Operational Aesthetic – REAL VIRTUALITY

Was taugte die erste Staffel von Agents of SHIELD?

Enthält keinerlei wirkliche Spoiler für Agents of SHIELD, nur für The Winter Soldier. Ich schreibe außerdem SHIELD statt S.H.I.E.L.D., weil Letzteres auf Dauer total behämmert zu tippen ist.

Um die ABC-Serie Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD hat sich in den vergangenen Wochen ein interessantes Narrativ gebildet. Es lautet: “Die Serie hatte einen sehr schwachen Start, aber in den letzten Wochen hat sie es echt rumgerissen und ist zu einem der besten Dinge im Fernsehen geworden.” Sehr praktisch für die Produzenten. Aber leider nur die halbe Wahrheit.

In Wahrheit sind einige Kritiker, ganz in meinem Sinne, totale Opfer der Operationellen Ästhetik geworden. “A true television marvel” nennt etwa Mary McNamara in der “Los Angeles Times die Serie, denn “never before has television been literally married to film, charged with filling in the back story and creating the connective tissue of an ongoing film franchise.”

Der einmalige Effekt

Und in der Tat ist das wohl der interessanteste und einmalige Effekt der Serie, mit dem sie vielleicht ein bisschen in die Annalen der Fernsehgeschichte eingehen darf. In Captain America: The Winter Soldier, der im Frühjahr ins Kino kam, bricht die Organisation SHIELD, die bis dahin das Marvel-Kinouniversium zusammengehalten hat, in sich zusammen. Und in der Serie gab es daraufhin die Folgen dieses Zusammenbruchs zu sehen.

In dieser Interaktion mit einem Kinostart hat lineares Fernsehen tatsächlich mal sein scheinbar größtes Defizit – das Festgelegtsein auf eine bestimmte Zeit – in eine Stärke umgewandelt. Wer Agents of SHIELD in Zukunft auf DVD oder VOD als Binge reinzieht, wird mit Sicherheit nicht so einen Aha-Effekt erleben, wie die Zuschauer, die frisch aus dem Kino kommend erleben durften, wie die Geschichte im Fernsehen weitergeht. Zuletzt hat solche Effekte wahrscheinlich Lost mit seinem allwöchentlichen Rästelraten erzeugt.

Was die Macher sagen

In einem Interview mit “Buzzfeed” haben die Showrunner Jed Whedon und Maurissa Tancharoen verraten, dass sie von Anfang wussten, was auf sie zukommt. Sie mussten also irgendwie mit dem Problem umgehen, dass sie eine Serie namens Agents of SHIELD leiten und SHIELD per Dekret von oben nach zwei Dritteln der Laufzeit aufhören würde zu existieren. Dabei durften sie das natürlich niemandem verraten. Die Geheimhaltung von Marvel scheint legendär, das bestätigen auch die Produzenten Jeph Loeb und Jeffrey Bell. Und auch Joe Quesada hatte ja vor zwei Wochen schon gesagt, dass die Schauspieler beispielsweise zu Anfang nicht wussten, was sie erwartet.

Doch so beeindruckend all das ist – ein interessanter Twist nach 17 Folgen rechtfertigt nicht automatisch die 16 schwachen, die ihm vorausgingen. Neuen Serien, besonders solchen im werbegetriebenen Network-Fernsehen, muss man ein paar Folgen Zeit geben, um ihren Tritt zu finden. Aber sie sind eben kein 22-stündiger Film, wie es im “Buzzfeed”-Stück heißt, sondern sie müssen ihre Existenz Woche um Woche rechtfertigen.

Eine Season – drei Phasen

Ich bin da eher bei Todd VanDerWerff, der im “A.V. Club” ein etwas weniger euphorisches Fazit zieht und die Staffel in drei Phasen einteilt:

For the first nine or 10 episodes, the show is too often a slog, an attempt to create a weird blend of NCIS and The X-Files with a chaser of superhero dramatics. […] Right after the first of the year, however, producers and showrunners Jed Whedon, Maurissa Tancharoen, and Jeffrey Bell started righting the ship. The episodes in this middle portion of the season are often clunky, but they do a better job of fleshing out the characters, and the superhero spy shenanigans start to coalesce into something more interesting than their disparate parts.

