The articles collected in this special issue of Response examine various aspects of media storytelling in the twenty-first century. They span narrative mediums, including film, television programming, and audiobooks. They also engage with scholarly debates in the fields of cultural studies, media studies, and literary studies concerning the discursive uses of popular media, the potential and limits for ideological critique and/or subversion when it comes to texts produced within the commercial U.S. media industry, the impacts of AI on both the production and the interpretive meaning of media texts, and the nature of adaptation in an era of recycled media content—not to mention the increasing prevalence of intertextual references, allusions, and homages across a wide swath of twenty-first century U.S. pop culture texts. Finally, the articles collected here likewise revisit key theoretical works in the fields of both media studies and cultural studies, including Roland Barthes’ Mythologies, Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation, Stuart Hall’s “Encoding/Decoding” and Barbara Creed’s The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, in order to reflect on their continued relevance and applicability to twenty-first media, in spite of the changes to both U.S. culture and the U.S. media landscape in the intervening years since their publication.
Reba Mitchell’s “Audio Erotica, Virtual Voice, & Gender Hegemony as Modern Myth” examines the impact of Virtual Voice, an AI-generated narration tool for audiobooks on the production of audiobook romance and erotica, as well as on the ideological dimensions of such texts and audience engagement with/reception of the stories that they tell. Drawing on Roland Barthes’ work on cultural myth, Judith Butler's work on gender performativity, Adrienne Rich’s theorization of compulsory heterosexuality, and Jean Baudrillard’s theorization of simulacra, Mitchell examines all of the ways in which Virtual Voice narration serves to “virtual voice narrated romance and erotic audiobooks convey patriarchal norms dressed in palatably modernized settings with inhuman detachment, invisibly limiting perceived possibilities outside of normative heterosexuality and a gender binary.” It also uses Liv Hausken’s warning about “medium blindness” in narrative analysis to make an argument for why consideration of the technological aspects of audiobook production and reception should be central to their analysis alongside—but also not separate from—textual aspects such as narrative, themes, and discursive/ideological dimensions.
Alyson Marzini’s “Don’t Look Away!: Reframing the Abject in Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance (2024)” analyzes the ways in which the film’s hyper-stylized world and multi-generic narrative function as a metaphor for the larger adversity that women face every second of their lives: the ticking clock of their youth. Drawing on Roland Barthes’ work on media representations as cultural myth, Barabara Creed’s work on Feminist New Wave Cinema as a subversion of patriarchal discourses surrounding femininity and the female body, and Julia Kristeva’s theorization of the abject, Marzini maps out the ways in which the film appropriates the trope of the “monstrous-feminine” characteristic of late-twentieth century body horror films for subversive, feminist ends.
Kelsie Crough’s “Abject Motherhood in Nightbitch” also considers the redeployment of the trope of the monstrous-feminine for subversive ends in another female-centered film released in 2024, Marielle Heller’s Nightbitch. Drawing on Julia Kristeva’s theorization of the abject, Barbara Creed’s work on the monstrous-feminine in body horror films of the 1980s and 1990s, as well as her theorization of Feminist New Wave Cinema as an early-twenty-first century subversion of patriarchal discourses surrounding femininity and the female body, Crough suggests that Nightbitch attempts to align itself with Feminist New Wave films by pushing back against patriarchal models of motherhood, but ultimately falls short of providing any meaningful critique—feminist or otherwise—by focusing on the tolls of motherhood on the individual rather than on the institutionalized demands and constraints placed on how motherhood is expected to be performed under patriarchy.
Micah Marrapodi’s “A Three-Pronged, Interdisciplinary Media Studies Approach & Jack Stauber’s Opal” takes as its focus Stauber’s 2020 short, animated film, Opal, which originally aired as part of Cartoon Network’s “Adult Swim” programming. Marrapodi’s analysis draws on Aristotelian plot complexity, Kristeva’s theorization of the abject, and autoethnography-oriented textual analysis in order to highlight the advantages of interdisciplinary approaches to media studies work. It also revisits the debates in the field of television studies in the early 2010s surrounding the autoethnographic analysis of media texts (centralized at the time around the emerging area of “acafandom” research) in order to consider the ways in which autoethnographic approaches to media analysis can yield critical perspectives on both media texts themselves and audience reception of those texts that might not be possible if scholars do not take into consideration the ways in which their own subject positions and life experiences inflect their critical work.
Finally, Riley Antonacci’s “Saltburn as Adaptation?” uses Emerald Fennell’s 2023 film Saltburn as a case study to consider the question of whether a narrative that is strikingly similar to that of a previous text can be considered an adaptation of that text if its author maintains that it is not. Noting that reviews of the film invariably catalogued similarities between the film’s story, plot, characters, and themes to those of The Talented Mr. Ripley—both the 1955 novel by Patricia Highsmith and Anthony Minghella’s 1999 film adaptation of it—Antonacci draws on Linda Hutcheon’s pioneering work on textual adaptation in A Theory of Adaptation, as well as Phyllis Fruss’s theorization of narrative “transformations,” in order to argue for how and why Saltburn can be considered an adaptation of The Talented Mr. Ripley. Antonacci’s analysis also makes a case for an expanded understanding of what constitutes adaptation, given Fennell’s repeated denials that Saltburn was ever conceived or intended to be one.