Will Brooker

Living on Dawson's Creek: teen viewers, cultural convergence and television overflow

This paper explores issues of cultural convergence around television audiences, with a particular focus on the Warner Brothers (WB) teen drama Dawson’s Creek and its viewers. It argues that contemporary television increasingly ‘overflows’ from the primary text across multiple platforms - particularly onto dedicated internet sites - and that certain programmes invite a participatory, interactive engagement which constructs the show as an extended, immersive experience. My ethnographic research with American and British viewers asks whether viewers actually follow this pattern of structured interactivity, whether they produce any ‘folk’ culture of their own or simply follow the culture provided from ‘above’, and whether factors such as age, nation, gender, and economic background shape their engagement with these secondary texts.

‘Now you’re thinking with portals’: Media training for a digital world

• Using a range of examples from contemporary popular culture, this article argues that our increasing engagement with the world as data, through digital technology, involves new vocabulary, gestures, conventions and conceptual models: new ways of seeing, acting and thinking. Drawing on the theory that 1920s cinema offered, in Walter Benjamin’s phrase, a ‘kind of training’ for the new modes of operation required by the modernist city, it suggests that contemporary popular narratives are currently serving a similar purpose, training us in the uses of digital technology and emphasizing the social mastery that results from understanding the world as data, and learning to read it, navigate it and manipulate it. •

Look back at that man: David Bowie in retrospect

At the age of 66, Bowie faced a career retrospective at the Victoria & Albert Museum, and, through a new single release, staged ‘the most surprising, perfect and welcome comeback in rock history’. But Bowie – the concept ‘Bowie’, rather than the individual – seems strangely to resist the idea of both a comeback and a retrospective (McCormick 2013). Not just because, as Where are we now? and the subsequent album The Next Day demonstrated, his career, and his ability to surprise and innovate, are far from over, but also because it feels as though it’s all been done before, over and over again. Bowie’s entire career has always already been a retrospective, a reflective mediation on itself – right from, or almost from, the very start. ‘Do you remember a guy that’s been/In such an early song?’ Bowie asked in the first line of Ashes to ashes. His reference to Major Tom, from 1969’s Space oddity, positioned the new song, Ashes to ashes – released in 1980, 33 years before the V&A retrospective – as an already nostalgic look back into history. Its lyrics carry a sense of reckoning, of final confession. ‘I’ve never done good things [. . .] I never did anything out of the blue [. . .] I’ve loved all that needed love, sordid details following.’ But then, Space Oddity, by the 22-year-old Bowie, was already a mournful farewell from a pilot facing his last hours alone – ‘feeling very still [. . .] there’s nothing I can do’ – and sending a final message to his wife. Hallo Spaceboy (1996) revisited the character for a third time, but the spaceman’s adventures had always been elegiac, already over, ever since 1969. ‘Once a time they really might have been/Bones and Oogie on a silver screen/Down in space, it’s always 1982,’ Bowie reflected in 2002, on Slip away. The song’s lyrics are as poignantly nostalgic as those of Where are we now?, hailing forgotten characters from a TV show that Lennon had originally recommended to Bowie, in the 1970s.1 ‘Down in space, it’s always 1982.’ That line provides the central crux of Bowie’s paradoxical looking-forward while looking-back. Bowie is regularly characterised as a pop chameleon, ahead of his time, a futuristic, ‘bisexual alien’ (Auslander 2006, p. 136). Yet his futurism is consistently retro. Space Oddity looks back from the end of a man’s life. Ashes to ashes unearths that ‘early song’, assuming that Tom won’t be remembered 11 years later. Hallo spaceboy speaks from an older man’s perspective, reassuring the astral traveller with a techno-lullaby (‘You’re sleepy now [. . .] moon-dust will cover you’). Ziggy Stardust, the pinnacle of Bowie’s extraterrestrial persona – ‘a Martian [. . .] an alien arrived to earth on a quest’ (Auslander 2006, p. 126) – is also a document of a closed

Hero of the beach: Flex Mentallo at the end of the worlds

This article explores the four-part mini-series Flex Mentallo, written by Grant Morrison with art by Frank Quitely, and published by DC Comics in 1996. With reference to queer theory, comic book history and the culture of male bodybuilding, it argues that Flex the series, and Flex the character, are more fascinating, rich and fundamentally ‘queer’ for their refusal either of an unambiguously straight or gay reading. It celebrates the multiple origins, possible explanations and fluid identities of this narrative in relation to the closure and censorship imposed at various times since the 1950s on the superhero genre, and suggests that the series may have led, in turn, to an opening up of alternate worlds and timelines in mainstream DC Comics continuity.