radio drama -- as the center piece of a transmedia franchise. It is the kind of project that needs to be done as a thought/design experiment that will help us to better understand some of the potentials of transmedia, but it is also the kind of project that it will be difficult to fund through commercial or state sponsorship. The crowd funding scheme is in its final hours and they are painfully close to meeting their goals, so I'm rushing this post out today in hopes some of you will read it, help spread the word about an interesting project, and kick in a little cash to support a worthy cause.
Everything below here is Christy Dena describing -- in her own words -- the thought process that led to the development of this project. Dramatically, she wrote this on a laptop with dwindling battery juice in a house that had lost its power somewhere in Australia. Or, at least, that's the story.
HOW SOUND CAN "UNIFY" TRANSMEDIA
by Christy Dena
I’d like to take the opportunity with this guest post to talk about how my research into transmedia has greatly influenced my creative project AUTHENTIC IN ALL CAPS. Here's what I like about where transmedia is moving now -- we’re seeing both practitioners and researchers take on their own approaches more and more. Not everyone is thinking the same way about transmedia. While in the past this was a sign that no-one had a clue what was going on, it is now a sign that people are making it their own. There are universals that can help newcomers understand the area, but when transmedia is under your skin, once it is a relatively unconscious activity, we start to see personal difference. This is because people are bringing their own influences and experiences to the table. We’re seeing more of themselves in their works rather than the imitative approach that is necessary when learning. So this post is about some of the influences on my transmedia thinking.
One of the criticisms of transmedia that raises it’s head every now and then is the idea that fragmentation is bad, that transmedia does away with wholeness. So during my PhD research, I trekked back to look at the notion of “dramatic unities” -- an approach to theatre that began with Aristotle and was extended later by Italian scholars. Dramatic unities includes unity of action (plot), time, and place:
Aristotle argues that tragedy must have a “unity of plot” (Aristotle 1997 [c330B.C.], 16). What this unity of plot means is that not all “incidents in one man’s life” should be included, for they “cannot be reduced to unity” (ibid.).
Unity of time, on the other hand, was introduced by Cintio Giraldi in 1554 with his Discorso sulle Comedie e sulle Tragedie publication, where he “converted Aristotle’s statement of an historical fact”—that “Tragedy endeavours, as far as possible, to confine itself to a single revolution of the sun” (Aristotle 1997 [c330B.C.], 9)—“into dramatic law’ (Spingarn 1963 [1899], 57).
And then it was Ludovico Castelvetro in his 1570 edition of Poetics, who introduced the theory of unity of place based on the idea of the unity of time (ibid., 61). It was considered proper dramatics, that a whole month of actions should not be represented (performed) in two or three hours. “This principle,” Spingarn explains, “led to the acceptance of the unity of place”: “Limit the time of the action to the time of representation, and it follows that the place of action must be limited to the place of representation” (ibid.).
As Gilbert Highet further explains, the “action of the play must seem probable,” and it “will not seem probable if the scene is constantly being changed” (Highet 1985, 143). In the end, scholarship on dramatic unities was “an attempt to strengthen and discipline the haphazard and amateurish methods of contemporary dramatists—not simply in order to copy the ancients, but in order to make drama more intense, more realistic, and more truly dramatic” (ibid.). So the notion is that a performance will be better if it has a unity of action, time, and place -- and that means focusing on small events that are linked by probability, at a certain time, and place.
Anyone who has worked on a transmedia project -- whether it be an alternate reality game or book, TV, film, and console experience -- knows that it is difficult to have your audience or players engage with all the multiple texts or touch-points you create. I remember Evan Jones observing in the early days that we could expect about 10% of our audience to continue to each touch-point. And so for some, this difficulty is in some way associated with the notion of unity. People cannot experience unity if the media texts are fragmented across time and space (and probably include many plot elements). But I’ve chosen to see this as a design challenge rather than impossibility. How can we have unity across media?
To answer this question, the other research area I looked at was “intermedia”. In 1965, Higgins introduced the term intermedia to “offer a means of ingress into works which already existed, the unfamiliarity of whose forms was such that many potential viewers, hearers, or readers were ‘turned off’ by them” (Higgins 2001 [1965], 52). It is a significant notion to discuss because its introduction coalesced a long-standing aesthetic approach, as Jack Ox and Jacques Mandelbrojt explain in their introduction to the special issue on intermedia in Leonardo: “Higgins did not invent these doings—many artists before him had achieved ‘intermediality’—but he named the phenomenon and defined it in a way that created a framework for understanding and categorizing a set or group of like-minded activities” (Ox and Mandelbrojt 2001, 47). Now, as Fluxus artist and theorist Ken Friedman explains, Higgins coined intermedia “to describe the tendency of an increasing number of the most interesting artists to cross the boundaries of recognized media or to fuse the boundaries of art with media that had not previously been considered art forms” (Friedman [1998]). Intermedia works brought together what had been artificially estranged:
Much of the best work being produced today seems to fall between media. This is
no accident. The concept of the separation between media arose in the
Renaissance. The idea that a painting is made of paint on canvas or that a
sculpture should not be painted seems characteristic of the kind of social
thought—categorizing and dividing society into nobility with its various
subdivisions, untitled gentry, artisans, serfs and landless workers—which we call
the feudal conception of the Great Chain of Being. […] We are approaching the
dawn of a classless society, to which separation into rigid categories is absolutely
irrelevant.
(Higgins 2004 [1965])
The creation of works that combine conventionally separate artforms and/or media is a
somewhat political as well as aesthetic act:
Thus the happening developed as an intermedium, an uncharted land that lies
between collage, music and the theater. It is not governed by rules; each work
determines its own medium and form according to its needs. The concept itself is
better understood by what it is not, rather than what it is. Approaching it, we are
pioneers again, and shall continue to be so as long as there’s plenty of elbow room
and no neighbors around for a few miles.
(ibid.)
Not all practices that bring together different media and artforms are intermedia though.
Higgins distinguishes between mixed media and intermedia according the degree of
integration. Opera is an example of mixed media for it has “music, the libretto, and the
mise-en-scene” which are “quite separate: at no time is the operagoer in doubt as to
whether he is seeing the mise-en-scene, the stage spectacle, hearing the music, etc.”
(ibid.). On the other hand, intermedia practices involve a fusion to the degree that
elements cannot be separated.
In her essay discussing her father’s theory of intermedia, Hannah Higgins reinforces this notion of fusion with her argument that intermedia “refers to structural homologies, and not additive mixtures, which would be multimedia in the sense of illustrated stories or opera, where the various media types function independently of each other” (Higgins 2002, 61). An example she cites of fusion is the blending of musical and visual techniques in Jackson Mac Low’s A Notated Vocabulary for Eve Rosenthal (1978).
It is important to note too that the distinctions from opera are, among other functions, an
attempt to distance intermedia from German opera composer Richard Wagner’s
“gesamtkunstwerk” or “total work of art”:
The true Drama is only conceivable as proceeding from a common urgence of every art towards the most direct appeal to a common public. In this Drama, each separate art can only bare its utmost secret to their common public through a mutual parleying with the other arts; for the purpose of each separate branch of art can only be fully attained by the reciprocal agreement and co-operation of all the branches in their common message.
(Wagner 2001 [1849], 4–5, original emphasis)
The difference between Wagnerian practices and intermedia has been further articulated
by Jürgen Müller (Müller 1996). Since Müller’s writings on this topic are not in English,
I refer to Joki van de Poel who, in his dissertation on intermediality, discusses Müller’s
argument about the difference between the “multimediality” and “intermediality”:
He makes, like Wagner, a distinction between multimedia and intermedia along
the lines of the functioning of media next to each other (Nebeneinander) and with
each other (Miteinander). With Nebeneinander he means that the separate media
function within a larger production but maintain there own qualities, concepts and
structure, whereas in the Miteinander variant the different media function in an
integrative way. The media take over each others structure or concepts and are
changed in this integrative process.
(Poel 2005, 36, original emphasis)
This notion of separation, or more appropriately retention of separation, is actually a key
trait of transmedia projects. So what I surmised is that while transmedia projects do share a concern with bringing together media and artforms that are distinct, in transmedia projects each distinct media retains its manifest nature. Fusion does exist in transmedia projects, but it happens at an abstract level. It is characterized by a conceptual synthesis of separate media rather than an assemblage or transformation at the expressive or material level. The peculiar challenge of this approach is to bring together elements that are disparate, incompatible or isolated, in a way that retains their independent nature. This approach does not try to change that which is manifest, but tries to find connections at a level that reconfigures them conceptually. The objects change, but that change happens around the materials, within the minds of those who design and experience them. Unity is perceived, variety is manifest.
For a few years, I concentrated on this idea of abstract unity through the use of content techniques: how can we motivate activity across media with a call-to-action? What role does character and worldbuilding play in this activity? And so on. But then I had a moment when I suddenly realised there was another kind of abstract unity that can happen with media. I had also been researching simultaneous media usage or multitasking. I read novels that came with music CDs to be played at certain chapters; and read studies on what media combinations people find the most complimentary, such as having a documentary on TV when surfing the Internet. And then when I did the Da Vinci Code audio tour of The Louvre it hit me. Audio. Audio is this media element that has an intangible manifestation, it can be used in conjunction with other media and help bind them together.
I’ve since implemented that epiphany into a full-fledged creative project: a web audio adventure called AUTHENTIC IN ALL CAPS. I’m mixing together the apparently dead artform of radio drama, with web navigation and online storytelling. I’m playing with having an ensemble cast that guide players across fictional websites (multiple touch-points) with the use of humour. It is a mix of storytelling, gaming, radio drama, alternate reality gaming, and electronic literature. It is a mix of audio and vision. So we have a content and medial unity without disturbing the distinct nature of each of those websites. It is an experiment, it is exciting to me, and it is working. This is all, I guess, an example of how one can draw on research, critical reflection, theory, and practice all in one to produce something...and that something is for me both a project and an insight into how we can unify in a world of diversity.
Christy’s crowdfunding page for AUTHENTIC IN ALL CAPS: www.pozible.com/project/11529
Friedman, Ken. ([1998]). Ken Friedman’s contribution to “Fluxlist and Silence Celebrate
Dick Higgins. Fluxus. http://www.fluxus.org/higgins/ken.htm (accessed Jan 26,
2008).
Higgins, Dick. 2004 [1965]. Synesthesia and Intersenses: Intermedia. UbuWeb
http://www.ubu.com/papers/higgins_intermedia.html (accessed April 25, 2007).
Higgins, Hannah. 2002. Intermedial Perception or Fluxing Across the Sensory.
Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media
Technologies 8(4): 59–76.
Highet, Gilbert. 1985. The Classical Tradition: Greek and Roman influences on Western
Literature. New York, Oxford Univ. Press.
Müller, Jürgen E. 1996. Intermedialität. Formen modener kultureller Kommunikation.
Münster: Nordus Publikationen.
Ox, Jack and Jacques Mandelbrojt. 2001. Special Section Introduction:
Intersenses/Intermedia: A Theoretical Perspective. Leonardo 34(1): 47–48.
Poel, Joki van de. 2005. Opening up Worlds: Intermediality Reinterpreted. PhD diss.,
Universiteit Utrecht.
Spingarn, Joel Elias. 1963 [1899]. A History of Literary Criticism in the Renaissance.
New York: Harbinger Books.
Wagner, Richard. 2001 [1849]. “Outlines of the Artwork of the Future,” The Artwork of
the Future. In Multimedia: from Wagner to Virtual Reality, ed. Randall Packer
and Ken Jordan, 3–9. New York: Norton
Christy Dena is a writer-designer who worked on global alternate reality games such as Nokia's Conspiracy for Good, Cisco's The Hunt, and ABC's Bluebird AR. She recently created a phone story for the pervasive gaming event Fresh Air Festival. Her web audio adventure for the iPad, AUTHENTIC IN ALL CAPS, was nominated for "Best Writing in a Game" at the 2012 Freeplay Independent Games Festival and is currently in production. Christy wrote her PhD on transmedia practice, and presents worldwide on transmedia writing, design, and philosophy.
I was interested in your description of transmedia audiences as “absorptive.” Explain what you mean by that concept and describe some strategies by which producers might support these desires to absorb your story, especially as they seek to also maintain a relationship with more “passive” viewers who can feel overwhelmed by a dense mythology or elaborate story arcs.
An absorptive audience will seek out as many pieces of a transmedia experience as they can and absorb it into their lives somehow. Some will take it to the (wonderful) extreme of creating their own stories within the storyworld. This is different from a passive audience. Some people simply want to sit back and be entertained. Both have are essential. The key with transmedia design going forward will be to give both passive and absorptive audiences something to chew on.
In my own highly unscientific poll while I was researching the book, I found that there are two sticking points keeping a more passive audience member from becoming absorptive. One we can’t do anything about. The other we can.
The first sticking point is time. We talked about it a bit in the first question. Time is the unspoken transaction in a creator-audience relationship. Money is the secondary transaction, given when time is available. A movie may ask two or three hours of your time in a single sitting. A video game anywhere from four to a hundred hours. A fully absorptive transmedia experience that may continue indefinitely? Who knows.
There is one thing that we can control, and I hate to belabor the point, but the story has to be worth absorbing. People will invest time and money if they are first emotionally invested in the story being told. I talk a lot about irresistible - not expectant - transmedia in the book. We have to give the audience a complete story within each medium so that they want to absorb more pieces of the story experience, not force them into a hunt for a complete story across media they may not normally use in their lives.
As you note, Superman went transmedia – or at least the character was appearing across multiple media platforms – within a few years of his first appearance in comics. What is it about the superhero genre which made such transmedia extensions a logical and compelling development?
The superhero genre is an iconic representation of being more than we are and of tapping into the best qualities of human nature, the mythological potential in all of us. With that in mind, there are aspects to the superhero genre that are more visceral in other media. There's nothing like seeing Superman fly on the big screen. I was giddy when I saw the new "Man of Steel" trailer and saw and heard him fly, a visceral, emotional experience that you don't get from turning the pages of a comic (usually). Even in his radio appearances, there was something “super” about Bud Collyer’s voice. He sounded like Joe Shuster’s drawings brought to life. The representation of superheroes in other media can inform our perspective of the ongoing adventures in comics - sometimes as a detriment, sometimes as a positive.
Extending a superhero into other media - in the best cases - utilizes the inherent characteristics of that medium to present the mythological potential of the superhero genre in its most visceral form, thus forming an emotional investment and bond. Comics can offer the wild and crazy, budget-free ongoing adventures and a deep fan community. Movies give us the chance to be the “man on the street” in the comics, experiencing the wonder that is inherent in the genre (much like Kurt Busiek’s masterpiece, Marvels). Video games give us the chance to be that hero - and be rewarded for it. Want to BE Batman? Play Arkham City, then read the accompanying comics to find out how things became what they became in the gap between Arkham Asylum and City - if you so choose. I would argue that the reason that all other Batman video game adaptations were so awful in the years prior to Arkham Asylum was that they failed to satisfy that urge to embody the hero, a hero that is actually human. Perhaps the reason Superman video games haven’t been that great is that there’s actually a possibility (no matter how remote) of us being Batman - much moreso than the possibility of us physically being Superman.
Comic fans are often obsessed with the ideal of a perfect “continuity,” yet comics publishers have found it difficult to maintain total consistency in a story which has extended over 40-50 years and which unfolds across multiple titles. What might other kinds of transmedia producers learn by looking more closely at the comics industry’s decades-long struggle with fan effort to police continuity?
As is often the case, reality interferes with the ideal. When something is explored and mined by human beings over the course of decades, hiccups are bound to occur. Chains are great in spurring creative solutions to problems, but when pulled too tightly, they can cut off circulation. One way forces you to be creative, the other makes you a prisoner (as I talked about in our first question).
As for what transmedia storytellers can learn about fan-policed continuity? Embrace it. Make it part of the experience. The Marvel Universe of the 1960s is the single best effort at a shared universe put to paper. The Marvel Universe was the superheroes yes, but it was more than that. It was a family that contained the fans and foragers of the second generation of comics fans. And Lee, Kirby, and the Marvel Bullpen, while they took the work seriously, never took themselves seriously - at least outwardly. Look at the brilliant No-Prize (in its early incarnation) for example. An empty envelope for spotting a continuity error. Simple, cheeky, but effective. Most importantly? Fun and engaging.
As you note, comics production involves deep collaboration between artists and writers, a situation which closely parallels the challenges transmedia producers are facing in bringing together artists who are used to work within very different media. What might producers learn by studying more closely the “Marvel Method” or some of the other strategies for collaboration developed within the comics industry?
The Marvel Method is a leap of faith in the abilities of your collaborator, sort of the creative (and less humorous) version of “trust falls” at corporate retreats. But we have to look at where and when the Marvel Method worked best: it arose out of a need to get comics released on a reasonable schedule with a small team. It didn’t hurt that the “small team” consisted of Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, John Romita, Wally Wood, John Buscema - all master comics storytellers.
Kurosawa had a saying that I love, and can be applied to any collaborative effort - not just film. It was something along the lines of “if it comes out just the way I envisioned it, I’m unhappy.” The point of collaboration is to work with great people and let your vision become more than you envisioned in the first place. Otherwise, what’s the point in collaborating?
The lesson for producers? Work with the best and let them do their job.
Right now, there’s a lot of buzz about Marvel’s plans to develop a television series based on S.H.I.E.L.D. as part of its ongoing effort to build out a series of franchises, all linked together through The Avengers. What do you think has worked about this strategy for Marvel? Are there any concerns you might have about this approach?
I’m intrigued by the S.H.I.E.L.D. series and hope that it’s successful. It’ll be fascinating to watch it play out - both as a critic and a fan. It sounds like they’re on the right track, though I do have a few questions, which I try to keep updating as new information becomes available. http://comicstoryworld.com/whedon-and-shield/.
As a whole, Marvel’s done a lot of things right with their “Cinematic Universe.” They’ve brought the concept of a shared universe to the mainstream in a way that no other film company has. They’ve brought some fun to the superhero film genre. Plus, they FINALLY got The Hulk right.
There have been missteps along the way - Iron Man 2 being the most egregious. By having a shared universe and distinct continuity within a non-serialized medium, Iron Man 2 felt more like Avengers .5, setting up plot points necessary for The Avengers to the detriment of the film as a whole.
I’m curious if there’s an endgame in mind for this iteration of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. With a reliance on a tight continuity between films, the longevity of the respective individual film franchises is questionable unless they take the James Bond series continuity as an inspiration. The James Bond series is a perfect example of a series that has both endured and achieved longevity through a loose continuity, sliding time scale, and different actors taking on the role. In a way, the Bond series is approached like a comic book series, but instead of pencillers changing the look of the character, actors change. But then again, there’s always the magical reboot button somewhere down the road. Either way, the Marvel Cinematic Universe is a fascinating experience and experiment that gave us Joss Whedon’s Avengers, so I’m in for the ride.
TYLER WEAVER is a writer of stories in (and across) books, comics, radio, and film. He is the author of Comics for Film, Games and Animation: Using Comics to Construct Your Transmedia Storyworld and the writer/co-creator of Whiz!Bam!Pow! a story experience of family, forgery, death rays, secret codes, laundry chutes, and the Golden Age of Comics. You can find him on Twitter under the creative handle of @tylerweaver.
For another perspective on the relationship between comics and transmedia, check out this video essay produced by Drew Morton as an expansion of his PhD Dissertation from the UCLA film school. Here, Morton offers a critique of transmedia storytelling (primarily based on the limits of The Matrix model) before delving deeper into the forms of remediation he associates with the comic book film. Using the translation of Scott Pilgrim vs. The World across media, he introduces the concept of transmedia style as a unifying factor, showing how aspects of comics, video games, popular music, and cinema merge to create a unique look and feel for this property. I was lucky enough to be on Morton's dissertation committee so I am proud to be sharing this video with you today. It's another great example of the kinds of video essays that UCLA faculty and students are exploring right now. Again, I think the compelling use of visual and audio evidence makes scholarly concepts more broadly accessible, and it produces something that can be taught in classes or as here, embedded into blogs where it will reach audiences that would never look at an academic journal.
From the very start, one of the powers of the superhero has been the capacity to leap across media in a single bound. Part of what cemented Superman's role in the American popular imagination was the degree to which he came at consumers from multiple media at once -- as a character who moved from comic books to comic strips, radio, animated shorts, live action serials, all in a matter of a few years, and then, television series, feature films, and computer games. This process of extending the mythology by absorbing elements associated with these other media has refreshed the character over time and made it feel that much more vivid in the minds of its fans. We will soon be seeing yet another transmedia reboot of the Man of Steel with the release this summer of a new feature film and all of the other stuff that is being constructed around it.
Tyler Weaver's new book, Comics For Film, Games and Animation: Using Comics to Construct Your Transmedia Storyworld represents the latest in a growing series of books that seeks to explain the still emerging and evolving practices associated with transmedia. In this case, Weaver combines a healthy dose of transmedia theory and production advice with a rich history of the American comics tradition (one primarily focused around the evolution of the superhero as the now dominant genre in mainstream comics production). The book also provides us with thoughtful analysis of specific transmedia products and franchises, including some that represent the movement of comics into other media (such as Batman: Arkham City or Batman: The Animated Series), some representing the movement of other media franchises into comics (such as Halo and Star Trek), some representing the attempts of other media to create their own superhero characters (The Incredibles), and finally, a few (such as The Fountain) which have sought to create and integrate original narratives across comics and other media. The result will be a treat for those of us who have been life-long comics readers, but it may also be a revelation for those who are just discovering how central comics have become to the operations of contemporary popular culture.
More than that, Weaver makes a strong case that many of the practices of contemporary transmedia were prefigured or had their origins in the ways that DC and Marvel have managed their extended universes over the past half decade or more. A better understanding of comics, for example, might help us to think through the shifting balance between continuity and multiplicity, the challenges of maintaining seriality over an extended period of time, the risks of balancing the veteran's fascination with mastery with the new comer's interest in accessibility. Over the course of this interview, Weaver speaks to each of these issues and much more.
You cite the adage, “every comic book is someone’s first,” several times across the book. Yet, while comics publishers often acknowledge this truism, there are also wide spread complaints that many current comics are impenetrable to first time readers, since they assume a hardcore fan deeply immersed in the continuity and mythology of the publisher’s own fictional universe. What does this suggest about the challenges of transmedia design?
I’m not convinced that the impenetrability of continuity and mythologies is at fault for keeping “new readers” away from the experience of buyingcomics on a regular basis. First, there are more demands on time and greater competition for attention from other media. Video games are to this generation what superhero comics were to kids in the 20th century, with many featuring deep continuities and mythologies with the added appeal of “you are the hero” immersion and the opportunity to demonstrate expertise through accomplishments, rewards, and completing the game on heightening levels of difficulty.
But the problem goes much deeper than demands on time. While continuity is a chain that produces longevity, unlocks story potential and gives fans something to dig into and a means to demonstrate expertise, it can strangle innovation and storytelling when it is wielded in the name of nostalgia and isn’t in line with the values and storytelling tendencies of the current generation. I think that’s what we’re seeing now. I’m a lifelong comics lover, and I hate to say it, but the story offerings of the biggest and most visible publishers (there are exceptions) aren’t that compelling.
A great continuity and mythology gives audiences something to dig into and a reason to hunt for back issues and return month after month. The only way stories — be it a transmedia story experience, video game, comics, television, novel –– inspire that sort of emotional and time investment is through incredible storytelling and characters that the audience wants to revisit again and again.
Your book includes an extensive history of the notion of seriality, a principle which I have long contended is central to understanding contemporary transmedia. Yet, it has been surprisingly absent from most accounts of the arts of comics and graphic storytelling, appearing no where, say, in the work of Scott McCloud and Will Eisner. What do we gain by emphasizing the serial nature of American comics publication and what might we learn by seeing the expansive and interlocking narrative structures of long-form superhero comics as an exemplar for what contemporary transmedia practice might look like?
Seriality is an essential component in a storytelling equation:
Seriality plus Elasticity (or, Evolutionary Ability of a Character) plus Craft equals Longevity.
Spider-Man just celebrated his 50th birthday. Batman? Going strong at 74. Superman? 75. Superman alone has been published regularly for nearly 900 months, usually more than once a month in a variety of books (in the 1990s, he was up to five solo books including the quarterly Man of Tomorrow). When something is published for that long on a regular basis, the confines of reality and human lifespan make it inevitable that the original creator won’t be with the character all those years. Again, there are exceptions, such as Will Eisner and The Spirit, though I would argue that The Spirit is more known for the craft and innovations Eisner brought to the medium through that character than the character himself.
But, in most cases - such as Superman, Batman, and Spider-Man - this is where the elasticity of a character - the evolutionary ability of that character - comes into play. Each creative team can build upon, pay homage to, deviate, stretch, and bring their own vision to the character because of the serialized nature of American comics and the reality of reality.
Seriality and elasticity require great storytelling craft to connect with an audience. There has to be some sort of primal connection between audience and mythology. I would argue that in the case of Superman, Batman, and Spider-Man, it’s their simplicity. Orphan from doomed planet (shown most brilliantly in Grant Morrison’s All-Star Superman in the space of four panels), through the love of a kindly couple, becomes symbol of truth and justice and Earth’s protector. Boy witnesses murder of parents, vows that no one will feel the same pain, dedicates life to war on crime. High school nerd bitten by spider, with great power comes great responsibility. All are vibrant mythologies and iconic representations of popular culture created by simplicity and populated with memorable characters that connect to audiences on a primal level.
Transmedia storytellers should understand this equation and consider it in the construction of their stories. How long do they want the experience to last? Is it a finite experience? An ongoing one? How can they craft enduring characters that can evolve - both with technology and with the vision of new creators (like Halo and the leap from Bungie to 343 Industries)?
TYLER WEAVER is a writer of stories in (and across) books, comics, radio, and film. He is the author of Comics for Film, Games and Animation: Using Comics to Construct Your Transmedia Storyworld and the writer/co-creator of Whiz!Bam!Pow! a story experience of family, forgery, death rays, secret codes, laundry chutes, and the Golden Age of Comics. You can find him on Twitter under the creative handle of @tylerweaver.
Today marks the release of not one but two closely related New Media Literacies publications. The first is a new print book, Reading in a Participatory Culture: Remixing Moby-Dick for the Literature Classroom, which is being published by Teacher's College Press in collaboration with the National Writing Project. I have not seen the completed book yet myself, but we are told that they will starting shipping copies as of Feb. 22.
The second is Flows of Reading, a digital book, which I have developed with Erin Reilly,the Creative Director of the Annenberg Innovation Lab, and Ritesh Mehta, a PhD candidate in the Annenberg School of Journalism and Communication here at USC. Flows of Reading is online and freely accessible, so check it out here.
This project started back when I was at MIT and these two release represent the culmination of more than six years of work. We tell part of the story in the opening chapter of the book, which you can read here. Here's an excerpt:
At first glance, playwright, youth organizer, and community activist Ricardo Pitts-Wiley might seem like a peculiar inspiration for a book about digital media and participatory culture. Although Pitts-Wiley is enthusiastic about the potential of new media, much of his work is distinctly low-tech. He writes and produces remixed versions of such classics as Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein for a traditional venue: the community stage.
But something magical—something participatory—happens on that stage. First, his plays’ universal themes are seasoned with immediacy, with issues that resonate with his community. His play Moby-Dick: Then and Now, for example, intermingles the themes of Captain Ahab’s obsessions, his fatalism, his willingness to place his crew in peril, with contemporary urban gang culture. In Pitts-Wiley’s retelling, Ahab becomes Alba, a teenaged girl whose brother has been killed by a “WhiteThing” a mysterious figure for the international cocaine cartel; she devotes her life to finding, and killing, those responsible for her brother’s death.
