Branding, Culture, Politics, and Everything in Between

For the uninitiated, here’s a short description of what is transmedia storytelling. Henry Jenkins and Transmedia Storytelling:

A transmedia story represents the integration of entertainment experiences across a range of different media platforms. A story like Heroes or Lost might spread from television into comics, the web, computer or alternate reality games, toys and other commodities, and so forth, picking up new consumers as it goes and allowing the most dedicated fans to drill deeper. The fans, in turn, may translate their interests in the franchise into concordances and wikipedia entries, fan fiction, vids, fan films, cosplay, game mods, and a range of other participatory practices that further extend the story world in new directions. Both the commercial and grassroots expansion of narrative universes contribute to a new mode of storytelling, one which is based on an encyclopedic expanse of information which gets put together differently by each individual consumer as well as processed collectively by social networks and online knowledge communities.

An apt metaphor that Jenkins has used is the art of “world building”, creating a storyline where readers can jump in and contribute at any point or from any medium. Transmedia storytelling has usually been about expanding one cultural franchise into new media channels, as stated above. However, what happens when you start expanding cultural franchises into other cultural franchises?

Inglourious Basterds and True Romance: Bonded by Family Blood

Quentin Tarantino has been building universes since day one. The characters of Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction and Death Proof talk about one another while eating at the same restaurants (like Big Kahuna Burger). Characters jump from one feature to another, and family relations might be mentioned in one script, but not seen on screen until another movie down the line. And at the Austin premiere of Inglourious Basterds, The Playlist learned that this film is, not surprisingly, related to True Romance, in a way that detail-oriented fans probably already suspect.

Fans of True Romance remember Saul Rubinek’s character, the producer Lee Donowitz. (Based by director Tony Scott, in a not too subtle manner, on Joel Silver.) In Austin, Tarantino said that Lee’s father is Eli Roth’s Inglourious Basterds character, Sgt. Donnie “The Bear Jew” Donowitz. Donnie is a violent, slightly unhinged individual, and some elements of that character were perhaps passed onto his son, who in True Romance is proud of his film Coming Home in a Body Bag.

I think this goes beyond just mashing up two cultural franchises in a one-off piece (like Aliens vs. Predators or Superman vs. Batman). This is more nuanced, more sophisticated and requires a higher level of literacy and dedication to Tarantino’s works. Tarantino’s works are currently confined only to the cinema medium, but I think this cross-referencing could be expanded to other media, easily. If transmedia storytelling is about creating “worlds”, as Jenkins states, then the next step might be about creating universes.

This is more of a rant, so take it as such. I’m just starting to conceptualize this subject, so there will probably be more posts to follow.

From the Wall Street Journal:

“Rebooting movies after the success of Batman is only logical, Kirk.”

The new “Star Trek” movie, opening next month, boldly goes where no “Trek” film has gone before: back to the beginning. It’s set in the decades before the start of the TV series, returning to the young adulthoods of space adventurers James T. Kirk and Spock and their first voyage on the Starship Enterprise.

Some of Hollywood’s biggest franchises, including “X-Men” and “Terminator,” are taking a similar back-to-the-future approach this summer. To refresh familiar film sagas and grab new audiences, studios are increasingly offering up stories that trace the early years of popular characters and tell epics from their beginnings.

Sami had spotted an interesting article about “cultural latency”, which made me think about the current state of Hollywood productions, and especially reboots and comicbook movies.

Digital distribution removes many of the friction points within the distribution system – making it more efficient, economically speaking.

But this also seems to lead to far more rapid cultural decay rates – sales charts now are driven almost exclusively by novelty – top selling DVDs are just what came out that week.

A reboot or a superhero movie has a clear business logic: you leverage a known cultural product and an existing fan base to assure you have an inbuilt audience before you even start advertising it. There’s a very clear reason why Hollywood is going for more predictability in its revenue: as the movie is released on the big screen, it’s just a matter of time when a pirate version is out there on the streets or on the internet. That’s why the opening weekend smash has become so important: get most of the money early, wait a few weeks and then start working on the home theater version, as the article stated.

Getting people to come on an opening weekend requires a lot of advertising and buzz, which has helped inflate film budgets considerably. It’d be interesting to see how much advertising is taking proportionally from a film’s budget nowadays. My guess is that the proportion has grown considerably.

Given all this, we should look for more movies in the Da Vinci code, Marvel or reboot variety. However, there’s a countering to the old “common denominator” theory. What Henry Jenkins calls “transmedia storytelling“, where a cultural product (film, book, comic etc.) is just one entry point to the franchise’s “world”, is becoming an increasing trend in storytelling. Think Star Wars and the Matrix: these franchises feature multiple products: games, books, comics etc. and they all work as individual works, but together they all tie in to the parent mythology. This is making storytelling deeper and more engaging, even as average Joe’s can enjoy just the individual works one at a time. The fans have their work cut out for them in mining the worlds and making sense of them.

Relating to this, Grant McCracken has argued that popular culture is becoming more and more self-referential, and thus smarter all the time. Star Trek was peppered with small references (albeit to Star Trek mythology) throughout the film. It’s becoming more and more rewarding watching Hollywood films if you have a wide range of pop culture knowledge.

It’s going to be interesting to see how we see and interpret movies is going to change if more and more movies are going to be safe bets. But on the other hand, Batman proved that a complex and darker movie could also make it big, and I think you could see a bit of risk taking in how Star Trek was done. I doubt that even Watchmen would have been greenlit without Batman’s success.

But on that note, here’s the trailer on the new adaptation of Sherlock Holmes, by Guy Ritchie: