Editor’s note: Owed to the length of “In the Multiverse of Madness,” I divided the essay into two posts. If you haven’t already, I encourage you to read Part 1 first, and please feel welcome to offer feedback on that post, this one, or both in the comments section of Part 2 below. Thank you.
Previously on “In the Multiverse of Madness,” we covered the three engagement strategies (and correlating tactics) transmedia mega-franchises deploy to keep us consuming each new offering in real time: by leveraging FOMO via “spoilers”; by encouraging “forensic fandom” with Easter eggs and puzzle-boxing; and by reversing “figure and ground.” Now let’s talk about why 1970s-born adults have been particularly susceptible to these narrative gimmicks—and what to do about it.
X Marks the Spot
Mega-franchises are dependent on a very particular demographic to invest in their elaborate and expanding multiverse continuities: one that has both a strong contextual foundation in the storied histories of the IPs—meaning, viewers who are intimately familiar with (and, ideally, passionately opinionated about) all the varied iterations of Batman and Spider-Man from the last thirty or so years—and is also equipped with disposable income, as is typically the case in middle age, hence the reason Gen X has been the corporate multimedia initiative’s most loyal fan base. Fortunately for them, we’d been groomed for this assignment from the time we learned to turn on the television.
Very quickly (if it isn’t already too late for that): From 1946 through 1983, the FCC enforced stringent regulations limiting the commercial advertisements that could be run during or incorporated into children’s programming. However:
Ronald W. Reagan did not much care for any regulations that unduly hindered business, and the selling of products to an entire nation of children was a big business indeed. When Reagan appointed Mark S. Fowler as commissioner of the FCC on May 18, 1981, children’s television would change dramatically. Fowler championed market forces as the determinant of broadcasting content, and thus oversaw the abolition of every advertising regulation that had served as a guide for broadcasters. In Fowler’s estimation, the question of whether children had the ability to discriminate between the ads and the entertainment was a moot point; the free market, and not organizations such as [Actions for Children’s Television] would decide the matter.
Martin Goodman, “Dr. Toon: When Reagan Met Optimus Prime,” Animation World Network, October 12, 2010
In the wake of Fowler’s appointment, a host of extremely popular animated series—beginning with He-Man and the Masters of the Universe but also notably including The Transformers, G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero, and M.A.S.K. for the boys, and Care Bears, My Little Pony, and Jem for young girls—flooded the syndicated market with 65-episode seasons that aired daily. All of these series had accompanying action figures, vehicles, and playsets—and many of them, in fact, were explicitly based on preexisting toylines; meaning, in a flagrant instance of figure-and-ground reversal, the manufacturers often dictated narrative content:
“These shows are not thought up by people trying to create characters or a story,” [Peggy Charren, president of Action for Children’s Television] explained, terming them “program-length advertisements.” “They are created to sell things,” she said. “Accessories in the toy line must be part of the program. It reverses the traditional creative process. The children are getting a manufacturer’s catalogue instead of real programming content.”
Glenn Collins, “Controversy about Toys, TV Violence,” New York Times, December 12, 1985
This was all happening at the same time Kenner was supplying an endless line of 3.75” action figures based on Star Wars, both the movies and cartoon spinoffs Droids and Ewoks. Even Hanna-Barbera’s Super Friends, which predated Fowler’s tenure as FCC commissioner by nearly a decade, rebranded as The Super Powers Team, complete with its own line of toys (also courtesy of Kenner) and tie-in comics (published by DC), thereby creating a feedback loop in which each product in the franchise advertised for the other. Meanwhile, feature films like Ghostbusters and even the wantonly violent, R-rated Rambo and RoboCop movies were reverse-engineered into kid-friendly cartoons, each with—no surprise here—their own action-figure lines.
I grew up on all that stuff and obsessed over the toys; you’d be hard-pressed to find a late-stage Xer that didn’t. We devoured the cartoons, studied the comics, and envied classmates who were lucky enough to own the Voltron III Deluxe Lion Set or USS Flagg aircraft carrier. To our young minds, there was no differentiating between enjoying the storyworlds of those series and collecting all the ancillary products in the franchise. To watch those shows invariably meant to covet the toys. At our most impressionable, seventies-born members of Gen X learned to love being “hostage buyers.” Such is the reason I was still purchasing those goddamn Batman comics on the downslope to middle age.
Perhaps the most lasting legacy of the Golden Age of Deregulation (roughly 1983–1989) was that it dominated the memories of a generation. Many [Xennial]-age Americans spent their formative years during the Fowler era, and He-Man, She-Ra, and the Transformers are now cherished relics of their childhoods. It was they who collected nearly one billion plastic figures, strained their thumbs on Atari games, wore out batteries by the truckload, and spent dreamy afternoons by the TV watching Voltron and Legend of Zelda.
Deregulation, in the final analysis, did not make American animation any better, did little to further the art, and negated creativity and originality as benchmarks for animated TV fare. It can be argued that the decade prior to deregulation produced few outstanding programs, but at least they engaged some level of the imagination. In the age of Ronald Reagan and Optimus Prime, this claim was harder to prove. Cartoon shows of the deregulation era were too often nothing more than soulless vehicles for product promotion, brightly colored symbols of corporate capitalism’s ascendancy over children’s entertainment.
Goodman, “Dr. Toon: When Reagan Met Optimus Prime”
Right. And given that contemporary transmedia initiatives, even accounting for the polished caliber of their screenwriting and filmmaking, are really just scaled-up versions of the animated “program-length advertisements” of the eighties—many of them, in an unflattering testament to our rose-colored Reagan-era nostalgia, featuring no less than the same toyetic characters—and given steroidal amplification by the telecommunications tools of the Digital Age, it is very much worth our while to interrogate the values unconsciously encoded into those Gen X–managed mega-franchises.
And I’ve been repeatedly assured by many franchise-passionate contemporaries that they’re harmless enough—and some, like Wool author (and last-wave Xer) Hugh Howey, have even gone so far as to say the MCU “is some of the best storytelling in ages,” and that we ought to do ourselves a favor and “Start from the beginning of the Marvel media universe and watch everything”—but considering how we summarily dismissed the warnings sounded by organizations like Actions for Children’s Television thirty-five years ago, perhaps it’s worth putting that “harmless enough” theory to the test?
Automatic and Accelerating Behaviors
At the core of our current fascination with the MCU or the Star Wars Galaxy is a fascinating fact: they resemble the epic stories that dominated human culture for thousands of years. They tell stories that feature countless characters, each one serving a role as part of an [sic] vast story, authored by scores of unknown writers and slowly shaped by audiences, each of whom could explain—if not detail—the particulars of these universes. Even one of the most cynically criticized aspects of today’s mega-franchises is consistent with the epic model: the idea that they may never end. The MCU in particular seems to reflect this aspect of epics.
Matthew Ball and Jonathan Glick, “Cinematic Universes Aren’t New; They’re the Oldest Stories on Earth (Marveliad: Eps. I + II),” MatthewBall.vc, October 28, 2019
That’s an intriguing observation: that today’s shared cinematic universes can be deemed narrative successors to the epic poetry of oral literature à la Homer and Virgil—that brand managers like Marvel’s Kevin Feige are modeling the form and function of their intertextual metanarratives not on the rigidly codified novelistic medium of the Enlightenment era (self-contained; close-ended; with a conventionally singular POV) as twentieth-century filmmakers did, but rather on a decentralized, amorphous storytelling tradition far more ancient and primal.
Hmm.
Martin Scorsese predictably drew fanboy ire for comparing Marvel movies to theme parks in 2019—when he distinguished them from cinema—but the analogy is apt: Theme parks are engineered to impel visitors to experience every attraction the venue has to offer, and to pick up some branded merch from the gift shop conveniently situated between the terminus of a given ride and its actual egress. That’s precisely how mega-franchises like Marvel operate: Partake in every ephemeral pleasure within the nonlinear, hyperlinked storyworld, and memorialize each one with a physical souvenir.
By contrast, cinema, Scorsese argued, was “about confronting the unexpected on the screen and in the life it dramatized and interpreted, and enlarging the sense of what was possible in the art form” (Martin Scorsese, “Martin Scorsese: I Said Marvel Movies Aren’t Cinema. Let Me Explain.”, Opinion, New York Times, November 4, 2019). He cites not only the avant-garde offerings of Ingmar Bergman, Jean-Luc Godard, and Don Siegel as exemplars of cinematic narrativity, but the auteur visions of contemporary filmmakers Spike Lee, Ari Aster, Kathryn Bigelow, and Wes Anderson, as well.
Of course, the work of filmmakers, artists, and novelists creating in this way is emphatically countercultural—if for no other reason than that it questions traditional narratives and heroic, individualistic values. Any art that asks its viewers to slow down or, worse, pause and reflect is hurting a market that depends on automatic and accelerating behaviors.
