Show Sold Separately. Jonathan Gray
our understanding of it; and so forth. In other words, there is never a point in time at which a text frees itself from the contextualizing powers of paratextuality.
Wear the T-Shirt, Skip the Film: Paratextual Superiority
Nevertheless, paratexts sometimes take over their texts. A child can, for instance, eat the Disney movie Happy Meal, buy the toys and the coloring books, and play the game with his or her friends without actually watching the film. Similarly, some fans recount the experience of falling more heavily for a text’s fan discussion site than for the text itself. If today’s television and film paratextuality extends the horizons of the narrative universe well beyond what “the text itself” offers, surely some audience members will find that the universe is more interesting at its horizons. In such cases, these audience members may still consider themselves fans or at least viewers of the text, but here rather than simply modify or inflect the text, the paratexts may in time become the text, as the audience members take their cues regarding what a text means from the paratext’s images, signs, symbols, and words, rather than from the film or program’s. As analysts, we might be tempted to think of the paratexts here as mere residue, or a long shadow, of the show, but individual audience members may not care to make the distinction between paratext and show. Precisely because the language of “paratextuality” is absent from everyday talk of film and television, and because the desire to delineate exactly what is and is not “the text” is often an analyst’s alone, not an average audience member’s, frequently we may find that audience talk of and reaction to a text may have originated with the paratext, yet been integrated into the individual audience member’s conception of “the text itself.”
Shunning the text in favor of the paratext may appear a somewhat anomalous practice, but as we have said, any given individual speculatively consumes thousands of texts over the course of his or her life. We cannot watch every show in order to choose what we would prefer to watch, and thus, by force of necessity, we all regularly allow paratexts to stand in for texts. As I have written elsewhere, non-fan and anti-fan texts in particular are often only partially consumed, therefore shifting the burden of textuality to the paratext.56 If all paratexts were accurate depictions of their related texts, and if no paratexts introduced any meaning other than those meanings which are in the related shows, paratexts would be unremarkable. However, since paratexts have, as I have argued and as the remaining chapters will show, considerable power to amplify, reduce, erase, or add meaning, much of the textuality that exists in the world is paratext-driven.
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Coming Soon!
Hype, Intros, and Textual Beginnings
Academic and popular accounts of film and television are frequently suffused with discussion of what happens after watching, following such questions as “What did you think of such-and-such a show?”, “What effects might it have?”, and “What does it mean?” The social science tradition of studying media has also produced considerable work examining what happens before watching, with, for instance, a strand of “uses and gratifications” research that studies the motivating factors behind one’s choice to watch, and another strand of production studies and political economy that explores the creative and economic processes that go into creating media. But comparatively little work exists from within a humanistic tradition examining how meaning begins and where texts come from, suggesting by its absence that texts begin when the first scene of a film or program begins. A refreshing exception is Charles Acland’s reading of multiplex geographies, construction, and contexts.1 Exploring similar terrain for television (and for films on television), Barbara Klinger has also examined the geography of the home theater.2 As important as such work is, and as much as it reminds us of the paratexts of geography and technology, in this chapter I argue that films and television programs often begin long before we actively seek them out, and that their textual histories are every bit as complex and requiring of study as are their audience, creative, or economic histories. This chapter is thus about the true beginnings of texts as coherent clusters of meaning, expectation, and engagement, and about the text’s first initial outposts, in particular trailers, posters, previews, and hype.
As was discussed in the Introduction, Hollywood invests large amounts of money, time, and labor into hyping its products. Therefore, just as one would not expect Nike to construct its ads half-heartedly, there should in theory be nothing random or accidental about the meanings on offer in Hollywood’s trailers, posters, previews, and ad campaigns. Clint Culpepper, president of Sony Screen Gems, warns, “You can have the most terrific movie in the world, and if you can’t convey that fact in fifteen- and thirty-second TV ads it’s like having bad speakers on a great stereo.”3 As a result, DreamWorks’ head of creative advertising David Sameth has said of trailers, “We’ll spend five months to a year obsessing about them, every single cut and every single moment we use,”4 showing how carefully manicured many texts’ ads are. In a rare academic account of trailers, meanwhile, John Ellis writes of them as offering a “narrative image” in which everything can be assumed to be there for a reason, and “can be assumed to be calculated. Hence everything tends to be pulled into the process of meaning.”5 Rather than regard trailers, previews, and ads as textually removed from the shows they announce, therefore, Ellis suggests, albeit briefly, that they are part of the show’s narrative, and that they are concentrates of the show’s meaning. Precisely because trailers, previews, and ads introduce us to a text and its many proposed and supposed meanings, the promotional material that we consume sets up, begins, and frames many of the interactions that we have with texts. More than merely point us to the text at hand, these promos will have already begun the process of creating textual meaning, serving as the first outpost of interpretation. Promos often take the first steps in filling a text with meaning. The term “trailer” is a hold-over from when trailers followed films, but in today’s media environment, movies and television shows are trailing the trailers and promos in months not minutes, slowly plodding forth while meanings, interpretations, evaluations, and all manner of audience and industry chatter are already on the scene. We may in time resist the meanings proposed by promotional materials, but they tell us what to expect, direct our excitement and/or apprehension, and begin to tell us what a text is all about, calling for our identification with and interpretation of that text before we have even seemingly arrived at it. This chapter will examine how texts begin, not in their opening scenes, but in their hype, promos, trailers, posters, previews, and opening credit sequences, and how these paratexts may continue to figure into the interpretive process even after the film or television show has started.
I will begin by discussing the role of promotional campaigns and trailers in initiating textuality, creating a genre, networking star intertexts, and introducing us to a new storyworld. This discussion leads into examinations of several movie posters and their initiation of their texts, and of a 2006 promotional campaign for ABC’s Six Degrees. Looking at a New York subway poster campaign and at the show’s advance teaser website, I will argue that both set up a gender, a genre, a style, and an attitude for the show before it hit the air. This pre-text was not a wholly accurate reflection of the television program that followed, and so too is my next case study one in which the paratext and the show itself failed to work in concert with one another. Close-reading two trailers for Atom Egoyan’s film The Sweet Hereafter, I examine how one film can “begin” in such starkly different ways depending upon the trailer that precedes it. Then, following this example, I ask what we are to make of the rise of trailers and hype, and of their increasing prominence on television and online in particular, especially given that, as I will argue, they play a constitutive role in establishing a “proper” interpretation for a text. This interest in “proper” interpretations finally leads to a discussion of television opening credit sequences as paratexts that can operate both as entryway and in medias res, telling us how to interpret a text, and then returning to remind us of this official, sanctioned interpretation, and serving a ritual purpose of transporting us once more into that storyworld. Throughout the chapter, my interests lie in where texts come from and how we return to them.