Fig. 1 — Mad Men from first …

Fig. 2 — …to last.

Post by Piers Britton, University of Redlands

In a manner befitting a series that flourished on its reputation for visual elegance, the finale of Mad Men, “Person to Person,” rewarded attentive viewers with an ending that subtly called upon the pilot episode. The opening of “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” was a gentle right-to-left tracking shot across a crowded bar, which ends with a dolly-in to the back of Don Draper’s head (Fig. 1). The close of “Person to Person” also begins with a right-to-left tracking shot, across the cliff-top lawns of what is supposed to be the Esalen Institute, and in the final moments there is again a dolly-in – but this time to a frontal close-up of the enigmatically smiling Don, eyes closed (Fig. 2). It is tempting to read the shift from rear to front view as a reification of narrative closure: in “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” (and in the opening titles of every subsequent episode) the over-the-shoulder shot of Don draws us into the world of Mad Men, into what lies before us and before him. The frontal shot conversely seems to evoke finality; it acts as a caesura, sealing off behind Don all that we have witnessed in the last eight years, compartmentalizing the series as something done and complete.

If such a visual metaphor was intended, it was perhaps the only way of drawing a clear line under Mad Men, a series that was never going to lend itself stylistically to dramatic resolution in the same way as, say, its AMC sibling Breaking Bad. Mad Men begins and ends with Don Draper, and as the frequently reiterated over-the-shoulder shot from the pilot suggests, his experiences willy-nilly offer the dominant point of view for the audience. Yet Mad Men is not Don’s story: it has always been a ensemble piece, and a resolutely untidy one at that. Some characters have abruptly disappeared (Sal Romano, Paul Kinsey), some others have wandered in and out of focus (Ken Cosgrove, Trudy Campbell, Bert Cooper), while six protagonists apart from Don (Peggy Olson, Pete Campbell, Betty and Sally Draper, Roger Sterling and Joan Holloway) have remained in, or somewhere near, the spotlight throughout. No recurring character had an “arc” in the conventionally understood sense of the word, for Mad Men has remained fundamentally skeptical about its characters’ capacity to grow and change according to some Save The Cat-type screenwriting logic. It is unsurprising, then, that the final few episodes seemed to be casting more lines than they reeled in, with Peggy and Roger embarking on new romantic relationships while Pete and Joan embrace or create new business opportunities. Given what we have seen of these characters over seven seasons, there is no good reason to envisage any of these new departures as “happily-ever-after” scenarios. Indeed, the only real certitude offered by the finale is that of Betty’s impending death from lung cancer. Even the closure of Don’s narrative is provisional: though the narrative does not make it explicit, that final smile seemed to many commentators to suggest that the series ends exactly as Don is dreaming up the famous “Hilltop” Coca-Cola ad that served, appropriately, as Mad Men’s coda. (Showrunner Matthew Weiner has since confirmed this.) Earlier in the episode, Stan Rizzo pointed out that Don’s going AWOL is a recurring pattern, while Peggy, in her person-to-person call with Don, underscored the fact that he could easily return to work at McCann. With these cues in mind, the road trip ending with his Esalen revelation should surely be read not as culminating catharsis but as yet another interlude.

Fig. 3 — Spaces of Madernity

So, if dramatic closure of character storylines was not on the cards, what exactly is it that became complete with the finale of Mad Men? Or, to put it another way, how can we understand the series’ structure in retrospect? One obvious way of answering this—perhaps the only incontrovertible way—is to note that the series’ story spans almost exactly a decade: starting in March 1960, the Mad Men narrative apparently ends in late October or November 1970. Mad Men in toto is thus an encapsulation of the Sixties, a fact that is likely to be remembered long after its narrative twists, recapitulations, and volte faces have faded from the memory of all but the most devoted fans. The “Sixties-ness” of Mad Men is in part marked by historical events that variously affect the protagonists’ work, emotional life, and attitudes, from the 1960 presidential election to the 1970 Newsweek gender discrimination lawsuit. More obviously, and from certain vantage points more potently, Mad Men is defined by the 1960s in terms of visual style. Quite apart from offering a much publicized parade of vintage fashions, period props and stylish environments, the show visually evokes late Fifties and Sixties films in its cinematography, and especially its lighting. Evocation is clearly not the same thing as reconstruction, pace detractors who have raised complaints about narrowness of focus or lack of “authenticity.” A good deal of commentary—some neutral and some adverse—has focused on the fact that Mad Men is a show about the Sixties created by a man who is, as Robert Lloyd succinctly put it, “too young to really remember them.” In itself this claim isn’t particularly useful.  It would be hard to mistake any scene from Mad Men, with its wonderfully stately, stylized dialogue, as an attempt to recreate Sixties mass-media vernacular, however sumptuously persuasive the visual recreation of the period might seem. Indeed, the claim that Weiner is “too young” has curiosity value precisely because he was born in the Sixties: observing that Julian Fellowes is too young to recall the era of Downton Abbey would hardly have the same piquancy.

