Abstract
How does the tendency toward series reboots, sequels, and remakes in contemporary Hollywood intersect with television’s capacity for serialization? How does the logic of promotion in transmedia entertainment connect to television’s ability to perform simultaneity in relation to other forms of screen media? This article will describe and analyze how the Resident Evil films have been broadcast on Japan’s Asahi TV network throughout the 2010s, focusing on how the week-after-week programming of the films acts as a case for demonstrating how transmedia serialization brings into relief qualities of narration and aesthetics within the context of convergent screen industries and global media production. Focusing on the concept of accumulation, this article will argue how the mode of viewing invited by Asahi TV’s mode of presentation is one that can be addressed both in terms of how viewers make sense of complicated networks of meta-textual continuity and of how convergent media forms rely on practices of simultaneity in media consumption.
Keywords
The appearance of a new media device or form is sometimes perceived as rupturing existing modes of media production and consumption. However, the arrival of this fresh alternative often ends up providing a new home for the very media that it portends to replace. The relationship between cinema and television initially unfolded in this manner. Television’s arrival in homes and public spaces in the mid-12th century produced an alternative form of media entertainment and leisure culture (one that initially threatened to displace cinema in the popular imagination), but at the same time also provided a new platform for Hollywood films to be consumed. Streaming services have similarly affirmed television’s identity not as something distinct from cinema or online media, but part of the same network of screens that hold our attention.
Throughout these changing tides in screen media, one quality that has defined television in the minds of critics and audiences alike is its relationship to time. The ‘liveness’ of broadcast television distinguished the device from theatrical filmgoing when TV was first introduced, while television’s temporal inflexibility comes into relief anew when viewed alongside time-shifting media such as home video or, more recently, on demand services. 1 As television becomes more and more entwined with broadband media its capacity for ‘liveness’ and simultaneous viewing sometimes seems less salient, but TV’s ability to perform a feeling of synchronization in relation to other screens grants it a special capacity for acting as an organ of promotion within larger constellations of popular media. Its temporal rigidity similarly provides a venue for instilling sequences of meaning by arranging texts in serializing order that invites a focused mode of paying attention.
Using Japanese television broadcasts of the Resident Evil films (2002–2016) as a case study, this article will approach television’s relationship to contemporary blockbuster filmmaking. The intersection of Hollywood’s visual and narrative emphasis on serial repetition alongside the promotional capacity of densely organized television airings provide examples of how media converge within the context of global networks of screen-based entertainment. Furthermore, the existing narrative tendency toward cumulative repetition within the Resident Evil films are made even more concrete when they are transplanted to broadcast television’s linear format and the type of viewing it invites. These dimensions of storytelling and media temporality overlap in a way that demonstrates how audience attention is solicited both by the aggressively intertextual model of storytelling found in contemporary Hollywood, but also by the repetitive aesthetic and promotional forms employed in Japanese television, which often works to remind audiences of compounding meaning through text-based prompts added to the image and by broadcast schedules coordinated to be consumed alongside other types of media exhibition.
As such, this article will discuss the broadcast of the Resident Evil series on Japanese television in terms of the narrative and aesthetic features of transnational media convergence. The films will be described as a type of serial media, one that demonstrates cumulative narrative development between sequels, but also in terms of how they expand across screens and markets in the ‘plurimedial field’ that Shane Denson attributes to serial media forms (Denson, 2011: 532). These tendencies of media seriality are also reflective of media production under global capitalism, in which the logic of marketing and commercial expansion has embedded itself in film production, while adjacent media forms (such as television) work to amplify that model by engaging audiences through contiguous routines of cumulative repetition. To that end, media convergence will be considered as not only a mixing of media content and screens but of media temporalities, consumption, and audience attention.
This article will begin by introducing the transnational dimensions of the Resident Evil films and their promotion, as well as an explanation of how serial mediality appear within contemporary film and televisual media cultures. A discussion of how Hollywood films have been screened on television in Japan will follow. Finally, the article will give an elaboration on Azumi Hiroki’s concept of ‘gamic realism’ as a way of further developing how serial cumulation can be used to theorize the narrative and aesthetic tendencies of convergent cinema and how audience attention responds to intertextual, cumulative media forms.