Douglas Rushkoff, Team Human (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019), 140
However much we may genuinely enjoy them for their impressive scale and spectacle, let’s not forget that transmedia mega-franchises aren’t cultural exercises in open-source mythmaking the way the Iliad and the Aeneid were, designed for the purpose of providing narrative context to historical events and natural phenomena science couldn’t yet explain; they are billion-dollar corporately superintended IPs, contrived and calibrated to serve an Industrial Age model of extractive capitalism with Digital Age algorithmic efficiency—to encourage and monetize automatic and accelerating behaviors.
Because with full concession to the artistic merits of individual entries in those varied franchises (Black Panther and Wonder Woman, for instance), and acknowledgment that plenty of viewers enjoy them and even their immersive worldbuilding casually, without ever developing an obsessive-compulsive “hostage buyer” complex over them, I would argue that any form of mass entertainment that’s exploitive (manipulates social anxiety), addictive (biochemically rewards devout followers), backward-gazing (mostly predicated on analog-age brands, themselves embedded with the outmoded ethos of their era), and both exemplifies and encourages the very ideology of rampant consumer capitalism that’s directly to blame for the crises of economic inequality and environmental degradation that came to a boil during pandemia is nowhere nearly “harmless enough.”
Hollywood has a proven formula to hold us hostage buyers: FOMO keeps us watching its multimedia franchises automatically, and increasingly elaborate mystery-box theories galvanize acceleration. With their multipronged deluge of new content, all of it spoiler-implanted for the shortest possible shelf life, mega-franchises keep us so efficiently occupied with forensic foraging that we don’t stop for a moment to ask ourselves what exactly we’re getting from running those hamster wheels. We just keep chasing the next breadcrumb… because that’s what we’ve been systematically conditioned to do.
Even disaffected Star Wars fans, burned by decades of reliably subpar movies, were rewarded for their tenacious brand loyalty when Return of the Jedi–era Luke Skywalker surprise-cameoed in the season finale of The Mandalorian. The message is clear: You’re not going anywhere. And, to be certain, every brand manager in Tinseltown has your number:
But even if you are one of those many informal viewers that doesn’t get caught up in all that—they do exist—if you happen to have young children in this “Golden Age of the Mega-Franchise,” it behooves you to explicitly understand what our parents didn’t during the Golden Age of Deregulation: that like the syndicated cartoons of the 1980s, today’s corporate transmedia franchises—because it’s no accident they’re called franchises—are training programs for a new generation of lifelong subscribers. Hell, you might even say being a superfan of a Hollywood multimedia initiative is a lot like being a Scientologist: All it requires is a billion-year commitment and an open wallet.
But there’s an escape clause.
Endgame
Despite forty years of programming to the contrary, we can let go of our favorite fictional heroes and intertextual storyworlds any time we want to—that’s what I want you to know, if it happens to be helpful to you. In 2013, I loaded the car with my entire comic collection—ten long storage boxes’ worth—drove it to a specialty shop on Ventura Boulevard, and sold the lot for several hundred bucks. (And that was gravy, because I’d have happily given it away.) And the space I reclaimed in my home was nothing compared to the space I reclaimed in my head, and in my life.
After putting superheroes in the rearview—I’ve never seen any of the “Batfleck” movies—it became easier and easier to disenthrall myself from one must-see musty media franchise after another: Star Wars. Star Trek. Terminator. Halloween. Alien. Jurassic Park. James Bond. Mission: Impossible. Bring on new old iterations of The Matrix, Ghostbusters, and Scream, I say—and watch me not give a fuck. They all at some point became too much of a (formerly) good thing. I’m over all of them.
Truly, the only thought I ever give to any of that stuff anymore is when it is directly relevant to this blog’s agenda of advocating for socially conscious storytelling or exhorting against toxic nostalgia. I’m not so much as momentarily tempted to sample any of the above—even the heavily touted, never-expected reprisals of Patrick Stewart and Linda Hamilton and Jamie Lee Curtis and Jeff Goldblum to their signature roles merely inspired a who-cares shrug—and “spoilers” have no hold over me, because how can a movie or show I have no interest in or intention of watching ever be spoiled?
I say none of that to toot my own horn, only to assure anyone who might feel they may be an unwitting “hostage buyer” to any of our endless media franchises that you can let this stuff go and I promise you—I promise you—you won’t even miss it.
You may even, when the clutter’s cleared and you can see the figure for the ground once again, reconnect emotionally with what you loved about it in your innocence—that elusive, indelible sense of amazement The Rise of Skywalker and Dark Fate and Coming 2 America couldn’t quite elicit. Such is what allowed me to look with unjaded eyes again on the Joel Schumacher/Val Kilmer take on the Caped Crusader and reappraise it as the purest-hearted of his modern cinematic representations; I discovered it’s infinitely preferable to be a fan of Batman Forever than a fan of Batman forever.
Apply this simple test: Does [Media Franchise X] still add value to my life? Does it provide enjoyment commensurate with the time, money, and attention I invest in it? It’s a yes-or-no question, and if it triggers even the briefest flicker of hesitation or anxiety, then the answer’s no.
At that point you should feel fully empowered to let it go—just mentally click UNSUBSCRIBE—with gratitude in your heart for what it meant to you once upon a time, and room again in your head for all-new visions, time once more in your day for brand-new narratives. Like an amusement park, the Multiverse of Madness can be a fun place to visit—every now and again—but none of us signed up to live there in perpetuity.
Don’t get me started, Sean. I’m biting my tongue!
Haha! Well, that’s far more discipline than I exercised when I wrote this 6,000-word two-part post, Jacqui! I’m known for turning my dinner guests into “hostage buyers”: Friends will often ask a simple question about my life — like, say, What are you working on? — only to be treated to a 20-minute monologue about it!
Hmm…that was interesting, the bit about cartoon deregulation. I had no idea that had happened, but it does go a long way to explain, say, Care Bears. Urgh.
All I can do on this post is to sing along. I wasn’t rich in much as a child, but one thing I did have was access to good stories. Used books were more expensive then, but I had enough volumes, and access to enough libraries, to form an opinion in this area.
In other words, I became a story snob at a young age. It’s perhaps the one form of snobbery that won’t hurt anyone, as long as you exercise reasonable tact.
Maybe part of it is enduring a childhood that nobody in their right mind would ever call privileged, but I’m the only person I know who faithfully watched Saturday morning cartoons until I was about eleven, but then turned the TV off in the middle one day. They were dumb, and I was tired of watching them, and that was that. And since I’m a little older than you, Sean, this was when cartoons were actually “good,” to use the term ironically. Scooby Doo was never going to light my story candle, but it beat the square pants off Sponge Bob.
Although, I’ll be honest and admit that ALL my pocket money at the time went to buy Nancy Drew mysteries. So, not a complete arbiter of good taste. They were competent written, but I’m glad I outgrew them as well.
In my defense, I also read Louisa May Alcott, Jane Austen, fairy tales, Lassie Come Home (and a host of other dog and horse stories), Tolkien, and other tales of more enduring quality. But the point is this: I read. Sometimes we didn’t even have a TV. Books were far more reliable, and they had better stories anyway.
So, I just can’t relate to being faithful to a franchise. The Star Wars and Dragon Lance books were something I mostly ignored. I only kept books that were good enough to re-read. When Piers Anthony or Gordon Dickson wrote one too many books in a series, I quit reading them. (Note: this never happened with Zelazny. Or my other favorite authors. It’s part of why they became my favorites.)
I went through a mild collector brush with Tolkien but soon got over it. Eventually, the maps of Middle Earth and depictions of Smaug joined my Led Zeppelin and Styx posters in the trash. I agree that you’re better off without that baggage. I went on to watch contemporaries collect Barbies–still in their original packaging–which still boggles my mind. I mean, my grandma collected china, which was still nonsensical to me, but least once a year we could eat on the stuff.
Hopefully, everybody reaches a point where they realize, no, the closets don’t expand, and no, we can’t get another storage unit. All you really need are clothes, books, and dishes. I’m glad to have my music and movie collections, too, The rest is just storage for miscellaneous stuff like towels and cleaners that we all need. Hang onto some Christmas decorations if you like that sort of thing. A little emergency food is probably a good idea.
But get rid of the extra stuff. Mental stuff and physical stuff. In my family, the two seem to go together, although that may be coincidental. But I’ve noticed that I feel lighter, in a good way, when I trim down.
I’m not a minimalist, but I do fit into my 3 bed plus garage without extra storage, and that’s a good feeling. I like knowing where everything is and what it’s for. In some ways, the ultimate in wealth is unused cupboard space.
