Program of Study
Gotham on the Ground: Transmedia Cultural Production, Fictional Geography, and the Narrative Assemblage of the Batman Franchise

In literary analysis through the 20th Century, authors were studied in terms of their oeuvres, but in the current cultural climate, licensing has inverted how fictions are produced: instead of studying prolific authors across their works, we must move towards examining popular properties across their media representations, viewing these properties as narrative assemblages and building cohesive stories from their constituent parts. My dissertation project, Gotham on the Ground, is an exercise in such an interdisciplinary methodology, drawing resources from multiple fields including Film Criticism, Game Studies, English Literature, and Media Theory. This work will enhance understandings of transmedia cultural production practices as well as studies of fictional geography. The project will draw connections between producers, audiences, and players, to develop a fuller understanding of all three, combining a Latourian Actor-Network Theory (ANT) (2005) approach with methods of distant reading taken from Moretti (2005), circulation theory from Straw (2010), and intersecting theories of cultural production adapted from Bourdieu (1993), to explore how transmedia cultural production affects narrative, character, and geographic consistency in franchised popular culture properties.

How do we account for the methods of cultural production when our media landscape is split between two disassociative views of itself—one of a creative field dominated by a rhetoric of authorship, and another of a legal field dominated by a rhetoric of ownership? As producers and consumers, we still cling to an idea of ourselves as authors dominated by creativity, while there is a growing contingency of thinkers and activists who feel that the nature of copyright within North America and on the world stage has begun to hamper creativity rather than foster it, as conglomeratised multimedia empires increasingly rely on transmedia business models, disseminating fewer narratives across more media.

Generally, transmedia storytelling “represents a process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience” (Jenkins, 945). While in recent years the growing field of transmedia has been of great use in cultural studies, the concept itself leaves some gaps in the scholarly landscape; of particular concern is its inability to address issues of ideology and distinguish between storytelling techniques and business models. I propose to address these gaps—and examine the field of cultural production in its entirety—by applying concepts of differential media that I have adapted from the media poetics of Johanna Drucker (1994) and Darren Wershler (2010), and from concepts of differential textuality developed by Marjorie Perloff (2006) and Jerome McGann (2001). In differential media, even practices such as copyediting or layout design for an adaptation are integral conceptual and concrete creative undertakings, and meaning is not discoverable content so much as dynamic exchange best revealed as a play of differences in such undertakings and their products (McGann, 111). Transmedia requires an intricately coordinated process conceptualized and executed by the highest-level creative directors in order to study the interpretive impacts of one media extension of a cultural property on another. Conversely, in differential media all creative contributions are rendered meaningful, and no cultural producers are exempt from analysis. By hybridizing theories of transmedia with conceptions of differential media, I can treat the whole field of cultural production in terms of creative labour and audience reception, whether looking at singular narratives executed across networked media, or simply different interpretations of narratives adapted from one medium to another.

I take as my object the popular transmedia icon and DC Entertainment property, Batman, and particularly Gotham City, the gritty urban landscape in which he wages his war on crime. As with transmedia, scholarship on this popular icon is plentiful but contains problematic gaps. While film scholar Will Brooker’s recent monograph Hunting Dark Knight (2012) offers some insights into Batman as a transmedia discursive process, it fails to address the significance of digital media and games. Where Brooker’s approach is primarily historiographic, my emphasis is on urban space and circulation as a key element of the transmedial network, with my overall framework informed by ANT, urban geography and mobility in cities, and circulation theory. Using distant reading techniques ranging from big data gathering of over 75 years of information and thousands of comics, to a careful examination of how Gotham has been represented cartographically and aesthetically in film, animation, live-action television, and both board games and digital games, my dissertation project will create a circulatory sketch of Batman’s city, exposing the branching evolution of the cultural production of Batman as differential media, and demonstrating how the varied narratives of the franchise are beginning to converge upon a consistent vision of Gotham City as a space and place. As the map of Gotham becomes more detailed, the openings for intervention by users and independent producers shrink; these new concretizations of Gotham radically alter the nature of fan interventions and change the groundwork of the political economy in Batman’s transmedia production.

What are the varying methodologies and protocols of pop-culture transmedia production? What consequences have these protocols had on the way we view Batman as a narrative assemblage? How does Gotham City represent its own histories, both diegetically and in terms of its many adaptations? What can we glean from studying the myriad depictions of Gotham not in terms of chronological progression, but of versioning and differentials? How do the participatory cultures of game players and fan creators work in dialogue with the tightly controlled intellectual properties that make up an “official” canon? What issues of authorship, ownership, and agency arise from such a dialogue?

My dissertation will seek to answer these questions. I will begin by tracing the history of the Batman franchise through the hundreds of hands that have maintained creative, legal, and editorial control of the property since its inception in 1939, paying special attention to the nuances of the property’s (sometimes disputed) ownership and licensing, and how the versions across media take their cues from whichever is employed most successfully. This will flow into an exploration of Gotham City as an evolving fictional space in its various representations. The bulk of the project will construct an argument focused on Gotham City as a virtual space for participatory circulation and mapping, examining its representations in board games and video games, including the popular Arkham series (2009-2015) and the licensed Lego Batman games (2008-2014). I will explain how the recent game versions of Gotham City are palimpsests of the seven decades of Batman texts preceding them, and show how these game versions of Gotham are beginning to work outward from themselves, again influencing representations in other media in the narrative assemblage, but also grounding a new geographical and aesthetic consistency for the Batman media empire.

Gotham on the Ground will explore discourses of corporate cultural production, participatory fan culture, and adaptation practices as they pertain to both film production and ludic game experiences. It will investigate the fields of virtual and fictional geography, as well as the emerging traditions of collaborative world-building in video games and large-scale transmedia narratives. In completing this project, I intend to address current gaps in the scholarship of transmedia cultural production, and in doing so develop a fuller understanding of the shifting relationships between producers, users, and fans.

Works Cited