Hypertextuality and Transmedia Storytelling

Reading about the hypertextual and transmedial authorship of characters such as Batman and James Bond this week, I started thinking about the further decentralization of the role of the initiating author. As I’m not a big fan of fiction or graphic novel reading, I’ve never really considered the development of and purveyance of the iconic fictional characters we read about this week—James Bond and Batman specifically. I’ve seen Batman the television show and a few of the movies, but never immersed myself into other incarnations of the story. I’ve seen the first Matrix movie, but within 10 minutes of walking out of the theatre had unraveled the entire premise of the movie so much so that I wasn’t tempted in the least to sit through two sequels, let alone one. And now I see that what was on the screen was only a part of the story and I should have been searching for further information via their websites and short subjects.

Thanks to the readings this week, I am looking at these titles in a different light, but not to the extent that I wish to immerse myself in the back stories, participate in fan fiction or take the time to play a video game based in those worlds. Quoting Fiona Marrow (quoted in Jenkins’ article): “You can call me old-fashioned—what matters to me is the film and only the film. I don’t want to ‘enhance’ the cinematic experience by overloading on souped-up flim flam.” In this day of media bombardment, who has the time? I can’t even get into the long defunct television show Black Adder because I’ve never seen episode one! I have seen episode one of Red Dwarf, so that’s a show I can slip more easily in and out of… But am I writing stories with their characters? No. Am I playing video games based on their world? No. If I didn’t have a mortgage, full time job, adjunct teaching or a degree program to worry about, would I? No.

Yet, we’ve been asked to consider a favorite “multi-mediated on-going text in terms of our reading for this week,” and so I tried to think about how these ideas fit into the music world—(that’s where my fiction worlds are build) and decided to think about these ideas in terms of the Beatles. They are based on real people, with real lives, real talents, real birth certificates, but have been remediated across many texts in many media forms—one of the first was “Hard Day’s Night,” in 1964, while they were riding high on worldwide adulation. This is a film they actually appear in as themselves, but follow a fictionalized script of a typical day-in-the-life written by someone else. Later, not long after that and their second film Help (where they are depicted as living all together in an eccentric ultra-modern conjoined rowhouse--with four separate entrances all attached to the same sub-divided living area), they became animated caricatures by an American company with animation actors attempting bad English, let alone bad Liverpudlian accents, targeting child-fans of the group from 1965 to 1969 (I was one of them).

In 1968, the characters were adapted for older audiences in “Yellow Submarine,” but as the real Beatles were not too keen on how they had been depicted in the television show, wanted no part in the film—until they saw it. They enjoyed it so much, that they quickly threw together a tag on film of themselves recapping aspects of the film and asking the audience to join in for a round of “All Together Now” to sing themselves out of the theatres.

Forty years later, I figured the legend of the Beatles was probably just existing in the hearts and minds of Boomers who had been there but I was wrong. The Beatles and their songs have moved into Cyberspace with their own official website with their own sanctioned video games on the site. And to my astonishment have even been the subjects of younger fan fiction. If you Google “Beatles fan fic” up come 298,000 sites, although the amount of fan fic that has appeared seems to have been created during the first 10 years of the Internet and is no where near as pervasive as that of more recent characters or stories. Perhaps I didn't know where to look.

Obviously I wasn’t originally thinking about how Beatles producer George Martin and son Giles have recently created sort of “mash-ups” (if you will) of Beatles songs—having access to all the extant tracks of recordings and lifting melody lines from one song and blending them into the backing tracks of other songs, ultimately teaming up with Cirque du Soleil to create a choreographed visual experience of the songs in their Las Vegas acrobatics show, “Love.” Granted, George Martin IS the fifth Beatle and most say he has a right to do this. But even so, what happens to a Beatles song when only Paul McCartney or only Ringo Starr performs it? I’ve seen both on recent tours and whereas they were there too, it’s not the same.

And if you really want to get away from the original texts, throw in the veritable plethora of Beatles tribute bands such as 1964, the Eggmen, Rain, Me And My Monkey, The Fabfour, The Liverpool Legends... And throw in Broadway's tribute show "Beatlemania."

At the core of these performances I believe is an audience desire to hear that music performed live and perhaps to pretend what it might have felt like to feel the energy and the presence of the musicians performing them. Heck, if you had seen the real thing, you wouldn't have even gotten to hear the music for the screaming.

Ideas of interest from the latest readings included the idea of hypertextual characters who might have been created within one cultural context (such as James Bond) have to evolve and change with the times to stay popular. The idea that Hollywood is motivated to create transmediated titles if nothing more than for merchandising purposes kind of opened my eyes a little more. I know I’ve realized that when a title can be a board game and a t-shirt and a toy, that means more money is to be made, but having not delved into any particular title to that extent, I didn’t realize how pervasive and expected it has become for audiences to expand the experience. This is why “building worlds” is really how new movies are developed, for if you know the world the characters come from and exist in, then you can create as many sequels and offshoots as you wish and can afford to pay for.

I was definitely wondering about the Wachowski brothers and their willingness to take probably more credit for creating the world of The Matrix than they probably deserved. In fact, in his book Japanamerica, author Roland Kelts says that the world of the Matrix was “directly and openly indebted to several anime films in particular and to the style in general.” So, was The Matrix a further widening of an earlier myth rather than a creation of its own world?