Editor’s note: By even the indefensibly prolix standards of this blog, the following essay—an analytical piece on Hollywood mega-franchises and how audiences wind up serving them more than they serve us—is a lengthy one. Accordingly, “In the Multiverse of Madness” will be published in two separate parts, with the concluding installment following this one by a week. I thank you in advance for your time and attention, neither of which I take for granted.
In last month’s post, I proffered that when a fan-favorite media franchise no longer serves us—when we come to recognize some of the popular fictions we’ve cherished embody values we no longer endorse, and potentially even threaten to stand in the way of where we need to go—often the best thing we can do for ourselves is to let it go, purposely and permanently.
Letting go is not about “canceling” (someone like disgraced geek god Joss Whedon) or boycotting (the films of, say, Woody Allen); it’s not about taking action at all. Instead, letting go is not doing something any longer—not renting out any more space in your life or in your head to the likes of Whedon or Allen, or even to the culturally defining popular narratives whose very ubiquity we take as a God-given absolute: Star Wars, Star Trek, Harry Potter, DC and Marvel, to name but a sampling.
Despite the universal prevalence of those transmedia brands—not merely the plethora of movies and TV shows, but the licensed apparel and iPhone cases, the die-cast collectables and plush toys—we can, if we choose, be done with any or all those franchises as of… right now. To learn to live without them entirely. And happily. Even lifelong, hardcore superfans can learn to let go of their preferred multimedia pastimes.
It’s both easier and harder than you may think.
But wait! What if you happen to genuinely enjoy Star Wars or Star Trek or DC or Marvel? If you’re a fan, and some or all of those entertainment franchises add value to your life’s experience, by all means, disregard this post’s advice. Though perhaps first consider this:
For most of Hollywood history, the movie business has needed a hostage buyer, a customer with little choice but to purchase the product. First, this was the theatre chains, which the studios owned, or controlled, until 1948, when the Supreme Court forced the studios to sell them on antitrust grounds. In the eighties and nineties, video stores partly filled the role. But, increasingly, the hostage buyer is us.
Today, the major franchises are commercially invulnerable because they offer up proprietary universes that their legions of fans are desperate to reënter on almost any terms. These reliable sources of profit are now Hollywood’s financial bedrock.
Stephen Metcalf, “How Superheroes Made Movie Stars Expendable,” New Yorker, May 21, 2018
Consider: How many of us are unwitting “hostage buyers”—fans who continue to subscribe to certain multimedia franchises no longer out of pleasure, but lately out of habit? Out of decades-long conditioning? We may watch Star Wars, for instance, simply because we’ve always watched Star Wars, even if we can’t truly recall the last time we actually enjoyed it the way we did when we were ten years old—with pure and wondrous abandon. Bad word-of-mouth will steer us clear of a one-off bomb like Blackhat or King Arthur: Legend of the Sword or The Happytime Murders, but it’ll merely lower our expectations for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker and X-Men: Dark Phoenix and Terminator: Dark Fate, not deter us from seeing those umpteenth sequels for ourselves.
When that happens—when we’re willing to spend our money, time, and attention (our three primary modes of currency) on a product we know in advance is shit—we’re no longer fans of those franchises so much as brand loyalists. Habit buyers, if not outright hostage buyers. And it can be hard to recognize that in ourselves—harder than we might realize. I was still reading Batman comics into my thirties, who-knows-how-many years after I stopped enjoying them—long after a once-joyful pleasure became an interminably joyless obligation. So, why was I still reading and collecting them?
Because I’d always read comics, from the time I was a kid; I’d buy them at the corner candy store in my Bronx neighborhood with loose change I’d rummaged from the couch cushions and reread each one a thousand times. I’d share them with my grade-school gang, and vice versa. I’d collected them for as long as I could remember, so it truly never occurred to me a day might come when they no longer added value to my life—when they’d outlived their onetime reliable purpose. And for years after I reached that point of terminally diminished returns, I’d continue to spend money, to say nothing of time and attention, on a habit I wasn’t enjoying—that did nothing but clutter my home with more worthless shit that went straight into indefinite “storage” in the closet. Why the hell did I do that?