In fact, I’ve been thinking it’s time to go through the linen closet again…
Wow, Cathleen! Thank you for this wonderful comment, which could be a blog post unto itself! I’m so appreciative that you read this (loooong) post, took time to consider all the nuances of the thesis, and then respond to it so thoughtfully! Thank you!
The thing is, I adored all those Saturday-morning cartoons of the early ’80s (and the syndicated after-school stuff, too — those “program-length advertisements” masquerading as children’s entertainment); I’m very much one of those late-period Xers for whom “He-Man, She-Ra, and the Transformers are now cherished relics of their childhoods.” (I even suspect Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! may’ve been one of the formative influences that inspired my love of supernatural fiction; I cherished nothing so much as watching that spooky series on a dark and stormy afternoon in my Bronx apartment!) So, when I write critically about those shows, it comes from a place of not only personal experience with them, but a measurable degree of personal affection for them still.
Take G.I. Joe: Though I in no way endorse its Reagan-era pro-military, pro–American Might Makes Right messaging now, I was positively addicted to the licensed comic book by Larry Hama (which was like a soap opera for nine-year-old boys), adored the syndicated cartoon (I can still hear the distinctively villainous voices of Cobra Commander and Destro in my mind’s ear!), and collected all the toys (well, not the more expensive playsets, alas).
So, when I offer a cultural critique of those Gen X formative faves, I’m speaking as someone who was raised on them. But unlike so many of my contemporaries — Adam F. Goldberg with his schlockfest sitcom The Goldbergs; Ernest Cline with that absolutely evil, immoral novel Ready Player One — I refuse to espouse a nostalgic view of the 1980s. It was a period of state-sanctioned consumerism — the dawn of the government-is-the-problem ethos of the so-called Reagan Revolution — and I for one applaud President Biden’s legislative ambitions to turn the page on the Gipper’s toxic brand of trickle-down, free-market capitalism.
Like you, Cathleen, my formative experience with fiction wasn’t limited to syndicated cartoons! Both of my parents worked in publishing, so we read a lot. I wasn’t a Nancy Drew reader (my wife was), but I powered through all of the Hardy Boys and Encyclopedia Brown mysteries. Later, in high school, I graduated to the horror fiction of Anne Rice and Stephen King, and then in college the crime fiction of Raymond Chandler and Richard Price. These days, I’ll happily read just about anything, though some series have worn me out after a while (the Alex Cross books were an addiction for a while — I used to read them on the subway to my first post-college job down in Soho — but they became mind-numbingly formulaic so I bailed after the seventh or eighth entry. I think he’s written about fifty more since!)
As for branded merch: I’ve expunged all of that stuff (some of it I sold for quite a bit on eBay). I happier without it. I downloaded all my CDs to iTunes and sold the physical discs to Amoeba Music in Hollywood (I only kept a small handful of CDs that have never been made available in a digital format, just so I’d have a backup in case the digitally downloaded files got corrupted.) I also sold or donated most of my DVDs; I only saved the “perennials” (the ones I make a point to watch annually). Now I have a very judiciously curated “collection” (though I am loathe to even use that word), and when I look at my DVD shelf, I can say with confidence, “Those are my favorite movies.” (And just last week two of those movies went on sale on iTunes for $4.99, so I bought them and donated the physical DVDs to my local library in Sherman Oaks.) Same with books: I don’t keep them anymore. I borrow physical books and eBooks from the public library; not because its free, but because I can return them when I’m finished. I only keep research materials and writing resources (like The Writer’s Journey and the The Chicago Manual of Style, et al.). I keep my media as minimal as possible, and I’m much happier that way.
It’s funny: I tell people I practice minimalism, and they think, “Oh, you mean that Marie Kondo thing.” To which I say: Sort of… because minimalism isn’t strictly about “cleaning out” or “tidying up.” Nor is it asceticism; it isn’t about living without. Rather, it’s living intentionally. Minimalism is a lifestyle philosophy based on the understanding that we have three forms of currency: our money, our time, and our attention. And when we come to recognize that everything we invite into our life — every physical object, every relationship, every event we attend, every text message we respond to, every blog post we stop to read and comment on, every habit and hobby we cultivate — costs us in at least one of those ways, usually in two, and often in all three, we become very selective about what we keep in our lives and what we bring into our lives moving forward. We have to look at everything we spend our time, money, and/or attention on and ask: Does this add value to my life commensurate with the personal resources I invest in it? If it adds value, keep it; if it doesn’t, let it go — because you won’t miss it.
And I suspect a lot of my friends, for whom being a “fan” of Star Wars or Star Trek or Indiana Jones or James Bond, etc., seems to produce nothing but anxiety and resentment (the old “They ruined my childhood” lament) are unwitting hostage buyers — erstwhile fans who’ve never considered that that don’t have to watch the latest offering from Star Wars or Star Trek or Terminator or Alien, etc., same I as didn’t realize that I no longer had to follow the Batman comics anymore. As I wrote in “This Counts, That Does Not,” figure out which stories in a long-running franchise have meaning to you, and then “decanonize” everything else. We needn’t be completists. I have great affection for the first three Star Wars movies and can live happily without the prequels (though I consider them honorable failures) and all the Disney addenda (which I consider dishonorable failures). With Indiana Jones, I love the original trilogy and the ’90s TV series, but the fourth one is an honorable failure and I doubt I’m going back for more when the fifth one comes out next year. With those franchises and others — Alien, Terminator, Star Trek, et al. — I keep the installments that meant something to me close to my heart, and make no room in my life or my head for the rest; they mean nothing to me.
But I couldn’t extricate myself from the Multiverse of Madness — I couldn’t see I was not obligated to follow those franchises to the end of the Earth — until I realized that I have a finite amount of currency (money, time, and attention) and that it should be spent wisely. And one of the best ways to make time for the things that are important to us is to jettison the things in our life that are weighing us down. Any possession or obligation or relationship that produces a sense of anxiety in us is one that has outlived its purpose, so we let it go.
It’s that simple — but it does take practice to master. Simply learning to understand that everything in our life is a commitment of time, money, and/or attention to one degree or another makes it much easier to look at the things in our life — particularly but not exclusively the physical objects — and say, “I’m no longer renting out space in my home or in my head to that. That doesn’t add value to my life anymore.” (And in addition to liberating ourselves from the burden of custodianship, it’s also a miracle cure for letting go of personal grievances!)
Anyway, Cathleen, I fully recognize that these dense, esoteric posts demand a considerable degree of time and attention from my readers, so please accept my sincere appreciation to you for always reading them so carefully and engaging me so thoroughly. Thank you. And good luck with your linen closet! As the Minimalists themselves advise: If you don’t use it, sell it! If you can’t sell it, donate it. If you can’t donate it, recycle it. And if it can’t be recycled, throw it away. Here’s to fresh starts for what I believe will be a period of renewed hope and sustainable living.
Sean
There have been a number of television shows I’ve held onto longer than I should have, given their decline in story-telling, and you capture that “can’t let go because what if?” feeling so capably. I will say that I’ve gotten much better at breaking up with them sooner than I once did. It’s not you, it’s me. . . It IS me, and I’m OK with that now, at being more discriminating with my time. Not that I can’t piddle away hours upon hours, to be sure!
Hey, Wendy!
Yes, we’ve all been guilty of unwarranted brand loyalty, especially when it comes to our (once-)favorite shows. Back in the day, I stayed with many series long after I stopped enjoying them (comics, TV, book series, and movie franchises alike), but these days, as soon as I sense narrative instability, I bail. For the first few seasons, my wife and I were addicted to This Is Us, but after the initial central mystery of “What happened to Jack?” was resolved, the show’s narrative engine ran out of gas fast, and the writers resorted to all manner of retroactive puzzle-boxing (Jack has a brother we never knew about and something horrible happened to him in Vietnam!) and we looked at each other and went, “This is all bullshit. They’re pulling this out of their ass in desperation to keep the series going. Unsubscribe!”
I guess if there’s a benefit to having so much “must-see” content these days across the various platforms it’s that it’s become so hard to keep up with it that eventually some of us are inspired to say, “Oh, fuck all of this!” That’s how I am, anyway: The more “must-see” TV I get served, the less I want to consume any of it. And nothing epitomizes that like the superhero franchises. I don’t watch superhero movies or shows anyway — they don’t add value to my life — but at this point keeping up with them is a full-time job unto itself! That’s why I call the whole enterprise the “Multiverse of Madness” (a label co-opted from the upcoming Doctor Strange sequel), because the entire point is to get us so caught up in these fictional “shared universes” that we can no longer find our way back to our actual shared universe. And because the mega-franchises of Marvel and DC and Star Trek, etc., are so hopelessly interconnected, the only real way to escape their gravitational pull is to banish all aspects of them from our lives. And take it from someone who doesn’t watch any of that shit any longer: It’s like setting down a bag of bricks you’ve been carrying over your back since who-knows-when.