Fig. 4 — Symptoms of Madmenalaria

That said, if the show did not in any absolute sense espouse period authenticity it seems hard to overstate its Sixties-philiac tendencies. Visual pleasure in Sixties styling looms large, as a key part of Mad Men’s identity, not just in the “raw” text of the episodes but also in its astonishingly consistent, cumulatively powerful paratexts, most notably the documentary videos on the Mad Men section of AMC’s website. “Making of Mad Men” and later “Inside… Mad Men” featurettes have appeared on the site throughout the series run, increasingly focusing on the micro-narrative of each episode and the characters’ motivations, as explicated by the actors portraying them, and by Matthew Weiner. After four seasons the “Fashion File” feature that accompanied each episode was replaced by a second regular video, “Fashion and Style,” based around interviews with the costume designer and property master or set decorator. If the “Inside …” videos speak to Mad Men’s “depth,” which is to say the ways in which it can be recognized as quality TV, worthy of the multiple awards and plaudits it has won, the “Fashion and Style” videos correspondingly speak to the importance of “surface.” Mad Men has reworked and mobilized the so-called “mid-century modern” to generate not just media buzz but an extraordinarily influential brand. The series’ fetishizing of Sixties clothes, hairstyles, accessories, cars and interior decoration has spawned an array of imitative or broadly competitive programming in the US and overseas, from Magic City via The Hour and Masters of Sex to Vegas and Aquarius. Mad Men has made a somewhat improbable style guru of its costume designer, Janie Bryant, it has begotten clothing lines for both men and women at Banana Republic and Brooks Brothers, and more broadly it has produced a fad that one commentator drily named “Madmenalaria.”

As Mad Men coalesced into a whole in the only way that television series can, by ending, then in so doing it underscored the fact that like Don Draper it has always embodied—even depended on—a duality. Other film and television texts may have de facto thrived on a tension between the espousal of emotional truthfulness on one hand and preoccupation with “superficial” visual pleasures on the other, but Mad Men is perhaps the first in which this dichotomy has been so smoothly reconciled into a branding strategy. The final ambivalent meeting of inner worlds at Esalen—with Don either/both finding spiritual peace and/or dreaming up the basis for a career-defining ad—could not more perfectly have encapsulated the obverse and reverse of the Mad Men coin.

Figure 1: Texturally rich costuming of Matt Murdock character in Daredevil.

Post by Piers Britton, University of Redlands.

How far are Marvel Studios’ film and television franchises visually coded for homogeneity? How insistently, that is to say, is brand identity maintained at the levels of design, cinematography, editing and post-production processing? This question seems worth pursuing in relation to Marvel’s Daredevil (Netflix, 2015), which has already been critically positioned as divergent from prior entries in the “Marvel Cinematic Universe” super-franchise. All the MCU films since 2008 have been rated PG-13, while the ABC television series Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (2013–) and Marvel’s Agent Carter (2014-15) are consistently anodyne, even at their darkest. Daredevil, by contrast, is already notorious for its frequent and intensely graphic violence, which earned it a TVMA certification, and for the conflicted nature of its anti-heroic protagonist. This shift in tone is not the only departure from the prior Marvel norm. Much more assertively than Agent Carter, and even more than the DC offerings on the CW, the new show emphasizes that its protagonist is one of Marvel’s “street-level” superheroes, with the action never straying beyond Hell’s Kitchen and the narrative focusing heavily on the socially disadvantaged and marginalized. While it is not the first Marvel property to introduce comic-book characters without their familiar costume trappings and idiosyncrasies of grooming, Daredevil has arguably gone further than its predecessors in this regard. For example, the series reduces the comics’ hirsute, flamboyantly coiffed and green-ulster-clad Leland Owlsley (Bob Gunton) to a deceptively avuncular elderly man with thinning hair and a short back and sides, dressed in earth-toned tweeds. Indeed, Daredevil even deprives Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox) of his red superhero suit until the climax of the final episode.

Showrunner Steven DeKnight has underscored the ways in which Daredevil differs visually from network series like Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., noting that he and his D.P., Matt Lloyd, “wanted to be able to do a show that was literally darker than what you would see on a network,” where series tend to be “very bright, very evenly lit,” and further that they “wanted to take more of the color palette of the classic movies of the ’70s, the Dog Day Afternoon and French Connection and Taxi Driver.” The series’ production designer, Loren Weeks, also emphasizes Daredevil’s departure from the sleek, well-appointed and technology-rich environments that typify Marvel’s cinematic tales of billionaire playboys, demigods and super-soldiers. Tellingly, Weeks claims: “We’re more The Wire than other Marvel movies. It’s not the stuff you see in Agents of SHIELD, it’s the stuff you see every day.”