In Moby-Dick: Then and Now, Pitts-Wiley chose not simply to revise the story, but to incorporate aspects of Melville’s version in counterpoint with Alba’s quest for vengeance. As the young actors pace the stage, telling their story in contemporary garb, lingo, and swagger, a literal scaffold above their heads holds a second set of actors who give life to Melville’s original tale. The “then” half of the cast are generally older and whiter than the adolescent, mixed-race “now” actors. The play’s meaning lies in the juxtaposition between these two very different worlds, a juxtaposition sometimes showing commonalities, sometimes contrasts.
Reading in a Participatory Culture reflects an equally dramatic meeting between worlds. Project New Media Literacies emerged from the MacArthur Foundation’s ground-breaking commitment to create a field around digital media and learning. The Foundation sought researchers who would investigate how young people learned outside of the formal educational setting–through their game play, their fannish participation, “hanging out, messing around, and geeking out” (Ito et al. 2010). The goal was to bring insights drawn from these sites of informal learning to the institutions—schools, museums, and libraries–that impact young people’s lives. Right now, many young people are deprived of those most effective learning tools and practices as they step inside the technology-free zone characterizing many schools, while other young people, who lack access to these experiences outside of school, are doubly deprived because schools are not helping them to catch up to their more highly connected peers.
Project New Media Literacies—first at MIT and now at USC–has brought together a multidisciplinary team of media researchers, designers, and educators to develop new curricular and pedagogical models that could contribute to this larger project. Our work has been informed by Henry Jenkins’ background as a media scholar focused on fan communities and popular culture and by the applied expertise of Erin Reilly, who had previously helped to create Zoey’s Room, a widely acclaimed on-line learning community that employs participatory practices to get young women more engaged with science and technology. Our team brought together educational researchers, such as Katie Clinton, who studied under James Paul Gee, and Jenna McWilliams, who had an MFA in creative writing and teaching experience in rhetoric and composition, with people like Anna Van Someren, who had done community-based media education through the YWCA and who had worked as a professional videomaker. Flourish Klink, who had helped to organize the influential Fan Fiction Alley website, which provides beta reading for amateur writers to hone their skills, and Lana Swartz who had been a classroom teacher working with special need children, also joined the research group. And our development and field testing of curricular resources involved us in collaborating both with other academic researchers, such as Howard Gardner’s Good Play Project at Harvard, with whom we developed a casebook on ethics and new media, and Dan Hickey, an expert on participatory assessment at Indiana University. We also worked with youth-focused organizations such as Global Kids, with classroom teachers such as Judith Nierenbergand Lynn Sykesin Massachusetts, and Becky Rupert in Indiana, who were rethinking and reworking our materials for their instructional purposes, and with scholars such as Wyn Kelley who had long sought new ways to make Melville’s works come alive in classrooms around the country.
Reading in a Participatory Culture is targeted primarily at educators (inside and outside formal schooling structures) who want to share with their students a love for reading and for the creative process and who recognize the value of adopting a more participatory model of pedagogy. Our approach starts with a reconsideration of what it means to read, recognizing that we read in different ways for different goals and with different outcomes depending on what motivates us to engage with a given text. Literary scholar Wyn Kelley, Theater director/playwrite Ricardo Pitts-Wiley, actor Rudy Cabrera, and myself, writing as a fan and media scholar, each describe our complex and evolving relations with Moby-Dick, and encourage teachers and students to reflect more about their own experiences as readers. We use the idea of remix as a central concept running through the book, exploring how Pitts-Wiley remixed Moby-Dick, how Herman Melville remixed many elements of 19th century whaling culture, how other artists have remixed Melville's work through the years, and what it might mean for students and fans to engage creatively rather than simply critically with literary and media texts. Along the way, we provide a fuller explanation and assessment of what worked as we moved towards a more participatory culture oriented approach to teaching classic literary texts in the high school classroom.
Here's a few early responses to the book:
"In Reading in a Participatory Culture, Media Studies meets the Great White Whale in the English Classroom. This book is one of the most exciting and breathtaking works on English education ever written. At the same time it is must reading for anyone interested in digital media, digital culture, and learning in the 21st Century."
— James Paul Gee, Mary Lou Fulton Presidential Professor of Literacy Studies, Arizona State University, and author of The Anti-Education Era
''An inspirational approach to democratizing the cultural canon and restoring classrooms to expansive educational purposes grounded in a participatory ethos. It explains in clear, accessible, and practically informative terms the New Media Literacies philosophy of reading and writing to prepare today's students for the world they must build -- together, collaboratively -- tomorrow. Reading in a Participatory Culture provides rich descriptions of experiences and perspectives of readers and writers, teachers, and learners who understand Moby-Dick as itself an instance of cultural remix and, in turn, a living creation to be remixed by all who take delight in it -- especially those who can come to take delight in it by being introduced to it as part of their education.'' -- Colin Lankshear, Adjunct Professor, James Cook University, Australia
Flows of Reading takes this process to the next level. We have created a rich environment designed to encourage close critical engagement not only with Moby-Dick but a range of other texts, including the children's picture book, Flotsam; Harry Potter; Hunger Games; and Lord of the Rings. We want to demonstrate that the book's approach can be applied to many different kinds of texts and may revitalize how we teach a diversity of forms of human expression. We look at many different adaptions and remixes of Moby-Dick from the films featuring Gregory Peck and Patrick Stewart as Ahab to MC Lar's music video, "Ahab" and Pitts-Wiley's Moby-Dick: Then and Now stage production to works that evoke Moby-Dick less directly, including Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan and Battlestar Galacitca's "Scar."
We share videos produced by the Project New Media Literacies team dealing not only with Moby-Dick but a range of cultural practices, including cosplay, animation, graffiti, and remix in music, but we also share many other clips, including a great series of videos on fan bidding produced by the Organization for Transformative Works and others produced by the Harry Potter Alliance. Altogether, there are more than 200 media elements incorporated into Flows of Reading.
We share classroom activities which were part of the original curriculum and we share "challenges" produced using our new PLAYground platform. The PLAYground platform is designed to allow teachers and students alike to produce and share multimedia "challenges" and to remix each other's work for new purposes and contexts. Think of it as Scratch for culture rather than code. In this case, it allows us to take the participatory pedagogy approach to the next level: this is not simply a book or a multimedia experience teacher's consume; it is a community of readers within which they can participate and we are creating a space where they can make their own contributions to this project.
This digital book was built using Scaler, a project of the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture at USC, and we are sharing the clips through Critical Commons, another USC initiative, which is intend to promote fair use of our shared culture for academic and creative purposes. We see this project as one which fuses traditional approaches to literature instruction with ideas drawn from Cultural Studies and Media Literacy, and we hope that the project provokes others to think about what can be learned at the intersection between high and popular culture.
And we also are using this project to explore how a classic work by a "dead white male writer" can contribute to multicultural education. Pitts-Wiley argues that Moby-Dick is already a multicultural work: as he explains, "everyone was already on that boat!" but we also show many different strategies for bringing alternative perspectives to bear on the book -- from a discussion of how artists and critics have responded to the absence of well-developed female characters in Moby-Dick to an exploration of contemporary Maori culture inspired by what Melville tells us about Quequeg's background. Along the way, we consider everything from the history of white appropriation of black music to the ways that Japanese and American subcultures build community and identity through cross-cultural borrowings.
Finally, we have some sections which deal directly with the representation of violence in literary and popular culture texts, recognizing that anxieties about media violence are concerns that teachers regularly must confront in their classrooms. We hope that you will check out Flows of Reading and even more so, we hope that it offers practical models and resources that educators may use to remodel how they teach Moby-Dick and other texts in their curriculum.
This project remains a work in progress. There are still some elements we hope to add or fix in the coming weeks, but it is now open to business, thanks to the hard work of Erin Reilly, Ritesh Mehta, and the other members of their team. (See the acknowledgements section in the digital book itself.)
Check it out. Participate. Spread the word. Share your insights with us.
Much has been written in recent years about the persistence of racist stereotypes and caricatures in studio era animation, especially as we are encountering fuller versions of cartoons which had been re-edited to match more contemporary sensibilities when they were aired on television. What might a performance studies approach to animation contribute to our understanding of this issue?
Well, again, the distribution of old cartoons was not that different from old mainstream movies that, when shown on TV or released on VHS, had minstrel, blackface, and race gags edited out. That such imagery and performances were racist is beyond doubt; the question revolves around whether its usage was "innocent" or hurtfully intended, which is complex. My thought is that racism is never benign, but may not have been instrumental, that is, intentionally hurtful. I also think that racism is a historical and cultural product and so must be contextualized.
In the book I discuss the racism in animation within the framework of the vaudeville aesthetic, which included acts, gags, and personae imported from minstrel shows. There are literal performances of race, as when Mickey "blacks up" to play a part in "Uncle Tom's Cabin" (Mickey's Mellerdrammer).
And there are aspects of films that are racially performative in the sense that being a toon is itself a figure of otherness with potentially racist dimensions. (I pointed this out about Felix the Cat in Before Mickey too.) Race stereotypes, along with national, ethnic, gender, and sexual stereotypes, are excellent examples of figurative performances because these roles depict nonindividualized characters who stand-in for the entire group.
