Tag Archives: transmedia

Making Mine Marvel

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marvuntold

Reading Sean Howe’s Marvel Comics: The Untold Story (New York: Harper Perennial, 2013) I am learning all sorts of things. Or rather, some things I am learning and some things I am relearning, as Marvel’s publications are woven into my life as intimately as are Star Trek and Star Wars: other franchises of the fantastic whose fecundity — the sheer volume of media they’ve spawned over the years — mean that at any given stage of my development they have been present in some form. Our biographies overlap; even when I wasn’t actively reading or watching them, they served at least as a backdrop. I would rather forget that The Phantom Menace or Enterprise happened, but I know precisely where I was in my life when they did.

Star Wars, of course, dates back to 1977, which means my first eleven years were unmarked by George Lucas’s galvanic territorialization of the pop-culture imaginary. Trek, on the other hand, went on the air in 1966, the same year I was born. Save for a three-month gap between my birthday in June and the series premiere in September, Kirk, Spock and the universe(s) they inhabit have been as fundamental and eternal as my own parents. Marvel predates both of them, coming into existence in 1961 as the descendent of Timely and Atlas. This makes it about as old as James Bond (at least in his movie incarnation) and slightly older than Doctor Who, arriving via TARDIS, er, TV in 1963.

My chronological preamble is in part an attempt to explain why so much of Howe’s book feels familiar even as it keeps surprising me by crystallizing things about Marvel I kind of already knew, because Marvel itself — avatarizalized in editor/writer Stan Lee — was such an omnipresent engine of discourse, a flow of interested language not just through dialogue bubbles and panel captions but the nondiegetic artists’ credits and editorial inserts (“See Tales of Suspense #53! — Ed.”) as well as paratextual spaces like the Bullpen Bulletins and Stan’s Soapbox. Marvel in the 1960s, its first decade of stardom, was very, very good not just at putting out comic books but at inventing itself as a place and even a kind of person — a corporate character — spending time with whom was always the unspoken emotional framework supporting my issue-by-issue excursions into the subworlds of Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, and Dr. Strange.

Credit Howe, then, with taking all of Marvel’s familiar faces, fictional and otherwise, and casting each in its own subtly new light: Stan Lee as a liberal, workaholic jack-in-the-box in his 40s rather than the wrinkled avuncular cameo-fixture of recent Marvel movies; Jack Kirby as a father of four, turning out pages at breakneck speed at home in his basement studio with a black-and-white TV for company; Steve Ditko as — and this genuinely took me by surprise — a follower of Ayn Rand who increasingly infused his signature title, The Amazing Spider-Man, with Objectivist philosophy.

It’s also interesting to see Marvel’s transmedial tendencies already present in embryo as Lee, Kirby, and Ditko shared their superhero assets across books: Howe writes, “Everything was absorbed into the snowballing Marvel Universe, which expanded to become the most intricate fictional narrative in the history of the world: thousands upon thousands of interlocking characters and episodes. For generations of readers, Marvel was the great mythology of the modern world.” (Loc 125 — reading it on my Kindle app). Of course, as with any mythology of sufficient popular mass, it becomes impossible to read history as anything but a teleologically overdetermined origin story, so perhaps Howe overstates the case. Still, it’s hard to resist the lure of reading marketing decisions as prescient acts of worldbuilding: “It was canny cross-promotion, sure, but more important, it had narrative effects that would become a Marvel Comics touchstone: the idea that these characters shared a world, that the actions of each had repercussions on the others, and that each comic was merely a thread of one Marvel-wide mega-story.” (Loc 769)

I like too the way Untold Story paints comic-book fandom in the 1960s as a movement of adults, or at least teenagers and college students, rather than the children so often caricatured as typical comic readers; Howe notes July 27, 1964 as the date of “the first comic convention” at which “a group of fans rented out a meeting hall near Union Square and invited writers, artists, and collectors (and one dealer) of old comic books to meet.” (Loc 876) The company’s self-created fan club, the Merry Marvel Marching Society or M.M.M.S., was in Howe’s words

an immediate smash; chapters opened at Princeton, Oxford, and Cambridge. … The mania wasn’t confined to the mail, either — teenage fans started calling the office, wanting to have long telephone conversations with Fabulous Flo Steinberg, the pretty young lady who’d answered their mail so kindly and whose lovely picture they’d seen in the comics. Before long, they were showing up in the dimly lit hallways of 625 Madison, wanting to meet Stan and Jack and Steve and Flo and the others. (Loc 920)

A forcefully engaged and exploratory fandom, then, already making its media pilgrimages to the hallowed sites of production, which Lee had so skillfully established in the fannish imaginary as coextensive with, or at least intersecting, the fictional overlay of Manhattan through which Spider-Man swung and the Fantastic Four piloted their Fantasticar. In this way the book’s first several chapters offhandedly map the genesis of contemporary, serialized, franchised worldbuilding and the emergent modern fandoms that were both those worlds’ matrix and their ideal sustaining receivers.

