Table Of ContentTheorizing Stupid Media
De-Naturalizing Story
Structures in the Cinematic,
Televisual, and Videogames
Aaron Kerner · Julian Hoxter
Theorizing Stupid Media
Aaron Kerner • Julian Hoxter
Theorizing Stupid
Media
De-Naturalizing Story Structures in the Cinematic,
Televisual, and Videogames
Aaron Kerner Julian Hoxter
School of Cinema School of Cinema
San Francisco State University San Francisco State University
San Francisco, CA, USA San Francisco, CA, USA
ISBN 978-3-030-28175-5 ISBN 978-3-030-28176-2 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28176-2
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P
reface
The current volume steeped for many years—Kerner thinks it has been
about 10 years, Hoxter remembers it being something a little less than
that. Whatever the case is we have been discussing this project, bouncing
ideas back and forth, for many years. To begin with, we thought we were
focusing on spectacle-driven films, and how that generally harkened back
to the cinema of attractions. However, over many beers and conversations
(often at our local bar the Little Shamrock in San Francisco), we began to
think in broader terms. In earlier iterations, the book was divided into
larger sections: Extreme, Explicit, and Everyday. And under these head-
ings, we imagined individual case studies. That too went by the wayside.
Nevertheless, all these nascent ideas are present in the sinews of the pres-
ent volume.
The stupid, as an idea, though, was probably with the conception of
this book from the very start. It took us years to figure out, though, what
we actually meant by the stupid. (And we are not sure if all those beers
helped, or hindered our progression towards the objective of determining
what the stupid in media actually is. Maybe that’s why it took us so damn
long to bring this book to final fruition?) Frankly, we probably could not
give you a definitive answer all those years ago. But this has been a labor
of love, we embarked on this project simply because we wanted to. We
honestly wanted to come to grips with narratives that did not neatly con-
form to existing regimes of assessment—specifically, paradigms of analysis
that are premised on the evaluation of narrative. We are unapologetically
writing from a position of privilege as tenured faculty. This freed us from
(real or imagined) professional concerns—could someone get tenure
v
vi PREFACE
writing about the stupid, or perhaps our gravest sin of all writing about
Transformers? And, to be clear, Transformers was a part of this project
pretty much from day one. Actually, we think so, but we also expect that
any emerging scholar looking to secure tenure would be advised to do
something else, to do something “serious.” Even when couched as a self-
indulgent project, from the very beginning we took this topic seriously.
And we hope that we can contribute to the expanding tool kit that media
studies have at its disposal. Because the tool kit matters. If one only has a
hammer, then, one is only going to work with nails. The tools matter,
precisely because they also determine what enters the conversation, and
what approach is taken to the object of study.
Additionally, and this only emerged in the last stages of writing, we
realized that the stupid often surfaces at evolutionary moments. The stu-
pid materializes in response to a failure in categorization—violations of
established categories, the emergence of a referent without a “proper”
category, a hybrid that falls between categories. And thus, and again this
came to us relatively late in the process, we felt compelled to focus on
contemporary media. The stupid lays latent in all narratives, but it is most
evident in innovations. What is that? Wait, what? What the ∗∗∗∗?
The case studies that we offer are not merely illustrative of this or that
aspect of the stupid, but also are some of our personal favorites and exam-
ples that have emerged from our personal as well as professional lives: a
girlfriend who spends too much time playing Pokémon GO; students who
pushed the discussion of the evolutionary stupid in SVOD serial drama.
Media that did not quite fit in other projects, but kept bugging us to write
about them (specifically, Adventure Time, and Gone Home). We had fun
writing this book, and we hope you have some fun reading it.
We are grateful to Sandra Ly for her sage advice and criticism, especially
on the sections concerning videogames. Any errors are, of course, our own.
Finally, we want to thank Lina Aboujieb, the Executive Editor for Film,
Television and Visual Culture at Palgrave Macmillan. Quite understand-
ably she might have looked at me crossed-eye once—when Kerner first
pitched the idea of a stupid book, Aboujieb was probably thinking, “You
want to write a book on the whaaattt?” Despite any reservations she
might’ve had, Aboujieb has been supportive. Aboujieb somehow man-
aged to wrangle three readers. And in our experience, these have been
some of the most thoughtful and helpful reader reports that we have ever
received. Each of the reports contributed to our thinking about this
PREFACE vii
project, and we hope that we have made the most productive use of their
ideas, thoughts, suggestions, and critiques.