VanDerWerff gesteht schließlich zu, dass Agents of SHIELD ab Folge 17, wenn es mit den Folgen von The Winter Soldier umgeht, deutlich spannender wird. Allerdings notiert auch er, dass diese Spannung vor allem aus den vielen Storywendungen entsteht und weniger aus den lebendigen Charakteren. Devin Faraci von “Badass Digest” hingegen lässt kein gutes Haar an der Serie:

I got a show that continued to be about people having fights in hallways and empty rooms, about characters who constantly explain what happened in the last scene to each other and that felt like the kicked-to-the-curb step-sibling of the mighty Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Hoffnung für langweilige Charaktere

Faraci hat recht, wenn er am Ende schreibt: “[W]hat the show needs [is] better, wittier writing. The characters are so bland that they can be reshaped in season two by better writers”. Das große Problem von Agents of SHIELD ist nicht, dass es keine interessante Geschichte zu erzählen hat, sondern dass es diese nicht auf interessante Weise an den Mann und die Frau bringt.

Zu sehr verlässt sich schon das Ausgangspaket auf die typische Whedon-Formel des Teams als kaputte Familie, die er in Buffy und stärker noch in Firefly scheinbar perfektioniert hatte. Doch nur weil ein Team aus disparaten Teilelementen besteht, von denen jedes eine andere Ecke des Fanservice-Spektrums und seiner Mary Sues zu erfüllen scheint (die Indiegirl-Hackerin, die arschtretende Ninja-Lady, der gutaussehende mysteriöse Mann, die zwei nerdigen Wisenschaftler mit sexy britischem Akzent), existiert damit noch lange nicht automatisch ein Ensemble, mit dem man mitfiebert. Man muss es auch mit Leben füllen.

Der steinige Weg zum Finale

Wenn dazu noch Episodenplots kommen, die in der Summe einfach schrecklich beliebig erscheinen und den Zuschauer selten überraschen, hat eine Serie einfach verloren. Agents of SHIELD wirkte von Anfang an zu formelhaft und kalkuliert, um in der Fernsehlandschaft der gestiegenen Ansprüche (auch im Network TV, man denke an gefeierte Serien wie The Good Wife) bestehen zu können. Auch ich musste zeitweise sehr die Zähne zusammenbeißen, um die Serie trotz meiner Enttäuschung weiterzuschauen. Gehalten hat mich hauptsächlich professionelles Interesse.

Treue Zuschauer wurden am Ende definitiv belohnt. Nicht nur, dass die Plotwendungen einem am Ende mehrfach den Boden unter den Füßen wegziehen – die Aufstockung des Casts durch Bill Paxton, Patton Oswalt und B. J. Britt als Agent Triplett fügt dem Ensemble tatsächlich mal ein paar Charaktere hinzu, die so wirken, als wüssten sie was sie tun. (Clark “I Am the Glue” Gregg, der in den Marvel-Filmen ein perfekter Nebendarsteller war, wirkt in Agents of SHIELD als Anführer ziemlich fade.) Außerdem sorgt die Tatsache, dass SHIELD zum Ende der Staffel nicht mehr existiert, dafür, dass nun für die Charaktere viel mehr auf dem Spiel steht. Sie waren vorher nicht mehr als Tatortreiniger, jetzt sind sie Gejagte. Mit einer Mission. Und im August – also kurz vor Start der zweiten Staffel – wird das Marvel Cinematic Universe bekanntlich galaktisch.

Praxistipp: Diese Episoden lohnen sich

Wer sich nicht durch 22 Episoden wühlen will, nur um auf Stand zu sein, dem sei folgendes empfohlen: Schaut den Piloten, Episode 5 “Girl in a Flower Dress”, Episode 10 “The Bridge”, Episode 11 “The Magical Place”, Episode 13 “T.R.A.C.K.S.”, Episode 14 “T.A.H.I.T.I.” und dann alle Episoden von 17 bis 22. Wenn ihr noch weniger Zeit habt, schaut nur den Piloten, Episode 5 und die letzten sechs. So könnt ihr vorbereitet in die nächste Staffel und die nächste Phase des Marvel Cinematic Universe starten.

