Post by Matthew Freeman, Bath Spa University

This post continues the ongoing “From Nottingham and Beyond” series, with contributions from faculty and alumni of the University of Nottingham’s Department of Culture, Film and Media. Today’s contributor, Matthew Freeman, completed his PhD in the department in 2015.

The media industries readily produce fictional stories across multiple media, telling the tales of the Avengers across comics, film and television, inviting audiences to participate in the reinvigorated intergalactic Star Wars universe across cinema, novels, the Web, video games, and so on. This transmedia storytelling phenomenon is of course a common go-to strategy in Hollywood’s fiction factory of brand-oriented franchise-making, tied up with commercial notions of digital marketing, merchandising, sequels, “cash nexuses,” and so forth. But what is becoming increasingly apparent is that transmedia is so much more than media franchising. In an age where the distribution of media across multiple platforms is increasingly accessible, transmedia has emerged as a global strategy for targeting fragmentary audiences – be it in business, media or education. And yet while scholarship continues to dwell on transmedia’s commercial, global industry formations, far smaller communities and far less commercial cultures around the world now make new and very different uses of transmedia, entirely re-thinking transmedia by applying it to non-fictional cultural projects as a socio-political strategy for informing and unifying local communities. There has been little attempt to track, analyze or understand such a socio-political idea of transmedia: Henry Jenkins famously theorized transmedia within a digital and industrial context,[1] but what does it mean to examine transmedia from a cultural perspective?

In one sense, examining transmedia from a cultural perspective first means acknowledging the innate multiplicity of transmedia’s potential. James Hay and Nick Couldry, hinting at this very idea, argue that the oft-cited model of transmedia – that is, the one seemingly based on convergences in the name of commerce – is far from the only model, especially when positioned globally: “international differences are obscured by the generality of the term ‘convergence culture’, and it can be helpful to consider convergence ‘cultures’ in the plural.”[2]

And so in another sense, examining transmedia from a cultural perspective also means establishing a whole new cultural-specificity model or approach to understandings of transmedia, taking into account the politics, peoples, ideologies, social values, cultural trends, histories, leisure and heritage of individual countries and their smaller communities. Taking a cultural approach to analyzing transmedia surely means mapping the many faces of transmedia in many different countries. For instance, while in the US and UK transmedia has evolved into an established marketing and brand-development practice,[3] emerging research across Europe paints a different picture of transmedia. In Europe, transmedia can occupy the role of a promotion tool for independent filmmakers, or that of a site of construction for social reality games, or even serve as a means of political activism.[4] In countries such as Spain, meanwhile, entire curricula are being developed around the potential application of transmedia as a tool for educational and literacy enhancement for students seeking global citizenship skills (Gomez 2013; Scolari 2013).

Hence one thing starts to become very clear: when conceived of or utilized as a cultural practice – rather than a commercially-minded industrial one – transmedia is suddenly no longer about storytelling, at least not in a fictional sense. Instead, it is about something more, something more real – that is to say, something more political, more social and more ideologically profound.

Allow me to offer some examples. Towards the end of last year I was invited to consult and to teach in the School of Sciences and Humanities at EAFIT University in Colombia. The invite was for the launch of a new MA in Transmedia Communication, the very first of its kind in Latin America. After consulting on the content of the MA program throughout the autumn, I then flew out to teach in Colombia, delivering a week’s worth of lectures about the different models, strategies and techniques of transmedia storytelling – focusing primarily on UK and US contexts. The aim here was to try and lay out the core characteristics and tendencies of many transmedia stories so students could then apply particular ideas when developing their own transmedia projects. What struck me about the whole experience was just how irrelevant some – though thankfully not all – of my own ingrained ideas about what transmedia actually is were to a Colombian audience. For them, transmedia is not – or rather should not be – a commercial practice of promotion, fiction, world building, franchising and the like. Instead, it is a political system that is nothing short of pivotal to developing social change in local communities; for them, transmedia is about reconstructing memories.

Though documentary has for many decades played a vital role in Latin America’s media ecology, independent producers and universities are the key drivers in the country’s current transmedia trend. While at EAFIT University, a number of innovative transmedia projects caught my eye – all of which aimed to fulfill this promise of developing social change and reconstructing local memories. One project, now currently underway, aims to create non-official narratives of the Colombian armed conflict from the victims’ point of view. By using different media platforms such as games, maps, web series, books and museums, the Medellín victims will be able to communicate their thoughts about the Colombian armed conflict to local and national public spheres. Another project, this one a graduate student’s, uses transmedia as a tool to gather and articulate the emotional fallout of the people from Medellín who have been displaced from their homes. The aim is therefore to document the citizens of Medellín, and Colombia, and show what it is like to be displaced in one’s own city, reconstructing an entire generation of historical memories concerning victims of internal displacement via the use of non-official stories and the representation of these stories across platforms.

