Over the last several decades a number of books, television programs, and films have created narrative universes set in post-apocalyptic times. Writers such as Mark Harris suggest that these types of narratives have grown increasingly popular out of, as he puts it, “the fear of a total systemic collapse.” These fears seem reasonable to anyone who keeps apace with current events, the near constant reminders over the growing global scarcity of clean water and food, and the dire predictions related to global climate change. These tales also seem rooted in a fascination with viewing society in its crumbled aftermath, the dissolving civility among survivors, and the lawlessness brought about by the daily challenge to stay alive, as played out in books such as The Stand, and The Night of the Living Dead films, and the television program The Walking Dead. If we think of apocalypse tales such as these as representative of a genre, perhaps as a subset of horror or science fiction, then the descriptions above create a basis for contemplating the nature of these stories, their visual and auditory styles, character tropes, and their ideological underpinnings.

In many ways, however, the apocalyptic genre seems to have significant roots in the western, another vastly popular genre in the United States. From the other side, the western encompasses many of the same thematic elements as the modern apocalypse tale: the untamed frontier, man coming to terms with the lawlessness of survival, the unrelenting harshness of nature, the desire for good to triumph over evil, and the necessity of avoiding disease, infection, and accidents in a pre-modern world. There are both ideological and stylistic connections between these two genres, at least across two recent television programs: HBO’s Deadwood (2004-2006) and The Walking Dead (2010- ), currently a record-breaking cable program in the middle of its fifth season on AMC. Both Deadwood and The Walking Dead use similar generic storytelling elements to create seemingly unbelievable worlds, one in the distant past and one in a horrific future, told partially through the tale of the reluctant lawman: Seth Bullock (Timothy Olyphant) and Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln).

While many long-running American television westerns such as Bonanza (1959-1973) and Gunsmoke (1955-1975) predate Deadwood, the sustained serialized narrative of Deadwood, along with the unencumbered storytelling possibilities of HBO, allowed the show to feature gritty and grotesque images of the day-to-day existence of the town’s residents. Deadwood‘s insistence on focusing on the perhaps more historically “realistic” images of endless dirt, dust, and mud, the unsavory employment options for poor women, and unwashed and unruly townspeople, perhaps gave new life to the genre and prompted a resurgence in interest in these types of tales. Likewise, the sustained, multi-season run of The Walking Dead (and its future spin-off) has created new possibilities for exploring the post-apocalyptic narrative, continually focusing on these same visual and stylistic elements to define these pre- and post-modern worlds.

The most interesting intersection of these genres is the uncomfortable relationship each narrative has with technology, even when it is not specifically acknowledged. For example, built into Deadwood are instances of a burgeoning western settlement in the midst of a new social order, such as when Al Swearengen (Ian McShane) looks unhappily upon the landscape as workers install telegraph lines connecting Deadwood to the outside world. In that moment, Swearengen foresees a loss of power through this technological encroachment. On The Walking Dead, on the other hand, one of the discomforts right under the surface is the disconnect from the comforts of modern life, and the need to learn or relearn how to hunt, farm, forage, and survive with minimal modern equipment (guns, cars, bullets, etc.). At the same time, this relationship with technology is similarly loaded, particularly in the moments in which The Walking Dead‘s characters acknowledge the man-made triumphs of modern technology as the possible cause for the plague of the walking un-dead and the inability to utilize the same technologies to prevent the collapse of American society or to restore its former social order.

Can The Walking Dead be read as an unconscious desire to return to the frontier, or a cautionary warning about the destructive path of the modern world? What seems to be the clear divide between these two narratives is split between the overarching ideological subtext. Though it can be interpreted in several ways that shift over the course of the series, the characters on The Walking Dead are only able to continue their battle in their zombie apocalypse world through a continued return to the idea of hope and faith in the future. This is true as well for characters in westerns—after all, the westward expansion in the US speaks to seeking out new worlds to improve chances for a better life. This thematic thread works in westerns. After all, they are loosely based in historical fact. Viewers know the fate of these characters (and sometimes real world figures) so the tension of the survival of humanity on the frontier is moot. But in the case of The Walking Dead, the opposite is true. Each and every episode brings more turmoil, more unrest and more uncertainty to the lives of the survivors. In a world that makes no promises about humanity (or civilization) even having a future, the characters force themselves, beyond all reason, to remain hopeful for better days.