Thanks for popping by, Wendy! I hope you and your family have been well, and that you are looking forward to more hopeful days to come…
Sean
As usual, you discuss an exceedingly complex topic w/ depth and insight
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I believe a mention of “sunk cost fallacy” is appropriate here
A definition can be found at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_cost, but basically a sunk cost is when you continue to invest in something you know will not pay off, simply because you’ve invested so much already
A gambler who is down $12,000 he can’t afford and keeps playing even though he knows he won’t win it back; a stock investor who pours more and more money into a company even though she knows it will probably be bankrupt by the end of the month; a doctor who’s practiced medicine for twenty years even though he knows he’d be happier doing almost anything else; a talented writer who tries to break into Hollywood for decades even though he knows that even if he succeeded he would hate it
As soon as you think, “I’ve put too much in to this to quit now”, you’ve fallen prey to the sunk cost fallacy
The application here is obvious: You’ve invested literally hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars watching this franchise, not to mention merch, talking about it online, reading every article, blog post, and tweet, in some cases even literally defining your very SELF in terms of the franchise…
It doesn’t MATTER if the next installment is any good or not. You can’t quit now or your investment is GONE
I use the word “investment” deliberately. When you watch a movie or a TV show, read a book or a blog post, your time and attention (and money, if applicable) is an investment. The return is entertainment, education, enlightenment, etc.
But once you’ve sunk so much cost, the return is not what matters. Protecting and justifying your previous investment is all that matters
The solution here is the same as any other sunk cost trap. Cut your losses. Stop throwing good money (and time and attention) after bad
Ask yourself honestly: Do I think I will ENJOY this next installment? Will it be worth the investment? Is it a better use of my time and attention (and money, if applicable) than watching something else, playing a video game, writing a blog post, or just taking a nap?
Or am I simply watching because I’ve sunk too much cost to quit now?
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Sean, I’ve invested much in your blog, and always got a great return
So thank you
Yes! Great perspective, Dell! The economic analogy I invoked was the law of diminishing returns, but that’s mostly because it’s the only principle from my high-school economics class I actually recall! (I still remember the instructor’s name, though: Mr. Bozzone. I ought to look him up.)
I might even argue the entire practice of “letting go” almost exclusively applies to sunk-cost scenarios. Screenwriting guru Robert McKee teaches that a choice between good and evil isn’t a choice at all; rather, it’s only a dilemma when you’re presented with a decision between irreconcilable goods or the lesser of two evils. We don’t have to “let go” of our trash after dinner each night, after all. No one “lets go” of a broken television, or expired fruit, or a favorite pair of blue jeans with a fray in the crotch. You just get rid of it without a second thought! The things we need to learn to let go of, on the other hand, are the things we’ve invested in — if not money than time or energy or emotion. That’s the difference, I suppose, between getting rid of something and letting go of it: the former is done automatically whereas the latter is performed intentionally, sometimes and even often with a degree of difficulty.
Such is the reason, I imagine, why so many viewers who became disillusioned with Lost after the third season couldn’t stop watching it. I mean, there hasn’t been a good Star Wars movie since 1983 (and arguably not a great one since 1980), but in the forty years hence, that hasn’t stopped us from lining up each and every time they release a new one! Because you’re right: We’ve invested too much time, money, and attention to stop now. Hell, even the most passionate Game of Thrones fans couldn’t find anything to redeem that final season, but they’re all frothing at the mouth for the forthcoming GoT “expanded universe.” And the more shows HBO produces, the more fans will have invested, so they’ll feel compelled, per the sunk-cost precept, to keep watching and watching and watching. Whether or not they’re enjoying those shows will be altogether irrelevant; this is an investment they’ve made, and they’ve gone all-in on it.
The central argument of “In the Multiverse of Madness” is a synthesis of many, many ideas I’ve workshopped and developed in previous posts — and in discussions you and I have had in the comments, so thank you for adding value to this blog, sir! — and I went out of my way to not come off as judgmental or accusatory, but rather to say to fans of open-ended mega-franchises that I empathize with you. I’ve been there. I was once a Batman completist, and a Star Wars completist, and an Indiana Jones completist, etc. I thought being a fan meant I had to support each new offering of the franchise, no matter how ancillary, by investing my money in it and making space for it in my home and in my life. Once a fan, always a fan, you know what I’m saying?
I think in some ways A Good Day to Die Hard in 2013 was a turning point for me. Now, I didn’t particularly care for Live Free or Die Hard five years earlier, but I was a die-hard Die Hard fan, so it didn’t matter — I had to go see each new movie. And I recall being halfway through A Good Day to Die Hard — in the theater — and feeling this overwhelming desire to just walk out, something I never did. We didn’t — we suffered through it to the closing credits — but I knew as I left the theater I would never go see a Die Hard movie again, nor would I read any of the fucking comics (Year One or A Million Ways to Die Hard), or have anything to do with the franchise moving forward. This was a movie series I’d obsessed over as a kid (I feel differently about it now, obviously, in light of my pursuit of greater sociocultural sensitivity), and yet I knew in that moment I was done with Die Hard forever.
That was at about the same time I was divorcing from the Dark Knight (another lifelong fave), and my eyes were starting to open to the idea that loving a particular movie or story or character does not make you beholden to follow the grander franchise to the ends of the Earth. You know? That I can like the first two Aliens, and the first two Terminators, and the first two Beverly Hills Cops, and the original Halloween without being obligated to see or own or care about everything or anything that came later. And I see so many folks online getting caught up in all this bullshit about what’s canon and what isn’t, and as I said in “This Counts, That Does Not,” the installments of an ongoing franchise that are “canon” are only the ones that mean something to you. That’s it. If it resonates with you, consider it “canon.” If it doesn’t, just disregard it and go on with your life.
But obsessively expending time and energy trying to puzzle out how Alfred Molina’s Doc Ock could possibly appear in the MCU or what the source of Agatha Harkness’ magical power is seems to me, to quote the great Bill Shatner, like a colossal waste of time — especially “when the answer is obvious to even the smallest child: because it’s not real” (Grant Morrison, Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us about Being Human [New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2011], 56).
Accordingly, the intention behind this two-part post was simply to shine a light on some of the tactics used to keep us watching these franchises so we can each make an accurate determination for ourselves whether our continued fandom is a worthy investment or merely a sunk cost. For many it will be the former, and that is absolutely fine, good, and right if that’s the case. My goal isn’t to shame anyone for being a superfan, merely to make sure that they are indeed self-actualized fans — and that they want to continue to be. I certainly wasn’t and didn’t… and I suspect there are others out there like I was: hostage buyers without the tools to wrest themselves free from the Multiverse of Madness. And as someone who’s made it to the other side — who’s found my way back home — I just want everyone out there to know that when (and if) they decide to let go of their once-favorite storyworlds, they won’t miss it as much as they fear they might. They won’t, in fact, miss it at all. Trust me.
Dell, your contributions add tremendous value to this blog, and I meant what I said: You can search conversations we’ve had on previous posts and find germs of ideas that later became the basis for subsequent full-length essays like this one — sometimes with even near-verbatim phrasing from my original comment! — and for that you have my profound gratitude. I don’t so much “geek out” on talking about the various metanarratives themselves as I do analyzing and discussing the “streaming code” behind the spectacle — the Matrix of Madness! Thanks for “getting” me!
Sean
BTW, when I say “literally defining your very SELF in terms of the franchise” I am not exaggerating
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jediism
Sweet Caroline!
Engaging in psychoneurotic fan forensics, erecting billboards beseeching the resurrection of our “beloved hero” Iron Man, and elaborate cosplaying at SDCC are all ways in which we define ourselves in terms of our slavish devotion to a particular media franchise. Studying the minutiae of superhero worlds (as we did when we’d read the old Who’s Who series back in the ’80s — remember that?), longing for fan-favorite characters (like Robin and Superman) to be brought back to life after event-series deaths, and dressing up as superheroes for Halloween are all perfectly fine, right, and good when children do it, but when adults engage in those games, they’ve unwittingly reversed figure and ground. For children, those fantasies are the ground on which they learn to develop the imagination and social skills they’ll need in reality; for adults, however, they are the figures — fictional realities whose “meaning” can be deduced and extracted with the diligent investment of enough time, money, and attention. (But as this post aims to demonstrate, that’s a fool’s errand if ever there was one.)
