evening redness

Some opening remarks for a roundtable I was just on for SFRA 2018. The topic was Avengers vs. Jedi and mainly focused on the problem of franchise and media consolidation in late late post post modern capitalism or whatever we are calling it these days.

Also, to be clear, I coined the term “naustalgia.”

More seriously, one of the ways I think we might distinguish between Star Wars and the MCU as franchises is by recognizing a difference between the former’s nostalgic logic and the latter’s easter egg logic. Franchises, I think, have to manage an audience’s affective response in order to maintain that audience’s interest in a sprawling storyworld and the media properties that express it. We all know that A New Hope is a key example of the nostalgia film insofar as it referred to eariler media properties such as Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon. I have argued and would continue to argue that, very simply put, the challenge for Stars Wars in the Disney era has to do with producing and managing nostalgia for earlier iterations of the franchise even as it produces and manages novelty. To be clear, I am drawing a distinction between nostalgia for previous but distinct media objects and nostalgia for the media objects that belong to an extant franchise. With this distinction in mind, we can see that the MCU has not had to worry about franchise nostalgia quite yet as it has come into existence and sprawled so quickly—18 going on 19 films in about a decade. There is, of course, nostalgia in it for fans of comics and fans of these characters, but there is no nostalgia yet for past iterations of the MCU (although I can imagine that coming shortly and I wonder what the effect will be). There are, however, easter eggs (and note that I am probably using the term in a somewhat heterodox manner here). Some of these easter eggs are minor in terms of the overall MCU arc but are cool for fans of the comics, such as Howard the Duck’s appearance in the end credit scene in the first Guardians of the Galaxy. I am not sure there is any nostalgia there, but if there is, again, it’s not for the MCU but for some pre-MCU media object. Some of the easter eggs are more significant for an anticipatory quality that becomes clearer in retrospect, such as the appearance of what turns out to be the fake Infinity Gauntlet in Thor. Finally, some of them are tremendously consequential for both their revelation of the present and their determination of the future, such as the appearance of Thanos in a post-credit scene at the end of The Avengers—which also includes a cool but inconsequential easter egg for comics fans, the mention of “courting death” by the Other as he describes the battle with humanity that just took place. (And I would note that the proliferation of end credit scenes is an escalation of the easter egg logic behind the MCU.) I want to keep this short, so I will refrain from theorizing the distinctions between nostalgia and easter egg as logics, but suffice it to say I think that they are at odds with one another in terms of how they manage audience’s affective expectations in relation to the coherence of the overall franchise. And, finally, I will note that one of the reasons Solo is so terrible is that it tries to introduce easter egg logic to a franchise structured by nostalgia, a nostalgia especially complex with regard to the iconic character whose name is in the title despite being, it turns out, an utterly random easter egg.

This entry was posted on 4 July 2018 at 22:40 and is filed under Conferences, papers, Uncategorized, Writing with tags Franchise, MCU, media ecology, Star Wars. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.