Howe is attentive to these resonances without overstating them: Lee, Kirby and others are allowed to be superheroes (flawed and bickering in true Marvel fashion) while still retaining their earthbound reality. And through his book, so far, I am reexperiencing my own past in heightened, colorful terms, remembering how the media to which I was exposed when young mutated me, gamma-radiation-like, into the man I am now.

Sharing — or stealing? — Trek

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In a neat coincidence, yesterday’s New York Times featured two articles that intersect around the concerns of internet piracy and intellectual property rights on the one hand, and struggles between fan creators and “official” owners of a transmedia franchise on the other. On the Opinions page, Rutgers professor Stuart P. Green’s essay “When Stealing Isn’t Stealing” examines the Justice Department’s case against the file-sharing site Megaupload and the larger definitions of property and theft on which the government’s case is based. Green traces the evolution of a legal philosophy in which goods are understood in singular terms as something you can own or have taken away from you; as he puts it, “for Caveman Bob to ‘steal’ from Caveman Joe meant that Bob had taken something of value from Joe — say, his favorite club — and that Joe, crucially, no longer had it. Everyone recognized, at least intuitively, that theft constituted what can loosely be defined as a zero-sum game: what Bob gained, Joe lost.”

It’s flattering to have my neanderthal namesake mentioned as the earliest of criminals, and not entirely inappropriate, as I myself, a child of the personal-computer revolution, grew up with a much more elastic and (self-)forgiving model of appropriation, one based on the easy and theoretically limitless sharing of data. As Green observes, Caveman Bob’s descendants operate on radically different terrain. “If Cyber Bob illegally downloads Digital Joe’s song from the Internet, it’s crucial to recognize that, in most cases, Joe hasn’t lost anything.” This is because modern media are intangible things, like electricity, so that “What Bob took, Joe, in some sense, still had.”

Green’s point about the intuitive moral frameworks in which we evaluate the fairness of a law (and, by implication, decide whether or not it should apply to us) accurately captures my generation’s feeling, back in the days of vinyl LPs and audiocassettes, that it was no big deal to make a mix tape and share it with friends. For that geeky subset of us who then flocked to the first personal computers — TRS-80s, Apple IIs, Commodore 64s and the like — it was easy to extend that empathic force field to excuse the rampant copying and swapping of five-and-a-quarter inch floppy disks at local gatherings of the AAPC (Ann Arbor Pirate’s Club). And while many of us undoubtedly grew up into the sort of upstanding citizens who pay for every byte they consume, I remain to this day in thrall to that first exciting rush of infinite availability promised by the computer and explosively realized by the Web. While I’m aware that pirating content does take money out of its creators’ pockets (a point Green is careful to acknowledge), that knowledge, itself watered down by the scalar conceit of micropayments, doesn’t cause me to lose sleep over pirating content the way that, say, shoplifting or even running a stop sign would. The law is a personal as well as a public thing.

The other story in yesterday’s Times, though, activates the debate over shared versus protected content on an unexpected (and similarly public/personal) front: Star Trek. Thomas Vinciguerra’s Arts story “A ‘Trek’ Script is Grounded in Cyberspace” describes the injunction brought by CBS/Paramount to stop the production of an episode of Star Trek New Voyages: Phase II, an awkwardly-named but loonily inspired fan collective that has, since 2003, produced seven hours of content that extend the 1966-1969 show. Set not just in the universe of the original series but its specific televisual utopos, the New Voyages reproduce the sets, sound effects, music, and costumes of 60s Trek in an ongoing act of mimesis that has less to do with transformative use than with simulation: the Enterprise bridge in particular is indistinguishable from the set designed by Matt Jeffries, in part because it is based on those designs and subsequent detailing by Franz Joseph and other fan blueprinters.

I’ve watched four of the seven New Voyages, and their uncanny charm has grown with each viewing. For newcomers, the biggest distraction is the recasting of Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and other regulars by different performers whose unapologetic roughness as actors is more than outweighed by their enthusiasm and attention to broad details of gesture: it’s like watching very, very good cosplayers. And now that the official franchise has itself been successfully rebooted, the sole remaining indexical connection to production history embodied by Shatner et al has been sundered. Everybody into the pool, er, transporter room!

I suspect it is the latter point — the sudden opening of a frontier that had seemed so final, encouraging every fan with a camera and an internet connection to partake in their own version of what Roddenberry pitched as a “wagon train to the stars” — that led CBS to put the kibosh on the New Voyages production of Norman Spinrad’s “He Walked Among Us,” a script written in the wake of Spinrad’s great Trek tale “The Doomsday Machine” but never filmed due to internal disputes between Roddenberry and Gene Coon about how best to rewrite it. (The whole story, along with other unrealized Trek scripts, makes for fascinating reading at Memory Alpha.) Although Spinrad was enthusiastic about the New Voyages undertaking and even planned to direct the episode, CBS, according to the Times story, decided to exert its right to hold onto the material, perhaps to publish it or mount it as some sort of online content themselves.

