Narrative Assumptions in the Binge-Watch Era
Avengers: Endgame is a thoroughly unsatisfying movie as a stand-alone piece of cinema, but full of heart-in-your-throat payoffs if you’ve invested in the 22 Marvel movies released over the eleven years prior to its release.
The Witcher on Netflix never really grabbed me on an episode-by-episode level, but it became remarkable when I we finished the season and pulled all the disparate narrative strands and timelines together.
Trying to engage with either of these works as a stand-alone is to read against the grain. The creators are playing by a fresh set of narrative expectations, once that started with home-video and repeated viewings. They’re film and TV of the binge-watch era, with narrative payoffs no longer confined to a singular arc or instalment. Their ambition is far-reaching and long-term.
And now, with Spiderman: No Way Home in 2021, the ambitions are more audacious. Marvel lays claim to two prior iterations of the character, bringing in actors and characters from movies stretching back to the Sam Raimi trilogy that saw its first instalment released in 2001. Laying claim to earlier, stand-alone works and making them part of the continuity.
You have seen these films, they whisper. You remember this version from 20 years ago. Get excited that they’re coming back.
Better yet, go back and watch it again. Binge watch every Spiderman movie ever made, because they’re connected now. They’re relevant.
But when you re-watch, consider this: the 2001 Spiderman deployed the same narrative that lay at the heart of every Superhero film of the era. Give your protagonist powers, introduce a life-changing conflict, and trace their transformative arc all the way through the conclusion. A story designed to be one-and-done, no prior knowledge necessary.
A legacy of a bygone age, made by people who never really understand what made comic books great.
It’s no surprise that Marvel embraces the possibilities of the binge-watch era, because print comics have spent decades exploring the pleasures of ongoing continuity and call-backs. The version of Spiderman you read about in comics today is the same character who debuted in 1962, with sixty years of legacy characters and stories to play off, each new tale iterating a core concept out rather than changing his life forever.
A thing fiction writers and publishers haven’t seemed to realise yet: we can pull these tricks off too. Not just the best-sellers of yesteryear, but everyone with the ambition and patience to build a readership.
It’s not easy. Like TV, like film, there’s a convention of the stand-alone story that’s ingrained in the way we approach storytelling, but it’s just that—a convention. A legacy of an era where we all fought for shelf space, and there were costs associated with keeping backlist titles available that prohibited relying upon them as a source of potential revenue.
But those days are gone. Ebooks and print-on-demand technology make back lists readily available, and the binge-read is a tool that changes narrative assumptions just as surely as the binge-watch, if you care to use it.
Like TV and film, the people who have realised the power of that are typically coming from outside the industry. Storytellers familiar with other forms, applying the lessons to prose and breaking all the rules along the way. People who don’t have to unlearn narrative conventions in order to take advantage of the new forms.
PeterMBall
Peter M. Ball is a speculative fiction writer, small press publisher, and writing mentor from Brisbane, Austraila. He publishes his own work through Eclectic Projects and works as the brain in charge at Brain Jar Press.
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