The Hunger Games

Transmedia storytelling has become a familiar element of film and television promotion, especially for media properties incorporating fantasy and scifi elements (currently, transmedia campaigns are underway for Prometheus, The Amazing Spider-Man, and The Dark Knight Rises). While many fans readily engage with official promotional material, they also create their own media. Transmedia produced for THG shows how multifaceted and sometimes conflicting interests among fans and marketing departments arise out of shared media platforms and a shared storyworld.

With the widespread use of Twitter and Tumblr, official and fan-produced transmedia increasingly share the same media spaces. Both fans and those who address fans through marketing use these spaces because they make sharing media easy. Indeed, sharing images and videos via reblogging is perhaps Tumblr’s core functionality and defining characteristic. Via reblogging and retweeting, fans spread news about the latest part of a marketing campaign faster and wider than a print ad, poster, or traditional preview could. Most importantly, reblogging turns officially produced transmedia into a personalized message: fans feel they receive an update about THG from a fellow fan, not from a studio’s marketing department. Or at least this is the perception that marketing departments try to create.

It is important to recognize that both Lionsgate’s marketing department and fans face constraints when producing transmedia for THG. Official transmedia’s main purpose is twofold: create interest in THG and persuade as many people as possible to purchase a ticket to see the film. In order to create this investment, official transmedia has to offer material about the world of THG that appears new and exciting to fans; at the same time, this material cannot give away too many details about the film itself. This is particularly crucial for a book adaptation because many fans are familiar with the story and are most interested in seeing how this story has been translated to the screen. In addition, official transmedia cannot stray too far from “canon.” It has to remain faithful to the story moviegoers will see. Working within these constraints leads to transmedia elements that focus on exploring places and settings rather than on expanding plot or characterizations.

Capital Couture announces the winner of its stylist contest. Fans reblog and respond.

Two core elements of THG transmedia campaign, namely the Capitol Couture Tumblr and the related virtual tour of the Capitol, focus on the culture of Panem’s premiere city. Both are perfect examples of official transmedia that provide new insights about the world of THG without spoiling the film or diverging from Collins’ canon. While the Capitol is an important location in THG‘s storyworld, neither the film nor the novel spend much time there. Offering a deeper insight into the city expands fans’ understanding of Panem without giving too much away. At the same time, a campaign that centers on the people and culture responsible for the terror of the Hunger Games is also a risky strategy. Fans might not have been willing to engage with this aspect of the book(s) and film. But the Capitol also appears as a decadent and alluring place in Collins’ universe, which makes it an interesting place to see even if one disagrees with its ideology.

Additionally, I would argue, fans can easily find the more sympathetic people and places of THG in fan-produced transmedia. Free from the constraints of avoiding spoilers and adhering to canon, most fanfiction and fanart delve into the lives of central characters, envisioning moments before, during, and after canon events. Fan creations spread across the same platforms as official transmedia: a new interpretation of a character might emerge in a tweet, turn into a story posted on a blog, and generate accompanying fanart on Tumblr.

Screenshot of the original Panem October ARG

Of course fans also face constraints: their creations are not officially sanctioned and often exist in a legal gray area, and they don’t usually have access to the resources that fuel official transmedia such as the Capitol tour. Frequently, these divergent sets of constraints in official and fan-produced transmedia enable new and largely complementary perspectives on the world of THG. This co-existence is less harmonious when fan productions appear too “official,” as was the case with Panem October, a fan-authored ARG that also revolved around a “citizens of Panem” theme. An early iteration, launched in spring 2011, was shut down by Lionsgate. The second version appeared simultaneously with the official ARG last fall. Thanks to fannish word-of-mouth, participation in Panem October grew to 50,000. Despite its popularity, the creator announced last December that he was abandoning the ARG to pursue other projects. It is unclear whether or not increasing pressure by Lionsgate motivated this decision.

Screenshot of Panem October, version two, on the left, and the official ARG on the right.

It is tempting to draw parallels between Panem October and THG trilogy’s overall story (a temptation the pursuit of which I leave to someone else). Regardless, it seems apparent to me that fan enthusiasm is most welcome when it stays within officially endorsed boundaries—as participation in the official THG ARG—and is tolerated as long as its focus does not encroach on commercially significant territory.

“you think it all breaks down into symbolism and structures and hints and clues”

“no, batman, that’s just wikipedia“

This exchange seems to sum up the long-running dynamic between Joker and Batman: between queer comedian and straight man, between raw energy and controlling logic, between chaos and reason. ‘Every single time I try to think outside his toybox,’ Joker complains, ‘he builds a new box around me.’

Control, reason, rationality and logic: these are Batman’s strengths, but also his weaknesses. He tries to make sense of the world, to analyse his adversaries, but as Alfred says of Joker in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, ‘some men just want to watch the world burn’; and Joker’s punning, playful mind, skipping down unpredictable tracks and short circuits, sends a flaming fire truck into Batman’s path – literally, a truck on fire. It’s the kind of twist Batman, constrained by his personal rules, could never have seen coming.