San Francisco, CA Aaron Kerner
San Francisco, CA Julian Hoxter
c
ontents
1 T he Stupider the Better 1
2 The Stupid in the Contemporary Hollywood Vernacular:
Spectacularly Stupid Transformers 31
3 The Stupid in Genre Fails 71
4 The Stupid as Narrative Dissonance 109
5 The Stupid as Ludonarrative Dissonance 139
6 Conclusion: Well That Was Stupid 179
Bibliography 197
Index 221
ix
L f
ist of igures
Fig. 2.1 Illustrated chart produced by Lucy V. Hay in an effort to explain
Transformers (Hay, Lucy V. “How to Write a Screenplay Bomb:
Transformers: The Last Knight.” Bang 2 Write (blog). June 26,
2017. Accessed February 19, 2018. http://www.bang2write.
com/2017/06/how-to-write-a-screenplay-bomb-transformers-
the-last-knight.html) 45
Fig. 2.2 A Mazda 3 swerves to miss the oncoming McLaren in
Transformers: The Last Knight (Michael Bay, 2017) 56
Fig. 2.3 A Mazda 3 passes the oncoming McLaren in Transformers: The
Last Knight (Michael Bay, 2017) 57
Fig. 2.4 A silver sedan slams into a Lexus in Transformers: The Last Knight
(Michael Bay, 2017) 57
Fig. 2.5 The back end of the Lexus shoots upward with explosive power
in Transformers: The Last Knight (Michael Bay, 2017) 58
Fig. 2.6 The great raining down of newspaper and debris—the explosive
mini-climax within the chase scene in Transformers: The Last
Knight (Michael Bay, 2017) 58
Fig. 2.7 Racing down country roads in Jean Epstein’s La glace à trois faces
(The Three-Sided Mirror) (Jean Epstein, 1927) 60
Fig. 3.1 The vivid and wild conclusion of Sion Sono’s Antiporno (Sion
Sono, 2016) 87
Fig. 3.2 On the left Antiporno (Sion Sono, 2016), on the right Pistol
Opera (Seijun Suzuki, 2001) 88
Fig. 6.1 Babydoll invites the male gaze in Sucker Punch (Zack Snyder,
2011) 181
xi
CHAPTER 1
The Stupider the Better
IntroductIon: no really, the StupIder the Better
During the course of a conversation with my colleague and co-writer try-
ing to recall a title I said, “You know, that movie with the women in anime
cosplay outfits and zeppelins.” Immediately, he knew exactly what I was
talking about, “Oh, right, Sucker Punch.” Not a shred of narrative infor-
mation to speak of really, rather the identifying markers that I offered fell
squarely in the realm of spectacle—the fetishistic exhibition of the female
form and fantastical airships. Zack Snyder’s 2011 film Sucker Punch makes
little effort to adhere to conventional narrative devices, this is not to say
that narrative is absent, but rather the film is driven by its continual prom-
ise to deliver a compendium of audio/visual marvels. Sucker Punch is a
pastiche of spectacle tropes: it draws heavily on exploitation cinema, spe-
cifically women in prison films from the 1970s, chambara and martial art
films, the fetishistic rendering of the female body drawn explicitly from the
pornographic genre, spectacular dystopic landscapes with no shortage of
apocalyptic carnage, strongly influenced both by fantasy films and video-
games, and elements of torture and humiliation indicative of the post-
9/11 horror genre that David Edelstein dubbed “torture porn.” It is safe
to say that, in commonsense terms at least, Sucker Punch is stupid. But how
is it stupid? Let us concede first that the plot is eye-rollingly inane—an
institutionalized young woman finds her inner strength in vivid (male-)
fantasy worlds. But there are also novel formal elements in Sucker Punch
that prompt us to read it as stupid.
© The Author(s) 2019 1
A. Kerner, J. Hoxter, Theorizing Stupid Media,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28176-2_1