All of which brings us back to the question of Caveman Bob, Caveman Joe, and their cyber/digital counterparts. Corporate policing of fan production is nothing new, although Trek‘s owners have always encouraged a more permeable membrane between official and unofficial contributors than does, say, Lucasfilm. But the seriousness of purpose evidenced by the New Voyages, along with the fan base it has itself amassed, have elevated it from the half-light of the fannish imaginary — a playspace simultaneously authorized and ignored by the powers that be, like the kid-distraction zones at a McDonalds — to something more formidable, if not in its profit potential, then in its ability to deliver a Trek experience more authentic than any new corporate “monetization.” By operationalizing Spinrad’s hitherto forgotten teleplay, New Voyages reminds us of the immense generative possibilities that reside within Trek‘s forty-five years of mitochondrial DNA, waiting to be realized by anyone with the requisite resources and passion. And that’s genuinely threatening to a corporation who formerly relied on economies of scale to ensure that only they could produce new Trek at anything like the level of mass appeal.

But in proceeding as if this were the case, Green might suggest, CBS adheres to an obsolete logic of property and theft, one that insists on the uniqueness and unreproducibility of any given instantiation of Trek. They have not yet embraced the idea that, in the boundless ramifications of a healthy transmedia franchise, there is only ever “moreness”; versions do not cancel each other out, but drive new debates about canonicity and comparisons of value, fueling the discursive games that constitute the texture of an engaged and appreciative fandom. The New Voyages take nothing away from official Trek, because subtraction is an impossibility in the viral marketplace of new media. The sooner CBS realizes this, the better.

Prometheus’s fan dance

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This summer will see the release of Ridley Scott’s Prometheus, a project weighted by considerable expectations given its connection to the thirty-year-old Alien franchise. The particulars of that connection have been kept vague by producers — witness the tortuous finessing of the film’s Wikipedia page:

Conceived as a prequel to Scott’s 1979 science fiction horror film Alien, rewrites of Spaihts’ script by [Damon] Lindelof developed a separate story that precedes the events of Alien, but which is not directly connected to the films in the Alien franchise. According to Scott, though the film shares “strands of Alien’s DNA, so to speak,” and takes place in the same universe, Prometheus will explore its own mythology and ideas.

This kind of strategic ambiguity is a hallmark of the viral marketplace, which replaces the saturation bombing of traditional advertising with the planting of clues and fomenting of mysteries. It’s a fan dance in two senses, scattering meaningful fragments before an audience whose passionate interest and desire to interact are a given. Its logic is that of nonlinear equations and unpredictably large outcomes from small causes, harnessing the butterfly effect to build buzz.

Any lingering doubt about the franchise pedigree of Prometheus, however, should be put to rest by this piece of viral marketing, a simulated TED talk from the year 2023.

The link here is, of course, the identity of the speaker: Peter Weyland is one of the founders of Weyland-Yutani, the evil corporation behind most of the important events in the Alien-Predator universe. “The Company,” as it’s referred to in the 1979 film that launched the franchise, is in part a developer and supplier of armaments, and across the films, comics, and novels of the series, the Company pursues the bioweapon represented by the toothy xenomorph with an implacable willingness to sacrifice human lives: capitalism reconfigured as carnivorous, all-consuming force.

The real-world origins of Weyland-Yutani are quite specific: the name and logo were invented by illustrator Ron Cobb as part of the preproduction and concept art for Alien. Cobb designed many of the symbols and insignia that decorate the uniforms and props of the Nostromo, small but distinctive details that lend the movie’s lived-in future a unity of invented brands. One icon in particular, a set of wings modeled on an Egyptian “sun disk,” was associated with Weyland-Yutani, a name that Cobb threw together as a combination of in-joke and future history:

Science fiction films offer golden opportunities to throw in little scraps of information that suggest enormous changes in the world. There’s a certain potency in those kinds of remarks. Weylan Yutani for instance is almost a joke, but not quite. I wanted to imply that poor old England is back on its feet and has united with the Japanese, who have taken over the building of spaceships the same way they have now with cars and supertankers. In coming up with a strange company name I thought of British Leyland and Toyota, but we couldn’t use “Leyland-Toyota” in the film. Changing one letter gave me “Weylan,” and “Yutani” was a Japanese neighbor of mine.

A version of this logo and the current version of the company name (which adds a “d” to “Weylan”) ends the simulated TED talk, demonstrating another chaos dynamic that shapes the fortunes of fantastic-media franchises: minute details of production design can blossom, with the passage of the years, into giant nodes of continuity. These nodes unify not just the separate installments of a series of films, but their transmedia and paratextual extensions: the fantasy TED talk “belongs” to the Alien universe thanks to its shared use of Cobb’s design assets. Instances like this make a convincing case that 1970s production design in science fiction film laid the groundwork for the extensive transmedia fantasy worlds of today.

