Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Politics

Transmedia World-Building Beyond Capitalism

Dan Hassler-Forest

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781783484942
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Medienwissenschaften

From Tolkien to Star Trek and from Game of Thrones to The Walking Dead, imaginary worlds in fantastic genres offer us complex and immersive environments beyond capitalism. This book examines the ways in which these popular storyworlds offer valuable tools for anticapitalist theory and practice. Building on Hardt and Negri’s concept of Empire as a way of understanding globalization, Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Politics shows how popular fantastic fiction has the potential of offering more than a momentary escape from capitalist realism in the age of media convergence and participatory culture. The book approaches fantastic world-building as an ideologically ambiguous way of imagining alternatives to global capitalism. By approaching transmedia world-building both as a narrative form and as a growing industry derived from fan culture, it shows on the one hand the limitations inherent in the political economy of popular genre fiction. But at the same time, it also explores the productive ways in which fantastic storyworlds contain a radical energy that can give us new ways of thinking about politics, popular culture, and anticapitalism.

1

Imaginary Empires

Transmedia World-Building and Global Capitalism

“Everything is awesome.” Anyone who has seen The LEGO Movie¹ won’t be able to hear those words without humming that mind-numbingly stupid but irresistibly catchy tune. The catchphrase is a perfect expression of the film’s ambivalently satirical take on the LEGO brand, the movie itself, and the cultural logic of global capitalism. Both critical and celebratory, participatory and exploitative, independent minded and highly commercial, The LEGO Movie is the perfect cultural product for our times, blithely incorporating a vibrant anticapitalist sentiment into a framework that greases the wheels of global capitalism. So blatant is the film’s overtly satirical take on consumerism, conformity, and commodity culture that film reviewers have described it as “practically communist,”² while commentators on Fox News attacked the film for indoctrinating children with anticapitalist values.³

As bizarre as it may seem to use the term anticapitalist for an animated film whose most obvious function is to advertise a popular toy brand, The LEGO Movie is an illuminating example of the many contradictions that inform twenty-first-century fantastic fiction and its relationship to capitalism. The ideological nerve it has struck is most visible in the film’s early scenes, which depict an urban population that lives in a state of what can only be described as a classically Marxist false consciousness.⁴ The narrative revolves around Emmet, a desperately ordinary construction worker who has been successfully integrated into an elaborate system of ideological mind control. Over the course of the film, Emmet is identified as the Chosen One, and his resulting adventures allow him to escape his desperately tedious life in the service of a vaguely North Korean variation on Starbucks capitalism.

In a more playful way than similarly organized dystopias in films such as The Matrix⁵ and V for Vendetta,⁶ the initial worldview presented in The LEGO Movie seems perfectly aligned with Guy Debord’s famous critique of the “Society of the Spectacle”⁷: the power of capital has become so overwhelming that it encapsulates all of lived experience. The system’s subjects are fully conditioned to take for granted the most monotonous daily routines, while mass media effectively brainwash entire populations. In the film, we are therefore introduced to Emmet as capitalist society’s perfectly indoctrinated subject: consuming endlessly repetitive catchphrase-heavy TV comedies, happily purchasing $37 cups of coffee, and spending his working days singing along to insipid but catchy pop songs with lyrics that reassure him over and over again that everything is indeed awesome.

The fact that Emmet soon thereafter comes to lead a team of adventurous rebels is more or less irrelevant, especially because the increasingly incoherent narrative all but falls apart under the strain of its own metatextual irony. Far more interesting is how the film’s imaginary world establishes itself not as ideologically neutral but as an environment where anticapitalist sentiment exists side by side with the most blatant promotion of a wide range of commodities and branded entertainment franchises. In this ambiguous context, “Everything Is Awesome” becomes a hilariously unsubtle articulation of neoliberalism’s notorious mantra “there is no alternative,” signaling that the world we live in is not just the best but also the only possible world. Just as Emmet learns that he can build whatever he can imagine as long as he builds it out of LEGOs, we, too, can do whatever we want, as long as we don’t question the fundamental logic of capitalism.