Because I’d ceased to be a fan and had instead become an obedient brand loyalist—an institutionalized hostage buyer. And, to be sure, corporate multimedia initiatives—which is to say the those so-called “mega-franchises” from which there is always one more must-see/must-have sequel, prequel, sidequel, spinoff, TV series, tie-in comic, videogame, and branded “collectible” being produced—very much count on our continued, unchallenged fidelity to once-beloved concepts and characters…
… and they are doubling down on the billion-dollar bet they’ve placed on it:
More than ever, studios are leaning on pre-established characters and brands—especially if their corporate parents are building streaming services. HBO Max has 12.6 million subscriber activations. Netflix has 195 million. How do you delight Wall Street and quickly close the gap? You start by putting your superheroes to work.
This month, Disney announced 100 new movies and shows for the next few years, most of them headed directly to its Disney+ streaming service, which has 87 million subscribers. Marvel is chipping in 11 films and 11 television shows, including “WandaVision,” which arrives on Jan. 15 and finds Elizabeth Olsen reprising her Scarlet Witch role from the “Avengers” franchise.
Warner Bros. has at least as many comics-based movies in various stages of gestation, including a “Suicide Squad” sequel; “The Batman,” in which Robert Pattinson (“Twilight”) plays the Caped Crusader; and “Black Adam,” starring Dwayne Johnson as the villainous title character.
Television spinoffs from “The Batman” and “The Suicide Squad” are headed to HBO Max. WarnerMedia’s traditional television division has roughly 25 additional live-action and animated superhero shows, including “Superman & Lois,” which arrives on the CW network in February.
Sony Pictures Entertainment has its own superhero slate, with at least two more “Spider-Man” movies in the works; “Morbius,” starring Jared Leto as a pseudo-vampire; and a sequel to “Venom,” which cost $100 million to make in 2018 and collected $856 million worldwide. Sony also has a suite of superhero TV shows headed for Amazon Prime Video.
And don’t forget Valiant Entertainment, which is turning comics properties such as “Harbinger,” about superpowered teenagers, into movies with partners like Paramount Pictures.
Brooks Barnes, “Managing Movie Superheroes Is About to Get a Lot More Complicated,” New York Times, December 27, 2020
And that doesn’t take into account Disney’s ambitious plans to amplify its Star Wars empire or to build out a “shared cinematic universe” from the creatively desiccated Alien series. Given that “mega-franchising” is now the preeminent commercial entertainment model of this nascent millennium, it seems worthwhile to dedicate a two-part post to identifying the specific, deliberate engagement strategies that keep us watching—and purchasing, willingly and habitually—each new offering in such synergistic multimedia initiatives; why Gen Xers like myself have been particularly susceptible to those tactics; and the one-step, self-administered test to conclusively determine if, outside our conscious awareness, we’ve gone from erstwhile fan to hostage buyer.
Engagement Strategy #1: Leveraging FOMO
Mega-franchises cultivate a sense of viewer urgency, the fear of missing out, by deploying “spoilers”—that is, a steady stream of game-changing plot developments that generate buzz among the fan base and propel the metanarrative arc directly into each subsequent installment of a given open-ended storyworld.
Spoilers, as their name implies, must be protected lest they spoil the whole experience for someone else. They’re like land mines of intellectual property that are useless once detonated. We are obligated to keep the secret and maintain the value of the “intellectual property” for others.
Douglas Rushkoff, Team Human (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019), 141
Right—and you know how considerate folks on Twitter are about shit like that. So, if we don’t keep up with every offering, in real time, we’re bound to have the latest “shocking revelation” spoiled, depreciating the impact of the answers we waited for so patiently (more on this point under the next subheading). And keeping up with these mega-franchises is increasingly becoming a full-time job:
Marvel chief creative officer Kevin Feige has made it clear that if you want to keep up with the ongoing slate of Marvel Cinematic Universe movies, you will indeed need to be watching the Disney+ shows on the side as well:
“If you want to understand everything in future Marvel movies,” he says, “you’ll probably need a Disney+ subscription, because events from the new shows will factor into forthcoming films such as Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.” The Scarlet Witch will be a key character in that movie, and Feige points out that the Loki series will tie in, too.