Joker is carnival, anarchy, everywhere and nowhere. When we first see him in The Dark Knight he’s one of a gang of clowns, indistinguishable beneath their masks; but when we, and Batman, search for him later, he’s stripped off his mask and make-up and slipped inconspicuously into a parade of policemen. If Batman represents Wikipedia – the drive for continuity, canon and control – Joker is the internet army of Anonymous. When the cops catch him, they find ‘nothing in his pockets but knives and lint. Clothing is custom, no labels.  No name, no other alias.’

Joker, from his first appearance in 1940, through Frank Miller’s Year One and Alan Moore’s The Killing Joke, has always been associated with poison. The Dark Knight’s promotional campaign picked up on that toxic theme through viral marketing, spreading Joker’s aesthetic through scribbled graffiti over the official posters, sabotaging, subverting and queering the original images. It was a powerful enough viral to cross from fictional politics – the campaign for DA Harvey Dent – into the real world – the Jokerised pictures of Barack Obama. The approach implied a grassroots, amateur army of vandals, a concept amplified and emphasised through the next phase of the ARG, which sent groups of fans on treasure hunts around real-world locations. Crucially, these fans weren’t being recruited into Batman’s personal army, but enlisted as Joker’s accomplices.  The hivemind, the collective intelligence of the internet – the medium that should, in theory, have been ideally suited to the Dark Knight’s detection and logical speculation – was being harnessed in the name of carnival, clowning, anarchy and play.

In May 2011, a similar campaign kicked in for Nolan’s concluding film, The Dark Knight Rises. Fan voices were compiled into a mob chant, which later became the soundtrack to Batman’s newest antagonist, Bane. The chant, run through an audio analyser – again, a typically Batman device, subverted for different ends – revealed a hashtag which, when tweeted, in turn revealed a piece of a mosaic picture. Collectively, they added up into the first image of Bane.

If Batman is Wikipedia and Joker is Anonymous, Bane is Twitter: the voice of the crowd, the voice of the megaphone and mic check, the voice of the people. Unlike Joker, his voice threatens a new form of organisation rather than destructive anarchy. His is the spirit of the Arab Spring and Occupy; not just disorder and disruption, but the drive for a new system. Bane is, like Joker, not so much a person as a movement. His many-voiced chant is the sound of Batman losing Gotham.

One man cannot fight a crowd, any more than traditional encyclopedia pages can definitively contain internet anarchy and collective digital intelligence.

But Batman is not just a man, and Wikipedia is not just an encyclopedia.

Wikipedia seeks to contain, but its definitions are elastic, its edits almost-invisible, its authors collective. Like comic book continuity and canon, it claims to offer authoritative information, but it shifts constantly, always rewriting and hiding the traces of its earlier versions. Batman may present himself as uptight, rule-bound and static, but he is himself dynamic; to keep up with Joker, to keep that anarchic energy controlled, he has to dance, dodge and detour, drawing new boxes around an ever-moving enemy.

And Batman may present himself as the ‘cure’ for crime’s poison, but he’s also a poison. He brought the costumed clowns and grotesque villains to Gotham; in a sense, he created them. He’s an urban legend, a bogeyman, a virus. As Bruce Wayne is constructed through society gossip, Batman is created via street rumour. Batman is discourse. Batman is myth.

That’s what he has to realise, accept and embrace. He defeats Joker only by becoming a form of poison, by fighting fire with fire – by infringing civil liberties, inflicting his own terror on Gotham, and exiling himself as an outcast. In early May 2012, the next stage of the Dark Knight Rises campaign sent fans on another treasure hunt. This time, they weren’t looking for Joker clues, but Bat-symbols: not corporate marques or brand icons, but the kind of quick, roughly-chalked sign a rebel or subversive might scratch up in passing, on the run. This is Batman as graffiti, Batman as people’s champion; Batman as the exile called back to his city by an army of followers.

The Bat-symbols, scattered all over the world, were quickly found and tweeted, and in turn revealed the newest trailer, frame by frame. The collective aesthetic, where thousands of people contribute a single piece that adds up to a complete picture, had finally – after its appropriation by Joker and Bane – been harnessed in Batman’s name.

No movie is ‘about’ one thing, and Nolan’s are no exception. But a clear message, at this stage, rises from the Dark Knight paratexts. Batman cannot survive as a single, fixed figure. Batman is a virus, a folk hero, an icon, an infection. He belongs to the people. He belongs to us. He survives, persists and rises only by remaining flexible and fluid, by embracing his own mosaic complexity, by accepting the fragmentation of his own identity, and allowing himself to split into a multitude of symbols that add up into a complete picture: a man of many parts, a symbol sketched by many hands.

For more on The Dark Knight Rises and ‘Occupy Gotham,’ see my piece on Huffington Post UK here.