Eastward inclinations
The Resident Evil film series (known as Biohazard in Japan) consists of six films. The first installment opened in early spring of 2002 and the last, The Final Chapter, was released in Japan in December of 2016 and then in early 2017 in other parts of the world. The films take their name and basic concept from the survival horror video game series produced by Capcom, which debuted in 1996 on the original Sony PlayStation console and has since continued to produce new sequels and spin-offs into the present. 2 However, despite the adaptive conceit of the film series (bioengineered undead creatures running amok alongside a conspiracy tied to a mysterious mega-corporation), the films diverge from their source material in many ways. Chief among these is that the series’ lead character, Alice, played by Milla Jovovich, is an original creation that does not appear in any of the games. Furthermore, while individual films will often feature set pieces or supporting casts borrowed from the original games, they still often stray far from the source material in terms of narrative, tone, and continuity.
As with many contemporary Hollywood action films, the Resident Evil series has done a lot of its business in overseas markets and has accordingly steered itself toward a global audience in its promotion. 3 The films have individually never earned more than US$60 million in the domestic box office of the United States but have grossed as high as US$300 million globally, and even US$55 million in Japan alone. The fifth installment, Retribution (2012), took home US$40 million within the United States but over US$240 million globally, grossing around US$50 million in Japan. Retribution ended its run as the eighth highest grossing film in Japan that year, besting summer tentpoles such as The Avengers. 4 The sixth and final film had its world premiere in Japan, signaling another aspect of the series’ shift toward East Asian markets and audiences.
This trajectory in box office performance has led more recent installments in the series to actively pursue international audiences with tie-ins and promotions. This included shooting one of the fourth film’s major action set pieces at the famous Shibuya Crossing in Tokyo, as well as casting a popular singer, Nakashima Mika, in a cameo role. Chinese movie star Bingbing Li appeared in the role of Ada Wong for the fifth film, while Japanese TV personality Rola was given a small role in the final entry in the series. 5 These performers also participated in the local promotion of the film for their respective local audiences, giving interviews for media coverage and attending premiere screenings. 6 Series star Milla Jovovich has similarly participated in publicizing the films in Japan, guesting on talk variety shows as new installments were about to open in theaters and also appearing in TV spots advertising broadcasts of previous entries in the series (Figure 1).
Mila Jovovich appears in an ad on Asahi TV in October of 2016 to remind audiences to tune in for the upcoming broadcast of Resident Evil 2, which is being shown as part of the lead-up to the theatrical release of the final film in the series. The spot largely consists of footage from the movie but ends with Jovovich speaking directly into the camera, telling the audience to watch the film (mite ne) in Japanese.
Serial structures
Beyond casting and promotion, another quality the Resident Evil films share with other contemporary blockbuster film franchises is their emphasis on intertextual continuity. This type of continuity between films is normally expressed through sequels, reboots, and remakes, all of which can work at juggling the accumulation of character and narrative content from one installment to the next. Such practices result in a figurative serialization of the films, but they can also put their narrative and aesthetic ambitions in greater proximity to television by foregrounding the significance of narrative and temporal sequencing. 7 The scale of attention shifts from viewing films as individual texts to part of a larger, cumulative constellation of meaning, similar to how narrative television dramas merge long-term and stand-alone plotlines as part of their construction of serial meaning. 8
Such an approach can also be considered as part of the commercial organization of contemporary Hollywood cinema, which often uses individual films as vehicles for advancing audience awareness and interest in intellectual properties and media brands. Tom Elsaesser has described how 1989’s Batman emphasized branding through logos on posters, soundtracks, and related materials in order to generate not only the sense of these films being ‘events’, but as commodities organized by marketing (Elsaesser, 2011: 334). This sense of intertextual consumption has also worked its way into the structures of film narration and how audiences understand – and pay attention to – films as narrative texts. The introduction of DVD as a prestige video format furthered this sense of media as commodity via deluxe editions wrapped in spectacular packaging and special features, but also through the ‘recalibration of agency’ that emerges through private ownership and ‘binge’ viewing within one’s home, a practice which preserves the sequential consumption of serial media while also ascribing it ‘sequestered autonomy’ of attention (Brunsdon, 2010: 65).
