Show Sold Separately. Jonathan Gray
the “threshold” between the inside and the outside of the text, and while paratexts can exist without a source—as when we read commentary on films or television shows that have been lost to time, for instance—a text cannot exist without paratexts.3 Writing of books, Genette offered a long list of paratexts, including covers, title pages, typesetting, paper, name of author, dedications, prefaces, and introductions as examples of “peritexts”—paratexts within the book—and interviews, reviews, public responses, and magazine ads as “epitexts”—paratexts outside the book.4 He also allowed for paratexts of fact, so that, for instance, knowing an author’s gender could serve its own paratextual function. Genette argued that we can only approach texts through paratexts, so that before we start reading a book, we have consumed many of its paratexts. Far from being tangentially related to the text, paratexts provide “an airlock that helps the reader pass without too much difficulty from one world to the other, a sometimes delicate operation, especially when the second world is a fictional one.”5 In other words, paratexts condition our entrance to texts, telling us what to expect, and setting the terms of our “faith” in subsequent transubstantiation. Hence, for instance, an ad telling us of a film’s success at Cannes and Sundance would prepare us for a markedly different film than would, say, an ad that boasts endorsement from Britney Spears (even if both ads refer to the same film). Each paratext acts like an airlock to acclimatize us to a certain text, and it demands or suggests certain reading strategies. We rely upon such paratexts to help us choose how to spend our leisure time: they tell us which movies and television programs to watch, which are priorities, which to avoid, which to watch alone and which to watch with friends, which to watch on a big screen, which to save for times when we need a pick-me-up, and so on. Thus, paratexts tell us what to expect, and in doing so, they shape the reading strategies that we will take with us “into” the text, and they provide the all-important early frames through which we will examine, react to, and evaluate textual consumption.
As such, the study of paratexts is the study of how meaning is created, and of how texts begin. Moreover, precisely because paratexts help us decide which texts to consume, we often know many texts only at the paratextual level. Everyone consumes many more paratexts than films or programs. When we move onward to the film or program, those paratexts help frame our consumption; but when we do not move onward, all we are left with is the paratext. Hence, for instance, when at a multiplex we choose to watch one of the ten films on offer, we not only create an interpretive construction of the film that we saw; we have often also speculatively consumed many of the other nine. Paratexts, then, become the very stuff upon which much popular interpretation is based. As analysts of media, making sense of the film or program itself remains a vitally important step, but such a step will only tell us what it means to those who have watched it. From Star Wars to The Passion of the Christ (2004), American Idol (2002–) to The Jerry Springer Show (1991–), many shows have meaning for an “audience” that extends well beyond those who actually watched the show. To understand what texts mean to popular culture as a whole, we must examine paratexts too. If media audiences have for too long been seen as unthinking, purely reactive monads, this is in large part because the analysis of media has consistently underplayed the importance of worries, hopes, and expectations in preparing us for texts. As full as the world is of films and television programs, it is more full of worries, hopes, and expectations concerning them. Ultimately, therefore, paratextual study not only promises to tell us how a text creates meaning for its consumers; it also promises to tell us how a text creates meaning in popular culture and society more generally.
“Only Hype”: From Soda to Soderbergh
In creating worries, hopes, and expectations, paratexts work in a remarkably similar manner to advertisements. Ads, of course, are the pariah of the media world, and thus just as paratexts are too often discounted as “only hype,” so too do ads often provoke more scorn than study. It is beyond the scope of this book to heap yet more scorn on ads. However, if we look beyond a moral evaluation of ads to see how they function semiotically, we find the same skeletal form that lies behind most paratextuality.
An ad’s purpose appears simple—to sell and brand a product. As Celia Lury and Alan Warde note, ads exist in such numbers because of “a permanent source of insecurity, uncertainty and anxiety for any producer: for they cannot force people to buy their products and can never be sure that people who already do use them will continue to want to do so.”6 Ads must continue the ministry of consumerism, making us want to buy their products, and giving us faith in the transubstantiation that they in turn promise. However, as many critics of advertising have noted, most ads have long since graduated from the form’s early days of merely listing what a product can do, and many have graduated from selling a specific product. Nike ads do not tell us that a particular line of Nike shoes pad our feet while playing sports, then let us decide whether to purchase them or not. They do not even excitedly tell us what their shoe is. Rather, as Sut Jhally observes, a key function of ads is often to erase much information of what a product is and where it came from, so that the entire history of how it came to be is a mystery: Nike’s labor practices in developing countries, for instance, are neatly left out of the picture, as is even a simple description of the product. Rather, ads aim to create new, metaphysical meanings for a product, so that “once the real meaning has been systematically emptied out of commodities [. . .] advertising then refills this void with its own symbols.”7 Much advertising aims to sell products by creating brand identity and by promising value-added—product and metaphysics.
Nike, for instance, is famous for its ads featuring basketball stars, a hip urban drum beat in the background, and stark, edgy black backgrounds and high-quality cinematography that highlight the stars’ remarkable displays of athletic prowess. As Judith Williamson explains, everything in an ad works as a gestalt and condensation of the product,8 so that here, by being hip, edgy, and urban cool, the ad hopes to create an image of Nike shoes as hip, edgy, and urban cool. By blacking out the background, the ads suggest that sports alone matter. By frequently featuring prominent African American athletes, the company hopes to suggest that it is “all about equality”; and since public mythology holds that many such athletes began playing in housing projects in inner cities, the ads subtly celebrate these athletes’ success and (Nike being the Greek goddess of victory) their victorious navigation of the American Dream. The ads also rely on a racial stereotype of blacks as being more in touch with their bodies, perhaps offering the non-black consumer the opportunity to achieve parity. Thus, the ads aim to create a brand identity, a semiotic entity called Nike that represents victory, the American Dream, equality, urban hip, sporting excellence, raw masculinity, and looking cool while winning. In doing so, they imply that by buying Nike shoes, you are stating publicly your allegiance and dedication to this image. Meanwhile, of course, Nike aims to attach itself to the public images of the stars it uses, hoping that their aura and meaning will rub off on the shoes.
As Gillian Dyer observes in her close study of the semiotics of advertising, in ads, “the meaning of one thing is transferred to or made interchangeable with another quality, whose value attaches itself to the product.”9 For instance, the black background (one thing) is made interchangeable with hipness and edginess (a quality), which attaches itself to the Nike shoes (the product). Effectively, then, ads create elaborate semiotic chains, which might seem to be logical in the moment of watching, but which offer no necessary correlation upon examination. To take another example, many ads for snack foods offer an image of a family in a beautiful, tidy home, yet with a hungry teenage son; usually the mother rescues the day by offering the supposedly ideal snack food, restoring perfection to the family. In such a script, the semiotic chain, “snack food brings happiness to son, which makes son happy with mother, and mother a good provider,” shortens itself to “snack food equals family bliss.” With such stunning sleight of hand, ads frequently add a rich layer of symbolism to any product, literally giving it meaning, rather than simply explaining the product. As such, ads are constitutive of a product’s meaning. Sometimes the proposed meaning and the product’s actual function are related, with the former growing organically from the latter, but this is never a necessity. When Che Guevara or Gandhi can be used to sell computers, advertisers prove themselves capable