Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts. Jonathan Gray. New York: New York University Press, 2010. 247 pp.
What do a Star Trek lunchbox, a child playing with a Buzz Lightyear action figure, and a water cooler conversation about last night’s Colbert Report have in common? According to Jonathan Gray in Show Sold Separately, these are all media paratexts. More than merely extensions of a central media text, Gray argues these paratexts are all equally vital to cultural and individual meaning-making. Gray, an associate professor of media and cultural studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has explored these issues throughout much of his career, most notably in his book Watching with The Simpsons: Television, Parody, and Intertextuality. What sets Show Sold Separately apart from his previous works is the assertion that media and cultural studies need to step away from the emphasis on close readings of primary texts and instead focus on what he labels “off-screen studies.” This form of study, he argues, can best be accomplished through examining the constitutive role of paratexts in creating a mediated experience that breaks up the notion of a central or primary text.
Explaining how this is accomplished succinctly is quite difficult, primarily because Gray fails to provide a specific definition for the term “paratext.” In the introduction he defines it by what it is not (that is merely an extension of an original text) with the unfulfilled promise that a more complete definition will follow later. It doesn’t. Instead, Gray uses the book to provide specific examples of paratexts and how they play at least an equivalent role in textual construction as what we often see as the text like a film or television show. Gray accomplishes this by providing extremely thorough and persuasive readings of paratexts, successfully showing, for example, how Jaws is not Jaws without its famous poster. By integrating these readings into a larger understanding of textuality, Gray effectively shows how close readings of singular texts fail to capture textuality as thoroughly as studies that combine paratexts.
The book demonstrates how paratexts like movie posters often serve as entryways into the textual experience. Gray also discusses in medias res paratexts, or those paratexts that continue the constitutive process beyond the initial exposure to texts. Gray notes how things like movie tie-in toys as well as events like playing with said toys act as paratexts, continuing to shape and expand a text beyond first exposure. This has a couple of interesting consequences for media and cultural scholars.
First, it shows that a paratext’s label of entryway, or in media res, is relative to experience. For example, one could certainly see Jaws the film before its poster. Second, this relativity means that texts are both cultural and individual products. Gray, for example, comes to read Star Wars primarily through the experience of playing with the toys. This reading is quite different from mine, as I understood it through video games (another subject of interest in the book), and both would differ from those who know the iconic movie primarily as, well, a movie. Yet despite our individual experiences, we share a similar overall understanding, suggesting that paratexts work culturally as well.
This positions Gray’s book in both a longstanding research program on textuality and within an emerging and exciting turn in media and cultural studies. The study of paratexts both as entryway and in media res expands theories of reading codes and polysemy, since paratexts often open texts to interpretation. Yet Gray argues that professionally produced paratexts like DVD bonus material as well as amateur contributions like movie reviews are able to (re)construct understanding and close reading alternatives as well. While these conclusions are not altogether new to these theories, Gray adds paratextuality to the conversation while moving research beyond an audience-only focus to concerns of production, something Gray supports throughout the book with numerous quotations from leading professionals.
Show Sold Separately will also likely become an essential read for those interested in the study on intertextuality. First, Gray begins a hierarchy by placing paratextuality as a subset of intertextuality. He never makes it clear what exists under the umbrella of intertexts beyond paratexts, so such positioning seems immediately questionable. This is only a minor quibble, however. Of greater concern is what the book adds to future research, which is the understanding that paratexts work together to make meaning. Equally important is the fact they are being created by both Hollywood and audiences. Gray demonstrates that the line between producer and audience is disappearing because of what is described as media convergence, a concept further emphasized in Henry Jenkins’ 2006 book Convergence Culture. Points of connection, however, also exist with other recent works like Brian Ott’s The Small Screen (2007) and Lawrence Lessig’s Remix (2009). Therefore, as part of this research program, I believe Show Sold Separately will prove invaluable to those concerned with how intertexuality shapes culture and the self.
For some JMCQ readers, the emphasis on cultural studies may be off-putting. Not only is Gray’s writing approachable to those unfamiliar with cultural studies, the book also includes examples of quantitative and qualitative studies of paratextuality that can serve as jumping off points for researchers. Therefore, I feel it is important to conclude this review by recommending Gray’s book as a useful starting point for scholars from theoretical and methodological backgrounds other than cultural studies interested in joining the (inter)textuality scholarly conversation.
CHRISTOPHER A. MEDJESKY
Bowling Green State University