Cycles, Sequels, Spin-Offs, Remakes, and Reboots: Multiplicities in Film and Television by Amanda Ann Klein, R. Barton Palmer (review)

Cycles, sequels, spin-offs, remakes, and Reboots covers a breadth of areas, including adaptations, sequels, remakes, imitations, trilogies, reboots, spin-offs, series, preboots, retro, and film cycles. At the outset, the collection acknowledges existing scholarship on remakes, adaptations, sequels, and other prominent works on media spillage and cross-textuality. In an attempt to thread together this dispersed scholarship into “cohesive ways of discussing transgeneric groupings,” editors Amanda Klein and R. Barton Palmer argue that dispersal and a “calculated instability,” rehearsed by cinema as well as television, point to an ongoing investment of these industries in creating what they call “multiplicities” (14). The collection uses the term to highlight links among different visual media to reveal how viewers and critics “simultaneously embrace and disavow what is most central to popular media production: repetition, continuation, and profit” (12). With a wide array of contexts—medium, periodization, location, formats—the volume sets up an ambitious task: to investigate “the relationship between audience, industry, and culture, in relation to multiplicities, and reflects on the presence, meaning, and function of multiplicities in the US and international cinema, television, and popular culture” (14).

To this end, the book mobilizes discourses on audience studies, fan studies, stardom, and performance cultures, as well as questions of genre, gender, and race that adeptly foreground the “relatedness of plural textual forms” (14). However, the scope of the study primarily serves as an advocating model for multiplicity studies. Though the collection doesn’t explicitly argue for a new field, the contributors’ concern with the marginalization of certain texts and phenomena within media scholarship asserts an urgency to intervene in this “historically and critically marginalized aspect of media studies” (20). In their introduction, Klein and Palmer advocate for scholarly attention to the question of multiplicities and argue that while the context of “high” versus “low” art, questions of taste, and originality have been the nodes along which media scholars have traced the phenomenon of repetition, the object of study has been widely understood as that of distinct singularities of closed texts. Instead, they suggest that the continuous flow of texts does not allow for a stable text to serve as “the object of hermeneutic inquiry” (3).

With this stated aim, the collection begins with Amanda Klein’s study of “the kissing cycle” to study how it “worked to negotiate the new power dynamics generated by heterosexual mixing in US cities circa 1900” (22). Klein argues that a cycle of films that emerged in this period of complex sociopolitical shifts makes legible the complex codes of decorum and resistance (38). Klein’s is one of the many essays in the collection that consciously deviate from “hot topics” like film sequels, spin-offs, and adaptation; rather, it is particularly invested in engaging with earlier scholarship on, for instance, Klein’s own work in American Film Cycles (University of Texas Press, 2011) and theorizing and developing the notion of a film cycle as a critical symptom of “multiplicities.”

In chapters 4 and 5, Barton Palmer’s study of rhetorical film techniques employed by Hollywood’s postwar semi-documentary and Steven Doles’s development of “cycle-consciousness” of the problem of race in postwar late 1940s films reveal how the multiplicity of narrative patterns (settings, character-types, props) can be employed to create and perpetuate ideologies of state consent (81). Later, in chapter 8, Elizabeth Birmingham looks at the economic flexibilities and cultural context of the “magical girl” genre of Japanese animation as representative tools that reveal cultural anxieties of shifting gender roles, unstable political environment, and a boom in the low-budget Japanese anime industry (131). Together, these essays reveal complex social codes that reflect the economy of films’ circulation as a cycle.

Cycles, Sequels, Spin-Offs, Remakes, and Reboots more often than not continues to engage with genre by redirecting the debates to build a case...