Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Politics: Transmedia World-Building Beyond Capitalism (Radical Cultural Studies) - Softcover

Dan Hassler-Forest

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1783484934 ISBN 13: 9781783484935

Verlag: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

From Tolkien to Star Trek and from Game of Thrones to The Walking Dead, imaginary worlds in fantastic genres offer highly detailed political worlds beyond capitalism. This book examines the complex ways in which these popular storyworlds offer valuable conceptual tools for anti-capitalist participatory politics.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Dan Hassler-Forest is assistant professor of media and cultural studies at Utrecht University.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Politics

Transmedia World-Building Beyond Capitalism

By Dan Hassler-Forest

Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd.

Copyright © 2016 Dan Hassler-Forest
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78348-493-5

Contents

Acknowledgments, 
Chapter 1: Imaginary Empires: Transmedia World-Building and Global Capitalism, 
Chapter 2: World-Building and Convergence Culture: From Imperialism to Empire, 
Chapter 3: Fantastical Capitalism and Postideological World-Building, 
Chapter 4: Revolutionary Storyworlds and Postdemocratic Capitalism, 
Chapter 5: Beyond Capitalism: Posthuman Storyworlds, 
Chapter 6: "Post"script, 
Bibliography, 

CHAPTER 1

Imaginary Empires

Transmedia World-Building and Global Capitalism

"Everything is awesome." Anyone who has seen The LEGO Movie won't be able to hear those words without humming that mind-numbingly stupid but irresistibly catchy tune. The catchphrase is a perfect expression of the film's ambivalently satirical take on the LEGO brand, the movie itself, and the cultural logic of global capitalism. Both critical and celebratory, participatory and exploitative, independent minded and highly commercial, The LEGO Movie is the perfect cultural product for our times, blithely incorporating a vibrant anticapitalist sentiment into a framework that greases the wheels of global capitalism. So blatant is the film's overtly satirical take on consumerism, conformity, and commodity culture that film reviewers have described it as "practically communist," while commentators on Fox News attacked the film for indoctrinating children with anticapitalist values.

As bizarre as it may seem to use the term anticapitalist for an animated film whose most obvious function is to advertise a popular toy brand, The LEGO Movie is an illuminating example of the many contradictions that inform twenty-first-century fantastic fiction and its relationship to capitalism. The ideological nerve it has struck is most visible in the film's early scenes, which depict an urban population that lives in a state of what can only be described as a classically Marxist false consciousness. The narrative revolves around Emmet, a desperately ordinary construction worker who has been successfully integrated into an elaborate system of ideological mind control. Over the course of the film, Emmet is identified as the Chosen One, and his resulting adventures allow him to escape his desperately tedious life in the service of a vaguely North Korean variation on Starbucks capitalism.

In a more playful way than similarly organized dystopias in films such as The Matrix and V for Vendetta, the initial worldview presented in The LEGO Movie seems perfectly aligned with Guy Debord's famous critique of the "Society of the Spectacle": the power of capital has become so overwhelming that it encapsulates all of lived experience. The system's subjects are fully conditioned to take for granted the most monotonous daily routines, while mass media effectively brainwash entire populations. In the film, we are therefore introduced to Emmet as capitalist society's perfectly indoctrinated subject: consuming endlessly repetitive catchphrase-heavy TV comedies, happily purchasing $37 cups of coffee, and spending his working days singing along to insipid but catchy pop songs with lyrics that reassure him over and over again that everything is indeed awesome.

The fact that Emmet soon thereafter comes to lead a team of adventurous rebels is more or less irrelevant, especially because the increasingly incoherent narrative all but falls apart under the strain of its own metatextual irony. Far more interesting is how the film's imaginary world establishes itself not as ideologically neutral but as an environment where anticapitalist sentiment exists side by side with the most blatant promotion of a wide range of commodities and branded entertainment franchises. In this ambiguous context, "Everything Is Awesome" becomes a hilariously unsubtle articulation of neoliberalism's notorious mantra "there is no alternative," signaling that the world we live in is not just the best but also the only possible world. Just as Emmet learns that he can build whatever he can imagine as long as he builds it out of LEGOs, we, too, can do whatever we want, as long as we don't question the fundamental logic of capitalism.

But, at the same time, The LEGO Movie makes it impossible to take any of this seriously: its anticapitalist jabs, its casual sexism, its self-reflexive hyper-commercialism, and the finale's sentimental paternalism are all overshadowed by the film's tone of overwhelming irony. The obviousness of the film's many contradictions and the fun we have with its self-satisfied awesomeness make it an especially vivid illustration of the cultural, ideological, and narrative logic of participatory culture and media convergence. With a cast of characters that includes Batman, Wonder Woman, Gandalf, Albus Dumbledore, Lando Calrissian, and Shaquille O'Neal, the jokes and narrative twists rely heavily on viewers' intimate familiarity with popular franchises and their many transmedia iterations. In this sense, the film's release is a culmination of the decades-long interaction between a wide range of popular narrative franchises and the LEGO brand. By its very design, LEGO is a toy that involves a highly participatory sensibility, with a productive tension (ultimately central to the film's plot) between straightforward assembly, as one follows the instructions to put together an X-Wing or a Quidditch arena, and creative production, as components from different sets are easily combined with others to create entirely new hybrids.

The contradiction between these two coexisting perspectives is remarkably similar to the relationship between canonical storyworlds in fantastic fiction and the creative fan cultures that have nourished and sustained them. Fandom is hardly ever limited to a single franchise or storyworld, typically spreading out across genres and media, as evidenced by the organization of fan conventions: Star Trek fans, for instance, will most commonly not only know and enjoy other sf narratives across numerous media but also be familiar with other related genres like fantasy and horror. What most forms of sf and fantasy fandom have in common is an interest in world-building as a limitless and continuously expanding narrative environment.

Matt Hills has described this kind of infinitely expansive storyworld as a hyperdiegesis: "a vast and detailed narrative space, only a fraction of which is ever directly seen or encountered," offering the dual attractions of ontological security and endlessly deferred narrative. The ongoing expansion of these storyworlds is primarily the result of fan culture's own creative and transformative activity, especially since fantastic storyworlds offer "creators and fan-bases coherent ways of suturing together gaps or contradictions in narrative when they occur." But what fans also add creatively is a continuous hybridization of these storyworlds: just as children can have Dora the Explorer team up with Spider-Man to defeat an evil Papa Smurf, fan culture thrives on the imaginative work of crossovers, mashups, and creative appropriation. The many forms of mashup culture that have emerged over the past two decades attest to this continuous hybridization of fan texts and collaborative creative production.

This tension between internally coherent storyworlds and the fandom's radically...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2016
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1783484934
• ISBN 13: 9781783484935
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 246
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland