Show Sold Separately. Jonathan Gray

The Simpsons is one of the only commercial television programs in the United States to have consistently attacked American consumerism and capitalism.¹⁵ It regularly savages advertising’s ethics and style, and rarely involves product placement while doing so (thus avoiding the Wayne’s World [1992] mock-yet-show strategy of parodying product placement), and many of its key figures serve allegorical functions with relation to consumerist capitalism—see, for example, Homer, the anti-hero who mindlessly buys anything he is told to; Krusty the Klown, the Ronald McDonald sell-out children’s entertainer; Mr. Burns, the evil corporate overlord; and Lisa, the hero whose environmentalism and anti-consumerist ethos is all too rare on American television. So, were we to evaluate the show’s relationship to and messages regarding advertising based solely on the television program, we would likely judge it as resolutely leftist in sentiment. However, to do so would be to overlook the apparent hypocrisy that while it criticizes Krusty’s lust to put his brand on everything, so too does The Simpsons brand at times appear to be on everything, and while it criticizes advertising, from the early use of Bart to advertise Butterfinger candy bars to countless other appearances in ads, The Simpsons has been complicit with more advertising than have most other shows on television.¹⁶ Yet some of its other paratexts also criticize ads, as with The Simpsons Hit and Run Game (2003, discussed further in chapter 6), in which destroying ads rewards one with money and quicker travel time, and whose story is based around advertising run amok. Matthew McAllister notes Simpsons creator Matt Groening’s commitment to privileging licenses that are self-conscious and mocking of their commercialism.¹⁷ Thus, at the paratextual level, or, rather, between the level of the show and the level of the paratext, the text is deeply conflicted, complex, and contradictory when it comes to advertising, consumerism, and capitalism. Individual audience members will see it as either anti-consumerist, rampantly consumerist, or somewhere in between, based in large part on their own interaction with not only the television program, but also the paratexts. Once again, a central popular understanding, or understandings, of The Simpsons come to us in part through the meanings created by the paratexts, not just the show.

      To understand why paratexts might be so powerful, we might reframe the issue as being one of time and place. In the United States, at the time of writing, The Simpsons plays on the FOX network, on Sundays at 8 p.m. when in season. Thus, the show itself is strictly contained by time and place, even if we factor in its syndication, and VHS, DVD, and DVR recordings and replayings. However, The Simpsons’ paratexts allow Springfield to exist well beyond those boundaries. Echoes of Springfield are in most shopping malls, throughout cyberspace, in countless souvenir stores worldwide (as Russian nesting dolls in the Czech Republic, as porcelain Homers in the night markets of Tijuana, and as soapstone carvings in Kenya, to list a few), in games and electronics stores, on newsstands, in comic stores and bookstores, in TV specials, lying on the floor of many a child’s room, on many an adult collector’s shelf, on people’s chests and heads, and in countless other venues. Such is FOX’s strategy of synergy: that people will not be able to escape Springfield. But when Springfield is seemingly everywhere, many people will only experience Springfield outside of the television show, and even many of those who regularly watch the show at its scheduled time and place will also experience Springfield in countless other locales. In a very real sense, then, The Simpsons often exists in the paratexts, and those paratexts are fostering many of its meanings and its fans’, non-fans’, and anti-fans’ reactions.

      My task in this book, then, is to engage in a textual cartography of sorts, mapping texts and making sense of the complex social geography not only of Springfield, but of multiple other storyworlds. I will be examining the types of meanings created by paratexts, how they variously dovetail or clash with meanings from their related texts, and how paratexts give value and/or identity to texts. I will move through various types of paratexts, and various entertainment properties from film and television, offering both a theory of paratextuality and numerous illustrations of how it creates textual meaning.

       An Overview of the Book

      Paratexts, this book argues, are a central part of media production and consumption processes. But precisely because of their centrality, no single book can do more than scratch the surface of their overall importance to a better understanding of media and culture. The present book focuses on paratexts as textual entities, emphasizing the relationship between paratexts, films, and television programs and audiences. But given their textual properties, and their prominent placement in consumption cultures, greater attention should also be paid to how paratexts are created and regulated. Taking the eye off the paratext, as media studies has often done, impoverishes our understanding of production and regulation cultures, and hence our ability to intervene meaningfully in these cultures. The present project, however, limits itself primarily to consideration of the paratext’s impact on texts and on audiences, as a way of establishing why paratexts matter in the first place.

      The book also focuses exclusively on television and film paratexts, though of course the music, videogame, online, and print industries have their own thriving examples. And while theater layout and branding, channel identification sequences, and the like may work as paratexts, and are thus worthy of attention,¹⁸ they do so for multiple texts, whereas here I have chosen to stick to paratexts that “belong” to a particular show. The book’s focus is also restricted mostly to popular and recent Hollywood film and television, in part because Hollywood produces so much paratextuality that it offers an embarrassment of riches for study, and thus rich soil in which to plant a theory of paratexts that I hope can grow elsewhere too, and in part because many of these examples are more accessible than older, independent, or non-American products. I deliberately return to some texts (such as Lost [2004–] and Lord of the Rings) with different paratexts, so that readers can see various facets of their paratextual entourage, but I would like my readers to be able to fill in a fuller picture themselves, hence my choice to restrict most analysis to more prominent shows. By doing so, I do not mean to imply that paratexts are either a recent or an American phenomenon: Hollywood’s current fondness for a franchise-based economy perhaps makes paratexts more voluminous today, but they have always existed and thrived, as they do outside Hollywood and America.

      From the outset, it should also be noted that many of my examples are of paratexts attached to niche or fan properties, but the book is not about fan cultures per se. Rather, I argue that paratexts often construct some of the wider audience’s scant encounters with the text, and thus while the show might be a niche or fan property, many of its paratexts (such as trailers, movie posters, hype, reviews, and audience commentary) are not only quintessentially mainstream, but also the mediators of niche and fan entities to both fans and the wider audience. Admittedly, not all will work this way. Paratexts are the greeters, gatekeepers, and cheerleaders for and of the media, filters through which we must pass on our way to “the text itself,” but some will only greet certain audiences. Many fan-made paratexts, in particular, address only those within the fandom. Other paratexts will scare away potential audiences, as the semblance of being a “fan text” is often enough to detract some. In such cases, though, the paratexts create the text for the fleeing would-be audience, suggesting a “geek factor” or an undesired depth that may turn them away. In other instances, paratexts will insist that a text is more mainstream, less niche or fannish. However, regardless of whether the paratexts greet or turn audiences away, they often prove to be vital mediators of the niche or fan property to a wider audience: just as Bart Simpson t-shirts and Butterfinger ads constructed an idea of what The Simpsons was about, for non-fans arguably more than for fans, so too do paratexts regularly address the non-fan, even when attached to fan properties. As such, this book is neither about fan cultures nor not about them; it instead aims to make sense of the textual residue that often flows between all “audiences,” fans, non-fans, and anti-fans.

      Chapter 1 begins by defining the phrase “paratext” more precisely and situating it within other existing theories of what texts are, what work they do, and how they do this work. The chapter establishes the textual importance of paratexts, examining the constitutive role they play in creating public understandings