The Extratextuals

Somehow I went a full year without seeing many films, so the competition wasn’t all that steep, though I’m still relatively happy with most of my top picks. Remember that they count if I saw them in 2008, hence some of the 2007 entries.

Movies

10. Enchanted. Silly but fun, and ideal for the second 9 hour leg of a trip to Malawi.

9. Sweeney Todd. I like Tim Burton’s aesthetic. Odd, dark, kinda cool.

8. The Bourne Ultimatum. If only I could move and fight like Bourne, my subway commute would be so much less of a hassle.

7. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Admittedly, in other years, the movie that gifted the phrase “nuking the fridge” to movie criticism wouldn’t make the list, but it was fun, and it was great to see Harrison back in action. I spent a lot of playtime trying to be him as a kid, so he has a long leash.

6. Quantum of Solace. Not quite Casino Royale, but I’m intrigued by the decision to serialize the Bond films, and Daniel Craig is still easily the best Bond.

5. There Will Be Blood. By the time Daniel Day Lewis was drinking from the other dude’s milkshake, I was a little tired, since I also saw this on the way to Malawi, but it was gripping stuff. I wish I could’ve seen it on the big screen.

4. Cloverfield. A great ride. My sense is that New Yorkers liked this film more than others. I loved it. Wouldn’t want to own it or see it without a full theatre, but I really liked it.

3. No Country for Old Men. I have a real weak spot for totally dark, badass villains, so this movie hit all the right chords with me. And I love the Coen Bros. stuff.

2. Iron Man. Like Batman Begins, Iron Man has a brilliant first two acts, then falls quite flat. But its first two acts were really fun.

1. The Dark Knight. I know I’m not supposed to like it, because hype is bad, right? Well, much of Dark Knight’s hype was really bad (a Gotham pepperoni pizza from Domino’s? Come on!). I think much of its marketing sucked. To the point that I was ready to dislike the film, and especially Heath Ledger’s performance. Instead, I really liked it. The IMAX screen helped, no doubt. But it was great fun. Let the haters hate, but I won’t. I’m even one of the only people I know who actually likes Christian Bale’s Batman voice.

Now for movie posters after the fold. Yes, I get to the extratextuals eventually …

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awards, lists, poster art Beautiful Losers, Blindness, Bourne, Cloverfield, Dark Knight, Enchanted, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Indiana Jones, Iron Man, Man on Wire, No Country for Old Men, Punisher, Quantum of Solace, Saw V, Sweeney Todd, The Eye, The Happening, There Will Be Blood

Recently, I saw both Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (funny how a sequel allows you the right to such a long title, eh?) and Iron Man. I was interested by how both dealt with the prospect of a sequel, and it got me thinking about how films announce a forthcoming sequel, and how sequels work. (NO SPOILERS YET, BUT I’LL WARN YOU LATER OF A COUPLE, IN CAPS).

To start, I’d argue that if sequels so often stink, or are at least very silly and fluffy, it’s because many sequels aren’t really about the hero who supposedly started the franchise.

More after the fold

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sequels heroes, Indiana Jones, Iron Man, sequels, Spiderman

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.

previews, trailers Blade Runner, Iron Man, Onion, parody