Supplemental Response #4_Ann

 *Spoiler alert; I’m briefly mentioning WandaVision in this post but I will try avoiding the plot. However, if you don’t want to know anything from the show then please skip paragraph 3.

I really enjoyed this week’s readings since they brought together many ideas we have discussed in the past weeks. Genre, to me, is something that is ever-present and always in the background when talking about media, and this week’s readings (especially Jason Mittell’s piece) really made clear that genre is also something that’s both influencing and defined by contemporary culture(s). What’s more, melodrama, as argued by almost all the authors this week, is extremely important in understanding the television genre. 

I started with Jane Feuer's “Melodrama, Serial Form and Television Today” among the readings and I really enjoyed her theorization of the “excess” melodrama creates. She writes: “Despite the changing theoretical stances, all see the excess not merely as aesthetic but as ideological, opening up a textual space which may be read against the seemingly hegemonic surface” (8). She continues to talk about the excess in set design, acting as well as the television form, and provides alternative readings against the dominant ideology. What this discussion reminds me of is Newcomb and Hirsch’s idea of “culture forum” (I know, I reference them a lot but I really like that week’s readings), which considers television as a medium—albeit in its very early form—as the key to a multi-faceted and subversive cultural discussion. While I still think this idea is a little naive, my opinion changed a bit after reading Feur’s article on melodrama. The way she finds excess in both melodrama’s aesthetics and in its ideologies makes me rethink the validity of culture forum as something that may actually exist when the audience is in conversation with the genre. This also echoes Michael Kackman’s brief mentioning of “quality audience” in his piece where I think—if such a demographic of audience exists—genre-conscious is one of their defining qualities. 

I also think Feur’s analysis on melodrama is in conversation with Michael Kackman’s “Quality Television, Melodrama, and Cultural Complexity” very well. Both of them (as well as Tara’s piece) recognize melodrama as something indispensable in analyzing television, especially recent ones. This brings me to my discursive thoughts today: what about the Marvel universe—or maybe I should call it the new Marvel television empire—and its relationship to genre, culture, and melodrama? Now I understand this is too big of a project to take on while writing a blog post, but I really want to talk a bit about Marvel’s new WandaVision because it is such an interesting intersection of quality television, cinema, and melodrama (also because I loved the show). First of all, we need to recognize that Marvel is still primarily understood as a theatrical film studio where their most prominent media are superhero films, with decent but not great performance in television shows like Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Marvel's Agent Carter. However, their recent television plan—including WandaVision, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and Loki—on Disney Plus does signal a monumental turn in the studio’s approach to both television and film. In some ways, Marvel is intentionally bridging the gap between television and film by, using Kackman’s words, “place[ing] it [television] in its ‘true’ aesthetic context – that of cinema”. However, aesthetics is not the only reason that Marvel, or specifically WandaVision, was successful. Rather, WandaVision stays very true to the serial form of television and it includes a lot of classic melodrama characteristics. The show, while it is still about superheroes, focuses more on recognizable melodramatic elements like the romance between Wanda and Vision, the grief Wanda is experiencing after the Blip, marriage problems, and the nuclear family as the stage where everything unfolds. In fact, all the actions, militaries, superhero abilities, and high-tech side characters—which are not often seen in melodramatic television—are in support of our understanding of Wanda and Vision’s romance and her struggle with her grief. Not only that, the show is eager to tell the audience that it categorizes itself as television: the 1950s TV frame ratio, the black and white photography (in some episodes), the tv-related episode titles, and the sudden insertion of nostalgic television ads all scream “you are watching television”. What’s interesting here is that these hyper-visible television characteristics actually help elevate WandaVision into the category of “quality television”. Because these elements are so obvious, the audience is propelled into reconstructing their understanding of the show; in turn—using Rick Altman who was briefly mentioned by Mittell— creates a new syntax unique to WandaVision. Mittell mentions briefly author Rick Altman and his theory of semantics/syntax in his article, and I want to point to the fact that the semantics of WandaVision is a complex mixture of sci-fi, horror, melodrama, and comedy (Altman, 12), thus having a stable syntax is crucial in constructing the show. 

This has been an absolute ramble on WandaVision and Marvel. In a way, WandaVision is extremely smart in recognizing itself as a television program while drawing its syntax from Marvel’s cinematic universe as well as melodrama. I want to end with a question on the relationship between cinema and television under today’s media climate. What Marvel has done is that it created a collection of films that are serialized with easter eggs, character crossovers, and complex plot developments. In a way, the MCU is a serialized television program with notable television "flow" as theorized by Raymond Williams. Now that Marvel is actually tapping into television, it is fascinating to think of how that may change both the genre definition of TV and cinema.

Work cited: Altman, Rick, “A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre”, Cinema Journal, vol. 23, no. 3, 1984, p. 6-18.