Stress on the quotidian, invocation of the ultra-realist Wire, insistence on chiaroscuro lighting (with its inevitable noir associations), and reference to the subdued palette of dour seventies thrillers all serve to distance Daredevil not only from other Marvel properties but also from other broadly cognate television shows. They rhetorically position the series as something “grittier” than the quasi-realist narratives of street-level superheroes in Arrow (CW, 2012–) and The Flash (CW, 2014–). Indeed, if there is a DC comparison to be made, it is with the notoriously tenebrous and bleak Dark Knight films. So, if we are to take Weeks’ and DeKnight’s remarks at face value, how does the visual style of Daredevil fulfill the branding imperative of offering variety within identity and novelty within continuity?

A number of recurrent or repeated visual motifs both in Daredevil’s paratextual materials—posters, publicity stills, and so on—and in the episodes themselves serve to weld strongly to Marvel’s other film and television, and to its comic-book lineage. Use of strong color in Daredevil represents the most interesting variation on established Marvel brand elements. MCU style in toto is defined by chromatic intensity and richness (in contradistinction to the DC film and television “multiverse” that has gradually developed since Batman Begins). Dominant color values have varied, with Phase Two movies and the second series of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. frequently exhibiting lower values and lower-key lighting than Phase One. Even so, selective, punctuative use of high-intensity colors is endemic to Marvel’s television and film offerings. Only the environments and personnel of S.H.I.E.L.D. are stripped of high value and saturated color; otherwise, the heroes and villains and their worlds are as bright as the Marvel logo, and the comic-book pages we glimpse in the animated version of that logo that heads each film and television show from the MCU. In most cases, focal points of vibrant color are typically located one way or another on the bodies of the protagonists, from Iron Man’s scarlet and gold livery to Peggy Carter’s blue suit, white blouse and red hat (used so extensively in publicity materials for Agent Carter), and from Thor’s flaxen hair to the Hulk’s green skin.

Figure 2: Superficially neutral costuming of Wilson Fisk character in Daredevil

Daredevil largely displaces intense color from bodies, except in the case of the saturated red costume worn by the “ninja” villain, Nobu (Peter Shinkoda), in a watershed fight scene. As befits a faux-realist television series, and especially one that unfolds over thirteen instantly reviewable episodes, the devil is in the details in Stephanie Maslansky’s costumes; bold gestures are correspondingly few and far between. Thus Matt Murdock’s suits are mostly mid-value monochrome but his clothes are texturally rich—shirts, for example, are nubby oxford rather than smooth poplin—suggesting the blind man’s heightened reliance on tactility (Fig. 1). By the same token, wisecracking Foggy Nelson (Eldon Hensen) is also superficially neutral in his dress, but the printed shirt fabrics and animal-motif ties reward leisurely, close inspection and add a “quirky but not flamboyant” note – and so on. Unmodified strong color is eschewed in inverse proportion to the dominance of all these surface nuances, a choice that is most notable in the reimagining of principal antagonist Wilson Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio). The white suits and ascot of the comic book Kingpin are relegated to an “Easter egg” joke in the fifth episode, while Fisk’s open-necked silk shirts and mohair-tonic, three-piece suits for the series are either black, gray or muted blue, the surface of the latter sometimes broken up with self-stripes that further mitigate saturation (Fig. 2).

Figure 3: Vivid lighting in Daredevil.

Vivid color is mainly a property of environments, and more specifically the illumination of environments, in Daredevil. Murdock speaks of experiencing “a world on fire,” and in addition to a couple of livid-red POV shots simulating this for the audience, the idea is echoed each episode in the opening credits, which show New York landmarks and finally Daredevil himself forming viscously out of a red haze. A no-less insistent leitmotiv is the acid yellow and green light suffusing the panes of the picture windows that are endemic to the various warehouse and loft spaces in which so much of the nocturnal action takes place — including Murdock’s own apartment (Fig. 3). This sickly glow can in most cases be rationalized as light pollution from neon signage and street lamps (the now celebrated hallway fight from the second episode is one of the exceptions), but this is ultimately beside the point. The device is surely used chiefly because the grid of glazing bars in these windows provides a strong, stylized, quasi-graphic backdrop to action – and perhaps because both the strong color fields and insistent linearity recall the simplified backgrounds beloved of comic-book inkers and colorists (Fig. 4).

Figure 4: Example of simplified backgrounds of classic comic books.

Figure 5: Netflix’s posters for Daredevil.