The Adam West, Michael Keaton, and Val Kilmer interpretations of Batman all prove (each in their own way) that there’s a way to do superhero movies that appeal to both children (who take them very seriously) and adults (who don’t historically take them seriously but enjoy them just the same, because there’s enough clever humor — subversive wit and double entendres — that speaks directly to more sophisticated ears). But the problem now is that superhero movies want to be taken seriously by everyone — especially adults. So, more and more, they are catering to an adult audience (notice I didn’t say a mature audience) at the expense of children — and at the expense of the genre itself:
Star Wars, by the way, falls into the same category: It’s mostly superhero fiction explicitly intended for a young audience. To develop a real-word religion (or at very least a religious philosophy) around Jediism is not only asinine for all the obvious reasons, but you would think that anyone who claims to be a superfan of Star Wars would have paid close enough attention to the series to be appalled by the Jedi Order. Seriously: It could easily be one of the most hateful fictional organizations ever. In the prequels, it is depicted (by its original creator, no less) as a body of arrogant, humorless, holier-than-thou warrior-priests who exercise a troubling degree of political influence (over an utterly dysfunctional galactic government), and whose insights and opinions seem guided nigh exclusively by transcendental intuition.
And even when they intuit correctly — Yoda and Mace Windu and the rest of them all “sense” that training Anakin would be a potentially dangerous mistake — they relent and let the very thing they warned against happen nonetheless! WTF? And then when the worst occurs, as prophesized, they have no structural or procedural guardrails in place to deal with an emergency — and the entire fucking Order collapses overnight! Children (or “younglings”) in their care and custodianship are murdered on account of their negligence and absolutely unforgivable lapses in judgment! And the few Jedi who manage to survive then opt to run away from their problems indefinitely — to Tatooine and Dagobah — rather than take responsibility for them. They are at no point held to account for their sins…
On the contrary: When the Order is rebuilt post–Return of the Jedi, it makes the exact same fuck-ups all over again, and — once more — the Jedi responsible (Luke Skywalker) throws up his hands and goes into hermetic self-exile. And this is the most heroic and noble institution in the galaxy? It sort of works in the original trilogy because the “Jedi” were this mystical and enigmatic abstraction, and because the series backstory was only known in vague broad-strokes. But once we saw the Jedi in their fully operational prime, we should’ve been deeply unsettled by the way they functioned as a quasi–shadow theocracy with extensive powers (both metaphysical and political) they were demonstrably unfit to wield.
But superfans are so consumed with metanarrative dot-connecting and sense-making, they never stop to interrogate the values encoded into their preferred transmedia storyworlds. And when they start organizing religions around those uncontested values, that represents a break from reality I personally find quite troubling.
Google “Jedi are evil” or “Sith are good”
https://screenrant.com/star-wars-why-the-jedi-are-bad-guys-villains/
https://www.cbr.com/most-evil-things-about-jedi-order/
https://www.salon.com/1999/06/15/brin_main/
And too many others to list
Those articles certainly make a far more lawyerly case for the argument at hand. And to my closing point in the previous reply, Brin says:
And Brin’s insights on Joseph Campbell later in the Salon piece go to directly what we were just discussing in the comments section of “The Road Back,” Dell. His analysis of the fable-template Lucas learned from Campbell and then used to promote oligarchal “demigod myths,” as Brin identifies them, is worthy of further consideration as we debate which aspects (if any) of the Hero’s Journey we ought to preserve. I absolutely agree that the Homeric archetypes Campbell identifies — and devotes considerable study to — are in need of serious scholarly interrogation, as Chris Winkle calls for in “It’s Time to Throw Out The Hero With a Thousand Faces.” That’s what we do as narratologists: We examine the tools and the tropes and identify which ones are working for us and which ones aren’t; which have value and which don’t; which can be improved and which need to be retired. Such is how we learn to write with both command of craft and moral imagination.
On the subject of Homeric archetypes as well as 1980s “program-length advertisements,” Netflix just released today the first images from its He-Man and the Masters of the Universe sequel series:
Amazing how that single sentence validates the entire thesis of “In the Multiverse of Madness: How Media Mega-Franchises Make Us Their Obedient Servants, Part 2,” no?
Speaking of cosplay…
Quote:
According to https://www.southbendtribune.com/story/entertainment/2013/07/07/hall-of-heroes-dons-wests-batman-sui/46985391/
The costume’s fabric is mostly spandex. The boots are felt. The bat insignia stuck on the leather utility belt is cardboard.
As for those pouches on the utility belt that appeared to carry Batman’s crime-fighting weapons and tools, “they just had them filled with blocks of wood so it looked like something was in there,” Stewart says.
“This costume,” he adds, “maybe cost 50 bucks to make.”
End Quote
Compare that to the Robert Pattinson batsuit
It’s far more serious, far more “realistic”. Interviews show how much time, thought, and effort went into designing it
And all it does is point up how ridiculous the idea of a grown man dressed as a bat is
Similar to the uncanny valley, the more serious the superhero gets, the more ridiculous it looks
W/ West, you know it’s a goof, you’re in on the goof
W/ the more serious costumes, you have to work hard to convince yourself that it’s serious
Oh, and I have no plans to see the newest Batman
But I admit, I DO want to see the upcoming DC League of Super-Pets movie
When I was a kid — and I suspect you had the same experience, Dell — we had Super Friends on Saturday mornings, and, complementing that, we had Adam West and Burt Ward as the live-action Caped Crusaders in syndicated daily reruns of Batman, along with Christopher Reeve and Lynda Carter portraying Superman and Wonder Woman, respectively. And what was so great about West, Ward, Reeve, and Carter was that they were the flesh-and-blood personifications of their comic/cartoon counterparts; they weren’t variations on or interpretations of them — they were those characters, right down to every minute costume detail, from the all-yellow S insignia on Superman’s cape to the shoelaces on Robin’s tunic. Fans of the contemporary DC and Marvel movies have the online “fidelity to the source material” debate all the time (which is, let’s face it, an idiotic debate, given the perennial reinterpretation and reinvention of those characters in the comics throughout the decades), but I submit that there’s never been more fundamentally faithful screen portrayals of Batman, Robin, Superman, and Wonder Woman than those of West, Ward, Reeve, and Carter.
And they all played those characters exactly right. (As did George Reeves, by the way.) They leaned into the squareness and the silliness of it all. They played it straight. They never winked at the camera, nor did they attempt to endow their performances with undue psychological heft. They understood that they were playing a child’s heroic fantasy, and they played those parts in all of their two-dimensional, four-color glory. (Christopher Reeve was such an exceptionally gifted actor that he endowed his remarkable performance with both humor, without ever veering into self-aware camp, and pathos, without ever going excessively emo or “tortured.” The quality of the scripts varied wildly from movie to movie, yes, but his performance was reliably top-notch, even when the material wasn’t. I can still watch The Quest for Peace to this day because he’s so fucking good in it.)
We used to have a View-Master — I’ll bet you did, too, sir! — and I had reels which featured stills from the Batman TV series as well as Superman: The Movie and Superman II. And I used to sit in my room and meticulously study those still frames for hours, admiring the spandex costumes, and counting the days till Halloween when I could dress up in a baggy Ben Cooper outfit of my own! And how happy I was to get superhero Underoos! I wore them on public display with the same straight-faced pride as West and Reeve, whose outfits never looked like silly unitards to me; on the contrary: they looked so enviably heroic! Such is the privilege of being seven years old.
You know, I recall going to see the first Keaton film when I was thirteen, and I was as swept up in that summer’s Batmania as any kid, but I definitely remember thinking, even then, that it was the first time I saw a live-action superhero production and became consciously aware that the costume was a costume — something deliberately manufactured and climbed into, piece by piece — as opposed to this magical garment that existed beneath the hero’s street clothes. You know? It felt more real, perhaps, but somehow less wondrous. But it looked cool enough, and at that point I was transitioning from the silliness of comic books to the seriousness of graphic novels: less Caped Crusader, more Dark Knight, if you please!
But perhaps the nagging sensation I felt in my gut that summer was an early indication of a realization I would not fully understand or embrace until many decades later: that the Adam West Batman was supposed to be stupid. That it was right to be stupid — because Batman himself is inherently stupid! It’s an objectively stupid concept! And trying to profile Batman psychologically — to figure out what makes him tick (note that Adam West never did) — only lays bare everything that’s conceptually absurd and morally problematic about him! Consider this recent quote from Robert Pattinson, who has gone on and on (and on… and on) in interviews about how his is the most “psychologically complex” and “fucked up” Batman you’ve ever seen:
Hmm.
Here’s a third (admittedly unlikely) interpretation: Is it possible — go with me on this — that Batman was never intended to be anything more than a simplistic children’s character, and his so-called “no-kill rule” was consistent with the archetypal characteristics of fictional do-gooders explicitly meant to appeal to ten-year-old boys? Because any earnest psychoanalytic evaluation of a billionaire who dresses up as a bat and dispenses vigilante “justice” in retribution for the murder of his parents can only reasonably yield one possible and incontrovertible conclusion: that he is an unheroic, violent sociopath with a pathological victim complex.