Mit Dank an Rochus

Full Talk: The Operational Aesthetic of Marvel’s Cinematic Universe

This is the full text of the talk I gave at the SAS Symposium “Adaptation: Animation, Comics and Literature“. To get the whole experience, call up the Prezi presentation (pictured above) and hit the next slide whenever there’s the word SLIDE in the text (as if you couldn’t tell).

I’m here to talk about the Operational Aesthetic of Marvel’s Cinematic Universe, so let’s get to it. (SLIDE)

First: Just a quick reitaration what the Marvel Cinematic Universe actually is. (SLIDE) It’s of course mostly a series of feature films that have come out since 2008. (SLIDE) and that share a narrative continuity, what you might call a Universe. (SLIDE)

But there’s also a series of short films, called “One Shots” (SLIDE) that explore smaller nooks and crannies of the universe and link them together. These short films are distributed as DVD extras. (SLIDE)

There is also, at the moment, one TV series, called “Agents of SHIELD”, airing on ABC (SLIDE), but four more are planned for distribution via Netflix, starting in 2016. (SLIDE)

Finally, there’s a number of tie-in comics, both digital and analog, that close narrative gaps and explore character Backgrounds. (SLIDE)

What’s important to note is that every one of these elements, every film, every series, every comic tells a self-contained story. But there are overarching narrative throughlines that connect them, like the rise and fall of SHIELD, the secret spy organization that plays a role in almost every one of them. (SLIDE) Now, Shared Universes are nothing new, of course. (SLIDE)

Crossovers have a rich tradition in literature, especially in serialized fiction narratives like the pulp novels that started becoming popular in the late 19th century. (SLIDE) A shared universe has also been a cornerstone of Marvel Comics’ success. (SLIDE) Starting with “Marvel Mystery Comics #7” in 1940, characters would start to share stories. (SLIDE) Superhero teams like “The Avengers” with a changing roster of members became regular comic series in the sixties. (SLIDE) And starting with “Secret Wars” in 1984, special comics would bring the whole universe together for big crossover events. (SLIDE)

Through the course of Marvel’s corporate history, these crossovers have become a valuable tool to, effectively, get readers to buy more comic books – if you want to participate in the momentous events, you have to buy them all. (SLIDE) Today, as you can tell by this screenshot from Marvel’s website, they are a regular thing. (SLIDE)

Now, as the last point notes, there is an obvious leaning of framing this principle simply in terms of business practice. If you cross over narratives you steer readers towards another serialized narrative and you hope to reap the synergy. You also strengthen the corporate brand, the umbrella over all other brands. Your customers consume more, but they stay inside the system that you provide for them.

But there is another component to these shared universe narratives and I personally believe it’s also a significant reason why they work so well. (SLIDE) Now, Television scholar Jason Mittell calls this the “Operational Aesthetic”. What he names “Complex Television”, he says (SLIDE)

“offers another mode of attractions: the narrative special effect. […] These moments of spectacle push the operational aesthetic to the foreground, calling attention to the constructed nature of the narration and asking us to marvel at how the writers pulled it off; […] we watch the process of narration as a machine rather than engaging in its diegesis.”

(SLIDE) Following Mittell, you could picture the operational aesthetic sort of Rube-Goldberg machine, where it’s simply a lot of fun to see all the elements work together to achieve an effect of awe. (SLIDE) I personally prefer to follow this guy, John “Hannibal” Smith, from the “A-Team”. Does anyone remember his catchphrase? That’s right: “I love it, when a plan comes together”.

Right. So let’s explore some of the opportunities and limitations that a shared universe – with its operational aesthetic – has. (SLIDE) Now, all these apply to comics as well as films. I will just use examples from the films, because I know them much better. (SLIDE)

A shared universe allows you to use the operational aesthetic for references to other parts of the universe with an audience that feels “in the know”, in what I call “Easter Eggs and Callbacks”. (SLIDE)

So, you can allude to things yet to come. This is most prominently done by adding so-called “stingers” to the films after the credits. The first one after Iron Man, pictured here, famously had Samuel L. Jackson saying: “You have become part of a bigger universe”, explicitly stating the mission of the studio. (SLIDE)

But you can also call back to things that already happened. In this scene in Thor: The Dark World, Thor’s brother Loki turns into Captain America with an inside joke that is only understandable to viewers who know The Avengers. (SLIDE)

Secondly, there is the aspect of coherence. An audience can explore different corners of the same universe and their investment is rewarded by narrative links that allow for a sense of recognition. I could quote Henry Jenkins here, but I’ve decided against it.