Very little of this disembodied color creates as potent an effect as Netflix’s Hopperesque banner and posters for Daredevil (Fig. 5), which feature a cityscape bathed in the super-intense blue that hyperbolically represents nighttime in screen media as well as some comic strips. It is in these paratextual images that the “Marvelness” of Daredevil is perhaps most economically and powerfully expressed. Even so, and notwithstanding analogies with The Wire and Dog Day Afternoon, Daredevil’s imagery consistently reflects the fact that, as Loren Weeks puts it: “We didn’t want to be too literal with the real. It is the Marvel universe, after all.”

I am not sure if I have ever bore witness to such a flurry of fan activity and creativity within such a short period of time. Given that the trailer debuted just over two weeks ago (although I am writing this after merely seven days), it astonishes me how quickly ‘24-7 always on’ digital fandom reacted and began posting comments, videos, parodies and artwork to continue constructing the Star Wars: The Force Awakens (or Episode VII) text twelve months before its December 2015 release.

I am currently working on a book-length study of the latest phase in Star Wars history. Tentatively titled, A New Hope?: Digital Fandom and the Star Wars Renaissance, I have been tracking how paratexts—whether producer- or viewer-generated—discursively surround the Star Wars text and how this interplay between audience and industry generates meaning and value creation. I began the first part of this project in 2012 when I conducted an audience research project to gauge fan reactions to the sale of Lucasfilm to Disney.

During the research process, I discovered that for many fans the Force Awakens text had already begun despite the fact that, at the time, there were no plans for the Star Wars Saga to continue in film (“officially,” at least). As Henry Jenkins pointed out in the seminal Convergence Culture, fans were “determined to remake it on their own terms.” More than this, however, fans were determined to “continue” the saga as well as “remake” it. Now that the sale of Lucasfilm to Disney has opened up the ostensibly “closed” text for further adventures, how will fans continue to play with the Star Wars brand within participatory culture?

Within hours of the trailer’s release, fan vids and art began to surface in cyberspace. Live reactions were filmed and uploaded to YouTube: some of these were intensely emotional, while others were fan parodies of fan reactions (usually of those who visibly wept), and others were negative or indifferent (like the Amazing Atheist who maintained that caution was the best approach citing the Prequel Trilogy as evidence of how things could go horribly wrong). ZachFB Studios uploaded a home-made version of the trailer as homage created entirely with LEGO, and numerous others followed suit.

There were many criticisms of the new lightsaber with its cross-guard judged by many to be ‘unrealistic’ and lacking sufficient rationale—in his own breakdown on The Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert pointed out one fan who tweeted “hilt on lightsaber stupid and impractical childhood ruined everything ruined!!!1!”

Fan art – once again, within hours — was uploaded via Instagram and Tumblr with links provided on Twitter and Facebook.

As Jonathan Gray and Jason Mittell have previously argued about fans of Lost, “spoilers” are often actively sought out as an integral feature of the fan experience. Lucasfilm carefully control the release of snippets of information to orchestrate a viral campaign that seeks to stimulate awareness of the brand to create a fever pitch as lead-up to the actual release of the film. Whether or not photographs of the Millennium Falcon or other concept images were “leaked” by Lucasfilm or via other methods—such as Latino Review reporting that set photographs were stolen by a Rebel Alliance of fans who used “affordable home drone technology” to swoop over locations and provide the world with snapshots of X-Wings and so forth—is difficult to determine. After all, this could be part of the plan to drip-feed the audience with tantalising teasers to turn us into Star Wars junkies all over again. Conversely, as Matt Hills suggests in a study of Sherlock spoilers, part of the attraction for forensic fandom is to assuage ontological anxieties about the fan-object, especially when the “idealized object is potentially threatened” by seeking out spoilers to mediate and monitor whether that which is being created matches up with a platonic textual authenticity. For many fans, the idealized object is, indeed, “threatened” (read: prequels) and this—to quote Hills—”working through of possible threats” is negotiated by paratextual exegesis and excursions into spoiler territory.

In the week following the trailer’s release, the mysterious figure know only by the nom de guerre “Spoilerman” leaked alleged, crucial plot details about The Force Awakens (which I could not help but read—I blame research, as despite being someone who usually avoids spoilers of any kind, I found that I could not help myself!). Once more, whether or not this clandestine “Spoilerman” is anything but a Lucasfilm/Abrams plant is difficult to ascertain; however, within the so-called spoiler itself, we are told that “fake” paratexts will be leaked periodically to misdirect and confound the sniffer dog-fans so that no one can be entirely sure what is real and what is not, suggesting there may be something rotten within Spoilerman’s “spoiler” itself.

As a researcher, the rich and creative fandom discursively surrounding a text that does-not-quite-exist yet—although Gray would no doubt argue that this is all part of the text—provides a mélange of data. Methodologically, however, worms are crawling everywhere. This is what I am thinking through at the moment as I seek to conduct an audience research project that is rather ambitious by looking at what Paul Booth has described as “transgenic media.” Instead of focusing on one platform, I want to bring in examples from Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Instagram, and so on, while also speaking directly to fans leading up to, and including, the release of Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

This much is certain: Episode VII is in full swing, and we’ve only seen 88 seconds of footage.