As for Peter Weyland’s talk, which was directed by Ridley Scott’s son and scripted by Damon Lindelof (co-creator of another complex serial narrative, LOST), the bridging of science fiction and science fact here manifests as a collusion between brands, one fictional and one “real” — but how real is TED, anyway? I mean this not as a slam, but as acknowledgment that TED often operates in what Phil Rosen has termed “the rhetoric of the forecast,” speculating about futures that lie just around the corner. In this way, perhaps the 2023 TED talk is an example of what Jean Baudrillard called a “deterrence machine,” using its own explicit fictiveness to reinforce the sense of reality around TED, much like Disneyland in relation to Los Angeles:

Disneyland is there to conceal the fact that it is the “real” country, all of “real” America, which is Disneyland (just as prisons are there to conceal the fact that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, which is carceral). Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology), but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle.

One wonders what Baudrillard would have made of the contemporary transmediascape, with its vast and dispersed fictional worlds superintending a swarm of texts and products, the nostalgic archives of its past, the hyped adumbrations of its present. Certainly our entertainment industries are becoming ever more sophisticated in the rigor and reach of their fantasy construction: a fan dance with the future, and a process in which observant audiences eagerly assist.

Paranormal Activity 2

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I was surprised to find myself eager, even impatient, to watch Paranormal Activity 2, the followup to 2007’s no-budget breakthrough in surveillance horror. I wrote of the first movie that it delivered a satisfactory double-action of filmic and commercial engineering, chambering and firing its purchased scares in a way that felt requisitely unexpected and, at the same time, reassuringly predictable. The bonus of seeing it in a theater (accompanied by my mom, and my therapist would like to know why I chose to omit that fact from the post) was a happy reminder that crowds can improve, rather than degrade, the movie experience.

PA2 I took in at home after my wife had gone to bed. I lay on a couch in a living room dark except for the low light of a small lamp: a setting well-suited to a drama that takes place largely in domestic spaces at night. My complete lack of fear or even the faint neck-tickle of eeriness probably just proves the truism that some movies work best with an audience — but let’s not forget that cinema does many kinds of work, and offers many varieties of pleasure. This is perhaps especially true of horror, whose glandular address of our viscera places it among the body genres of porn and grossout comedy (1), and whose narratives of inevitable peril and failed protection offer a plurality of identifications where X marks the intersection of the boy-girl lines of gender and the killer-victim lines of predation (2).

I’m not sure what Carol Clover would make of Paranormal Activity 2 or its predecessor (though see here for a nice discussion), built as they are on the conceit of a gaze so disinterested it has congealed into the pure alienness of technology. Shuffled among the mute witnesses of a bank of home-security cameras, we are not in the heads of Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, or even Gaspar Noe, but instead the sensorium — and sensibility — of HAL. A good part of the uncanniness, and hence the fun, comes from the way this setup eschews the typical constructions of cinematography: conventions of framing and phrasing that long ago (with the rise of classical film style) achieved their near-universal legibility at the cost of their willingness to truly disrupt and disturb. PA2 is grindhouse dogme, wringing chills from its formal obstructions.

Rather than situating us securely in narrative space through establishing shots and analytic closeups, shot-reverse-shot, and point-of-view editing, PA2 either suspends us outside the action, hovering at the ceiling over kitchens and family rooms rendered vast as landscapes by a wide-angle lens, or throws us into the action in handheld turmoil that even in mundane and friendly moments feels violent. The visuals and their corresponding “spatials” position viewers as ghosts themselves, alternately watching from afar in building frustration and hunger, then taking posession of bodies for brief bouts of hot corporality. Plotwise, we may remain fuzzy on what the spectral force in question (demon? haunted house? family curse?) finally wants, but on the level of spectatorial empathy, it is easy to grasp why it both hates and desires its victims.

Along with Von Trier, other arty analogs for PA2 might be Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman or Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen’s Riddles of the Sphinx, which similarly locate us both inside and outside domestic space to reveal how houses can be “haunted” by gender and power. They share, that is, a clinical interest in the social and ideological compartmentalization of women, though in the Paranormal Activity films the critique remains mostly dormant, waiting to be activated in the readings of brainy academics. (Certainly one could write a paper on PA2’s imbrication of marriage, maternity, and hysterical “madness,” or on the role of technological prophylaxis in protecting the white bourgeois from an Other coded not just as female but as ethnic.)

But for this brainy academic, what’s most interesting about PA2 is the way it weaves itself into the first film. Forming an alternate “flightpath” through the same set of events, the story establishes a tight set of linkages to the story of Micah and Katie, unfolding before, during, and after their own deadly misadventure of spirit photography gone wrong. It is simultaneously prequel, sequel, and expansion to Paranormal Activity, and hence an example — if a tightly conscribed one — of transmedia storytelling, in which a fictional world, its characters, and events can be visited and revisited in multiple tellings. In comments on my post on 2008’s Cloverfield, Martyn Pedler pointed out that film’s transmedia characteristics, and I suggested at the time that “Rather than continuing the story of Cloverfield, future installments might choose to tell parallel or simultaneous stories, i.e. the experiences of other people in the city during the attack.”

Paranormal Activity 2 does precisely that for its tiny, spooky universe. It may not be the scariest movie I’ve seen lately, but for what it implies about the evolving strategies of genre cinema in an age of new media, it’s one of the more intriguing.