Now, the commitment to a coherent universe and lasting characters allows for an exploration of plot “holes” and “What if”-Scenarios. (SLIDE) For example: at the end of Thor the Bifrost, a magical bridge that allows the citizens of Asgard to travel to other worlds, is destroyed. At the beginning of Thor: The Dark World it is whole again and the film doesn’t explain why. He doesn’t have to, because the story is explained in one of the comics leading up to the film. (SLIDE)

And since one of the favourite pastimes of geeks around the globe seems to be to pit their heroes against each other to see which one would win in a fight, a shared universe allows for these things to actually happen and canonically answer “What if”-questions like “What happens, if Thor’s hammer” hits Captain America’s shield”? (SLIDE)

These are the opportunities (SLIDE), but of course, there are also downsides. “Limitations and Pitfalls”. (SLIDE) For one thing, having a coherent universe, means that even slight narrative incoherences risk destroying the whole operational aesthetic. Extra care needs to be taken that all odds and ends are tied up. There are two mechanics that come into play here.

One is the act of retroactively explaining inconsistencies away, what is called “Retroactive Continuity” or “Retcon”. For example, there was a stinger at the end of The Incredible Hulk in which Tony Stark meets General Ross and tells him, that he’s “putting a team together”. The filmmakers later decided that it wouldn’t actually be Stark who puts the Avengers together and produced a whole short film that explained, that SHIELD sent Stark to see Ross as a decoy to distract from their actual plan. (SLIDE)

The second mechanic is simply one of convention. After The Avengers, viewers had to simply accept that the individual members of the team would continue to have solo adventures for which the other Avengers will not be available to help them. (SLIDE)

There is also the limitation that the individual narratives have to stay self-contained because, audiences might not have seen all other instalments. So you have to provide some exposition every time. There are, of course, clever ways to do this (SLIDE). In Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Steve Rogers relives his own history, which is the plot of the first film, by visiting an exhibition at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington. (SLIDE)

Finally, you have to take care that you don’t overuse the operational aesthetic and rely to heavily on it to avoid the so-called “Small Universe Syndrome”, where a reference to everyone else in the universe pops up at every corner. At this point, you both alienate casual viewers, who are not deep into the mythology, and you lessen the impact of the operational aesthetic’s mechanics.

This means: A succesful operational aesthetic allows for longterm, earned narrative payoffs of previously established coherences. Too much narrative entanglement ultimately leads to narrative cul-de-sacs and a need to “reboot” the universe. (SLIDE) This has actually happened several times in comics history. DC Comics famously destroyed its whole universe at the end of the 80s to be able to start fresh. (SLIDE)

Since this conference is dealing with adaptation, let’s finally deal with the way these more or less established principles of serialized fiction present a challenge in the world of movies. Here, you are not only dealing with writers, artists and characters that have to be shared, but also with large financial risks, large logistical undertakings, huge crews of people and possibly the egos of the people embodying the characters.

So how did Marvel pull it off anyway? (SLIDE) The first thing they did was to secure longterm funding. In 2005, the newly-founded Marvel Studios secured $525 Million dollars of Credit from Merrill Lynch to produce ten films over eight years. This financial independence allowed them to plan ahead in a way that they could not have, if they were just licensing their characters out to other studios, like they did with Spider-Man. (SLIDE)

They also signed long-term contracts with actors that commited them to as many as 9 films for a fixed wage. In this way they kept the overhead costs for the films stable. (SLIDE) There is tight creative supervision and control through central figures like Studio President Kevin Feige and writer/director/producer Joss Whedon. They basically play the same role a so-called “showrunner” would play in a television series, keeping the individual parts of the universe in line with the overall vision. (SLIDE)

Finally, as Derek Johnson has noted, Marvel Studios used a lot of good self-marketing and so succeded to create a positive industry narrative for themselves. An “origin myth”, as Salon puts it here. (SLIDE)