Previously on “Downloading Serial”…

I peered down the rabbit hole of Serial’s Reddit board. Today I want to explore it a little more, raising the question of how people listen to Serial.

For anyone reading this without a media studies background, this might seem like a secondary digression for a critical analysis of the podcast itself. But one of the tenets of media studies is that any text (like a film or podcast) only matters through its consumption and cultural circulation. And I contend that a serialized text’s reception is even more essential, as the timeframe of production, consumption, and circulation is intertwined, and the gaps between episodes generate far more cultural material about the series than typically occurs in a self-contained text. Thus how we listen helps shape what it is.

Right now, how people are listening to Serial is the most interesting facet of Serial to me. This is not to say the last two episodes aren’t interesting—they definitely are, both in laying out the case against Adnan last week, and this week confirming my own sense that the case left “mountains of reasonable doubt” according to the experts in the law clinic. But together they feel like a transitional moment in Serial, moving from the first wave of establishing the facts as presented in trial, to the process of pushing back against that conviction and proposing alternate narratives. After all, we’re given a key clue as to where this might be going in this last episode: “As a legal question, Deirdre says they should only have to prove Adnan isn’t their guy, he’s not the killer. But as a practical matter, she said, their chances are much better if they can go a step further, and say to the state, ‘not only is this not your guy, we can tell you who is your guy.’” I assume Sarah Koenig says this knowing full well that offering a compelling case for an alternative perpetrator plays much better not only as a legal matter, but as a non-fiction narrative too. Whether that will be Jay, as teased for next episode, or someone else is still to be determined.

But one place where such questions are already being explored are on Serial’s many paratexts. The Reddit board is thriving, with more than 7,000 subscribers (and rapidly growing) and constant chatter between episodes. Slate started tackling Serial on their “Spoiler Special” podcast after the fifth episode, and they have now created a dedicated “Serial Spoiler Special” podcast that now ranks #7 on iTunes (Serial itself is #1). Serial is a popular topic on Twitter and many culture-centered websites, generating copious conversation and analytical attention. There is even a parody series, a sure sign of cultural importance in this day and age. What most interests me is how these paratextual practices fit with norms that have been well established over the past two decades for fans of fictional television series. I mentioned this briefly last post, with Reddit fans creating timelines, but it deserves more consideration.

As I have analyzed elsewhere, fictional television viewers have embraced forensic fandom for many series to try to parse out what is happening in a program and speculate what is still to come. Often times this involves gathering together evidence from interviews with producers, subtle clues within a series like freeze-frame images or intertextual references, and exploring official paratexts that point to broader contexts. Serial fans are doing all of these things, but with the added dimension that they are researching a non-fiction story, with much of the material in the public record. This creates a very strange differential of knowledge: some listeners want to only know what has been shared in the podcast (but still want to discuss that material and often ache with anticipation for the next episode), while others are looking into other sources of information, creating what we might think of as “reality spoilers” (in Myles McNutt’s phrase, as coined in a Twitter conversation).

As with spoilers of fictional series, the reasons why someone might seek to be spoiled are wide-ranging, including wanting to short-circuit anticipation, focusing more on how a story is told rather than what will happen, and hoping to thwart the producers. In the case of Serial, it seems that the nonfiction nature of the story, with much of the “action” occurring in the past, inspires forensic fans to do their own investigations into the case largely because that story information did not emerge from the creative impulses of producers—knowing that there are trial documents and news reports out there makes them irresistible paratexts for some listeners. In this way, fans become parallel investigators to Koenig, and I’m sure some of them are motivated by the competitive drive to “scoop” or at least equal the journalists. Of course, we have seen many cases in recent years of the dangers of online communities trying to be amateur cops, as with the wrongful accusations in the Boston Marathon bombing case and others; there have been ethical discussions on the Reddit board as to what information is appropriate to share versus withhold, given the potential recriminations that being linked to the murder might bring (as discussed in this Guardian piece on the fan phenomenon). And even parties who know more about the case can be respectful of Koenig’s storytelling imperatives to avoid spoilers, as with the fascinating blog of Rabia Chaudry, the lawyer who first brought the case to Koenig’s attention—she fleshes out lots of details and perspectives, but always in deference to Serial’s sequence of revelations.