Again: None of this matters when Batman’s stories are written for kids, but…
All that said, I don’t think there’s any going back, any putting the toothpaste in the tube again. Once this shit was corrupted — and you can certainly thank the one-two-three punch of The Dark Knight Returns, The Killing Joke (for which Moore has repeatedly expressed his regret for writing), and A Death in the Family in the late ’80s — the die was cast. Unfortunately, the only way now to bring even a modicum of humor and innocence to superheroes is through projects like DC League of Super-Pets… though I wouldn’t be altogether surprised if before long we’re treated, thanks to online fan petitioning, to Zack Snyder’s grimdark, R-rated Bat-Hound v Superdog: Dogfight of Justice. Why not? Shittier projects, after all, have actually happened.
We should also note that tomorrow is Star Wars Day
May 4th (May the Force be w/ you)
I’m seeing many references on Twitter and DeviantArt already…
I honestly don’t know if “May the Fourth Be with You” was something that arose organically on social media or if it was deliberately contrived by someone in marketing at Lucasfilm, but if it was the latter, that person is a PR genius; and if it was the former, it’s a testament to how culturally pervasive that mega-franchise in particular has become. I mean, Christ: There is an unofficial national (international?) holiday devoted to fuckin’ Star Wars! Wow! (I’ve also noticed attempts to do #BatDay and #SpiderManDay, but I can’t speak to how well they’ve caught on; Star Wars was able to pin that campaign on a very specific date, which gives it special sticking power.)
And in a way, the “May the Fourth Be with You” hashtag goes to what I said in my opening salvo of “In the Multiverse of Madness, Part 1”: that some brands have become so prevalent, we simply take their existence and their ubiquity for granted. And after a while, we forget we can opt out of them — that we can choose to ignore them and live life happily without them. For example: I see a McDonald’s restaurant just about every day, but I haven’t eaten in one in probably a quarter century. I’ve opted out of that franchise same as I have Star Wars. And I don’t miss either. I harbor no desire to try a Big Mac, even for old times’ sake, nor do I have any desire to sample The Mandalorian (this despite having heard reasonably good things about it). I have reallocated the time, attention, and money I used to spend on Star Wars in other things — enterprises and endeavors that add measurable value to my life — and I don’t look back.
Boy oh boy, though, when Ben Kenobi said “The Force will be with you… always,” we had no fuckin’ idea, did we?
How are you not a university professor? I love reading these posts so much! As for me, I’m not sentimental. I can very easily put a book aside if I’m not enjoying it, or stop watching or caring about any TV show that’s stopped giving me the feels. My time is too valuable to waste it on things I don’t enjoy (exception is that damn quilt I’m trying to make, but that’s more a case of personal pride than anything else–I will NOT let a 1936 Singer sewing machine get the better of me!).
Oh, bless your heart! I’m very lucky to have a readership that indulges this horseshit!
Just between us, Suzanne, I’d always envisioned for myself a career as a novelist when I was in high school, but I was seduced by screenwriting in college, which sent me down a path that eventually led to Hollywood (until Hollywood decided it had had enough of me!). Despite some (inevitable) setbacks and (crushing) disappointments, I in no way regret the course of my life, but I imagine I probably would’ve been better off professionally had I pursued prose as planned and perhaps taught media studies or something like that, yeah. But that’s an alternate universe, so who knows? As this article attests, I’m not one for indulging parallel-reality scenarios. To everyone’s shock and surprise, my best friend’s father went back to school in his forties (possibly his fifties?) and became an English professor at CUNY, so perhaps I’ll do the same? For reasons I’m not yet ready to blog about — but will be in the coming months — I am entering a period of renewed possibilities and opportunities, so stay tuned…
Indeed, I myself will not stick with a book or television show beyond a few chapters/episodes if I’m not “feeling” it. Fuck that — my time and attention are too valuable to me to waste. Those are the easy cast-asides, though; the challenge is with the “legacy” stuff. When you grew up on Star Wars and Halloween and Ghostbusters and Terminator and Star Trek, there’s a tacit presumption — by the producers of those franchises, yes, but also amongst our peers and even within ourselves — that a new offering, especially one that features an O.G. star like Harrison Ford or Jamie Lee Curtis or Bill Murray or Linda Hamilton or Patrick Stewart, will automatically have our audience.
(I have many friends my age who, no matter how many times I explain it to them, can’t fucking understand why I haven’t seen Joker or Picard or Logan. Much like I was when I was still collecting comics long after I’d stopped enjoying them, it is simply beyond their ken that someone would voluntarily opt-out of a nostalgic event like that. Every time I get on the phone with them, I’m made to answer once more whether I’ve watched The Mandalorian yet, which inevitably yields the following counter-response: “Jesus Christ, man! It’s an $8.99 subscription, you cheap bastard! What’s wrong with you? Just get it so we can talk about the damn show already!”)
And as this post attempts to demonstrate, brand managers have become very adept at keeping us watching long after we’ve stopped caring. So, I hope “In the Multiverse of Madness” offers a set of tools to help us recognize when and if those franchises have ceased to add value to our lives, and even offers permission — if we’re looking for it — to let them go. Such is the advice I wish someone had given me ten or fifteen years ago.
CorderyFX argues that the recent Halloween Kills movie is a “nostalgic pandering nightmare” that spends too much time w/ what he calls “point and clap”
You point and clap at stuff you recognize
https://youtu.be/xm9iS5QB4HA
What a fantastic analysis of Halloween Kills, Dell! Thanks so much for sharing a link to it!
So, full disclosure: I have not watched the 2018 Halloween (which, for clarity’s sake, I will refer to here as H40) or Halloween Kills. (Side note: What’s with this recent trend of christening belated and/or legacy sequels with the exact same title as the original? See: Scream, Candyman, Shaft, The Thing.) I’ve seen the preceding ten Halloween movies, and the first seven of those I’ve screened multiple times, but for reasons I made clear in this post, I’m out. I’d actually considered seeing H40 in the leadup to its release — I wasn’t opposed to it on principle — but when I asked several friends who’d seen it if it was any good, every single one of them replied like this: “Absolutely. Yes. It’s good. You should see it. It’s fine. Definitely see it. It’s good.”
“It’s fine”? “It’s good”? None of that sounded like a ringing endorsement to me. It sounded like they wanted it to be good, but hadn’t yet come to terms with how underwhelmed they were by it, much like CorderyFX did on his second viewing of H40. I recall when The Force Awakens came out, I had a friend who saw it that Friday and said it was an A — absolutely! Then on Saturday he emended his position and declared it a solid B. By Sunday it was a C, then on Monday he settled on a final grade of D. He clearly needed the weekend to digest his disappointment!
So, I decided to pass on H40, and then later I even came to the blanket decision that I won’t watch do-over sequels until I’m reimbursed for all the money I spent on the now-retconned entries, which is (in part) why I refuse to watch Terminator: Dark Fate until Arnold personally writes me a check. (And even then he can go fuck himself.) I mean, half of the eight Rocky movies are outstanding (the original, Rocky Balboa, Creed, and Creed II), whereas the other half are a case study in diminishing returns (II, III, IV, and V), but at least they all count. Stallone takes creative ownership of all of them, and it can even be argued that Creed is a second shot at the Rocky-as-mentor story he first attempted, unsuccessfully, in Rocky V, and Creed II utterly redeems the cheesy jingoism of Rocky IV (Ivan Drago, one of the most cartoonish villains of the Reagan era, made me cry at the climax of Creed II!). But I can’t abide this bullshit of “retconning.” It’s basically the producers saying, “Yeah, we know the last half-dozen sequels were dogshit, but this one — this time — is good. Promise.”
I’m so grateful that there are online critics who do these kinds of video essays, because it allows me to have a baseline knowledge about movies and shows I just can’t bring myself to watch, like H40 and Picard and Ghostbusters: Afterlife, precisely because I cannot, for my own mental health, indulge the very nostalgic backward-gazing those projects are meant to encourage and exploit. To my view, there is nothing sadder than geriatric Jamie Lee still running from the Shape, than Bill Murray strapped into his Proton Pack over three decades later, than Michael Keaton back in the rubber Batsuit, than Harrison Ford in his fedora and bomber jacket despite now being forty years removed from World War II, than Eddie Murphy in his Detroit Lions letterman once again. I mean, all of the aforementioned were my favorite media franchises when I was in junior high school! C’mon, Gen X: How long are we going to keep doing this…?
Now, all that said, CorderyFX’s analysis of Kills as a narrative in its own right is fascinating. It seems like H40, as a soft reboot–cum–legacy sequel, was satisfying enough, but rather than stopping there — taking a relative win and exiting the stage gracefully — David Gordon Green (who is exactly one year older than I am, I should note) fell into the same trap that eventually ensnares every slasher franchise: He beat it into the ground. Compounding that, his nostalgia pandering, as demonstrated in CorderyFX’s video essay, is so perfectly emblematic of the very point-and-clap “storytelling” I call out in this two-part post. Whether it’s a legacy sequel or a shared universe, the only point to any of this is to spot all the Easter eggs and appreciate the callbacks to previous entries in the franchise. That’s it. The narrative, such as it is, exists only to support Easter-egg hunting, an empty-calorie treat if ever there was one.