In other words, in the context of Colombian culture, transmedia is not just a tool for social change – it is a blessing born out of a long history of cultural tradition that can help Colombians reconstruct the country after more than 50 years of armed conflict. As one of the students enrolled on EAFIT’s MA in Transmedia Communication asserts, “I strongly believe that transmedia in Colombia can contribute to creating processes of memory, recognition and solidarity for the victims of the Colombian armed conflict. I think that using and developing transmedia with local communities can be the clue to starting real processes of reconciliation in the country.”

The emphasis, again, is on using transmedia for something real. And so it seems particularly important to continue more fully interrogating non-fictional transmedia cultures – in the plural. Susan Kerrigan and J.T. Velikovsky begin to interrogate non-fictional transmedia storytelling through the framework of reality television formats, [5] just as Paul Grainge and Catherine Johnson (2015) consider the BBC’s coverage of the 2012 London Olympic Games through the lens of transmedia. And yet it is still far from clear in academic circles what it might mean to fully conceptualize a “real transmedia,” as it were. As my and William Proctor’s Transmedia Earth Network will aim to address, perhaps it is now time to move beyond emphases on industry and technology and instead to more fully embrace how cultural specificity (politics, heritage, social traditions, peoples, leisure and more) informs “real” transmedia stories with real cultural impacts and powerful resolutions for communities around the world. How do the unique politics, heritages and social traditions specific to a given country inform alternative models of transmedia? In Colombia at least, transmedia is now used to reshape its cultures and its communities – and in the words of one Colombian student, this is because, in Colombia, “transmedia is still a field of experimentation; it is new, it is unknown and we are the ones defining it and making it important for all branches of our knowledge.”

Free from the shackles of its Western understandings, then, Colombia’s notion of what transmedia actually is raises important questions about the future of transmedia, both as a phenomenon and as a focus of academic enquiry. How else is transmedia being interpreted by other cultures? And how else might it begin to reshape cultural communities and to tell their real stories of political and social traditions around the world? Only time will tell…

Notes

[1] See Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006).

[2] James Hay and Nick Couldry “Rethinking Convergence/Culture,” Cultural Studies 25.4 (2011): 473-486.

[3] See for example Jonathan Gray, Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts (New York: New York University Press, 2010) and Paul Grainge and Catherine Johnson, Promotional Screen Industries (London: Routledge, 2015).

[4] See Carlos Scolari, Paolo Bertetti and Matthew Freeman Transmedia Archaeology: Storytelling in the Borderlines of Science Fiction, Comics and Pulp Magazines (Basingstoke: Palgrave Pivot, 2014).

[5] See Susan Kerrigan and J. T. Velikovsky, “Examining Documentary Transmedia Narratives Through The Living History of Fort Scratchley Project,” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies (online 2015, DOI: 10.1177/1354856514567053).

This post continues the ongoing “From Nottingham and Beyond“ series, with contributions from faculty and alumni of the University of Nottingham’s Department of Culture, Film and Media. This week’s contributor, Matthew Freeman, completed his PhD in the department in 2015.

Screen capture from the James Bond 007: From Russia With Love video game of 2005.

A couple of years ago, Jonathan Nolan, co-screenwriter of the popular Dark Knight (2005-2012) movies and brother of acclaimed Hollywood director Christopher Nolan, spoke candidly about the process of writing a real ending to the Nolan Batman saga. “It’s the right way to tell a story, to blow the whole thing up,” Nolan insisted. “It’s better than trying to spin the thing out indefinitely like the Bond franchise. They’ve successfully pulled it off with Bond, but at certain costs. I think with almost every other franchise it’s a mistake to try and keep those plates spinning. You want stakes.” Nolan here reflects on the process of telling serialized stories and the problem of constructing narratives with meaningful character arcs and payoffs in a world where movie stars are signed up for multiple sequels and franchise-filmmaking is the order of the day.

Nolan’s postulation got me thinking. In this age of Hollywood franchises and transmedia storytelling, where story progression, character development and narrative coherence across multiple films and peripheral media extensions have become a logical means of sustaining audience engagement in a crowded marketplace, to what extent is James Bond–one of the oldest, most enduring and most popular of all media franchises, one that spans books, movies and video games–something of an anomaly? After all, while Marvel et al. now build coherent universes for their pool of characters to roam, in the Bond movies actors change faces, story threads are dropped from one film to another, and the death of characters more often than not goes unnoticed in the hearts of heroes. And that’s not even to consider Bond in other media besides film, in works whose own narratives contradict, stray and repeat old ground as often they narrate new adventures. Don’t the Bond franchise’s constant contradictions and straying repetitions directly oppose the common ideology of how media franchises are typically built in the 21^st century? For according to Henry Jenkins, “everything about the structure of the modern entertainment industry [is] designed with the single idea of transmedia in mind.”[1] Transmedia, of course, speaks about the sort of narrative coherence, story progression and expansive character development I mention above.

How, then, has this noted loss of narrative coherence, story progression and character development across the Bond franchise affected how audiences engage with it? Is transmedia even a possibility for a franchise as contradictory, longstanding, episodic and fundamentally un-serialized as Bond? This is a property that celebrated its 50^th anniversary, at least cinematically, fairly recently–and did so in style with 2012’s Skyfall, a film that earned more money than any Bond movie previously and will be followed by this year’s Spectre. Inevitably, spin-off video games preceded Skyfall, as they have done for years. But do the various Bond films and accompanying video games actually unfold in the same storyworld–and do fans even require them to do so? Are the video games consumed as coherent extensions of the Bond films or rather as distinct versions of some alternate Bond universe? And if the latter, is James Bond a minor anomaly in today’s transmedia landscape–and what might all of this tell us about the nature of media franchises?

Daniel Craig as Bond in advertising for 2012’s Skyfall

I explore such questions in a chapter in Claire Hines’s upcoming collection Fan Phenomena: James Bond, and it might well be that a franchise like James Bond doesn’t actually engage with popular strategies of transmedia storytelling at all. Instead, we might say that Bond makes use of a fixed temporality that engages fans across multiple media via strategies based around nostalgia and retroactive continuities.

Nostalgia is hinted implicitly even in the titles of some Bond video games. The USP of 2012’s 007 Legends was that, as one review put it, the game “trades in nostalgia, and does so in spades.” Perhaps a more explicit example of how nostalgia works in Bond video games to encourage fan engagement despite the lack of so-called transmedia storytelling can be found in 2005’s James Bond 007: From Russia With Love. Here, the game was billed as “the first game to let you play as Sean Connery’s 007.” Released at a time when the Internet was filled with fans’ bewilderment about Daniel Craig’s casting in Casino Royale (2006), James Bond 007: From Russia With Love worked to pacify fans by returning them to a safer memory of the Bond of the past. “Starring a beautifully-realised digital double of Connery circa 1963,” Empire wrote, James Bond 007: From Russia With Love featured every major set-piece from that 1963 film, allowing players to extend their engagement in the Bond storyworld across media precisely by curtailing the storyworld’s extension: the audience’s engagement in the present was driven by a return to the past.

This mark of nostalgia says something about the audience for Bond in the 21^st century. A game like James Bond 007: From Russia With Love might be seen to embody Bond fans’ almost perpetual desire to keep Bond in the past. In other words, is part of this character’s appeal the fact that he doesn’t actually change, or age, or progress, or remember, or look ahead? Living Bond as a site of nostalgia–either via rereading old books, re-watching old movies or reliving old memories via video games–has provided Bond producers’ with a seemingly endless means to capture audiences’ engagement across media. By keeping Bond in the past, forever unchanged and untainted, fans too can return to that world over and over again.

The idea of moving a story backwards rather than forwards may contradict today’s more conventionally transmedial franchises. Yet when encouraging Bond fans to cross multiple media, the Bond franchise gets even messier when one drills down. Indeed, over the years Bond video games have made use of retroactive continuities to engage audiences across media. Essentially, retroactive continuities–or retcons for short–refer to the deliberate changing of previously established narrative facts. Retcons are common in comics, which comprise long histories of many series that continue over many editions, and so sooner or later the makeup of the story must be radically reshaped to attract new audiences.

Screen capture from 2012’s 007 Legends video game.

The Bond video games have been reshaping the narrative makeup of the films for years, seemingly as a way to attract fans across media. Take 2012’s 007 Legends as a case in point. This game was praised by Empire not only for the way it allowed fans not only to revisit Bond’s past, but also to experience a mixed-up version of that past: “For the most part the efforts to effectively reboot the major story beats of Goldfinger, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Licence to Kill, Die Another Day and Moonraker through the eyes of current 007, Daniel Craig, are admirably effective.” This was a game that distorted ideas of nostalgia by allowing fans to relive their old memories of Bond adventures in very different ways, effectively altering the legacy as story beats of Bond’s past unfolded in new and alternative ways.

While an example like 007 Legends shows just how effective incoherence and inconsistency can be when encouraging fans to migrate from one source of media to the next, the game indeed highlights the Bond franchise’s anomalous status in today’s transmedia entertainment landscape. Whereas games like 2003’s Enter the Matrix thrived on the way it expanded the Matrix story across movies and games in strikingly coherent ways–with the subplots of the films carefully woven into plot threads of the game–Bond’s use of retcons in video games works on the basis of historical revisionism and contradiction alone.

Bond’s entrapment as a source of nostalgia may indeed carve him a rare niche in today’s entertainment industry, one where the prospect of re-engaging with a so-called “sexist, misogynist dinosaur” offers a unique contrast to today’s more intricately transmedial communities that involve coherent world-building.

Bond has garnered an enduring popularity across multiple media not in spite of but because of the character’s adherence to the past. Bond thereby serves as a lens through which to study models of transmedia franchising at a time when other popular heroes constantly move forward.

[1] Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006), p. 104.