Imagine There’s No Kabe: An Appeal for Literacy

Imagine There’s No Kabe: An Appeal for Literacy

“To truly appreciate what we are watching, we have to do our homework. And that does not end with simply watching films. Together with the movies Warner Brothers bring out a videogame, nine animation films, an online role playing game, a series of comic strips, and so on. What is unique about the Matrix industry, according to Jenkins, is that involving the different media is more than a marketing strategy. Together the various media create a narrative so large and complex that it cannot be contained within a single medium. The animation films or game versions, for instance, offer information and twists in the plot that help us to better understand what is going on in the films. They add to the content of the story. Jenkins concludes: ‘transmedia storytelling is the art of world making. To fully experience any fictional world, consumers must assume the role of hunters and gatherers, chasing down bits of the story across media channels, comparing notes with each other via online discussion groups, and collaborating to ensure that everyone who invests time and effort will come away with a richer entertainment experience’ (p. 21). Many other films and television series have in the meantime used this once unique production and marketing model, ranging from Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings, to Heroes, Lost and Idols.” – Ginette Verstraete, “The Politics of Convergence: On the role of the mobile object”

“Kabe was the adopted daughter of Muftak, a Talz. Whenever Muftak and Kabe would go to the Mos Eisley cantina, Kabe would drink too much juri juice, and Muftak would have to carry her home. Despite his rough look, Muftak was a good guardian and cared about Kabe, although he was obsessed with finding out what species he was. Kabe worried that when he did, he would leave her and travel to his home planet.

Kabe was an associate of Greedo, and knew information that many others did not. She helped Greedo find Temo Dionisio when the Rebel sympathizer went missing.” – Wookiepedia.org Entry, “Kabe”

            One of the most iconic scenes in Star Wars: A New Hope takes place in a cantina on an isolated desert planet, a world that is, in every sense, alien; intertextually drawing on various orientalist tropes used in Western art to represent a place unlike here (a tradition with a long legacy; it was already commonplace by the time it was used in the middle English Breton lai Emaré and the medieval romance The Sowdone of Babylone), with twin suns hanging overhead, and, most memorably, a rogues’ gallery of strange aliens inhabiting the bar itself. The unknowable strangeness of the bars’ denizens in precisely the point; it is the bar at the end of the world (or galaxy), a far point at the edge of society where one can remain nameless, the ideal starting point for those conspiring to take down a mythically huge empire. Or it’s Chalmun's Spaceport Cantina, owned by Chalmun, a: “Wookiee born on Kashyyyk in 157 BBY, and a distant relative of Chewbacca[…]” (Link), an actual location in a fully detailed universe where the so-called “fan” can pinpoint any location on a sufficiently large map, know, with certainty, what the actual thought process of every character in the bar was, and have a canonical explanation as to why each of them happened to wander in. The strangeness of the film gives way to the banality of an average day in Mos Eisley, an actual place with an actual economy, explanations for its architectural style, etc.

            The convergence celebrated by Henry Jenkins is functionally a movement away from even the most barebones attempts at textual analysis, instead asserting that the “world-building” process can stand in its place. Chewbacca is no longer an alien reimagining of the Blaxploitation protagonist, refusing to wear chains, clashing with the slur-slinging, establishment Princess Leia, but instead an actual figure divorced from his intertextual origin. There is no longer any need to read a text, to interpret, to be: “charged with the here-and-now, [and] exploded out of the continuum of history” (Link); instead, there is the canon, an empty record of events handed out by the text’s God-Author, whose dictatorial hold over the universe settles any contradictions, gives explanation to anything odd or strange, and places it in the safe permanence of viewer certainty.

When a text violates the canon or reintroduces the strange and alien, fans immediately panic; in Prometheus, a prequel to Alien, a mysterious black substance is introduced. This black goo is effectively the ultimate destroyer of stable meaning, Bataille’s abject ‘base material’ made physically manifest; it violates all hierarchical organicist logic, interfaces with anything and, in this new multiplicity, they: “constantly construct and dismantle themselves in the course of their communications” (Pg. 54), and reverses all positivist assertions of ontological certainty. In short, the ideal substance for a film dealing with the impossibility of positivist certainty as to the meaning of the universe, human purpose, God’s will, etc. Naturally, this wouldn’t do; the fan needs that certainty. Dozens of “explanations” soon surfaced (Link, Link, Link), all of which were premised on the idea that this substance really exists, and the fan’s one task is to solve that mystery. In short, a reading that is based chiefly on ignoring the rest of the film, in favor of determining what really happened in this real (fictional) universe. Fan culture does not represent a new age of media literacy, but rather the opposite; an enthusiastic embrace of the refusal to read, but instead to merely catalog.