The Extratextuals

In honor of last night’s Oscar winners, here’s a very funny trailer I found for every Oscar winning movie, and I thought I needed to share:

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Courtesy of The Huffington Post’s pre-Oscars “Worst Movies Ever Made” list, comes this spectacularly awful trailer:

HuffPo notes, “it sets you up to think you’re going to watch a teen film about dancing your way through the loss of a parent, but then it calls you a sucker and whips out some demons,” but the trailer doesn’t so much change directions as much as it adds a whole new layer. The result is a seemingly hilarious (and hilariously badly acted) genre hybrid of inspirational dance film and horror. The demons don’t interrupt the protagonist’s therapeutic dance, after all; they give it new (cosmic/spiritual) meaning.

I still don’t know why the title insists on spelling “see” with a “c”, either, though I’m wondering if they were paying whoever did the title card by the letter. Or maybe the film was pitched via text message. So gloriously bad, I’m almost inclined to watch it.

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The lists for best films, TV shows, and music of the decade have already begun, but what about paratexts? What have been the best extratextuals of the 00s?

In no particular order, here are 14 of my top 20. I’m banking on having forgotten some biggies, so I’m hoping my readers will jolt my memory, and I’ll fill in the remaining 6 based on those. After the fold …

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A brief pause from reviews to discuss the passing of Beautiful Life, and the low ratings of Brothers. Both cases illustrate how much the extratextuals matter. After the fold …
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Thanks to Jason Mittell for drawing my attention to this, thereby absolutely requiring that I come out of a mass grading-induced blogging break. As Jason said in his email, it’s paratext and parody together: all the things I like in one small clip.

I love how it plays with precisely what drew my interest to paratexts/extratexts, testing the limits of how much we’re prepared to see something that we’ve been told is peripheral as the core of the thing itself. So, here, it’s the trailer as the original text.

Yet, of course, it’s actually a bit more complex than that, since the clip doesn’t purport to make the trailer precede Iron Man as comic book character. Thus, in its play with the idea that the trailer’s “active fan base” are expecting to be let down by the actual movie “adaptation,” it brilliantly captures the odd paradox of many paratexts, namely that since many of them sell anticipation and small flavors, oftentimes the text exists in its purest and best state when being anticipated, and before actually being made.

This makes me think, then, of a chapter I wrote for Will Brooker’s The Blade Runner Experience: The Legacy of a Science Fiction Classic (Wallflower, 2006), for which I interviewed several active fans of Blade Runner about their hopes for the release of a Final Cut of the film (a cut that has since finally hit the market). There, I found the seemingly odd situation of several fans, who had loved this film for over twenty years, so much so that they were still on BR list-servs and discussion sites … and yet who felt that they had never seen the full and proper version of this object of love. Using the language of BR, I said that the text they’d fallen in love with was something akin to a replicant, and just as BR examines Deckard’s love for someone that both is and is not a human, so too did this project show how fandom can be (or, I’d argue, is always) for both a real text and an absent, second, idealized text. With the BR study, several of the people I talked to therefore both wanted a Final Cut and didn’t, since while the Final Cut remained hypothetical, it could perfectly approximate their ideal text, whereas they seemed quite worried that once it became real, that text might fail to live up to their replicant beauty.

Herein lies the dilemma with almost any textual proliferation, right? I went through the exact same crisis of faith before the release of the new Star Wars trilogy. I was intrigued to know more of the story, to have the world filled in, and yet at the same time, the world – I feared – was better in my head than in Lucas’s hands. Ditto with the announcement of the Lord of the Rings films. And many other films, television shows, and so forth. And yet in each case, the pleasure of anticipation is wonderful, so that imagining what a Lord of the Ring film might look like, for instance, is a better game when you know it’s actually going to happen, as the stakes go up.

This is about anticipation, but it’s also about what the text is, at its core. All that anticipation, after all, feeds into the consumption of the eventual text, and all that anticipation is part of the joy that the text provides. Thus the paratext or extratext as an absolutely vital, often central, part of the text. And The Onion’s example here is wonderfully apt, since the Iron Man trailer is indeed very enticing (see below), thereby raising the bar for what I expect, and what I hope for. Somehow, come summer, I’ll need to square away that idealized text and the replicant text (or, perhaps, that big hunk of scrap metal) in front of me.

There’s so much more I could say about this Onion clip. Very amusing, and well done. But I’ll call it a day here.

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