Works Cited

1. Linda Williams, “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess,” Film Quarterly 44:4 (Summer 1991), 2-13.

2. Carol J. Clover, Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).

Counting Down Galactica (1 of 4)

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One advantage to serialized narrative of the type I’ve been discussing with my class on TV & New Media this term is the way such stories occasionally align with the flocking of audiences to make a kind of collective reading ritual: conjoined at the internets, we witness each new installment together, previewing, receiving, discussing, digesting in happy cacophony. I remember the thrill of discovering this phenomenon back in the 90s with The X-Files, my first experience with “appointment television,” finding in the nascent USENET newsgroups next day more conversation, concentration, and conspiracy than I could handle. Till then, my pleasures had been too cultishly isolated (Red Dwarf, Mystery Science Theater 3000) or too relegated to reruns and the dislocated arrhythmia of syndication (the original Star Trek and its rebirth — in retrospect, a brilliant piece of franchise engineering — in Next Generation) to coalesce socially.

Nowadays, of course, fannish modes of attentiveness have become the rule rather than the exception, and Battlestar Galactica (followed closely by Lost) is perhaps the most mainstream subcultural artifact going. BSG is winding down, its four-season run drawing to a finish three episodes from tonight’s, and I’ve decided to mark the occasion with my own serial contribution: a set of four blog posts, one each Friday, to count down the end of the series. (I’ve written previously about BSG, and readers hungry for background might wish to check out my Flow essay.)

Even as I invoke the idea of some solid ending, it sounds hollow: for in confronting Galactica in its true multiplicity, one has to acknowledge that BSG has achieved critical mass for franchise immortality, its storyworld spinning off into extensions via TV, film, videogames, and on and on. A new series, Caprica, will be airing soon, along with a telefilm, The Plan, which together shift us into a period of history preceding the events of the current series. Prequelization — that odd retrograde movement into primal scenery — is the first symptom that a property has hit its transmedia singularity, backing and filling the fractal nooks and crannies of its narrative terrain. Let’s be honest, though. It won’t really be about narrative anymore, but instead a kind of rhizomatic self-historicization, an ongoing enterprise of mapping diegetic spacetime in all directions at once. On the textual side, it’s about generating more stories; on the industrial and commercial axis, it’s about maximizing profit returns, strip-mining the concept down to its bedrock. We saw what happened when George Lucas did this to Star Wars; let’s hope BSG doesn’t disappear quite so frictionlessly up its own asshole.

All that said, BSG has had a great run, arguably among the finest science-fiction TV series ever, up there with the best sustained stretches of Trek and Doctor Who. It’s mature, dark, intelligent, twisty, devoted to its own premise, and brilliantly cast and filmed. It’s wrapping up this particular incarnation long before series senility sets in — that creeping cancer that overwhelmed The X-Files around season seven and seems to long ago have sapped The Simpsons of its essence — and there is a genuine sense of drama, of something at stake, as the final episodes tick away.

Beyond these generalizations, though, and my eagerness to remain glued to my ringside seat, I don’t have much desire to review the show. Another aspect of serial narrative is that, while it’s unfurling in the realtime of broadcast, it’s like a train rushing by: each episode blurs past, delivering its individual punch, but the ultimate destination (and meaning/quality of the journey) is impossible to discern. There will be time for that, all the time in the world, when the series has concluded and we begin our long scholarship using DVD box sets and the Battlestar Wiki, canonizing favorite characters, arcs, and episodes, remixing our vids and building our model kits. The show will live on, that is, in our vernacular study and reverence of it, and if the franchise does go sour, at least we’ll always have Adama as singularly embodied by Edward James Olmos from 2004-2009. In these “countdown” posts, I’ll focus instead on more global aspects of BSG, from its place in science-fiction history to the aesthetics of its visual effects.

The image at the top of this post is from Ralph McQuarrie’s concept art for the 1970s series that launched Galactica (both ship and franchise) on its starlost voyage. In next week’s post, I’ll speak more about that incarnation of BSG and my own encounter with it in the shadows of that larger inspiration — from which Galactica gleefully cannibalized — Star Wars.

Getting Granular with Setpieces

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Dan North has published an excellent analysis of the Sandman birth sequence in Spider-Man 3, using this three-minute shot as springboard for a characteristically deft dissection of visual-effects aesthetics and the relationship between CG and live-action filmmaking. His concluding point, that CGI builds on rather than supplants indexical sensibilities — logically extending the cinematographic vocabulary rather than coining utterly alien neologisms — is one that is too often lost in discussions that stress digital technology’s alleged alterity to traditional filmic practices. I’d noticed the Sandman sequence too; in fact, it was paratextually telegraphed to me long before I saw the movie itself, in reviews like this from the New York Times:

… And when [The Sandman] rises from a bed of sand after a “particle atomizer” scrambles his molecules, his newly granulated form shifts and spills apart, then lurches into human form with a heaviness that recalls Boris Karloff staggering into the world as Frankenstein’s monster. There’s poetry in this metamorphosis, not just technological bravura, a glimpse into the glory and agony of transformation.