Characters like Betty Boop are often discussed alongside Greta Garbo as “stars” and they often got represented side by side in studio era cartoons. In what ways is this an appropriate or inappropriate description of the kinds of functions they play in the studio era?
Trying to explain stardom has left many distinguished scholars scratching their heads. I add another dimension to the debates by insisting that toons have the same claim to stardom as human movie stars like Garbo, or stars from stage and athletics as well. The reason, as I mentioned earlier, is that all star personae are media constructions. While theorists like to point out the tension between the on- and off-screen lives of movie stars, in fact, this is specious because those alleged off-screen lives are fictions as much as the on-screen lives. The humanness of stars actually is irrelevant, since the public creates stardom, not the actor, studio, or publicity machine.
Lots of cartoons, from Mickey's Gala Premier to What's Up, Doc?, give us intelligent critiques of the animated character within the star system and show how it was rigged against toons.
Donald Graham turns out to be a recurring figure across the book. Who was he and what role did he play in shaping studio era American animation?
While the credit for defining the new approach to animation in the 1930s rightly goes to the directors and animators, the conceptual and visual artists who inspired and taught them have been forgotten. That's the case with Don Graham at the Disney studio. In the late 1920s he was an art teacher at the Chouinard Institute of the Arts, the predecessor of Cal Arts. When Disney was beginning the process of retraining his animators in what would become the embodied approach, he brought in Graham and other instructors from Chouinard to set up art classes on the studio premises. Graham gave them the classical training that most had never had. There were lectures and classes on lighting, shadows, composing in space, perspective, and the relation of the character's psychology to its environment. Graham was also a big advocate of embodied personalities, telling the animators to think of the motives, story functions, and outcomes of an action before beginning to animate it. He insisted that the characters must appear to be thinking. I believe that it was Graham who was primarily responsible for realizing Disney's West Coast style, and since that was so influential, Graham became a major contributor, but unsung.
“Right Wing Talk Radio Duck” is a widely circulated remix of Walt Disney cartoon footage mashed up with Glenn Beck’s radio commentary, which re-opened debates about the kinds of “ideologies” at work within Disney animation. In the book, you use Three Little Pigs to explore the competing claims made about the political and social effects of cartoons in the 1930s. What roles have cartoons played in our ongoing debate about the politics of entertainment?
Thanks for alerting me to this brilliant piece. Hilarious! Actually, Beck’s response is also hilarious, since it basically confirms the satirical points made about his manic irrational outbursts in the cartoon. What fools these mortals be.
Cartoons have always been overtly or covertly produced to spread propaganda. Dziga Vertov wisely set up an animation unit in his Soviet film studio to produce propaganda cartoons, and all the American animation studios cranked out patriotic films for the war effort. WWII was truly Popeye and Donald Duck’s finest hour. Of course the Japanese had propaganda animation too, some of which we are just now seeing.
Disney, although the corporation resists it, has become “vernacular,” an element of our everyday lives. Therefore it’s also a target for all manner of parodies, satires, and counter-cultural attacks, as in the notorious “Air Pirates Funnies” comics that wound up in the courts for years.[2] As vernacular texts the studio’s output is susceptible to counter-readings by fans or anyone else.
Social theorists tell us that everything happens for ideological reasons whether we recognize them or not, and the "culture industry" is where political motives are the most pervasive and the most pernicious because they're readily disguised and misrecognized. Because they're so popular, Disney cultural products have always been prime suspects as proponents of ideology. There's the famous analysis of Disney's alleged efforts to shape the consciousness of Latin American comic book consumers called How To Read Donald Duck.[3] The authors argue convincingly that the Spanish language versions of Disney comics in the 50s and 60s were doctored to promote the US and capitalism and to paint Communism in a bad light. In more recent animated features there are many viewers who have seen the studio’s efforts to define female adolescents by the portrayals of Wendy, Alice and eventually the princesses. Various other groups (who usually are against these things) perceive pro-gay, pro-sex, pro-feminist critiques hidden within modern Disney films. Simply asking such questions, especially when they're disseminated via the Internet, shows that consumers' readings have the power to ignore or re-write the producers' intended messages. It also reveals that ideology isn't easy to read. I show how The Three Little Pigs' reception from 1933 to the present has moved all over the political spectrum. Even now, what that film "means" and what secret agendas, if any, were hidden inside it remain open questions. (A riff on Pigs, appropriately, was the first installment in the “Air Pirates” comics series.) It turns out that it's hard to program ideology in mass cultural products because audiences can't be relied on to decode the subliminal meanings “correctly,” and tend to do their own programming.
With the release of the UPA cartoons on DVD, and the publication of books such as Cartoon Modern,[4]there has been a growing interest in the more stylized and abstracted cartoon spaces of the 1950s, which are often read in opposition to supposedly more "Classical” styles, especially that associated with Disney in the 1930s. What might your book contribute to our understanding of the relationship between studio-era animation and modernist movements in the art world?
Although the economic troubles associated with WWII usually are given as the cause of Disney’s troubles in the 1940s, I point out that the studio’s commitment to highly labor intensive and mechanically sophisticated apparatus succeeded in producing films that rivaled Hollywood, but the acting in these expensive ventures like Bambi didn’t please the public as in the old days. In fact, critics complained that the emotions were saccharine and over the top, especially the shooting of Bambi’s mother—which still sets my students weeping.
The embodied performances were becoming unsatisfying or even detrimental to the films’ popularity. At the same time, the simplified visual style of mid-century modern art is being picked up by art students and disseminated to the public through many outlets. Even in the Disney product, one sees infusions of “New York Style,” not only in Dumbo, but also in the compilation films released during and just after the war, starting with Saludos Amigos and Three Caballeros.
After the war, Disney films slowly start looking more like Warner Bros. cartoons and even UPA cartoons. I think that the studio realized that embodiment did not necessarily require massive engineering, and that visual minimalism could still generate emotional engagement and audience participation if the story was good.
The video game, Epic Mickey, Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and Kim Deitch's Waldo the Cat comics are among a much wider array of recent popular narratives which mythologize the history of American animation. Each acts as if animated characters were, in some sense, real personalities who exerted a strong influence on the production process. What do these contemporary works owe to a much older history of attempts to portray what you describe as the "agency" of animated characters?
Yes, toying with who has the agency, that is, the ability to control themselves and others, including their creators, or to resist control, is one of the original animation themes. I describe agency as a power grid, with the currents flowing from various sources—producers, creators, consumers, and the toon characters themselves to the extent that their animators and viewers imagine them as having it. Waldo takes the trope to an extreme and I love the mind-boggling complexity in Deitch’s comics. Another example you’d like is McCay: La quatrième dimension,[5] a graphic novel where Gertie the dinosaur is a living animal as well as Winsor McCay’s cartoon creation. There are lots of modern cartoons that play with the conflict between animator and animated, but one that’s especially wonderful is George Griffin’s Lineage (1980), an artistic autobiography that combines animation history, his animated character, and himself back to their common ancestry in the days when cinema was a vaudeville attraction.
I’m certain, Henry, that there’s a toon version of you out there, somewhere.
T-T-T-That's All Folks!
[1] “The Veiled Genealogies of Animation and Cinema,” Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal 6:2 (July 2011), 93-110.
[2] Bob Levin, The Pirates and The Mouse: Disney's War Against the Counterculture. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2003.
[3] Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart, How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic. Amsterdam: International General, 1984.
[4] Amid Amidi, Cartoon Modern: Style and Design in 1950s Animation. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2006.
[5] Thierry Smolderen and Jean-Philippe Bramanti, McCay Volume 4: La Quatrième Dimension. Paris: Guy Delcourt Productions, 2006.
A specialist in film history and visual culture, Donald Crafton earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan, his master’s degree from the University of Iowa, and a master’s and doctorate from Yale University. He was the founding director of the Yale Film Study Center, and served as director of the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research. Crafton chaired the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre at Notre Dame from 1997 to 2002 and 2008-2010, and the Department of Music from 2004-2007.
Crafton's research interests are in film history and visual culture. His most recent publications are Shadow of a Mouse: Performance, Belief, and World-Making in Animation (2013) and The Talkies: American Cinema's Transition to Sound, 1926-1931 (California, 1999). He was named Academy Film Scholar by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 2000 and was the recipient of an NEH Fellowship for 2003-04. The World Festival of Animation presented him in 2004 with an award for his contributions to animation theory. He received the University of Notre Dame's Presidential Award in 2007.
You write in the opening of the book that animation created a new kind of film performance, and you suggest throughout that it may seem radical or counterintuitive to discuss animation as a kind of performance. In what ways must performance studies be rethought in order to apply to animated film? And conversely, what might the study of film animation contribute to our understanding of live action performance in films?
So many questions, Henry! Good ones, too. I maintain that theatrical animation is a version of cinema and not some completely different form of expression or medium. As you know, it's trendy now to claim that all cinema is a subset of animation and now that cinema's dead, animation has made a phoenix-like return as digital fx and CGI.[1] I don't think so. There have always been uses of animation techniques outside of cinema—for instruction, for avant-garde expression, scientific imaging, advertising, etc.—but for me "cinema" is a constellation of things. Things like a social experience (especially in the twentieth century), an entertainment enterprise (in the business sense of the word), storytelling and spectacle, a cultural barometer, and potentially an art, to name the most obvious. Borrowing an excellent term from Thomas Lamarre, cinema has always been a multilectical performance, capable of many readings and participating in various social orders. CGI may be subsumed inside that performance in films like The Life of Pi, or it may enable performances outside the cinematic experience as a video game, Internet avatar, or whatever. I really don't see a conflict here.
