Ted Gioia has on the bane of never-ending stories in contemporary Hollywood, revisiting the thesis that franchise nostalgia has cultural self-veneration in it

The worst or best element about genre fiction, depending on whether you like it and providing a few tacit caveats per genre, is that the story never ends.  Serialized pulp fiction can go on as long as the writer keeps living.  In the most famous cases of genre fiction Sherlock Holmes has long outlived his inventor.  Characters that can inspire seemingly endless stories are a boon for the entertainment and publishing industries but characters have shelf lives.  There are no truly "timeless" works of literature or art or music, Romantic art-religion withstanding.  

 

Ted Gioia has highlighted a more foundational problem with contemporary pop and pulp as handled by the largest entertainment industry corporations of our day--the Marvel/Disney formula has always been formulaic (I can hear Kate Beckinsale's Charlotte from The Last Days of Disco sniping, "Of course it's formulaic, that's why they call it a formula." when a character complains about the formulaic nature of best-selling books). The problem is that the schema has become too obviously schematic even for audiences and, worse yet, we're supposed to be in Phase 5 when Endgame would've and could've been the, well, endgame.

 

Not that Gioia has the details but he's feeling his way through general concepts when he has this at his Substack.

 

https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/audiences-grow-weary-of-stories-that

But Ted Gioia being Ted Gioia there's a counter-argument you can make from the start.

Would you start a novel, if you weren’t allowed to read the final chapters? Would you play a video game, if there was no winning solution? Would you watch a movie if the last 15 minutes were missing? Would you go on a date if it ended after you picked up the restaurant tab?

 

Of course not.

Herman Melville regarded Moby Dick as a draft of a draft, didn't he?  Dostoevsky never actually finished his story in The Brothers Karamazov.  People read Walter Benjamin's The Arcades Project despite it being unfinished, if I recall.  Romanticism reveled in the evocative fragment.  

Still, points noted.  Gioia singles out Netflix for being particularly capricious and aggravating to fans of shows by cancelling shows. 

It's in his section 2 that he still keeps things broad.  We've had Star Trek for more than half a century.  James Bond has been around for even longer.  Batman and Superman have been around since World War II.  Star Wars has been around for generations.  The Terminator has kept coming back.  Freddy and Jason keep killing and terrorizing (or kept, they haven't been rebooted lately and the last time they were high profile was Freddy vs Jason, which was exactly as dumb as the crossover title suggests).  There were even sequels to Sleepaway Camp, ahem.  I didn't see all the Pokemon movies but I know sequels exist.  I hear lately that the latest Puss in Boots movie has a surprisingly solid story (I thought Shrek was kinda smug and lame and full of superfluous pop culture references but thought Antonio Banderas was a blast as Puss in Boots in the sequel, so, sure, I'll probably see Puss in Boots: The Last Wish when it hits the local library).

I gotta say though ...

James Bond might appear invincible, but that’s only because box office receipts are still healthy. Yet if 007 does die, it won’t happen on screen

Ted, you should've actually seen reviews, at least, of No Time to Die.  Bond had himself nuked by calling in a nuclear airstrike on an island full of a super-virus engineered by the rote villain.  In mid-20th century film there might've been some way out but this was Bond's death, not the fake-out ending of atomic incineration from Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises.  The nomex survival suit was apparently just. that. good.  

Now I have floated an idea in the past that we should  stop parroting journalists and film critics who can't get over the endless nostalgia imputed to franchise bloat and look at what patterns we can see in which franchises get retained.  The idea is that genre fiction generally and sci-fi/action stories draw on mythologies about culture.  Gioia seems to brush against this when he talks about how musicals and westerns were done to death in the mid-20th century.  Yes, and sci-fi and adventure stories related to World War II; the JFK/LBJ administrations; and the Reagan terms suggest that the pattern that holds is that the endlessly recyclable franchises Hollywood keeps coming back to relate to peak moments of empire.  That's what I proposed when I wrote in 2016 a little piece called

Nostalgia and the Anxieties of Empire: Toward a unified theory of American sci-fi movie nostalgia

Regarding section 4., a friend of mine who wanted to get into screenwriting once told me that American television had as its goal not narrative closure but syndication.  Once you know this intra-industrial dream-come-true then the sprawling and aimless nature of television becomes easier to understand, if not necessarily appreciate. Television is like the daily comic strip where closure is anathema.  You're supposed to go through life "with" these characters.  The dominance of comic book movies in mainstream cinema may simply underline the tension between generations of cinema where having an actual end was the point and the new open-ended "the franchise can't stop now" of the Marvel cinematic universe.  Reportedly Christopher Nolan inspired some ire from some Marvel fans by commenting that there's no need for post-credit scenes because by the time you get to the end credits the movie is over.  