The reemergence of serial structures in popular Hollywood film is a significant component of this trend. 9 We can witness this in the barrage of sequels that are released year after year, but also how post-credit sequences create cliff-hanger-like anticipation for upcoming films by embedding ‘coming attraction’ style footage into the films themselves. Tom Schatz notes that the ‘serial qualities’ of the sequel and reboot littered landscape of contemporary cinema often stress their characters as centers of audience interest over external plots (Schatz, 2009: 32), while Angela Ndalianis connects this recent trend of serialization toward a ‘neobaroque’ aesthetic that creates elaborate nodes of intertextual connection mediated by technology (Ndalianis, 2004: 25). Characters and spectacle become part of the logic through which that model of storytelling is achieved by displacing audience attention away from holistic narrative consumption and toward a model focused more on the accumulation of discrete elements.
The Resident Evil films are perhaps more open to figurative serialization than other recent Hollywood film franchises due to the ways in which they foreground their repetitive and overlapping content through visual and narrative returns to previous films. In that sense they are not just sequels or part of the same shared ‘universe’ as with other contemporary series, but often directly restage and remediate content from previous installments. Flashback sequences that look back on earlier entries appear as soon as the first sequel, and subsequent entries will often have a ‘recap’ sequence within the first or second scene to go over the events of previous films, lending the films an almost televisual quality in how they engage their audience with navigating intertextual continuity.
Perhaps the most pronounced instances of this notion of accumulative repetition are found in the fifth installment in the series, 2012’s Retribution. This entry uses the conceit of an undersea laboratory filled with massive simulation chambers to restage the major action sequences from earlier films, including the Shibuya Crossing set piece from the previous film. The result is something of a tour through the highlights of previous entries in the series as the characters battle their way back to the surface. This not only recalls the ‘greatest hits’ of the series for audiences to recognize but organizes the set pieces in a sequential manner that treats them like linked episodes. In a way, that very structure invites comparisons to how television programs are presented, and even to the eventual sequencing the films will be shown through on TV in Japan.
This tendency toward repetition can also be connected to place of popular film in contemporary screen culture. The ‘recap’ footage from previous entries will often be shown within screens that appears within the film itself, further emphasizing the films’ aesthetic affinity with television and contemporary screen media (Figure 2). Anne Friedberg (2009) has written extensively on how screens function as windows for viewing the world (virtual and literal), but this use of screens within screens also intersects with the connection Angela Ndalianis draws between media aesthetics and narrative within the ‘polycentric’ world of serializing filmmaking (2004: 34). In other words, these recap sequences are not only reminding audiences of what to pay attention to, but they are using the visual cues of media technology to frame that model of attention.
A serializing ‘recap’ sequence from the beginning of Retribution that uses a screen-within-screen presentation to remind audiences of what had happened in the previous films.
The abundance of screens within the Resident Evil films is also reflective of their identity with global media capitalism. It codifies the relationship between screens and the consumption of visual information but also echoes the manner by which screens of different scales exist side-by-side as they operate in a symbiotic relationship in advancing the reach of media properties. The films’ affinity for television therefore is not just a matter of aesthetics, but also part of how their model of repetitive, cumulative storytelling resonates with the serial structures of television broadcast and TV’s ability to intensify the simultaneity of images across screen media.
The following section will elaborate on this point further, while also offering an explanation of how Hollywood cinema has been formatted to Japanese television.
Hollywood films, Japanese screens
Barbara Klinger has observed that the ‘recycling’ of films for TV broadcast has been a ‘staple’ of Hollywood’s relationship to television (Klinger, 2006: 92). Klinger’s interest in this practice is tied to how films are preserved in public memory, and how classical movies become part of national culture by being shown on TV for a mass audience. Bringing films to television also embeds these media texts in TV’s commercial and temporal architecture; the ‘flow’ that Raymond Williams famously described in his pioneering work on television (Williams, 1975). As Klinger observes, classical films are often shown on broadcast TV to coincide with theatrical rereleases or annual events, such as holiday seasons (Klinger, 2006: 92). The reshowing of previous entries in a popular franchise as a new sequel or remake is about to have its theatrical bow offers another example of this practice and is where this section will focus its analysis of the simultaneity of media consumption. This latter strategy is also part of how television and Hollywood film intersect in global media ecologies.