Another key element of the forensic fandom involves the operational aesthetic, the focus on how a story is being told. As I’ve argued, this is a key element of contemporary serial television, both in fiction and reality television, and such attention to the mechanics of Serial’s storytelling are a central concern of both Slate’s podcast and the fan discussions. People parse out why Koenig makes the choices she does, what she’s omitting and including (like last names of key figures like Jay vs. Jenn), and the strategies the series seems to be following. The type of analysis I’m offering here on Antenna is widespread, both among the Redditors and journalists covering the series, as there seems to be an intense focus on where Serial is going and how it is being put together.

In thinking through the fan reaction and forensic attention the series has gotten, I’ve come to one conclusion: the ending of Serial will be regarded as a disappointment for a large number of listeners. As brought up by Cynthia Myers and Mike Newman in a Twitter conversation, Serial invites comparison to The Thin Blue Line, but it seems unlikely that the series ends with Adnan’s conviction being overturned. As Koenig has reasserted numerous times, she is still reporting the case (and seemingly the Innocence Project is also still working on it), and she doesn’t know where it will end. If fans are bringing expectations from well-crafted serial fiction, an ending that doesn’t resolve neatly or conclusively would seem to violate its assumed arc. Even the best fictional series rarely nail their endings, as expectations are too high and varied to please most viewers. Given that Serial’s ending is still a moving target, it’s hard to imagine how it will resolve in a manner sufficiently satisfying to match its hype. (This point is made more expansively and eloquently by NPR’s Linda Holmes, in a piece I read after drafting my column.)

And yet, even knowing that a satisfying ending is unlikely, and that elements of the reporting fill me with discomfort for rehashing a girl’s murder to prompt fans to debate the entertainment value of the series, I still listen, read, and write about Serial. What’s the draw of this format, this series, and this story? Next time, on “Downloading Serial”…

‘The Curse of the Black Spot’ reveals the curse of the ‘meh’ slot. It’s a return to workaday Who after a two-part series finale, a Christmas Special, and a two-part series launch imitating a finale for good measure, all of which carried the signature of showrunner Moffat. By contrast, this is self-consciously “ordinary” Doctor Who, coming after mission statements from ‘The Impossible Astronaut’ and ‘Day of the Moon’. Even its arc elements feel reheated already – oh, it’s the eyepatch lady looking through another impossible hatch, and Amy’s Schrodinger’s pregnancy, along with flashbacks to the Doctor’s future death.

This episode doesn’t, at first glance, appear to carry any ‘author-function’, beyond copying last week’s arc stuff. It isn’t identifiable as carrying a specific writer’s preoccupations, tropes, and repetitions. The guiding parameters seem instead to be pastiche – as Steven Moffat remarks in the accompanying Doctor Who Confidential, you want certain things in a pirate story: a storm, swashbuckling, a stowaway child, and so on. And ‘The Curse of the Black Spot’ serves up these warmed-over intertextualities with gusto. But such manic repetition of generic fare seems to over-ride considerations of authorial distinction. Somewhat reinforcing a sense of non-authorship, Confidential writes out the flesh-and-blood writer of this piece, Steve Thompson. Mentioned once in passing by director Jeremy Webb, Thompson is otherwise absent, being neither interviewed nor appearing on camera, and not even being referred to in Moffat’s commentary. (By marked contrast, Neil Gaiman is fronting next week’s making-of; the show looks set to become one long paratextual cue for ‘written by Neil Gaiman!’)

So, where’s Steve Thompson? Why has this empirical writer been forgotten about and cast out into the (Authorial) Silence? (He similarly disappeared from paratexts for Sherlock, where his episode alone had no DVD commentary).

Television authorship is a fickle business, it seems. All TV drama is written, but not all of it is ‘authored’. And this is the major value of Michel Foucault’s concept of the ‘author-function’ – it allows consideration of authorship as a discourse, granted in some cases and denied in others. Showrunners and ‘star’ writers are often extratextually present in promotional, paratextual content and fan readings – Richard Curtis even got special publicity trails last year. And at the other end of the spectrum are jobbing writers, yet to achieve paratextual presence let alone pre-eminence; those who professionally write TV drama but don’t yet publicly ‘author’ it.

Enter Steve Thompson. What preoccupations and tropes demarcate a Thompson script? We don’t know, and Confidential doesn’t help us find out because all statements about the story’s contents are entrusted to Steven Moffat, who in effect ventriloquises Thompson. And yet Steve Thompson appears to be Moffat’s discovery or protege – entrusted with the second episode of Sherlock, and reappearing here. On Sherlock and Who, Thompson has thus far been a (literally) middling writer – he’s done the stuff that showrunners need to farm out, the bits in the middle, after the important set-up and before the important finale (though Sherlock series 2 seems set to promote him to the finale of all finales, intriguingly). For now, Thompson is working his way up the industry ladder, aided by Moffat’s powerful support and mentoring.