The discipline known as performance studies is almost unknown to most film studies specialists. And most performance studies scholars seem to be oblivious to or in denial of the possibility that movies, television, video games, virtual reality, etc. are also performances. (There are some enlightened exceptions, like Noël Carroll.) One of the devious schemes in Shadow of a Mouse is to break down the disciplinary walls between these two pursuits of knowledge. I'd like us to consider media performances and stage performances using the same tools and criteria. For example, I insist that human actors on stage or on film and toon actors in media are all fictive and imaginative constructions, and whatever can be said about one class of performer may be said about the other. I provocatively claim that toons are as "live" as any other movie actor. After you read it, I know you'll be convinced!
In Before Mickey, you suggest that the trope of the hand of the animator played important roles in explaining and foregrounding the process of animation for early film audiences. Yet, your examples throughout the book suggest that the relationship between the animator and his characters remains a central concern well in the 1930s. What kinds of meanings get attached to this relationship in these studio era works?
When I first conceived of animated cinema as a performance art (it was in a talk I gave at DreamWorks Animation about a dozen years ago), it became clear to me that the "hand of the animator" trope was much more pervasive and persistent than the rather short shelf life I originally had ascribed to it, and that it was best understood as a performative gesture and not some vague anthropological or psychological expression (although those are performances too). Actually, “the hand of the artist” is a figurative performance because it casts the animator or artist as a conventional symbol of the act of creation that is manifested in all cultures and times. Although the image of the hand endowing its creation with "life" has religious connotations, the trope doesn't have to be mystical or theological. Usually it's just a convenient artistic device, a stock way of starting a film. As a performance it serves two functions. It says, "I, the animator, am creating this toon being for your edification and so you should assume that I have godlike or artistic mojo." And it says, "Imagine that you, the movie watcher, are also an animator and you are bringing this being to life."
In the earliest films the hand of the artist-animator or his performing body often was shown literally making the film. Think of Winsor McCay and his Gertie, or Max Fleischer and Ko-Ko the clown. But this seldom happened during the classicizing of the cartoon that I mentioned earlier—although the literal hand motif never went away altogether. Instead the interventionist filmmaker became either an implied absence (invisible but making us aware of him/her) or a symbolic creative presence in the narrative. Quick examples would be the adaptation of the mainstream cinema convention of voice-over narration, as when the animator-narrator explains the faux-travelogue locales in Avery's The Isle of Pingo Pongo, or Bug's off-screen hanky panky in Duck Amuck.
As I read your book, I found myself thinking about the role of personification and anthropomorphization in 1930s animation. There are scenes in the Fleischer Brothers films where it seems every element on the screen has agency. How might our inability to separate figure from field impact an understanding of animation as performance?
This is very perceptive. As I think about it, your idea of universal agency in cartoons is another reason for regarding these films as performative. Unlike a non-animated film shot with actors before a camera, in animation nothing is an accident. Everything is motivated, even if its motive is to create the impression that it's unmotivated or accidental. The jokes in cartoons that the frame has slipped in the projector or that there's a hair in the film gate are carefully scripted and executed "accidents." So yes, everything has agency and participates in the show, even the reporter's pen in Betty Boop's Rise to Fame that grows a butt and starts dancing the hula along with Betty. That also suggests that everything has the potential to be anthropomorphic, which is another way of saying to perform as if human.
There is non-anthropomorphic animation to be sure, like industrial films showing how to assemble a motor let's say. But it's hard to imagine what a non-anthropomorphic cartoon or animated feature would look like, isn't it? As the great Robert Benchley short The Sex Life of the Polyp shows, even simple animated squiggles can be personified as human.
You write, "If Hollywood cartoons have a soul, it is vaudeville." What does screen animation take from vaudeville? Why do you think vaudeville images were so pervasive in studio-era animation?
My historical research revealed that vaudeville and studio animation were deeply intertwined. There were material connections. Cartoons, especially Paul Terry's Aesop's Fables series (which were funded by a vaudeville circuit), were regularly screened as "acts" on live programs. And vaudeville acts were frequently represented within cartoons. Mickey's early appearances often depict him as a stage entertainer. And the Fleischers filmed actual vaud performers such as Cab Calloway and the Royal Samoans.
But the connection also extends to animation's adherence to a vaudevillesque aesthetic (a concept I borrowed from you when you discussed early sound comedy. Thanks!). The short films pack a punch, they are structured like stage business (sometimes but not necessarily on an actual drawn stage), with repartee between figurative character types, slapstick, singing and dancing, and a "wow finish." The films assume that their viewers had either contemporary experience with vaudeville forms or a memory of them (perpetuated by the movies and radio as much as by studio cartoons).
A specialist in film history and visual culture, Donald Crafton earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan, his master’s degree from the University of Iowa, and a master’s and doctorate from Yale University. He was the founding director of the Yale Film Study Center, and served as director of the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research. Crafton chaired the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre at Notre Dame from 1997 to 2002 and 2008-2010, and the Department of Music from 2004-2007.
Crafton's research interests are in film history and visual culture. His most recent publications are Shadow of a Mouse: Performance, Belief, and World-Making in Animation (2013) and The Talkies: American Cinema's Transition to Sound, 1926-1931 (California, 1999). He was named Academy Film Scholar by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 2000 and was the recipient of an NEH Fellowship for 2003-04. The World Festival of Animation presented him in 2004 with an award for his contributions to animation theory. He received the University of Notre Dame's Presidential Award in 2007.
Tell us more about the distinction you draw in the book between figurative and embodied performance. What assumptions about the nature of acting and spectatorship are implicit in these different styles of animated performance? What accounts for the shifting popularity of these different models over time?
Whether a performance is figurative or embodied stems from how the behaviors were intended by the animators and understood by the viewers (which often are not the same experience). They aren't opposites; they are registers that may overlap, like bass and treble adjustments. Figurative performances are given by cartoon characters (which I call toons, as used in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?) whose interest derives mainly from their exaggerated physical traits. These could be a funny walk, caricatural references outside the film, or a distinctive way of talking (like Goofy's “Uh-hyult, uh-hyult”).
Think of early Mickey or early Bugs. They were beings who were types (small-town boy and slick trickster, respectively). Their behavior was hostage to the collections of attributes, quirks and attitudes that constituted their actions. So Mickey was a caricature that blended recognizable traits borrowed from Charles Lindbergh and Buster Keaton; Bugs was hyperactive and nutty. Several have pointed out that he’s a schnorer, a friend or guest who takes excessive liberties. The repetition of their singular mannerisms was part of the humor. The figurative performance mode wasn’t limited to animation. Comedians like Harry Langdon, Jacques Tati, Roberto Benigni, Jerry Lewis, and Woody Allen in his first films exploited it too.
Embodied performance reflects animators' Stanislavskian goals and their expectations (or hopes) that viewers' empathetic understanding and belief in the temperament and uniqueness of the character would understand, accept, and “complete” it. The later 'thirties Mickey, say in Moose Hunters, integrates him into a believable environment. He responds to it as the viewer or any individual might, with some degree of unpredictability. He engages in banter and give-and-take with Donald and Goofy, who are foils with their own individuality. The animators and we spectators readily imbue them with characteristics that go beyond their simple existence. We care about the fate of the chums and the outcome of the story.
It may be too complicated to explain the mechanics of the change here, but the figurative and embodied modes complemented and competed all through the 1930s and 40s. Although Disney took his filmmaking far in the embodied direction, Langer shows that the figurative New York style could intrude even in that studio, as in the "Pink Elephants on Parade" number in Dumbo. Most of the Disney princes are figurative too—necessary placeholders in the plots in need of some "princeness" to redeem the princesses.
For various reasons, the public and critics grew tired of the embodied approach. The popularity of films from Warner Bros., MGM, and later from UPA avoided the embodied style or actively parodied it (Avery's Screwy Squirrel, Jones' What's Opera, Doc?).
It also became clear that the enormous investment in hardware (such as multiplane cameras) and the immense animation infrastructure of the Disney studio was not necessary to achieve empathetic characters. There’s Wile E. Coyote, naturally, but UPA's Gerald McBoing Boing might be the best example. Jones' geometric romance in The Dot and the Line, seen in this light, tested the minimal graphic investment needed to "embody" character.
Today there are plenty of examples of embodied acting in animation—Disney/Pixar's Up or Brave, for instance, which have a retro feel because of it, and despite their sleek digital surfaces.
The vast majority of animation, though, is figurative and exists in work for television and video games. These are stock characters in conventional roles doing conventional things. The personality is supplied imaginatively by the viewer/user, or programmed as a combination of preselected attributes.
Your titles call attention to the degree to which Walt Disney has dominated our understanding of American animation, even as your books make a concerted effort to discuss a much broader range of animators and studios. Why do you think animation history still remains so deeply under the shadow of the Mouse?