Image: James Turrell, Dhatu, 2010

A year ago, Neil Verma and I assembled a panel for the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference titled, “The Aesthetic Turn in Radio Studies,” aimed at mapping renewed engagement by radio scholars with concerns traditionally classified under the heading of “aesthetics”: among them, analysis of narrative structure and broadcast genres, methods of spatial and temporal representation, styles of vocal performance, and experiential qualities of radio listening. This turn to questions of aesthetics has also swept the field of television studies, with a proliferation of work on narrative complexity, TV genres, visual style and sound style, performance studies, and viewing experiences engendered by television’s changing technological interfaces. Yet, despite its prominence in contemporary media research, few efforts have been made to trace the origins of this aesthetic agenda or assess its current methods and goals. A genealogy of the aesthetic turn, I suggest, in fact reveals a return to and affirmation of core concerns extending back to the founding moments of American media studies. While recognizing this rich history, in assessing directions for future work on media aesthetics, I wish to argue the value of a specifically production-oriented approach, as an updated project of “historical poetics” that blends traditional tools of textual analysis with methods derived from current work in production studies.

An aesthetic agenda has, to some degree, been a part of the media studies project from the start, even in the “effects” tradition to which subsequent humanities-oriented approaches are commonly contrasted. Hadley Cantril and Gordon Allport’s founding 1935 study, Psychology of Radio, for instance, pursued a detailed investigation of radio’s distinctive modes of affective engagement (its “psychological novelty”) and the presentational styles needed to “conform to the requirements of the medium” (182). In their 1955 Personal Influence, Elihu Katz and Paul Lazarsfeld lauded this attention to the experiential qualities of different media, while reminding researchers that the “content analysis” on which effects research relied also required close attention to “form,” or the presentational techniques used to render content via particular delivery channels (22).  Lazarsfeld championed this same approach during his tenure at the Rockefeller-funded Office of Radio Research, warning against exclusive reliance on quantitative studies and courting figures such as Rudolf Arnheim to develop what Rockefeller staff described as a “positive aesthetics of mass communication” that employed humanistic methods to illuminate the communicative properties and possibilities of mass media.† A fully developed program of mass communication research, as Lazarsfeld understood it, would demand strategic forays into the field of aesthetics.

Fig. 1. In a move lauded by Katz and Lazarsfeld, Cantril and Allport’s Psychology of Radio (1935) delineates key differences between storytelling techniques for radio vs. stage and screen entertainment (228).

Despite this early dalliance with humanities-oriented research methods, concerted development in this area was delayed until the television era. Beyond the initial flowering of more literary modes of narrative and genre study in the 1960s-1970s (see, for instance, Lynn Spigel’s discussion of this period), few movements did more to advance the aesthetic agenda than the cultural turn that followed in the wake of work by Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall. As Jonathan Gray and Amanda Lotz note in elaborating the foundations of their own multimodal “television studies approach,” the cultural turn brought not only new methods for analyzing audience “decodings,” but also valuable tools for studying institutional contexts and the “encoding” strategies pursued by media producers. From John Fiske and John Hartley’s work on semiotics, to new models of genre study by Julie D’Acci, Robert Allen, and Jason Mittell, cultural studies scholars have encouraged close reading and critical interpretation of media texts, while working to situate these texts within their larger industrial and cultural contexts. Importantly, then, concerns with questions of aesthetics in contemporary media studies represent not a radical correction and repudiation of the cultural turn, but rather a strategic renewal and intensification of founding tendencies within this movement.

Fig. 2. Cultural Studies interventions: The “encoding” half of Stuart Hall’s Encoding/Decoding model (1973) calls for combined attention to media texts and their underlying institutional contexts.

The rise of production studies in recent years has offered further opportunities for enriched modes of aesthetic analysis. From John Caldwell’s seminal work on production culture, to Havens, Lotz, and Tinic’s influential “mid-level” approach, production studies scholars have argued the need to supplement structural analyses of media ownership and regulation with detailed studies of craft practices – moving industry studies, in effect, from the corporate boardroom to the studio floor. When coupled with methods of close textual analysis, consideration of struggles on the set and the “self-theorizing talk” (Caldwell) of producers in interviews and trade journals offers valuable tools for understanding, as Havens et al put it, “in an aesthetic sense . . . how particular media texts arise” and achieve dominance (237) – illuminating, in other words, the processes through which particular sets of programming forms and production styles are consolidated, and connecting them to the larger modes of production of which they are a part.