Paul Tassi, “Kevin Feige Confirms You’ll Need To Watch Disney Plus Marvel Shows To Keep Up With The Movie MCU,” Forbes, November 7, 2019
Meaning, just like the text messages pinging fast and furious on our phones, the superfan is obligated to keep pace with a never-ending stream of new (and unsolicited) content. Spoilers, then, have nothing to do with storytelling and everything to do with marketing. Real stories needn’t resort to such gimmickry. Name a “spoiler” in Blade Runner. Hell, I could describe the plot of that movie here beat for beat, and it still wouldn’t diminish the experience of seeing it for yourself—and deciding for yourself what it all means. For that matter, what’s the “spoiler” in The Godfather? In E.T.? In The Thing? In Groundhog Day? In Richard Donner’s Superman or Tim Burton’s Batman?
The entire classic Star Wars trilogy arguably contains a single “spoiler”—Luke’s true parentage—that leads not to more open questions but rather the conclusive resolution of the central story arc. Spoilers are embedded into mega-franchises not to provide new insight and context to the whole of the narrative—the way Darth Vader’s revelation inspired us to reflect anew on the events of A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back, or the final moments of The Sixth Sense compelled us to reconsider everything we just saw—but rather to oblige us to watch (read: buy) each successive entry in the multimedia initiative. It’s an exercise in empty-calorie storytelling—and much like junk food, it’s biochemically addictive…
Engagement Strategy #2: Fueling Fan Theories
So, you’ve been trained to consume each new offering in real time, but that still makes you merely a passive spectator of the franchise, same as, say, a student in a classroom. To be an active participant in an integrated storyworld, you need extracurricular lab work; accordingly, mega-franchises deploy a strategy adopted from postnarrative television called “forensic fandom”—i.e., following the hyperlinked breadcrumbs and deciphering the clues (the numbers on Lost; Bernard’s there-again/gone-again scar on Westworld; Jack Pearson’s ambiguous whereabouts during the contemporary timeline on This Is Us; what exactly happened during Black Widow and Hawkeye’s oft-alluded-to mission in Budapest) in order to proffer theories and make predictions. The tactics used to encourage such interactive engrossment include migratory cues and negative capability—more commonly (and less academically) known as Easter eggs and puzzle-boxing:
Negative capability, briefly, is purposely inserting gaps in the narrative to evoke an enjoyable sense of mystery or doubt in the audience. This relates to [Marc] Ruppel’s description of migratory cues, which are small pieces of information embedded within a story that signal viewers toward another media format. These serve as hints to look for more.
Drew Menard, “Entertainment Assembled: The Marvel Cinematic Universe, a Case Study in Transmedia” (master’s thesis, Liberty University, 2015), 50
Mega-franchises are seeded with Easter eggs—in-universe cross-references that reward the most devoted superfans with the thrill of pattern recognition. This is not done lightly or accidently, either. Whereas once such Easter eggs were innocuous in-jokes—the Shanghai nightclub in Temple of Doom named Club Obi Wan, for instance—now they are incorporated as a calculated intertextual strategy:
We want fans to spot Easter Eggs at the end of the movie that relate to a movie or show coming up or a show about to launch on HBO Max. We can harken back to something that was said in “The Flash” movie or there could be a cameo appearance of one of the actors from one movie into a current show.
Brent Lang, “WarnerMedia’s Ann Sarnoff on ‘Zack Snyder’s Justice League’ and DC’s Future,” Variety, March 22, 2021
And the more intricately woven a given mega-franchise’s intertextual fabric becomes, the more outlandishly complex the fan theories get, as viewers work to maintain what media theorist Douglas Rushkoff calls “a coherent theory of everything” (Rushkoff, Team Human, 142). The puzzle-boxing of Marvel’s WandaVision, for example, inspired endless morning-after online analysis and debate in no less than major publications as Variety; scroll, for instance, through this exhaustive article published on the eve of the season finale and see for yourself (but please remain seated ’cause you’re gonna get dizzy).