I don’t have anything to add to Dan’s exegesis (though if I were being picky, I might take issue with his suggestion that the Sandman sequence simply could not have been realized without computer-generated effects; while it’s true that this particular rendering, with its chaotic yet structured swarms of sand-grains, would have taxed the abilities of “stop-motion or another kind of pro-filmic object animation,” the fact is that there are infinitely many ways of designing and staging dramatic events onscreen, and in the hands of a different creative imagination than Sam Raimi and his previz team, the Sandman’s birth might have been realized in much more allusive, poetic, and suggestive ways, substituting panache for pixels; indeed, for all the sequence’s correctly lauded technical artistry and narrative concision, there is something ploddingly literal at its heart, a blunt sense of investigation that smacks of pornography, surveillance-camera footage, and NASA animations — all forms, incidentally, that share the Spider-Man scene’s unflinching long take).

But my attention was caught by this line of Dan’s:

This demarcation of the set-piece is a common trope in this kind of foregrounded spectacle — it has clear entry and exit points and stands alone as an autonomous performance, even as it offers some narrative information; It possesses a limited colour scheme of browns and greys (er … it’s sand-coloured), and the lack of dialogue or peripheral characters further enforces the self-containment.

I’ve long been interested in the concept of the setpiece, that strange cinematic subunit that hovers somewhere between shot, scene, and sequence, hesitating among the registers of cinematography, editing, and narrative, partaking of all while being confinable to none. Setpieces can be an unbroken single shot from the relatively brief (the Sandman’s birth or the opening to Welles’s Touch of Evil) to the extravagantly extended (the thirteen-minute tracking shot with which Steadicam fetishist Brian DePalma kicks off Snake Eyes). But we’re perhaps most familiar with the setpiece as constituted through the beats of action movies: hailstorms of tightly edited velocity and collision like the car chases in Bullitt or, more humorously, Foul Play; the fight scenes and song-and-dance numbers that act as structuring agents and generic determinants of martial-arts movies and musicals respectively; certain “procedural” stretches of heist, caper, and espionage films, like the silent CIA break-in of Mission Impossible (smartly profiled in a recent Aspect Ratio post). Setpieces often occur at the start of movies or near the end as a climactic sequence, but just as frequently erupt throughout the film’s running time like beads on a string; Raiders of the Lost Ark is a gaudy yet elegant necklace of such baubles, including one of my favorites, the “basket chase” set in Cairo. Usually wordless, setpieces tend to feature their own distinctive editing rhythms, musical tracks, and can-you-top-this series of gags and physical (now digital) stunts.

Setpieces are, in this sense, like mini-movies embedded within bigger movies, and biological metaphor might be the best way to describe their temporal and reproductive scalability. Like atavistic structures within the human body, setpieces seem to preserve long-ago aesthetics of early cinema: their logic of action and escalation recalls Edison kinetoscopes and Keystone Cops chases, while more hushed and contemplative setpieces (like the Sandman birth) have about them something of the arresting stillness and visual splendor of the actualite. Or to get all DNAish on you, setpieces are not unlike the selfish genes of which Richard Dawkins writes: traveling within the hosts of larger filmic bodies, vying for advantage in the cultural marketplace, it is actually the self-interested proliferation of setpieces that drives the replication — and evolution — of certain genres. The aforementioned martial-arts movies and musicals, certainly; but also the spy movie, the war and horror film, racing movies, and the many vivid flavors of gross-out comedy. The latest innovation in setpiece genetics may be the blockbuster transmedia franchise, which effectively “brands” certain sequences and delivers them in reliable (and proprietary) form to audiences: think of the lightsaber duels in any given phenotypic expression of Star Wars, from film to comic to videogame.

On an industrial level, of course, setpieces also signal constellations of labor that we can recognize as distinct from (while inescapably articulated to) the films’ ostensible authors. One historical instance of this is the work of Slavko Vorkapich, renowned for the montages he contributed to other peoples’ movies — so distinctive in his talents that to “Vorkapich” something became a term of art in Hollywood. Walt Disney was a master when it came to channeling and rebranding the work of individual artists under his own overweening “vision”; more recently we have the magpie-like appropriations of George Lucas, who was only in a managerial sense the creator of the Death Star battle that ends the 1977 Star Wars: A New Hope. This complexly composited and edited sequence (itself largely responsible for bringing setpieces into being as an element of fannish discourse) was far more genuinely the accomplishment of John Dykstra and his crew at Industrial Light and Magic, not to mention editors Richard Chew and Marcia Lucas. Further down the line — to really ramify the author function out of existence — the battle’s parentage can be traced to the cinematographers and editors who assembled the World War II movies — Tora! Tora! Tora!, The Bridges at Toko-Ri, The Dam Busters, etc. — from which Lucas culled his reference footage, a 16mm reel that Dykstra and ILM used as a template for the transcription of Mustangs and Messerschmitts into X-Wings and TIE Fighters.