So, these are the components that made it possible. However, I believe that the fact that it is quite a bit harder to create a shared universe in the world of feature films, actually strengthens the operational aesthetic. Viewers that are aware of narrative machinations, probably also have a faint idea of the complicated logistics involved in producing films like these. (SLIDE)

Now, can I prove this? The short answer is no. In my further research (SLIDE), I want to explore factors of social pychology that might figure into, for example, theories of consonance. (SLIDE)

However, there’s the evidence of the side of the creators that suggests that an operational aesthetics figures into what they are doing, beyond monetary considerations. The filmmakers often grew up with comics and loved the mechanics there. (SLIDE)

Joe Russo, one of the directors of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, recently said in an interview that he “gets off” on the fact that his film is connected to the others. (SLIDE)

Clark Gregg, the star of the SHIELD T.V. series even joked that viewers who can’t wait for the longterm payoffs to affect them are “losers”. (SLIDE)

Marvel has also started leaning heavily on the connectedness of the universe in their marketing, airing a TV special called “Assembling a Universe” and suggesting the hashtag #itsallconnected for people tweeting about “Agents of SHIELD”. (SLIDE)

Finally, other studios have started to imitate the Marvel model. I guess we can safely say that their main motivation is to make money. (SLIDE) However, there is not a lot of justification for a film like the upcoming X-Men: Days of Future Past, which connects the films from the early 2000s with the more recent Prequel First Class – beyond a general feeling of “Wouldn’t it be cool, if we joined these universes together”. (SLIDE) So to summarize all this on a most basic level, I conclude (SLIDE)

The construction of a shared universe across feature films, a tv series and accompanying texts creates an operational aesthetic, where the shared universe exists both as a narrative challenge of adapting serialized comic book mechanics to the screen and as an exploration of the gratifying nature of a complex but coherent narrative construct and the commitment of the company to keep it coherent.

I hope this all made some sort of sense to you and I (SLIDE) Thank you for listening.

Thank you so much to Hannes Rall and Susanne Marschall for accepting my proposal and letting me talk at their event. Thanks also goes out to all those helping me with my ongoing research, especially Jochen Ecke, Janina Wildfeuer, Sascha Brittner, Martin Skopal, Bernd Zywietz, Andreas Rauscher and, of course, Katharina.

Quotes of Quotes (X): The Operational Aesthetic

Accounts of cinematic special effects highlight how these moments of awe and amazement pull us out of the diegesis, inviting us to marvel at the technique required to achieve visions of interplanetary travel, realistic dinosaurs, or elaborate fights upon treetops. These spectacles are often held in opposition to narration, harkening back to the cinema of attractions that predated narrative film and deemphasizing classical narrative form in the contemporary blockbuster cinema. While such special effects do appear on television […] complex television offers another mode of attractions: the narrative special effect. […] These moments of spectacle push the operational aesthetic to the foreground, calling attention to the constructed nature of the narration and asking us to marvel at how the writers pulled it off; often these instances forego strict realism in exchange for a formally aware baroque quality in which we watch the process of narration as a machine rather than engaging in its diegesis.
– Jason Mittell, Complex TV, “Complexity in Context”

I do love it, when a plan comes together. And I love it even more, when someone finds a technical term for that love. After reading my defense of Star Trek Into Darkness‘s plotting, a friend alerted me to Jason Mittels excellent work-in-progress book Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling which is now fully online for free! I have only devoured two chapters so far, but it is an excellent read with not too many academic strings attached. Highly recommended!

As for the “Operational Aesthetic”, that is: the joy of watching a machine work, I feel like Mittell has found me out. Since I have always been a fan of visual special effects, it comes as no surprise that I’m also a fan of narrative special effects – and I think it’s one of the few joys left to us in the realm of market-oriented contemporary franchise filmmaking. Mittell mentions puzzle movies like Inception as examples from the big screen, but I think the same terms fit perfectly with the Marvel Cinematic Universe movies and evolving franchises like The Fast and the Furious.

Finally, I also like the fact that Mittell mentions the “baroque quality” of these narrative shenanigans. I have been trying to link the baroque to contemporary cinema before, and it’s always good to see people agree with me. (Although Mittell’s quotation referred me back to Angela Ndalianis’s book which I remember quoting six years ago in my MA thesis, so maybe the thought wasn’t really my own in the first place.)