And when WandaVision declined to satisfy many of the mysteries it raised, superfans consoled themselves with the hope those open plot threads will simply be resolved in the forthcoming MCU feature Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness—a title that openly telegraphs the movie’s intention to sow yet more narrative enigmata and introduce new parallel dimensions to reconcile with the rest of Marvel’s sprawling continuity.
But rather than soberly prompting the logical epiphany—Hey, maybe this all a lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing?—superfans are only drawn deeper down the rabbit hole. And it isn’t merely corporate mega-franchises that skillfully encourage “fan forensics” in order to keep adherents on the hook:
QAnon leverages the mechanisms of fantasy role-playing and fan fiction to engage its participants in a form of active sense-making and pattern recognition. Every time an addict is able to draw a connection between Biden and Burisma, John Podesta and Pizzagate, or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and antifa, they get a shot of dopamine. Once the easy associations are used up, players must go deeper into the absurd in order to connect a blackout at the Vatican to the fictional arrest of the pope or prove how a 2015 data theft in Italy means that Barack Obama manipulated the Philadelphia voting results remotely.
Douglas Rushkoff, “It Won’t Be Easy to Break Free From Trump’s Media Chaos,” GEN, January 19, 2021
Through right-wing news outlets and social media, QAnon creates a vast (fictional) conspiracy that only its most committed zealots can see; through coordinated transmedia initiatives, Marvel and DC and Star Wars, et al., create vast (fictional) “continuities” whose intricacies can only be appreciated by their most committed patrons—the ones who’ve seen every movie (repeatedly), watched every show, and catalogued every Easter egg on Reddit.
Now, unlike QAnon, Marvel and DC don’t have an insurrectionist agenda, I’ll concede, but they do have a robust capitalistic imperative: They want us to keep hostage-buying. Such is why we’re now seeing both companies move on from the been-there/done-that “team-up” event movie (The Avengers and Justice League) and embrace the all-things-canon “multiverse” construct: It allows them to bring together multiple iterations of their heroes, like Michael Keaton’s Batman appearing alongside Ben Affleck’s in the forthcoming Flash movie or previously “retconned” Spider-Men Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield potentially joining the MCU. What’s more, it turns an entire “shared universe” into a game of three-dimensional diegetic chess—thereby requiring the devout superfan to invest yet more time, attention, and money into “figuring it all out” for the dopamine reward such meticulous dot-connecting provides.
Like a sex addict who needs to resort to progressively kinkier behavior for the same thrill, any of us going down these rabbit holes must dig for deeper and more absurdly totalizing conspiracies to trigger the same sense of release.
ibid.
The multiverse gambit not only “legitimizes” every iteration of every superhero ever—making them all active assets (meaning it’s time to upgrade those standard-def DVDs on your bookshelf with the 4K UHD steelbook Blu-ray reissues)—but it provides a next-level challenge to the dutiful superfan toward maintaining his Theory of Everything. “Like one of those card games where you keep buying new, expensive packs in order to assemble a powerful team of monsters, all it takes to master a [mega-franchise] is work and money” (Rushkoff, Team Human, 141).
Entertainment used to request our intermittent audience; now it demands our habitual obedience. And it converted us into hostage buyers simply by shifting our perspective…
Engagement Strategy #3: Reversing Figure and Ground
I explored figure/ground reversal at length in “The Nostalgist’s Guide to the Multiverse,” but just to recap:
Human inventions often end up at cross purposes with their original intentions—or even at cross purposes with humans, ourselves. Once an idea or an institution gains enough influence, it changes the basic landscape. Instead of the invention serving people in some way, people spend their time and resources serving it. The original subject becomes the new object.
Or, as we may more effectively put it, the figure becomes the ground.
The idea of figure and ground was first posited by a Danish psychologist in the early 1900s. He used a simple carboard cutout to test whether people see the central image or whatever is around it. . . .
What fascinates people to this day is the way the perception of figure or ground can change in different circumstances and cultures. When shown a picture of a cow in a pasture, most westerners will see a picture of a cow. Most easterners, on the other hand, will see a picture of a pasture. . . .
Neither perception is better or worse, so much as incomplete. If the athlete sees herself as the only one that matters, she misses the value of her team—the ground in which she functions. If a company’s “human resources” officer sees the individual employee as nothing more than a gear in the firm, he misses the value and autonomy of the particular person, the figure.
When we lose track of figure and ground, we forget who is doing what for whom, and why. We risk treating other people as objects. Worse, we embed these values in our organizations or encode them into our technologies. By learning to recognize reversals of figure and ground, we can liberate ourselves from the systems to which we have become enslaved.
Figure/ground reversals are easy to spot once you know where to look, and maybe how to look.
Take money: it was originally invented to store value and enable transactions. Money was the medium for the marketplace’s primary function of value exchange. Money was the ground, and the marketplace was the figure. Today, the dynamic is reversed: the acquisition of money itself has become the central goal, and the marketplace just a means of realizing that goal. Money has become the figure, and the marketplace full of people has become the ground.
Rushkoff, Team Human, 43–44
Once the “reversed” perception of an instrument or institution becomes accepted as its unassailable, universal truth, much like gravity, behaviors can be dramatically conditioned to accommodate it—even when those behaviors don’t withstand so much as cursory logical scrutiny:
For example, most Americans accept the premise that they need a car to get to work. And a better car leads to a more pleasant commute. But that’s only because we forgot that our pedestrian and streetcar commutes were forcibly dismantled by the automobile industry. The geography of the suburban landscape was determined less by concern for our quality of life than to promote the sales of automobiles that workers would be required to use. The automobile made home and work less accessible to each other, not more—even though the car looks like it’s enhancing the commute.
ibid., 45–46
Figure/ground obfuscation is precisely how the superhero-industrial complex commodifies nostalgic sentimentality. Whereas comic books and action figures used to actively expand the imagination of children, now they purposefully limit it in adults, training us to fill our heads and our homes with superheroic adventures and playthings originally intended for the eight-year-old boys of the 1970s and ’80s.
The pop-cultural fantasies of our youth—the ground on which we developed our social relationships and nascent imaginations by playacting as superheroes and Jedi and Ghostbusters with our friends—have become the literal figures now, from the “collectibles” for which we willingly pay top dollar to the aging actors made to reprise their onetime roles as Luke Skywalker and Sarah Connor and Jean-Luc Picard, repackaged and sold to us as if the ephemeral experience of childhood could ever really be recreated or relived.
We know this in our gut, too. And I mean that literally: That sinking sensation in the pit of your stomach during Kingdom of the Crystal Skull or The Force Awakens or Coming 2 America when you realize that despite everyone’s earnest efforts, the old magic just ain’t there for the recapturing—that dressing Harrison Ford and Michael Keaton and Bill Murray up to look exactly as they did at age 38 isn’t going to make us feel the way we did when we were twelve.
If anything, these “legacy” sequels serve only to remind us how old we’ve all gotten—how far behind us those halcyon days of youth really are. And yet still we keep trying, as with the forthcoming Halloween Kills and Top Gun: Maverick and Ghostbusters: Afterlife. That’s because Generation X was trained to conflate figure with ground, all the way back in the mid-eighties.
Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say we were programmed…
Please join me next Monday, May 3, 2021, for the concluding half of “In the Multiverse of Madness,” in which I’ll address why late-wave Xers and Xennials have been so susceptible to the aforementioned strategies, and how to recognize if we’ve unwittingly become hostage buyers ourselves.
Accordingly, I have disabled the comments on this post only, and will eagerly open the topic up for roundtable conversation at the conclusion of Part 2. I appreciate your audience and look forward to your thoughts and feedback.
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