If H40 was a “soft reboot,” Kills is clearly a full-on nostalgic family reunion, bringing back all those supporting players from the first movie (Lindsey, Sheriff Brackett, Nurse Marion), with the original actors reprising their roles, no less, who don’t seem like they were given much to do in the movie, save Tommy Doyle leading a lynch mob into the streets to kill Michael. (Great messaging, by the way, in the wake of the Capitol riot.)
That scene in the bar of Tommy recounting the events of 1978 was douche-chillingly hacky, and CorderyFX was right on the money when he said the movie exists in a continuity whereby only the events of the original actually happened, yet Michael Myers’ reputation seems to draw from the cumulative killings of all the now-retconned sequels! CorderyFX is absolutely right: If three teenagers had been murdered in my neighborhood forty years ago, and the killer was caught and locked up the night it occurred, would we still be living in a state of collective, perpetual terror and paranoia? Christ, here in New York, 3,000 people were killed in a single day during the Trade Center attacks, and all we’ve done since is build one record-breaking skyscraper after the next — and people pay top dollar to live in them! If anything, it’s probably more accurate to suggest the gift shops in Haddonfield would be stocked with Michael Myers–themed merchandise; they’d be capitalizing on their reputation, not living in fear of a recurrence.
Halloween was a scary and stylish little exploitation flick that, to everyone’s surprise, become one of the most profitable independent films ever produced; naturally, with Hollywood being Hollywood, it became an ongoing franchise. But it was never designed or intended to go on and on and on — even Carpenter himself tried to put the storyline to bed after Halloween II (1981) — and doesn’t it say something so sad, even embarrassing, about Generation X that we won’t move on from this? The brilliance of Kevin Williamson’s original Scream screenplay was that it took inspiration from and payed homage to John Carpenter’s Halloween, but it’s also its own self-contained, fully realized slasher story, with its own fully developed characters, that speaks to the particular postmodern teenage cynicism of the mid-nineties Clueless generation. (I may write about Scream for its 25th anniversary next month.) It moved the genre forward, building on what had come before, and such is why it is truly one of the great horror movies — perhaps the greatest? — of the past quarter century. (Which is not to say that franchise didn’t stumble into the same sequel trap that perpetually bedevils the very subgenre so cleverly sent-up in the 1996 original.)
We’ve got to move on from this shit. Do none of my demographic cohorts share my embarrassment about still getting giddy over more Star Wars and Ghostbusters and Top Gun adventures? That was the observation I closed on in “Tim Burton’s Batman at 30″: After a while, you just start to feel like that guy hanging out at his old high school long after graduation. As Ferris Bueller said in his own post-credits tag, long before they were fashionable: “It’s over. Go home.”
If you’ve never watched it, Dell, I highly recommend this analysis of the Austin Powers trilogy, which demonstrates how the series, like a cinematic Nostradamus, predicted the current cycle of nostalgia to which Hollywood — and, by extension, the audience — is interminably consigned.
Thank you, sir, for keeping this conversation alive! I feel in many ways this two-part post, “In the Multiverse of Madness,” really ties together a number of issues I’ve been talking about and working through on this blog for the past few years. I wrote it in the weeks leading up to my move from L.A. to New York — which I will blog about in the new year — with the first installment publishing right before I left L.A., and the second right after I arrived in New York! It’s wild to me that I could’ve written such a dense dissertation during a period of such intense stress and heavy distraction! But as Chili Palmer said in Get Shorty, sometimes you do your best work when you’ve got a gun to your head!
P.S. On the subject of point-and-clap storytelling, here’s an excerpt from a recent article you might appreciate:
I hope you don’t think I’m spamming, but I saw this post (https://www.gawker.com/culture/the-very-real-decline-of-all-we-hold-dear-as-told-through-the-progressively-shittier-spider-man-movies) and thought you’d like it
I particularly want to point your attention to this section:
>one of the most worthwhile parts of popular art is how it can galvanize disparate audiences around a shared appreciation for an idea, or even a set of ideas, that make us appreciate the commonalities of the human experience — a sorely needed thing, I think.
and this:
>In just a few movies, we go from the death of a surrogate parent motivating Peter Parker to become a local superhero protecting his native New York City, to the death of a cool best friend motivating Peter Parker to become a global policeman.
Though there is much else in that article worth reading
Completely different topic, and even more likely to be considered spam, but Mythcreants.com just put up my post How Useful Are Dave Lerner’s Eight Rules of Writing?
Please feel free to alter or delete this if it is spam
Hey, Dell! First off: Friends of this blog are always welcome — even encouraged — to promote their work here, for whatever that may be worth. My humble platform is yours, to whatever extent it is helpful to you. That’s an open offer — with no expiration date.
Secondly: Congrats on the new post over at Mythcreants! I loved the glimpse at a more satirical side of your personality, which we don’t get to see here. You always make such great contributions to our conversations here, and it’s really nice to see you starting a conversation. Do more of that. It suits you.
Now let’s talk about “The Very Real Decline of All We Hold Dear As Told Through the Progressively Shittier Spider-Man Movies”! I read a lot of stuff that gives me food for thought (much of it recommended by you, as it happens, so thanks!), but rarely do I come across a piece and wish I’d written it. This is definitely one of those. Part of the reason, alas, I can no longer write topical critical essays like “The Very Real Decline…” is precisely because I refuse to watch any more superhero movies or so-called legacy sequels! Such is why I published “In the Multiverse of Madness”: It was almost my way of publicly declaring, “I’m not going to have any more insights about superheroes and Star Wars, et al., because I’m officially out. I’ve said all I can say about this subject, and, speaking personally now, I no longer want to subject myself to these movies anymore. So this is it — my Final Word on the matter, before I permanently exfiltrate from the Multiverse of Madness. I’m unsubscribing now for my mental health and to prove it can be done, if anyone else cares to join me.”
All that said, I still love reading intelligent takes on this stuff! Gordon’s thesis — that our inability to move on from this ephemera is “indicative of a broader decline in the culture” — is one I’ve been wrestling with since at least as far back as “Attack of the Clones” in 2015. Obviously, I completely agree with his assessment that this shit isn’t “American mythology,” for reasons I explicitly addressed in the post above, though with far less enviable color than Gordon’s caustic wordsmithing: “Now, superhero stories are not ‘essentially’ a collective American mythology because collective myths like Paul Bunyan and Johnny Appleseed are not bloodlessly mediated by corporate boardrooms with a burning fixation on generating profit, a wrinkle that ‘essentially’ upends the entire premise.” Ha!
(Side note: Later this week, I’ll be publishing a 5,000-word post about what Robert Rodriguez’s Mariachi trilogy has to teach us about mythic storytelling and franchise filmmaking. I don’t know if you’re a fan of those movies, Dell, but I think you’ll enjoy the piece for what it has to say about being creative and what it means to practice creativity, something you satirically addressed in “How Useful Are Dave Lerner’s Eight Rules of Writing?”)
And I completely second Gordon’s observation that we spend so much time puzzling out “what this or that scene means for the Marvel Cinematic Universe,” a.k.a. forensic fandom, that we fail to ask ourselves what these movies say about us — specifically, our “fairly depressing embrace of the security state that’s par for the course in the films.” The Raimi Spider-Man films — the first two, at least — really stick with you; he gets at the delightfully simplistic wonder and pathos that Stan Lee conjured when he first created Peter Parker. To some extent, Raimi does for Spider-Man what Schumacher did in Batman Forever: He fuses whiz-bang superheroics with just enough pop-psychology to give the material some depth without asking more of it than was ever intended. As Gordon so astutely observes: “The life of a superhero is necessarily simple.”