And this makes Moffat’s standing in for Thompson both telling and ironic. Telling because Thompson himself can act as a sign of Moffat’s industrial power – the showrunner’s status being indicated by his very gift of patronage (likewise, Russell T. Davies supported Tom MacRae; Paul Abbott recently entrusted the writing of Exile to Danny Brocklehurst, and Jimmy McGovern has used The Street to mentor and develop new writers). In a sense, ‘The Curse of the Black Spot’ is Mentor Who, with Steven M paternalistically building the TV career of Steve T.

But Moffat voicing Thompson in Confidential is also ironic, because this is surely a script marked by choice Moffatisms. Automated technology carrying on, saving humanity whilst being misinterpreted as evil – that’s textbook Moffat, right out of ‘The Empty Child’/’The Doctor Dances’. Moving from a historical setting to a futuristic spaceship… say hello to ‘The Girl in the Fireplace’. The story’s basic premise seems designed to appeal to Moffat’s sensibilities as a writer; one might even suggest this is pirated Moffat, with Thompson imitating and voicing his patron. Authorship thus self-deconstructs; the protege appropriates his master’s voice in a process of indeterminate doubling. But this indeterminacy – authorship flickering between two states like Amy Pond’s pregnancy – means that piracy cannot quite be fixed or located. Perhaps Thompson (un)consciously appealed to Moffat with his initial story pitch; perhaps Moffat pitched in across the story’s development. Industry discourses can ‘t be trusted to resolve this ontological mix-up, as hierarchies and careers have to be protected and conserved.

What this suggests about TV authorship is not merely that it is multiple, but rather that it is extra-textually and paratextually bestowed on some while discursively denied to others. In short, authorship is hierarchical, forged here through a mentor-apprentice dialectic. Unsurprisingly, Steve Thompson’s Steven Moffat’s Doctor Who represents rather less of the former Steve and rather more of the latter Steven. ‘The Curse of the Black Spot’ devolves into a menu of pastiche pirates with a side order of pastiched, pirated Moffat. Last week saw the showrunner copying himself and introducing difference into repetition; this week introduces repetition into difference via the sincerest form of showrunner flattery.

‘The Curse of the Black Spot’ is standard Doctor Who – just a spot along the way on Thompson’s career arc, and a step towards the ultimate finale of ‘The Final Problem’. Unrecognised writing is what typically gets done in the middle; recognised, paratextually-promoted industry prestige begins and ends with the prize of authorship.

While in the first part of this post I explored how some of Glee’s dubbed Italian promos help frame the show as a sometimes starkly different text, I now move on to consider locally produced promos, where an increased amount of creativity seems to be put forward and the intent is noticed of “domesticating” the show for the target culture.

The promo for Glee’s second season, aired by FOX Italia in the Fall of 2010, brings together scenes from the new episodes, while the voice over informs us that Glee is back with more auditions, nice songs, etc. Some of the key words heard in the voice over appear on screen with a slightly modified Italian spelling, i.e. with a ‘-ee’ instead of ‘-i’ ending, for example: audizionee (auditions), televisionee (lit. televisions), canzonee (songs), etc. While one could argue that using the dubbing actress who lends her voice to Sue Sylvester to promote Glee in such an upbeat, enthusiastic tone might not have been the most consistent choice, the promo clearly stands out for its verbal and visual creativity in superimposing alternative spelling on a grammatical feature of the Italian language, namely the plural noun and adjective ending ‘-i’. Thus the promo can be seen as successfully complying with the show’s verbal playfulness (both in other original promos and in the show itself) which is evident, for example, in the creation of ‘gleek’ and other Glee-inspired neologisms and in Sue’s elaborate and colourful insults. Perhaps building up on Glee’s hugely successful first season, this promo as a whole seems to be more daring than its first season counterparts. In fact, the inclusion of the clip in which Kurt makes explicit reference to himself being gay and Mercedes being black – and to these features making both of them “trendy” – calls attention specifically to some of the minority issues dealt with in the show.

The second case I consider here is the promotional campaign launched by the national network Italia1 when it started airing the first season of the show in January 2011. Italia1, traditionally famous for addressing a younger audience, used its well-known slogan “Italia Uno!” by adapting it to Glee and transforming it into “Gleeitalia Uno!”. In the promo we see a number of TV personalities putting their L-shaped fingers on their foreheads and saying “Gleeitalia Uno!”. The voice over at the end informs us that Glee, the “event TV series of the year”, is coming soon to Italia1.