Fig. 3. A production-oriented approach to media aesthetics: Applying new tools for industry analysis from contemporary production studies, while reintegrating close analysis of resulting textual forms.

While most production studies work has remained focused on contemporary media and has yet to fully cultivate the aesthetic component of its research agenda, a production-oriented approach to media aesthetics holds great promise and may be of particular value for historical work. As an updated project of historical poetics, this approach combines close analysis of surface-level textual phenomena (the “what” of media programming) with critical study of the production techniques and institutional logics behind them (their “how” and “why”), isolating privileged formal properties and possibilities of media while recognizing these as historically contingent products of industrial sense-making and consent-winning. However, such an approach remains every bit as much “aesthetics” as “industry studies.” In a field increasingly occupied with an aesthetic agenda, why not call this certain tendency by name and begin serious discussion of its nature and future?

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† John Marshall, “Postwar Work in Film and Radio,” Memo to David H. Stevens, December 16, 1943, and “Interview with Rudolf Arnheim, January 3, 1944, Series 200R, RG 1.1, Rockefeller Foundation Archives. Thanks to Josh Shepperd for his assistance in procuring these documents.

This is the first in a series of posts describing and reflecting on the goals, challenges, successes, failures, and student responses to a social media based assignment. While I am by no means the first to assign students to create social media personae or tweet about media theory, I hope that sharing my experiences will garner some brilliant tips and suggestions, spur a conversation about the values and pitfalls of this kind of digital pedagogy, and perhaps even inspire someone to try out something similar. In light of last weekend’s New York Times piece “Blogs vs. Term Papers” and the response from Cathy Davidson, a Duke University English professor and co-founder of the Digital Humanities community HASTAC, the concept of the Google+ assignment seems especially timely.

The class is Contemporary TV Genres, and at our first meeting, each student selected a genre for which they would create a Google+ profile. During the semester, they must write an About page defining their genre and its history. They must post pictures and links illustrating past and present iterations of the genre, complete with comments and captions analyzing their significance to the genre’s evolution over time. They must shoot or edit at least one video, and they must interact with each other via wall posts, relationship statuses, +1s (Likes in Facebook parlance), sub-circles (Google+’s organizing principle is the Circle, rather than Facebook’s List), and comments on classmates’ posts. The tasks cover all levels of thinking from recall to evaluation and application, and require students to practice writing, research, and analysis skills. In short, it encompasses all of the course’s learning goals, and if it works, we’ll create a community of characters/genres that is fully interactive and has the bonuses of being fun and of linking classroom content to lived social experience.

In speaking to others who have experimented with similar assignments, the number one problem cited was assessment. How do you assign a grade for a student impersonating the procedural genre changing their relationship status to “Married to Melodrama?” We all know grading is subjective, but how to create a rubric for something like this? I’ve scheduled four checkpoints during the semester, at which time each student will receive a letter grade and written feedback. Each item on the Google+ page is assigned a point value. 1 point possible for including a hometown, 25 possible points for writing the historical About page, for example. One advantage of this type of assignment is the ease with which students can revise, change, rewrite, etc. in response to feedback. The four checkpoint grades will be averaged for a final grade at the end of the semester.

Besides the practicalities of assessment, of course the biggest question is why. Why do this instead of response papers or individualized research or analysis essays. In fact students will also have to write 3 short analysis papers representing different aspects of or stakeholders in TV genres. But the Google+ assignment aims to link learning with social technologies students are already using, spurring students to use the tools and consume the social media more critically, and making the classroom material relevant to and even part of their daily activities…We’ll see how it goes!

Of course, there is much to recommend a text-intrinsic definition, most of all that it’d be easier if we could create a taxonomy in which every text belonged to a given genre regardless of contextual information. The most obvious choice in defining fan fiction as a genre is to characterize it by its derivative/transformative character. After all, that is a generally accepted definition of fan fiction: fiction that expands/comments on/criticizes existing media texts. Creating a taxonomy that relies on the transformative process, however, expands the category to near uselessness. We suddenly need to include postmodern retellings, from Wide Sargasso Sea to The Hours, but also Biblical and mythological transformative works, from Paradise Lost to Ulysses. In short, given the intertextuality of literature generally and the central role of certain canonical Western texts specifically, much of the Western canon would suddenly fall under fan fiction.