But, at the same time, The LEGO Movie makes it impossible to take any of this seriously: its anticapitalist jabs, its casual sexism, its self-reflexive hyper-commercialism, and the finale’s sentimental paternalism are all overshadowed by the film’s tone of overwhelming irony. The obviousness of the film’s many contradictions and the fun we have with its self-satisfied awesomeness make it an especially vivid illustration of the cultural, ideological, and narrative logic of participatory culture and media convergence. With a cast of characters that includes Batman, Wonder Woman, Gandalf, Albus Dumbledore, Lando Calrissian, and Shaquille O’Neal, the jokes and narrative twists rely heavily on viewers’ intimate familiarity with popular franchises and their many transmedia iterations. In this sense, the film’s release is a culmination of the decades-long interaction between a wide range of popular narrative franchises and the LEGO brand. By its very design, LEGO is a toy that involves a highly participatory sensibility, with a productive tension (ultimately central to the film’s plot) between straightforward assembly, as one follows the instructions to put together an X-Wing or a Quidditch arena, and creative production, as components from different sets are easily combined with others to create entirely new hybrids.

The contradiction between these two coexisting perspectives is remarkably similar to the relationship between canonical storyworlds in fantastic fiction and the creative fan cultures that have nourished and sustained them. Fandom is hardly ever limited to a single franchise or storyworld, typically spreading out across genres and media, as evidenced by the organization of fan conventions: Star Trek fans, for instance, will most commonly not only know and enjoy other sf narratives across numerous media but also be familiar with other related genres like fantasy and horror. What most forms of sf and fantasy fandom have in common is an interest in world-building as a limitless and continuously expanding narrative environment.

Matt Hills has described this kind of infinitely expansive storyworld as a hyperdiegesis: “a vast and detailed narrative space, only a fraction of which is ever directly seen or encountered,”⁸ offering the dual attractions of ontological security⁹ and endlessly deferred narrative.¹⁰ The ongoing expansion of these storyworlds is primarily the result of fan culture’s own creative and transformative activity, especially since fantastic storyworlds offer “creators and fan-bases coherent ways of suturing together gaps or contradictions in narrative when they occur.”¹¹ But what fans also add creatively is a continuous hybridization of these storyworlds: just as children can have Dora the Explorer team up with Spider-Man to defeat an evil Papa Smurf, fan culture thrives on the imaginative work of crossovers, mashups, and creative appropriation. The many forms of mashup culture that have emerged over the past two decades attest to this continuous hybridization of fan texts and collaborative creative production.

This tension between internally coherent storyworlds and the fandom’s radically heterogeneous creative work is central to any understanding of what I define in this book as transmedia world-building. While most other studies have chosen one perspective, focusing either on the construction of complex, coherent storyworlds or on fan cultures’ creative appropriation of popular culture, I see this internal contradiction as an expression of the two faces of global capitalism:

On one face, Empire spreads globally its network of hierarchies and divisions that maintain order through new mechanisms of control and constant conflict. Globalization, however, is also the creation of new circuits of cooperation and collaboration that stretch across nations and continents and allow an unlimited number of encounters. This second face of globalization is not a matter of everyone in the world becoming the same; rather it provides the possibility that, while remaining different, we discover the commonality that enables us to communicate and act together.¹²

The discovery of this commonality is central to the imaginative and collaborative work of transmedia world-building. Even as popular storyworlds are constantly being appropriated by capitalism’s incontrovertible logic of accumulation, and as audiences’ creative work is transformed into immaterial labor at the service of media corporations, there remains a valuable radical potential that is clearly worth salvaging. By emphasizing the radical spirit of collectivity that underlies so many fantastic storyworlds, I will attempt to make sense of the central contradictions of transmedia world-building by relating them back to Hardt and Negri’s influential work on global capitalism. But before I explain in more detail this theoretical connection between fantastic storyworlds and politics, I will first unpack a few central terms, beginning with transmedia world-building.

MEDIA CONVERGENCE AND TRANSMEDIA WORLD-BUILDING

The most commonly used definition of the term transmedia storytelling was introduced by Henry Jenkins, who described it as a single narrative that is spread out across multiple media, “with each new text making a distinctive and valuable contribution to the whole.”¹³ Later debates about the term have expanded its range somewhat from Jenkins’s original definition, adding in further important factors such as branding, adaptation, extension, seriality, and radical intertextuality.¹⁴ Some have even rejected the term due to its implicit focus on narrative coherence, preferring instead a more traditional industrial term like media franchising.¹⁵ Without entering into a semantic discussion of the exact limitations of the term and to what degree any given transmedia narrative is fully consistent across any given number of textual formations, I use the term in combination with world-building to indicate commercial franchises that develop complex fantastic storyworlds across a variety of media. Transmedia world-building thereby articulates a fundamental element of convergence culture: boundaries between media have blurred to the point at which it makes little sense to foreground fundamental distinctions between contemporary media. Instead, the term helpfully foregrounds the fact that our immersion in imaginary storyworlds takes place not within but across media.¹⁶

My u...