Hollywood films have been a mainstay on Japanese television since the 1960s. This was the same time that television was becoming an affordable device in Japanese homes, with close to 90% of households owning a television by the time of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. 10 Weekly programs that would broadcast Hollywood and European films in dubbed format were part of a cultural elevation of the medium and new way of bringing globally recognized art and culture to a mass audience. NHK, Japan’s publicly funded national network, began showing Hollywood films from the 1930s and 1940s in 1961 and screened approximately 100 titles that year alone. Rival networks such as Fuji Television produced similar programs, such as Masterpieces of Cinema on Television (Terebi meigaza, 1960–1968), which screened European classics such as Madchen in Uniform (1932), The Devil’s Envoy (1942), and The Bicycle Thief (1948).
Additional programs focused on screening foreign films have appeared in more recent years, but there has also been a shift away from classic and art films to a focus on popular cinema, and Hollywood blockbuster films in particular. Asahi TV’s Sunday Western Cinema (Nichiyō Yōga Gekijyō, 1966 to present) and Nihon TV’s Friday Roadshow (Kinyō Roadshow, NTV, 1985 and onward) are two such examples. In the past, networks would license a film studio’s backlog to develop an archive of movies to program. For example, NHK held the rights for films by Warner Bros. and RKO in the 1960s. However, in recent decades that system has been reconfigured so that films and series are now licensed on an individual basis, and often for a limited amount of time (Inui, 1990).
Popular and long-running series have become regular features in this model, with films from the Harry Potter and Resident Evil series becoming mainstays on Nihon TV and Asahi TV, respectively. On top of that, these films are often shown in mini marathon ‘festivals’ (matsuri) that run from 1 week to the next. These will, as will be described in the next section, often be accompanied by graphic effects in the program’s television opaque projector (telop) that direct the viewers’ attention to specific points and in understanding the cumulative content of the films through visual prompts and annotations. The back-to-back airings of sequel-heavy series are often scheduled to coincide with the premiere of a new installment. For example, in 2010, Resident Evil: Afterlife had its theatrical premiere in Japan on September 10, and as part of the promotion first Resident Evil film was shown on Asahi’s Sunday Western Cinema on September 12, the second on September 19, and the third on September 26. This was repeated in 2012 in advance of the theatrical release of the fifth film on September 5, although this time out of sequence. The third film was shown on January 15 and the first on January 22, and then the second and fourth films shown on September 9 and the fourth on September 16.
This type of broadcasting of older films is of course part of the commercial organization of promoting Hollywood cinema around the world. Jonathan Gray has written extensively on the use of trailers and related promotional media as part of the development of ‘hype’ within commercial filmmaking (Gray, 2010), while Henry Jenkins has looked at viral media campaigns that expand upon the narrative worlds of film series such as The Matrix (1999) to engage audiences across media platforms (Jenkins, 2006). These techniques mix the logic of promotion with an invitation to audiences to understand these films in a different way by paying attention to intertextual content that is shared and repeated between them, such as the repetition of images, sequences, and how characters are used. 11
Transplanting the films to Japanese television adds new dimensions to these patterns of media convergence. There are of course issues of licensing and translation to consider, but the asymmetrical gap between Japan and Hollywood within global film culture also places these types of broadcasts into a channel of prestige they might not occupy domestically. The Resident Evil films are, in the United States, a type of cult cinema that has a small, dedicated following, but little recognition among critics and mainstream audiences. However, the films acquire a new level of prestige through their promotion in Japan, which as previously discussed, paid special attention to Japanese television as a market for exhibition. As objects of transnational cult media they cross national borders but move also different types of screens and the styles of attention associated with each. 12
The affinity between cross-media proliferation and simultaneous promotion can also be linked to practices found in contemporary media production in Japan. Social media platforms such as Twitter and Niconico have been used to create sensations of virtually shared viewing, demonstrated by the way that fans of Studio Ghibli’s Castle in the Sky (1986) have taken to posting dialogue on SNS so as to synchronize with the character’s speech during TV broadcasts (Oremus, 2013). The emphasis on simultaneity in popular media can also be traced back to include the ‘Kadokawa Storm’ model of promotion developed by Kadokawa publishing in the late 1970s and early 1980s. This strategy would typically pair the theatrical release of a new film with an album or pop title-song (often performed by one of the leads) as well as a republishing of the source novel in paperback form, all of which worked to cultivate an audience who would consume images and sentiments across media forms. Alex Zahlten has connected Kadokawa’s strategy to the temporality of media-mix promotion and narrative in contemporary Japan, which stresses simultaneity in the marketing of narratives that often deal with time-travel, time loops, or other types of temporal distortion (Zahlten, 2017: 111–114).