This promotional campaign is obviously interesting from a number of different angles. First of all, on a linguistic level, it shows a certain amount of creativity in playing with sound and directly attaching the title of the show to the name of the network, thus superimposing new content on an existing – and highly recognizable – promotional campaign for the network. Secondly, a sort of cultural shift seems to be occurring as far as the ‘Loser’ gesture is concerned. While we can safely assume that the majority of Italian viewers will not be familiar with the L-Loser association (see previous post), the Italian VIPs who keep repeating the gesture seemingly unaware of its cultural significance in English also seem to invite Italian audiences to view the ‘L’ in the logo and on their foreheads simply as a visual extension of the /l/ phoneme in the word Glee, thus skipping the cultural significance of the gesture altogether. We could also comment on the use of local celebrities to endorse the show. Although it might make little sense for Italian VIPs to promote a foreign show, we could perhaps see this as mimicking and localizing the same strategy used – perhaps with equally awkward results – by  FOX in the US[1] or by FOX Italia at the beginning of the show’s first season. In this frankly surreal promo, for example, Italian actors, musicians and TV personalities talk about cast choices for a hypothetical Italian version of Glee.

While I can see how the hype surrounding the show even before its airing in Italy might have made Italian distributors confident with using celebrity images to promote the show from the start, I can’t help wondering whether this might have somewhat skewed the ways in which potential Italian viewers have walked onto the Glee phenomenon. Specifically, in addition to the “if you like these celebrities, you’ll like this show” effect normally invited by celebrity endorsement, I would also suggest that the use of mostly young, hip celebrities to promote Glee from its first season in Italy might have created glamorous associations that perhaps clash with the show’s message – or at least with the messages conveyed at the start of the first season in the US – of being confident with who you are even, and especially, if you are perceived as a nerd/loser.

I would like to suggest that many of the promotional strategies adopted for Glee in Italy seem to point in the direction of familiarizing the audience with the show by bringing it closer to the target culture and by closely engaging its fan base. In addition to the promos commented on above, this can be seen in FOX Italia’s idea to advertise Glee’s premiere with a flash mob in a busy shopping mall in Rome a few days before Christmas 2009 and in the recent launch of a web-based competition for the best fan rendition of songs featured in Glee, where winners of the competition will receive tickets to the London Glee concert. It seems safe to say that Glee is being brought (literally, in the case of the flash mob) to Italian viewers through shrewd use of locally produced – albeit sometimes slightly incoherent – paratexts which strategically appeal and reach out to both prospective and established gleeks.

Any time a beloved text is adapted, there is the risk that the adaptation will deviate significantly from the world that readers have imagined; however Universal has an already accepted template provided by the films and the video games on which to base their theme park, significantly reducing this risk. The real gamble here, and the question the theme park most pressingly begs, is how the franchise will be kept alive after the final film is released in 2011. Paratexts, as Jonathan Gray points out in Show Sold Separately, are a vital part of any text’s life, and this is particularly true of the franchise. Harry Potter has done well with paratexts, spinning out not only video games and board games but also toys, candy, Halloween costumes, etc.  However, paratexts are most effective in conversation with a primary text – but soon all of the planned narrative texts for the Harry Potter franchise, both films and novels, will have been released.

Of course the world of Harry Potter will live on long after 2011 in the imaginations of the franchise’s fans and this is what Universal Studies is counting on. Yet the investment laid out by Universal Studios is too much to be justified by the fans that Harry Potter has today. While certainly rides are based around now defunct films like Water World or Honey I Shrunk the Kids, the construction of small theme parks around a single textual worlds are very rare. The unusual focus of an entire park on a single text indicates a faith in a franchise, like Star Wars and Batman, with long-term cultural currency. (And even Star Wars only has one ride, one stage show and occasional “Star Wars” Weekends at Walt Disney World.)

The question left by the announcement of this theme park is not whether or not it will succeed – children everywhere will have ruined the rest of the Super Bowl begging their parents for a trip to Orlando – but how the franchise will be kept alive to reward Universal Studios’ investment?  There are three possibilities: 1) the world made by the Harry Potter franchise has such mythic power that the existing texts are enough for fans to return to again and again, for generations to come.  2) Universal Studios is counting on the fans to keep the world alive. This wouldn’t be a bad bet given the massive amount of fan texts created around Harry Potter. Everything from fan-fiction, to recipes, to Wizard Rock available on iTunes from bands like The Remus Lupins have been created by loyal fans. Even the unopened theme-park already has a fan site! Yet the studio’s occasionally draconian measures regarding copyright might hinder the saturation of fan creations. 3) Finally this may portend the possibility of more licensed ancillary materials after the final film comes out. The Star Wars franchise was not kept alive by fan creations alone, but also licensed novels, role-playing games and video games. Will Harry Potter comics, novels about other Hogwarts students, an MMORPG and an animated series be soon to follow? Although it would be consistent with how other franchises, Spiderman, Batman, Star Trek, etc. are handled, the unique magic of the books make this much more difficult. How the future of the franchise will play out remains a mystery for now, but what is certain is that soon there will be many a glass of Butter Beer toasted, by both kids and Universal Studio shareholders, in celebration when the Wizarding World of Harry Potter opens its gates in Orlando.