While this problem could be circumvented by defining fan fiction as only those texts who are intertextual with commercial and copyrighted media texts, this definition is likewise flawed insofar as it relies on the fairly arbitrary copyright laws that often have more to do with protection of copyright owners than literary or genre categories. Moreover, such a definition would exclude large swaths of fan fiction that are, for the most part accepted as fan fiction by most, including historical Real People Fiction (RPF), Bible and mythological fan fiction, as well as fan fiction transforming Shakespeare and Austen and everyone who’s fallen out of copyright. In fact, one of the larger and more community building challenges in fandom has been the yearly Rare Fandom Yuletide Challenge, which includes all of these categories and others that might easily not fall under this more narrow definition.

Yuletide, however, indicates what for me is the central quality that distinguishes a fan-created Lizzie who runs off with Mr. Darcy against her parents’ will from Bridget Jones’ Diary or even Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. I’d suggest that fan fiction exists within a fan community for its creation, distribution, and reception. As such, the two commercial Austen transformations cannot be fan works insofar as they are not culturally situated within a fan community: while they are clearly in intertextual dialogue with the source text, they are not so with one another or a community of fans and their interpretations. Fan fiction, on the other hand, is both–though depending on text and writer to varying degrees. But in the end, it is the writers’ decision to situate their story within the complex network of other transformative works and thus making it fan fiction: by labeling it as fan fiction; by following the shared paratextual apparatus of headers; or by submitting it to a fan fiction archive. Fan is as fan does, and the cultural context of a fan work indeed ultimately determines whether we are reading a New York Times bestseller, a tie-in novel, or a fan work—even if they do not differ in contents, quality, or reliance on the source text.

Is this simply sour grapes from a filmmaker who can’t get funding for his next project, or are we truly hearing the death knell of adult-oriented drama? It’s clear that the number of adult dramas has plummeted since 1999, which was perhaps the peak year of the “Indiewood” phenomenon, when studio specialty divisions flooded theaters with films like Boys Don’t Cry and The Cider House Rules.

What has happened in the last ten years? The Independent argues that “in these recession-hit times the studios are playing it safe” – but this doesn’t make sense for a couple of reasons. First, times of economic uncertainty are the only times in which Hollywood doesn’t play it safe. The “Hollywood Renaissance” of the sixties and seventies over which so many cinephiles rhapsodize was a direct result of the massive industrial recession of 1969-1971. The studios are more than willing to shake things up if they’re losing money. But they’re not losing money – 2009 box office grosses were up a huge 5.9% from 2008.

With things going well, studios are likely to continue their risk-adverse production strategies – and adult dramas have proven time and again that they are risky propositions. Recent adult dramas have disappointed at the box office (see Duplicity, The Soloist, Amelia, State of Play, The Lovely Bones, etc.) — especially compared to similarly budgeted (or cheaper) comedies like The Proposal or Paul Blart: Mall Cop. Most adult dramas released by the major studios can be considered mid-budget films, costing somewhere between $20 and $70 million. The Washington Times notes that adult dramas usually gross somewhere in the $40 million range, which suggests a relatively small but consistent audience.

So how do studios make the adult drama economically viable? The Washington Times suggests that they follow the model of comedies and horror films – keep budgets low to ensure profitability. They can do this, the article argues, by avoiding “star-driven projects”, as huge star salaries account for much of an adult drama’s budget.

Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. Traditionally, Hollywood has used two kinds of basic audience appeals – genre-based and star-based. Unlike slapstick comedies or horror films, the adult drama is too nebulous a category for studios to use genre-based appeals in marketing — adult dramas need stars in order to establish their identity in the marketplace. Second, it’s likely that the stars are responsible for supplying the consistent box office returns mentioned by The Washington Times. Would Duplicity have made $40 million in North America with an unknown actress instead of Julia Roberts? By eliminating stars, the adult drama would be relegated to the low-budget (under $20 million) realm of the “Indiewood” drama – a category that has become increasingly marginalized recently, as studios close their specialty divisions.

The decline of the adult drama reflects a larger historical trend away from star-driven films and toward genre-based projects. This trend can be located as far back as the 1950s, when studios began to utilize exploitation strategies (including an emphasis on spectacle and controversial content) into their “A” features. The star system isn’t entirely dead, but it has been subordinated: in the classical studio era, star-driven films dominated, while today the most successful star vehicles are first and foremost genre films (I Am Legend, Pirates of the Caribbean). Recognizing this, the industry has already begun to “correct” inflated star salaries, something I suspect will rejuvenate the adult drama.

George Clooney in MICHAEL CLAYTON (2007)