Everything new is old again
Turning to one of the TV broadcasts of the Resident Evil films can hopefully demonstrate some of these points in more concrete terms. The third Resident Evil film was broadcast on Asahi Television’s Sunday Western Cinema program on January 15, 2012. As mentioned above, this series had played on Asahi many times in the past, and often in a week-after-week schedule. On this occasion, however, it was announced that the screening would be of a version of the film never seen before: sekai hatsu tokubetsu baajon (‘world premiere special version’). What exactly would be different was not explained in the TV promos that were used in advance of the airing, but it was also promised that at the end of the show there would also be ‘shocking’ (shōgeki) news related to the film series.
To the disappointment of many fans of the films, the version screened on Asahi was not a new edit of the film, nor did it include additional scenes or alternate takes. Rather, it incorporated many visual cues in its onscreen graphics that drew connections between the various installments in the series. One of these was the insertion of a ranking of action sequences from throughout the series, which were played between commercial breaks. These were simply footage taken from the five films in the series, with a ranking number and brief explanation of the scene represented in the program’s telop in the lower right-hand part of the frame. A second element was the highlighting of sequences in which the protagonist Alice reflects on or remembers something from previous films. Such highlights were played over the film itself and identified through a telop text display that would appear, this time in the upper left-hand corner of the frame (Figure 3). The sequences highlighted in this manner were of the moments where the film reuses or remakes footage or scenes from previous entries, such as the simulated ‘return’ to the mansion and underground compound that had been featured in the first film. As such, not only were the films themselves relying on repetition to draw connections between films and remind audiences of memorable moments from previous versions, but the method of broadcast was also further insisting on this accumulation of overlapping continuity.
A scene from Asahi Television’s January 15, 2012, broadcast of Resident Evil 3: Extinction. The text in the upper left-hand corner reads Biohazard III in the upper column, and ‘Alice’s Reflection’ (kaisō) in the lower. This sequence revisits a location featured in the first Resident Evil film, which is itself evocative of the Spencer Mansion setting of the original video game.
The inclusion of these elements led to strong fan responses on Twitter, message boards, and blogs. The reaction was generally not positive due to the false promise of this being a ‘new’ version of the film that had never been seen before. Online comments included expressions of frustration such as ‘wtf are they doing?!’ (mō uke wakaran) to ‘they’re making fools of their audience!’ (shichosha wo baka ni shiteru n jyanai ka). Future re-airings of Extinction in 2014 and 2015 were also criticized due to an increasing fatigue with the films being shown over and over on a seemingly annual basis, with ‘how many times is this?’ (nan kai me) becoming a common complaint among social media users (Figure 4).
Comments on the now defunct Japanese language text-board 2channel responding to news that Asahi TV will be airing Resident Evil 3 once again. Some of the complaints include ‘I’m already tired of asking how many times they’ve shown this’, and ‘Asahi must really like Resident Evil’.
This type of televisual elaboration on series continuity through graphical effects is not unique to the Resident Evil films, nor to the Asahi TV network. Rival network Nihon TV’s airings of the Harry Potter films have sometimes been accompanied by a variety of effects that emphasize the accumulation of content over the course of the series, such as a running counter that keeps track of how many points each of the different houses within the school of magic have acquired. The visual presentation of this information uses many window-within-screen effects to also recall the appearance of social media sites viewed on a computer or smartphone screen. Indeed, this sensibility was extended to the point of the network encouraging audiences to use their smartphones while watching to answer trivia questions and acquire their own points, which could then be redeemed as part of a promotional lottery.
The colorful text and cartoon-like images of telop have been a staple of Japanese television since the 1990s. Aaron Gerow has observed that these graphical effects are used in Japanese variety TV to ‘reward continued viewing’ by making callbacks to previous episodes or routines (Gerow, 2010: 121). They are part of a ‘proliferation of intertextuality’ that directs the attention of the audience not only to antecedent forms of meaning within a single program but also by explaining jokes that refer to outside materials and events (Gerow, 2010: 129). This includes annotation like explanations of repeating gags or inside jokes, but also graphics that elaborate upon the onscreen activity or dialogue. The effects added to Resident Evil: Extinction by Asahi produce a related effect, but also in a way that complements the use of repetitive sequencing and repurposing of content in the film itself. There is, in other words, an affinity between the aesthetics of this televisual presentation and the narrative construction already present in the films. This brings into contact two tendencies within contemporary media culture: the overflowing text and visual information of East Asian television with the intertextual ambitions of Hollywood cinema.
The following section will continue this discussion of repetition and the accumulation of meaning regarding the logic of video games, a concept which has been described as ‘gamic realism’ by Azuma Hiroki. This refers to the repetition of action and resetting of time during the act of play through character death, player continues, and the accumulation of experience that emerges from playing the same content over and over. That concept will be used as a way of theorizing spectatorship within the context of cumulative serial media.
Repetition, gamic realism, and repetition
One analogy we sometimes hear in contemporary film criticism is that movies are becoming more and more like video games. This comparison is frequently used to complain about the abundance of computer-generated effects and repetitive action sequences that threaten to overwhelm the audience or distract from the story. Tom Elsaesser has used this analogy to describe the prevalence of narrative forms that require some kind of unraveling by the viewer in order to understand, such as puzzle-like forms or even branching narrative systems that require the viewer to keep up with multiple nodes of information at once (Elsaesser, 2009: 34).
Working from a different perspective of comparison, Azuma Hiroki has developed a definition of what he calls ‘gamic realism’ in his writing on ‘light novel’ and computer-based branching path literature in Japan. 13 His interest in these genres of literature is based on how their readers understand narrative content in nonlinear modes that encourage rereading to go over all possible pathways, and which are oriented more toward recognizing and interpreting patterns in content than in conventional modes of narrative comprehension (Azuma, 2007). 14 Among the most significant distinctions Azuma makes is the privileging of narrative accumulation over progression as a way of uncovering (and generating) meaning. And while Azuma focuses on meta-narrative qualities within a single text, his ideas can still be useful in understanding the serial accumulation within a media form that emphasizes intertextual resonance such as the Resident Evil film series.
One of the texts that Azuma analyzes in detail is Sakurazaka Hiroshi’s 2004 light novel All You Need is Kill, which was recently adapted as the Hollywood science fiction/action film Edge of Tomorrow (2014), renamed Live, Die, Repeat on home video formats. It tells the story of a young man, Kiriya, who finds that he is resurrected to relive the same day every time he falls in battle during a war against invading alien forces. Through repeated deaths on the battlefield this character gradually accumulates experience that can be used in the next ‘life’ until he is able to triumph over the invading forces.
Azuma’s analysis of All You Need is Kill is centered on patterns of repeated action that occur as Kiriya fights through the same battles over and over. He describes these as ‘time loops’ in which the narrative ‘resets’ every time the main character dies and is brought back to live through the same episodes again and again. Looking at how the death of the protagonist resets the state of the narrative world in a way that is akin to the save state of a video game, Azuma observes that both the character Kiriya (existing within the diegesis) and the reader (existing apart from it) retain knowledge and experience of what has passed between ‘lives’ of the meta-narrative accumulation (Azuma, 2007: 199). As Kiriya learns to be a better fighter through his nearly endless deaths and in mastering the world he lives in, the reader (as player) also learns to how read in a nonlinear manner and across narrative instances, paying attention to echoes that loop throughout the novel. This becomes a focusing of reader attention that is animated by patterns of repetition and cumulative sequencing but also blends the properties of dissimilar forms of media/storytelling: games and literature.
