Archive for Mass Markets
My SFRA 2018 Paper: Captain America and General Intellect: Abstraction in the Marvel Cinematic Universe
Posted in Conferences, papers, Uncategorized, Writing with tags Abstraction, Fixed Capital, Franchise, General Intellect, Marvel, Marx, Mass Markets, MCU, Pop culture on 4 July 2018 by Ben
This is the paper I gave yesterday at SFRA 2018 in Milwaukee. It's part of a future project on the franchise as form. It's a bit rough, but some of the broad strokes are there I think.
Captain America and General Intellect: Abstraction in the Marvel Cinematic Universe
I am going to start with two quotes from within the MCU that speak to my interest in franchise. The first is from Hawkeye, in Age of Ultron: "The city is flying, we're fighting an army of robots and I have a bow and arrow. None of this makes sense." The second is from Baron Wolfgang von Strucker, in an end-credits scene to The Winter Soldier "This isn't the age of spies. This is not even the age of heroes. This is the age of miracles … and there's nothing more horrifying than a miracle." I will come back to these quotes below, but for now suffice it to say that what holds the MCU together is not its genre or its historicity, but the fact that it does not make sense. This is miraculous.
So, I am interested in how we interpret a franchise, what methods we use, and how those methods must necessarily challenge older methods that privilege objects whose relative stability derives from their clear date of publication, release, or whatever. I am not primarily interested, here anyway, in franchise as a production model or as a means to leverage fan engagement. But when we speak of interpreting franchise we must ask what we are interpreting exactly. Can we can call a franchise, such as the MCU, Star Wars, Harry Potter, or The Hunger Games, a text? It would be difficult, I think, to call a franchise of any size a text, although we can say that franchises are made up of texts (all of which can be interpreted as such). We have other concepts available, including that of form. However, I am also not certain that franchises share clear formal characteristics such that we can easily compare them or establish a methodology that can account for all of them. Star Wars and Star Trek operate according to very different logics, I think, when we think about them at the level of franchise. Although they have both changed considerably over the courses of their respective histories, Star Trek begins with an episodic structure that still informs its overall development. By contrast, Star Wars begins with aspirations to a continuity and coherence of narrative that presents problems for its filmic iterations today. I realize that these are gross generalizations.
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