Let’s talk now about this passage:
Ditto all of that, especially the final clause. It means nothing. We don’t care about Holland’s Spider-Man as a character in a believable (if not exactly realistic) world, merely as an action figure in an expansive toybox. That’s why Sony ultimately cut a deal to bring Spider-Man into the MCU, because they knew the character as a solo act was essentially worthless, owed to the prevailing attitude that if a movie doesn’t somehow connect with a much grander meta-narrative, who cares less? Such is life in the Multiverse of Madness. (And such is why previous iterations of these IPs, like Maguire’s Spider-Man and Keaton’s Batman, are now being integrated into the current cinematic multiverses, because it makes decades-old movies relevant anew as active assets once again. That means new SteelBooks and SDCC-exclusive collectables…)
Of all the points he raises, though, none resonate more profoundly with me than this: “We have been awash in remakes of nerd shit for nearly all of the 21st century, and the loop between past and present grows tighter.” Later in the essay, he follows that point up with this:
That right there is the essence of “In the Multiverse of Madness.” I couldn’t have said it better myself! I wish I’d said it just like that, in fact. But I’m glad Gordon did, and I’m grateful to you, Dell, for bringing it to my attention here. It is absolutely punishing — being forced to hostage-buy all this recycled “nerd shit,” as he calls it. This is what happens when a culture subsists strictly on a diet of high-fructose corn syrup. Even Emmy darling Game of Thrones is symptomatic of an all-in investment on geek interests, as that show was never anything more than a big-budget, FX-heavy dramatization of a storyless Dungeons & Dragons campaign. (And I say that as someone who used to play D&D back in grammar school in the ’80s.) Game of Thrones is Dungeons & Dragons by another name — that’s all. (And it’s no secret that I found that show — all eight interminable seasons — to be just as punishing an experience as the MCU franchise.)
Our culture is so starved for new, meaningful stories about adults. And by that I in no way mean more dreary fucking prestige dramas! Hell, no! Honest to Christ, I wouldn’t watch Mare of Easttown or Y: The Last Man (and I’ve read the entire comic series) at gunpoint. A thousand Game of Thrones aren’t worth a single Ted Lasso; let’s have much less for the former and lots more of the latter, please. We’ve got to wean audiences off their fast-food addiction and start feeding them narratively nutritious meals again. Else what’s the point of even being a storyteller?
Thanks again for sharing links to both of the pieces, Dell. Your contributions are always meaningful and appreciated.
SPC
P.S. On the matter discussed above, to say nothing of points I’ve raised in both “Too Much Perspective” and “Scream at 25,” here’s an excerpt from a recent article you might appreciate:
Sean, you may want to sit down and brace yourself before reading this. And I REFUSE to accept responsibility for your state of mind if you watch the embedded Teaser Trailer:
https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/16/22937546/disney-plus-chip-n-dale-rescue-rangers-movie-reboot
Holy. Shit. Was that MC fucking Skat Kat?!
Jesus H. Christ. Well, what can you say but… at least they made the new Rescue Rangers, relatively speaking, grounded and elevated.
Yeah, this is the nostalgia–industrial complex — and I don’t use that term just to be cute — expanding on the tactics it’s honed over the past decade-plus serving Xers a buffet of deep-eighties delights in a targeted effort to now appeal to aging Millennials who ache for the nineties, something I warned was on the horizon a few years ago. Note how the bit in the Chip ‘n Dale trailer with Seth Rogen as the live-action mo-cap character who interacts with Chip and Dale isn’t merely intended to comedically comment on the aesthetic differences between old-school 2D (which sang its swan song in the ’90s) and computer-graphic imagery (which became the preferred format of the aughts), but to take a definitive position about how the way things used to be is objectively preferable to how they are now. (“Remember that animation style where everything looked real but nothing looked right?”)
This new iteration of Chip ‘n Dale is manifestly taking the same position on the 1990s that Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One took on the ’80s: The revered decade was a Renaissance period unto itself that wasn’t merely culturally important, but in fact represents the nadir of creative achievement. That’s gonna be a point-and-clap event if ever there’s been one. By contrast, I recently watched Lin-Manuel Miranda‘s Tick, Tick… Boom!, and that movie perfectly captured what Lower Manhattan felt like in the ’90s — I used to eat at the bygone Moondance Diner all the time — without getting orgiastically nostalgic for it, or cramming in every conceivable pop-cultural point of reference from the era like that piece-of-shit Goldbergs spinoff Schooled or now Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers. The new Chip ‘n Dale should be a big, blinking warning sign for Millennials: The nostalgia–industrial complex has its sights on you — and, more to the point, your wallet.
Need further proof? Even the Transformers franchise, a transparently crass commercial exercise from its inception, is looking forward to looking back:
So, there you have it, Dell: As if living in an ’80s time loop hasn’t been miserable enough, here come the ’90s… again. Perhaps the official slogan of this particular Millennial-centric nostalgic campaign ought to be: “The Nineties — Say You’ll Be There!” (Alternatively, “The Nineties, Baby… One More Time!” would serve as an acceptable tagline.)
Hey, one quick thing that’s off-topic but germane to the overarching point of this post as well as “Tim Burton’s Batman at 30″ and many others on this blog: Grant Morrison had a number of things to say on his own blog earlier this week about the grimdarkening of classic superheroes. Here’s a sampler:
Thought you might appreciate this
If “appreciate” is the right word…
https://bogleech.tumblr.com/post/713795158391521280/bogleech-this-might-sound-mean-maybe-but-i-feel
To the reviewer who noted, “It feels like a feature-length ad for Nintendo,” I would encourage that person to dwell on that comment for a while, and perhaps ponder whether that’s an unfortunate flaw of The Super Mario Bros. Movie… or whether it is in fact the movie’s entire raison d’être.
He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, that prototypal specimen for the sociopolitical initiative known as commercial adolescence, turns 40 this coming September. That means the formative experiences of four successive generations — Gen X and their children, Gen Z; Millennials and their children, Gen Alpha — have been influenced by that sociocultural experiment.
In the ’80s, Gen X was trained to see narrative entertainment and toy commercials as one and the same. Then in the ’90s, when the Millennials came of age, a campaign was underway to legitimize pulp ephemera. Juvenile junk that would’ve previously been considered “good crap,” like Buffy the Vampire Slayer had been at the beginning of the decade, was elevated to the status of high art — a “culturally defining masterpiece” — by the end of the last millennium. (For those interested, I explore the “evolution” of the Buffy franchise here.)
Come the aughts, both Xers and Millennials had been conditioned to see no distinction between storytelling and marketing, between art and entertainment. All of it had been conflated. And as those generations climbed into adulthood and then middle age, nostalgia set in. So, now it was about taking those beloved brands and adultifying them — making them grounded and elevated. Not necessarily deep, just dark.
But audiences can no longer distinguish between deep and dark, any more than they can between an earnest TV program and a program-length advertisement, or a movie and a movie-length coming attraction, or ephemeral crap from high art. It’s all fucked-up now. We’ve been trained to crave juvenile entertainment, but to demand it be “grounded and elevated.”
Consequently, an offering like Super Mario Bros., which represents the worst of all worlds — an animated movie based on an ’80s videogame (previously adapted as a terrible ’90s live-action feature) that’s jam-packed with fan-service callbacks for nostalgic adults, but whose storytelling is shackled by the limitations of the nonnarrative source material — leaves audiences not knowing what the hell to make of it. Here’s the takeaway, folks: The Super Mario Bros. Movie is the result of a 40-year descent into the Multiverse of Madness. We’re hopelessly lost in it now.
Friend of the blog Jeff Ritchie recently made me aware of this fascinating analysis, “The Real Reason Matrix Resurrections Bombed,” published last year in Wired. The author suggests that Matrix Resurrections (which I have not seen) is a cultural critique masquerading as a legacy sequel — a movie about the self-loathing of nostalgia. Almost makes me want to watch it!
Almost…
There is an art to making something appeal on two different levels, child and adult
Alice in Wonderland had it. The old Bugs Bunny cartoons had it. Batman ’66 (as it’s now called) had it
I’m not so sure many stories have it today
Which would be fine, if those stories would let kid stuff BE kid stuff
I used the phrase “Children’s clothes in adult sizes” before, and I think it still applies
Agreed. And the problem with most branded entertainment these days is that it’s cross-generational: Each of us have “our version” of Batman, of Bond, of Star Wars, etc. In other words: Those concepts and characters come with baggage. Audiences who came of age on Zack Snyder’s Batman and Dainel Craig’s Bond and Space Jam‘s Bugs Bunny have very different conceptions of and expectations for those characters than those who first experienced Adam West’s Batman and Roger Moore’s Bond and Chuck Jones’ Bugs. Consequently, it becomes increasingly harder to present representations of those characters that can appeal to multiple viewership demographics, hence the reliance on the “multiverse,” which exists solely to validate each iteration of those icons, rather than to use them in any kind of meaningful narrative.
The original Star Wars is a prime example of a piece of entertainment that had what’s known as “four-quadrant appeal,” but that’s gone now — that franchise speaks only to its devoted fan base these days. (Or it doesn’t, at its own peril, as The Last Jedi demonstrated.) Once a franchise or an iconic character (like Batman) has developed a fandom, subsequent storytelling almost invariably becomes about serving that fandom, not trying to appeal to different audiences on different levels, like Batman ’66 did. A character’s history can become a narrative albatross. Such is the reason, at least for me, pop culture has become so altogether joyless here in the Multiverse of Madness, so devoid of wonder or surprise or humanity.