We can perceive a similar mode of serial, cumulative attention in recent Hollywood films such as the Resident Evil series, both in terms of the model of narration they adopt and how audiences consume these films. Fukushima Ryota has made such a connection with the 2009 Star Trek reboot, focusing on its use of a time-travel narrative as a way of resetting of the Trek universe and franchise so that it can begin again in a fresh state for a new generation of fans. He describes this as returning Trek to its ‘initial state’ from which the series can be re-experienced, which he compares to the resetting of a game to its save data with each new character life as described by Azuma. 15 Furthermore, the disruption of the classic Trek universe in order to make room for the new canon (populated by the same characters, but in a different constellation) offers another way for thinking about intertextual accumulation and how contemporary media texts address their audiences based on an understanding of how new entries into a series (or series of series in the case of Trek) fit into what Fukushima describes as ‘mythology’. Fukushima uses this notion of mythology to describe how network culture transforms narrative media and audience engagement with said media.
The Resident Evil series does not have a literal rebooting or resetting within its six cinematic installments. However, as the series progresses it does engage with an adjacent notion of ‘resetting’ through the regular use of flashbacks, re-introduction of older characters (many of whom do not appear in the films sequentially), and restaging of sequences from previous films. ‘Resetting’ is therefore less a matter of returning to an initial state than in engaging with repetition as a form of generating meaning, part of an ‘interplay’ that Shane Denson describes as ‘the basic stuff of seriality’ (Denson, 2011: 532). As with the Trek reboot the Resident Evil series is constantly referring to itself, accumulating more intertextual density and complexity with each addition. The abovementioned sequence shown on Asahi TV’s broadcast of Extinction in which the film returns to a set piece from a previous entry is one example of this sensibility, but the fifth installment, Retribution, features the most pronounced examples of cross-film overlap and repetition.
The film opens with a prolonged sequence (running 7 min and 42 s) that is actually a direct extension from cliff-hanger ending of the previous film, Afterlife, even sharing the same exact shot that concluded the previous entry (Figure 5). Retribution begins with an elaborate action sequence, showing the seaborne research facilities of the villainous Umbrella corporation being raided by a squadron of helicopters in reverse and slow motion. This sequence ends with a return to the final shot from the previous film, which is then interrupted by an expository interlude that catches the viewer up with recent events in the film series’ universe. This segment is made up primarily of footage taken from previous films. Once this synopsis is complete, the film returns once more to the final shot from the previous movie, which is then replayed in regular speed and standard, forward motion.
An image of helicopters descending on the survivors of a ‘biohazard’ attack that is shared between the finale of Afterlife and the rewind opening of Retribution.
Although perhaps not a literal kind of gamic ‘reset’ as what we see in All You Need is Kill or even the Star Trek reboot, this is very much a reset within the sequence itself (which is played out twice in symmetrical presentation) and in regard to the continuity of the two films that are being bridged together through the shot shared between them. The repetition of events – both within the two times we see the sequence and the overlapping content with the previous film – engenders an adjacent sense of narrative accumulation between texts, one that even ‘resets’ itself by using previously seen footage again and again. Repetition is, not unlike the ‘lives’ of All You, the narrative logic through which accumulation is achieved, and the mode through which the audience is directed to view and understand the onscreen events. This quality is reinforced by the interlude expository sequence that not only summarizes the content of previous films in a voice-over narration, but which uses footage from previous films to literally show the viewer what has been happening throughout the series.
Following Fukushima’s analysis, we might describe films such as Star Trek as favoring a kind of ‘deep’ continuity in that sense that Abrams’ movie is constantly (and explicitly) negotiating its relationship to its source material. On the other hand, the accumulation of intertextual continuity in the Resident Evil films might be described as ‘dense’. By this I mean that nothing is given a particular meaningful investment to be carried over (which we might characterize as ‘deep’), but a wealth of new materials is introduced, taken away, brought back, recycled, erased, and forgotten about from one installment to the next. In other words, while Star Trek appears concerned with trying to resolve its complicated debt to earlier films and television shows that feature the same characters and inhabit the same universe, the Resident Evil films devote more energy `toward producing layers of content, visual patterns, and rehearsals of similar sequences. Both reward audiences who know how to pay attention to these meta-textual elements, but in different ways.