Having just done some holiday shopping at the Disney store, I’m inclined to say that it's all about character. The Disney formula for "toons" always has and continues to emphasize a certain definition of personality. There's limited individuality, meaning that certain expressive behaviors are allowed—let's say Ariel's rebellious actions—but never exceed the tightly enclosed limits of the character as a figure—those defining the role of "princess" in the mermaid's case. Another aspect that makes Disney characters eternal, to borrow the marketing lingo for a moment, is that they are believable versions of people, acting out childlike behaviors. We all know (or maybe are) someone like that. Peter Pan is one of those types. Disney films also are full of adolescent folks playing at being grownup—Ariel, Tiana, Wendy, and Snow White (and Remy, if rats have adolescence). But even that is regressive, since their behaviors are clearly childish. They’re playing house. They are not believable performances of adulthood (which can be relatively boring).
Cartoon characters, Disney's especially, succeed because they are designed to invite consumers to complete them imaginatively and to fully embody them. These characters often are diminutive versions of imagined selves. The possibilities are endless—aggressive, passive, maternal/paternal, sexy, smart, and even plush avatars. There was a stuffed Pumbaa in the store that I found particularly sympathetic…. Now conglomerate Disney enters our lives at some level almost daily, and whether these entertainment commodities are cinematic, or athletic in the case of ESPN, or the transcendental fantasies of the theme parks and cruises, or the plastic princesses, the company's in the business of selling mediatized bodies performing, whether real, simulated or virtual.
Of course, Mouse, as Variety calls Disney, has been perfecting the machinery for bringing this concept to consumers by way of various points of retail merchandizing for about 80 years. As for the animated films, the studio during its successful periods has been adept at anticipating and reacting to consumer interests. The immediate embrace of Winnie the Pooh as a collectible object and then the gradual acceptance of "Princess" as a desired existential category. On the contrary, we could cite the lack of traction for other franchises like Merlin and King Arthur (The Sword in the Stone), or "Kevin Flynn" (Tron). This suggests that animated filmmaking is like other Hollywood enterprises in the sense that box office trends ultimately are unfathomable because consumer response remains largely unpredictable.
A specialist in film history and visual culture, Donald Crafton earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan, his master’s degree from the University of Iowa, and a master’s and doctorate from Yale University. He was the founding director of the Yale Film Study Center, and served as director of the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research. Crafton chaired the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre at Notre Dame from 1997 to 2002 and 2008-2010, and the Department of Music from 2004-2007.
Crafton's research interests are in film history and visual culture. His most recent publications are Shadow of a Mouse: Performance, Belief, and World-Making in Animation (2013) and The Talkies: American Cinema's Transition to Sound, 1926-1931 (California, 1999). He was named Academy Film Scholar by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 2000 and was the recipient of an NEH Fellowship for 2003-04. The World Festival of Animation presented him in 2004 with an award for his contributions to animation theory. He received the University of Notre Dame's Presidential Award in 2007.
When I was in graduate school, I was lucky enough to be a teaching assistant to Donald Crafton. At the time, Crafton had recently published two important books on the history of animation -- Before Mickey (which explored the role of the cartoon in silent cinema) and Emil Cohl, Caricature, and Film, which dealt with one of the great animation pioneers from Europe. Taken together, the two books made a significant contribution to opening up the space of animation as a major field for scholarly research.
Now, several decades later, Crafton has released a new book, Shadow of a Mouse: Performance, Belief, and World-Making. As the book's title suggests, Crafton's latest project expands the time line of his earlier work, allowing us to understand more fully how he might apply his analytic approach to think about sound era animation, especially the works of Walt Disney, but also a range of his contemporaries. Second, as the title suggests, Crafton's focus here is on what performance studies approaches might tell us about the study of animation and vice-versa. The result is contemporary genre criticism at its very best -- drawing on a broad corpus of works, combining history and analysis in imaginative ways, providing new ways to look at films we thought we knew well, and in the process, rejiggering the cannon to focus our attention on people and projects that have largely faded from view. As always, the writing is a pleasure to read and there is a sense here of someone bringing a career's worth of classroom insights into a form which can be shared with a larger public. I know because I had a chance to take Crafton's seminar in animation at the University of Wisconsin back in the day and came away with an appreciation of the work involved in plowing through multitudes of animated shorts and features to develop a deep appreciation of how the form evolved over time.
In this interview, Crafton offers us a guided tour of a diverse range of examples of classic studio-era animated works, helping us to see the core differences in how they think about the animation process -- especially the construction of character and the figuration of the cartoon body. Along the way, he offers us some insights into the ideological work that cartoons have performed and the ways contemporary popular culture, including games and comics, still lives under "the shadow of a mouse." Enjoy!
Your earlier work Before Mickey recounted the first few decades of animation, while The Shadow of a Mouse takes us into the 1930s. What do you see as the major transitions (beyond the obvious one, sound) that take place in animation between these two periods?
The big change was in the performativity of 1920s and 1930s cartoons. I mean that just about everyone at the time understood that the basic concept of the films as performances was changing. Unlike in mainstream cinema, which accommodated the transition to sound over the thirties' early years and settled back into a modified "classical Hollywood" style, American animated cinema became transformed fundamentally. The earlier cartoons tended to incorporate characters that pre-existed in comic strips, like Krazy Kat, or that were simulacra of comics characters, like Farmer Al Falfa and Felix the Cat. I call these performances figurative because the characters are formulaic, caricatures, refer to characters outside the films, or behave as conventional stock characters. The films consisted of interchangeable gags—what you call "accordion" structures in What Made Pistachios Nuts?, Henry.
In the 1930s, though, this freewheeling approach began giving way to more complex cinema structures in which character depth, gags, pictorial space, and emotional engagement were unified. There was a classicism analogous to what had developed in mainstream non-animated filmmaking in the late 'teens. This was something new in cartooning.
Studio animators often spoke of the “personality” of animated characters. What did they mean by that term and what strategies did they use to give drawn figures “personalities”
"Personality animation" was a phrase that emerged mainly from Disney's shop. I think the term embodied animation captures better what the animators were aiming for. The embodied character has distinctive features of expression and patterns of idiosyncratic movement—“personality”—but also develops individuality over the course of multiple film appearances through repetition and variation. He or she can think and act spontaneously, that is, have their own agency aside from the animator’s influence.
A good example is Popeye. He was imported from the comics too ("The Thimble Theatre"), and the cartoons had plenty of anarchistic gags, and his early performances were highly figurative. Eventually, however, Popeye came to have a complex character built around making the right ethical decision to change the outcome of the plot. Audiences came to learn of his quirks, idiosyncratic behaviors and surprising attitudes—like his dislike of children, but his paternal affection for baby Swee’Pea. But they also started appreciating his moral authority and the degree to which his lower-class “swab” character was capable of sophisticated ideas. Not to mention his fistic prowess. So his personality is just one aspect of the character's role in the stories. Not that these Popeye stories were always coherent; sometimes the narratives were pretty choppy.
Comparing a relatively fully embodied Popeye performance from the mid-to-late 1930s to figurative Ko-Ko the clown from the mid-1920s says it all about the evolution of personality outside Disney. Betty Boop's performances, in 1930-33, were transitional, as in Betty Boop's Bamboo Isle, from 1932, which is chockfull of eye-popping, show-stopping effects, but still tells a story—although it's a simple and rather perfunctory one. All three examples, I hardly need to mention, come from the same studio: the Fleischer brothers.
Historian Mark Langer has proposed that there was a geographical distinction between the two attitudes toward performativity (without using the word). He sees a more figurative New York Style in contrast to the embodiment trending West Coast Style. He characterized the filmmakers in the big NYC studios (Fleischer, Sullivan, Terry, Van Beuren) who worked mainly in a high-contrast black-and-white comic-strip style as continuing their graphic media connections to comics and popular illustration. The movement in such films was rubbery and gag-filled (redolent of the animators' love affair with vaudeville). These films also were surreal and fantastic.
Disney, once they settled in L.A. (the Silver Lake area specifically), exemplified the West Coast style, which evolved into the embodied performance approach. Although his roots were in Kansas City, not New York, he and his partner Ub Iwerks had begun drawing in this comics style in their 1920s silents and early sound films. But Disney wanted product differentiation and so began emphasizing storytelling, character development, and less "cartoony" constructions. The pictorial space of his films became more rational, often observing proper Renaissance perspective, lighting, and color for creating convincing depth. This was necessary to support a character-based approach to performance.
These beings in the Silly Symphonies, let's say the ones in Father Noah's Ark, moved more gravitationally and less rubbery. Sometimes, as with the dancing porkers in The Three Little Pigs, they moved with choreographic grace.
Most important, the Disney studio tried to transform the older style characters from caricatures and comic types (often inspired by minstrels) to individuals with uniqueness and psychological depth. There might have been some surreal fantasy, but it was kept in check within the story.
The most influential force on the emerging West Coast style was the Russian acting theorist Konstantin Stanislavsky, whose ideas about how the stage actor must "inhabit" the fictional body to bring life to it was a model for Disney animators as well as for other "live-action" film directors in the 1930s. Eventually these ideas would give rise to “The Method.” If you ask me, the 1950s Method acting of Dean, Brando, Monroe etc. is kind of cartoony. But that’s another blog.
After the talkies came in, there had to be a new attitude towards sound, as you say. Early 30s animation for commercial reasons had to be anchored in music performance. Hence the references to "tunes," "symphonies," "melodies" etc. in the 1930s series titles were tie‑ins with the music publishing industry. We should think of these films as intermedial because often they were structured around and animated to a pre-existing track, usually the instrumental version of a public domain melody in the case of Disney, or of a currently popular song in the cases of Fleischer and the Schlesinger studio (Warner Bros.). So the structure of the music interacted with the gags to create a new sensation.