Thirty years after the first Star Wars, sequences in blockbuster films are routinely farmed out to visual effects houses, increasing the likelihood that subunits of the movie will manifest their own individuating marks of style, dependent on the particular aesthetic tendencies and technological proficiencies of the company in question. (Storyboards and animatics, as well as on-the-fly oversight of FX shots in pipeline, help to minimize the levels of difference here, smoothing over mismatches in order to fit the outsourced chunks of content together into a singularly authored text — hinting at new ways in which the hoary concepts of “compositing” and “continuity” might be redeployed as a form of meta-industrial critique.) In the case of Spider-Man 3, no fewer than eight FX houses were involved (BUF, Evil Eye Pictures, Furious FX, Gentle Giant Studios, Giant Killer Robots, Halon Entertainment, Tweak Films, and X1fx) in addition to Sony Pictures Imageworks, which produced the Sandman shot.

When we look at a particular setpiece, then, we also pinpoint a curious node in the network of production: a juncture at which the multiplicity of labor required to generate blockbuster-scale entertainment must negotiate with our sense of a unified, unique product / author / vision. Perhaps this is simply an accidental echo of the collective-yet-singular aura that has always attended the serial existence of superheroes; what is Spider-Man but a single artwork scripted, drawn, acted, and realized onscreen by decades of named and nameless creators? But before all of this, we confront a basic heterogeneity that textures film experience: our understanding, at once obvious and profound, that some parts of movies stand out as better or worse or more in need of exploration than others. Spider-Man 3, as Dan acknowledges, is not a great film; but that does not mean it cannot contain great moments. In sifting for and scrutinizing such gems, I wonder if academics like us aren’t performing a strategic if unconscious role — one shared by the increasingly contiguous subcultures of journalists, critics, and fans — our dissective blogging facilitating a trees-over-forest approach to film analysis, a “setpiece-ification” that reflects the odd granularity of contemporary blockbuster media.

Crudeness, Complexity, and Venom’s Bite

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Back in the 70s, like most kids who grew up middle-class and media-saturated in the U.S., I lived for the blocks of cartoons that aired after school and on Saturday mornings. From Warner Brothers and Popeye shorts to affable junk like Hong Kong Phooey, I devoured just about everything, with the notable exception of Scooby Doo, which I endured with resigned numbness as a bridge between more interesting shows. (Prefiguring my later interest in special effects both cheesy and classy, I was also nutty for the live-action Filmation series the networks would occasionally try out on us: cardboard superhero morality plays like Shazam! and Isis, as well as SF-lite series Ark II, Space Academy, and Jason of Star Command, which was the Han Solo to Space Academy‘s Luke Skywalker.)

Nowadays, as a fancypants professor of media studies who teaches courses on animation and fandom, I have, I suppose, moved on to a more mature appreciation of the medium’s possibilities, just as animation itself has found a new cultural location in primetime fare like Family Guy, South Park, and CG features from Pixar and DreamWorks that speak simultaneously to adult and child audiences. But the unreformed ten-year-old in me is still drawn to kids’ cartoons – SpongeBob is sublime, and I rarely missed an episode of Bruce Timm’s resurrection of Superman from the 1990s. This week I had a look at the new CW series, The Spectacular Spider-Man (Wiki rundown here; Sony’s official site here), and was startled both by my own negative response to the show’s visual execution and my realization that the transmedia franchise has passed me by while I was busy with others things … like going to graduate school, getting married, and buying a house. Maybe the photographic evidence of a youthful encounter that recently turned up has made me sensitive to the passage of time; whatever the cause, the new series came as a shock.

First, the visual issue. It’s jolting how crude the animation of the new Spider-Man looks to my eye, especially given my belief that criticisms of this type are inescapably tied to generational position: the graphics of one era seem trite beside the graphics of another, a grass-is-always-greener perceptual mismatch we all too readily misrecognize as transhistorical, inherent, beyond debate. In this case, time’s arrow runs both ways: The garbage kids watch today doesn’t hold a candle to the art we had when I was young from one direction, Today’s shows [or movies, or music, or baseball teams, etc.] are light-years beyond that laughable crap my parents watched from the other. Our sense of a media object’s datedness is based not on some teleological evolution (as fervently as we might believe it to be so) but on stylistic shifts and shared understandings of the norm — literally, states of the art. This technological and aesthetic flux means that very little cultural material from one decade to another escapes untouched by some degree of ideological Doppler shift, whether enshrined as classic or denigrated as obsolete, retrograde, stunted.

Nevertheless, I have a hard time debating the evidence of my eyes – eyes here understood as a distillation of multiple, ephemeral layers of taste, training, and cultural comfort zoning. The character designs, backgrounds, framing and motion of The Spectacular Spider-Man seem horribly low-res at first glance: inverting the too-many-notes complaint leveled at W. A. Mozart, this Spider-Man simply doesn’t have enough going on inside it. Of course, bound into this assessment of the cartoon’s graphic surface is an indictment of more systemic deficits: the dialogue, characterization, and storytelling seem thin, undercooked, dashed off. Around my visceral response to the show’s pared-down quality there is a whiff of that general curmudgeonly rot (again, one tied to aging — there are no young curmudgeons): The Spectacular Spider-Man seems slangy and abrupt, rendered in a rude optical and narrative shorthand that irritates me because it baffles me. I see the same pattern in my elderly parents’ reactions to certain contemporary films, whose rhythms seem to them both stroboscopically intense and conceptually vapid.