In an era where Disney/Marvel seems to be one of the worst offenders of never letting the story end I'm going to note that Disney Studios ran three seasons of Kim Possible and when fans wanted another season Disney made one and they let Kim and Ron save the day (of course) and graduate from high school.  Team Disney has not lacked for writers and production teams who know how to give characters an actual ending. On the theme of high school, Buffy the Vampire Slayer should have ended when Buffy Summers graduated from high school but, no, it had to go on for at least ten or eleven seasons even if the latter seasons were via comic books.

There are some significant differences between pre-1980s franchises and 1980s and onward franchises, however, that I don't think Gioia touched on.  How is it we got five Michael Bay Transformers movies and Bumblebee (which, honestly, I actually like)?  The thing about My Little Pony or G. I. Joe or Transformers is that these were and are toy lines kids can play with.  That goes double for Star Wars.  Hollywood knows very well that the franchises that have toy lines have franchises with the investment of the fantasy lives of millions of kids who go on to be adults who introduce their kids to the same toys and the never-ending story goes on because it's not just the "canon" it's a canon that includes the investment of self in the play of self-discovery via self-presentation.  I ... know of someone who played with that concept and kicked things off with a Gadamer quote somewhere.

https://mbird.com/2019/01/optimus-prime-and-the-religion-of-toys-part-1-the-total-work-of-art-as-a-transformer-of-culture/
https://www.mbird.com/2019/02/optimus-prime-and-the-religion-of-toys-part-2-the-birth-of-cybertronian-tragedy-the-cyclic-deaths-and-rebirths-of-king-optimus-prime/
https://www.mbird.com/2019/03/optimus-prime-and-the-religion-of-toys-part-3-mass-producing-the-monomyth-joseph-campbells-unintended-legacy-and-ours/
 

Speaking as a West Coast American I can tell you that Gioia is still mostly right about the contrast between contemporary refusal of closure and the satisfaction of narrative closure.  I could use an example of the 1990s tidal wave of anime becoming popular here in the U.S.  For those of us who grew tired of the syndication-seeking non-closure of American cartoons anime offered an alternative where their series have start points and end points.  You may not have actually liked Neon Genesis Evangelion as much as the next twenty people but it did end, at least before the re:do series.  Star Blazers ended.  When the ship blows up that's an end.  Spike dying in a hail of gunfire at the end of Cowboy Bebop but reconciled to death is certainly an end.  Finding the man "who smells of sunflowers" at the end of Samurai Champloo and defeating him is an end.  Even Ranma and Akane eventually have their wedding day in Ranma 1/2 (sort of).

Now I don't have a problem with superheroes in princple.  I like Batman, I like Spider-man.  No Way Home was fun, honestly.  It worked better as a Peter Parker story by finally bringing in villains whose motives were not entirely tied to Tony Stark.  Not that I don't like Tom Holland as Peter Parker and Spider-man but it took the third film to nail down a story based on villains who were obstacles for Peter first and foremost rather than seeking revenge on Tony Stark.  Say what you will about Sam Raimi's first two Spider-man movies, he and company understood that the hero gets a villain based on differences they have with each other, not differences the villain has with the hero's idol.

I think, however, that with superheroes and other genre stories there is a problem Gioia doesn't touch on that would be worth at least touching on, which is that in the post-Joseph Campbell era of the hero with a thousand faces we might want to look at the possibility that some of these characters are brazenly written as author surrogate and audience surrogate power fantasies at the expense of the characters having their own identity and purpose.  I have said this before but I like Batman a la Adam West, Batman: the animated series, Nolan/Bale Batman, and even Batman: The Brave and the Bold because these are all characters that have identifiable strengths and weaknesses.  A lot of the teeth-gritting grimdark post-Frank Miller Batman didn't stick with me and Miller's Batman is, eh, maybe more Miller than Adam West Batman comes out of retirement and he's angry as we got told it was.  

At this point if James Bond returns it will be more or less the same way Jason Voorhees returns, despite obviously receiving multiple fatal wounds.  

But to come back to my past observation about franchise nostalgia and the anxieties of empire the actual death of James Bond or the increasing tendency in Star Trek stories for powerful people in the Federation to be the real villains suggests that there's an anxiety about empires lost and being lost that drives not just the nations and cultures that keep these franchises around but the industries that keep holding them as the would-be mirrors to our societies.  Crises of faith in our shared myths and mythologies and how shared they really are or how true they are about who we are may be what's going on.  I have quipped that Americans would rather make movies about the end of the world than imagine a world in which Americans aren't saving it.  That bromide about how it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism is just too Marxist to see that even a fully socialist/Marxist United States would still be making movies about saving the world.  I heard that in China there was a sci-fi film where China repositioned the earth to keep humanity from succumbing to anthropogenic climate change.  The idea that there's anything uniquely American about sci-fi imperial self-veneration is something we should never succumb to, even if, dare I say it, we've been doing it better than most because we happen to have Hollywood.