These are the major transformations, to give a long answer to your short question, but all the different aspects boil down to changes in the underlying performances presented on screen. As for Disney, there was never any doubt about his motives: he wanted his films to be like Hollywood shorts and then features so he could rent them for more revenue, and he felt that cartoons had to have the look and feel of a big studio production if they were to compete.
A specialist in film history and visual culture, Donald Crafton earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan, his master’s degree from the University of Iowa, and a master’s and doctorate from Yale University. He was the founding director of the Yale Film Study Center, and served as director of the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research. Crafton chaired the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre at Notre Dame from 1997 to 2002 and 2008-2010, and the Department of Music from 2004-2007.
Crafton's research interests are in film history and visual culture. His most recent publications are Shadow of a Mouse: Performance, Belief, and World-Making in Animation (2013) and The Talkies: American Cinema's Transition to Sound, 1926-1931 (California, 1999). He was named Academy Film Scholar by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 2000 and was the recipient of an NEH Fellowship for 2003-04. The World Festival of Animation presented him in 2004 with an award for his contributions to animation theory. He received the University of Notre Dame's Presidential Award in 2007.
UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television,and
USC Annenberg School of Communication &
USC School of Cinematic Arts
Transmedia, Hollywood 4:
Spreading Change
Presented by The Andrew J. Kuehn, Jr. Foundation
Friday, April 12, 2013
James Bridges Theater, UCLA
9:00 am – 6:00 pm
Transmedia, Hollywood is a one-day public symposium exploring the role of transmedia franchises in today's entertainment industries. Transmedia, Hollywood turns the spotlight on media creators, producers and executives and places them in critical dialogue with top researchers from across a wide spectrum of film, media and cultural studies to provide an interdisciplinary summit for the free interchange of insights about how transmedia works and what it means. Transmedia, Hollywood is co-hosted by Denise Mann and Henry Jenkins, from UCLA and USC, two of the most prominent film schools and media research centers in the nation.
Transmedia, Hollywood 4: Spreading Change
Transmedia entertainment has been advanced within the Hollywood system primarily through a logic of promotion, audience building, and engagement, offering the ideal tools for capturing the imagination of networked audiences through the creation of immersive and expansive imaginary worlds. As transmedia has spread around the world, especially to countries with a much stronger tradition of public media, these same practices have been embraced as a means not of building fictional realms but of changing the world:
As advertisers seek to construct their own “brand communities” as a way of forging strong affiliations with their consumers, many are embracing cause-based marketing. In the process, these brand marketers are recognizing young viewers’ capacity for civic engagement and political participation, one of the hallmarks of the millennial generation. While sometimes these brand messages end up advancing cultural movements, in other instances, they simply coopt these shared generational concerns.
Educational approaches to entertainment, popular across the developing world, are now extending across multiple media platforms to allow fans to develop a deeper understanding of health and social policy issues as they dig deeper into the backstories of their favorite characters. Alternative reality games, which seek to encourage grassroots participation as a marketing tool, have shifted from solving puzzles to mobilizing players to confront real world problems.
Fan networks, organized to support and promote favorite media franchises, are taking on the challenge of training and mobilizing the next generation of young activists, using their capacity as thought leaders to reshape the attention economy by increasing public awareness of mutual concerns.
Nonprofit organizations are increasingly thinking like entrepreneurial start-ups and vice-versa, as young people are starting organizations which embrace the notion of the “consumer-citizen,” modeling ways that social-change efforts can be embedded within the everyday lifestyles of their supporters.
Each of these productive, participatory, community-based activities have been facilitated over the past decade by a widening web of 2.0 social media platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. The millennial generation’s mastery of “play” has now expanded to include a growing number of apps, casual games, short-form digital entertainment experiences, and expansive alternate reality games. Millennials, who have been acclimating themselves with the tools of connectivity in times of play, now have at their disposal the means to harness a global community to solve such pressing issues as global warming, ethnic, racial or religious genocide, labor unrest, the inequities associated with class, and countless other modern-day assaults. Many of today’s thought leaders—baby boomers that witnessed an earlier social revolution during the late sixties—marvel over the subtle but pervasive shift that is underway in the web 2.0 era and beyond as social connectedness is becoming reframed as a means for large-scale community action.
Transmedia producers in Hollywood have much to learn from a closer examination of these other forms of entertainment and educational discourse, which we might describe as “transmedia for a change.” When is it appropriate for the big media companies to incorporate such themes and tactics into their pop culture franchises? And when should they tolerate, even embrace, the bottom up activities of their fans which have used their content as vehicles for promoting social justice and political change? What does it mean to produce entertainment for a generation which is demanding its right to meaningfully participate at every level — from shaping the stories that matter to them to impacting the governance of their society?
Also, that same weekend, 5D Institute, in association with University of Southern California, invites you to join us in The Science of Fiction, our first Worldbuilding festival. This groundbreaking event will take place on April 13, 2012 in honor of the unveiling of the new USC School of Cinematic Arts Interactive Media complex. For more information, see http://5dinstitute.org/events/science-of-fiction
9:00—9:10 am: Welcome and Opening Remarks – Denise Mann & Henry Jenkins
9:10—11:00 am: Panel 1 Revolutionary Advertising: Cultivating Cultural MovementsIn the web 2.0 era, as more and more millennials acquire the tools of participatory culture and new media literacy, some of this cohort are redirecting their one-time leisure-based activities into acts of community-based, grassroots social activism. Recognizing the power of the crowd to create a tipping point in brand affiliation, big media marketers, Silicon Valley start-ups, and members of the Madison Avenue advertising community, are jumping on board these crowdsourcing activities to support their respective industries. In other words, many of the social goals of grassroots revolutionaries are being realigned to serve the commercial goals of brand marketers. In the best-case scenarios, the interests of the community and the interests of the market economy align in some mercurial fashion to serve both constituencies. However, in the worst case scenario, the community-based activism fueling social movements is being redirected to support potato chips, tennis shoes, or sugary-soda drinks. Brand marketers are intrigued with the power and sway of social media, inaugurating any number of trailblazing forms of interactive advertising and branded entertainment to replace stodgy, lifeless, 30 second ads. These cutting edge madmen are learning how to reinvent entertainment for the participatory generation by marrying brands to pre-existing social movements to create often impressive, well-funded brand movements like Nike Livestrong, or Pepsi Refresh. Are big media marketers subsuming the radical intent of certain community-based organizations who are challenging the status quo by redirecting them into unintentional alliance with big business or are they infusing these cash-strapped organizations with much needed funds and marketing outreach? Today’s panel of experts will debate these and other issues associated with the future of participatory play as a form of social activism.Todd CunninghamFormerly, Senior Vice-President of Strategic Insights and Research at MTV Networks.
VP, Social Action Film Campaigns, Participant Media
Rachel Tipograph
Director, Global Digital and Social Media at Gap Inc.
11:10 am—1:00 pm: Panel 2 Transmedia For a ChangeHollywood’s version of transmedia has been preoccupied with inspiring fan engagement, often linked to the promotional strategies for the release of big budget media. But, as transmedia has spread to parts of the world which have been dominated by public service media, there has been an increased amount of experimentation in ways that transmedia tactics can be deployed to encourage civic engagement and social awareness. These transmedia projects can be understood as part of a larger move to shift from understanding public media as serving publics towards a more active mission in gathering and mobilizing publics. These projects may also be understood as an extension of the entertainment education paradigm into the transmedia realm, where the goal shifts from informing to public towards getting people participating in efforts to make change in their own communities. In some cases, these producers are creating transmedia as part of larger documentary projects, but in others, transmedia is making links between fictional content and its real world implications.
2:00—3:50 pm: Panel 3 Through Any Media Necessary: Activism in a DIY CultureA recent survey released by the MacArthur Foundation found that a growing number of young people are embracing practices the researchers identified as “participatory politics”: “interactive, peer-based acts through which individuals and groups seek to exert both voice and influence on issues of public concern.” These forms of politics emerge from an increasingly DIY media culture, linked in important ways to the practices of Makers, Hackers, Remix Artists and Fan Activists. This panel will bring together some key “change agents,” people who are helping to shape the production and flow of political media, or who are seeking to better understand the nature of political participation in an era of networked publics. Increasingly, these new forms of activism are both transmedia (in that they construct messages through any and all available media) and spreadable (in that they encourage participation on the level of circulation even if they do not always invite the public to help create media content).
Research Director and Senior Producer at Youth Radio-Youth Media International
4:00—5:50 pm: Panel 4 The e-Entrepreneur as the New PhilanthropistNonprofit organizations are increasingly thinking like entrepreneurial start-ups and vice-versa, as young people are starting organizations which embrace the notion of the “consumer-citizen,” modeling ways that social-change efforts can be embedded within the everyday lifestyles of their supporters. While the boomers treated the cultural movements of the late sixties as a cause, today’s e-citizens are treating their social activism as a brand. They are selling social responsibility as if it were a commodity or product, using the same strategies that traditional business men and women used to sell products.
Sarah Banet-Weiser
Professor, USC Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism and Department of American Studies and Ethnicity