The irony in all this is that animation historically has been about doing more with less — maximizing affective impact, narrative density, and thematic heft with a relative minimum of brush strokes, keyframes, cel layers, blobs of clay, or pixels. Above all else, animation is a reducing valve between the spheres of industrial activity that generate it and the reception contexts in which the resulting texts are encountered. While the mechanism of the live-action camera captures reality in roughly a one-to-one ratio, leaving only the stages of editing and postproduction to expand the labor-time involved in its production, animation is labor- and time-intensive to its very core: it takes far longer to produce one frame than it takes to run that frame through the projector. (This is nowhere clearer than in contemporary CG filmmaking; in the more crowded shots of Pixar’s movie Cars, for example, some frames took entire weeks to render.)

As a result, animation over the decades has refined a set of representational strategies for the precise allocation of screen activity: metering change and stasis according to an elaborate calculus in which the variables of technology, economics, and artistic expression compete — often to the detriment of one register over another. Most animation textbooks introduce the idea of limited animation in reference to anime, whose characteristic mode of economization is emblematized by frozen or near-frozen images imparted dynamism by a subtle camera movement. But in truth, all animation is limited to one degree or another. And the critical license we grant those limitations speaks volumes about collective cultural assumptions. In Akira, limitation is art: in Super Friends (a fragment of which I caught while channel-surfing the other day and found unwatchably bad), it’s a commercial cutting-of-corners so base and clumsy as to make your eyeballs burst.

It’s probably clear that with all these caveats and second-guessings, I don’t trust my own response to The Spectacular Spider-Man‘s visual sophistication (or lack of it). My confidence in my own take is further undermined by the realization that the cartoon, as the nth iteration of a Spider-Man universe approaching its fiftieth year, pairs its apparent crudeness with vast complexity: for it is part of one of our few genuine transmedia franchises. I’ve written on transmedia before, each time, I hope, getting a little closer to understanding what these mysterious, emergent entities are and aren’t. At times I see them as nothing more than a snazzy rebranding of corporate serialized media, an enterprise almost as old as that other oldest profession, in which texts-as-products reproduce themselves in the marketplace, jiggering just enough variation and repetition into each spinoff that it hits home with an audience eager for fresh installments of familiar pleasures. At other times, though, I’m less cynical. And for all its sketchiness, The Spectacular Spider-Man offers a sobering reminder that transmedia superheroes have walked the earth for decades: huge, organic archives of storytelling, design networks, and continuously mutating continuity.

Geoff Long, who has thought about the miracles and machinations of transmedia more extensively and cogently than just about anyone I know, recently pointed out that we live amid a glut of new transmedia lines, most of which — like those clouds of eggs released by sea creatures, with only a lottery-winning few lucky enough to survive and reproduce — are doomed to failure. Geoff differentiates between these “hard” transmedia launches and more “soft” and “crunchy” transmedia that grow slowly from a single, largely unanticipated success. In Spider-Man, Batman, Superman and the like, we have serial empires of apparent inexhaustibility: always more comic books, movies, videogames, action figures to be minted from the template.

But the very scale of a long-lived transmedia system means that, at some point, it passes you by; which is what happened to me with Spider-Man, around the time that Venom appeared. This symbiotic critter (I could never quite figure out if it’s a sentient villain, an alter-ego of Spidey, or just a very aggressive wardrobe malfunction) made its appearance around 1986, approximately the same time that I was getting back into comic books through Love and Rockets, Cerebus, and the one-two punch of Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns and Moore’s and Gibbons’s Watchmen. Venom represented a whole new direction for Spider-Man, and, busy with other titles, I never bothered to do the homework necessary to bind him into my personal experience of Spider-Man’s diegetic history. Thus, Sam Raimi’s botched Spider-Man 3 left me cold (though it did restage some of the Gwen Stacy storyline that broke my little heart in the 70s), and when Venom happened to show up on the episode of Spectacular Spider-Man that I watched, I realized just how out of touch I’ve become. Venom is everywhere, and any self-respecting eight-year-old could probably lecture me on his lifespan and dietary habits.

Call this lengthy discourse a meditation on my own aging — a bittersweet lament on the fact that you can’t stay young forever, can’t keep up with everything the world of pop entertainment has to offer. Long after I’ve stopped breathing, the networked narratives of my favorite superheroes and science-fiction worlds will continue to proliferate. My mom and dad can enjoy this summer’s Iron Man without bothering over the lengthy history of that hero; perhaps I’ll get to the same point when, as an old man one day, I confront some costumed visual effect whose name I’ve never heard of. In the meantime, Venom oozes virally through the sidechannels and back-alleys of Spider-Man’s mediaverse, popping up in the occasional cartoon to tease me — much as he does the eternally-teenaged, ever-tormented Peter Parker — with a dark glimpse of my own mortality, as doled out in the traumas of transmedia.