Overlapping accumulation
Returning to the topic of media convergence and to the relationship between television and cinema, the opening sequence of Resident Evil: Retribution described above has obvious points of resonance not only with the serializing presentation (due to its invocation of a cliff-hanger ending) but also with the mode of attention that is conjured by the overlapping flow of back-to-back viewing. This sensibility is already present in the films’ construction, but it is something which we can view as further animated by their rescaling to a temporally dense broadcast schedule on television.
This connects back to the concept of ‘gamic realism’ through the agency of repetition. Sequences that repeat, rewind, and are restaged throughout the Resident Evil films fit within a rhetorical frame that emphasizes the accumulation of experience for the viewer. The films reward viewers for being able to recognize sequences or assets that are repeated (such as locations, action set pieces, or shot segments), and the televisual presentation adopted by Asahi TV furthers this mode of viewing by adding telop effects to cue viewer attention and by placing the films in close temporal proximity to one another. Where this differs from other forms of serial media is that the quality of accumulation is not one of linear, forward progression but of overlapping repetitions that gesture toward a polycentric model of media consumption.
What the televisual treatment of the Resident Evil films by Asahi TV can show us about transmedia and transcultural convergence can therefore be characterized by this notion of accumulation. Accumulation can be understood as an intersection of the specific instances of content that are shared between media texts and the temporality of their viewing. It is a matter of attention and is even something that the viewer contributes to by engaging with the process of putting things in order as they work out connections and recognize patterns of repetition. As with Azuma’s notion of gamic realism, there is an interfacing of the agency of the viewer with that of the narrative and aesthetic forms of the media being viewed. And with serialization overlapping with this sense of ‘putting things in order’, we can also observe the role that audience attention contributes to the process of serialization.
This description recalls Jonathan Beller’s writing on attention and cinema. Beller compares montage editing and its sequencing of material to create meaning with the ‘logic of the assembly line’, casting the viewer as a laborer working under the cinematic machine to ‘suture(d) one image to the next’ and construct the film-commodity into a spectacle of entertainment (Beller, 2006 p. 9). The agency of attention is needed to complete the production of cinematic meaning, with the viewer performing a type of work through their visual consumption of the images and ideas on the screen before them. Aaron Gerow has elaborated on this point in regard to the telop of Japanese television, observing how the animated text and captions provides an architecture for audiences to ‘participate’ in the routines of humor found in variety TV as they recognize patterns of repetition and align themselves with being ‘in on the joke’ (Gerow, 2010: 143).
The cumulative meaning of the Resident Evil films (as well as their broadcast on Japanese television) can be placed along a similar trajectory in that audience attention performs an adjacent notion of visual labor in putting together meaning that is repeated between images and texts. There is a sequencing of content in the films (via their serial nature) that is amplified further by the way they are screened on TV. These provide frames for audience attention to ‘suture’ cumulative meaning.
There is, however, also a distinction of scale to be observed. This sense of scale is a matter of both the intertextual dimensions of serial media forms, but also how those images fit within the convergence of different types of screens and across global media. In other words, the ‘work’ of attention for films such as the Resident Evil series is not just of constructing meaning within the films themselves (or even within cinema), but also through the dual axis of cinema’s relationship to television and Hollywood’s relationship to its global markets (Japan in this case).
For films such as the Resident Evil series, accumulation is therefore not just a matter of serial storytelling and franchise expansion. It is also part of the logic by which media move across screens to reach different audiences, and even how audience attention itself follows said media to construct meaning and connection within a logic of serial consumption. This speaks to the ‘gamic’ aspects of the films and their transmedia exhibition, but also to larger issues concerning media capitalism and the confluence of attention with production.
One of the central nodes of that logic of convergence is television. Television translates and adapts Hollywood cinema to a different culture of viewing (with its own patterns of attention and temporality) but also reframes the films within the media ecology of Japan and its networks of promotion and prestige. Those aspects rely on different notions of accumulation, but in ways that complement one another and allow for a continued expansion of their meaning as images, narratives, and commodities of popular media.
