Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts Book

Gray's book is on pop culture, specifically, the pop culture that relates to television shows and film. But he's not looking at the films and shows themselves; rather, he's looking at their paratexts, the texts that circle around these main texts, and alter their meanings in significant ways. He looks at how a movie trailer declares the genre of a movie; how a television show's opening credits set the tone for the show. A paratext can be more distant as well--a fan fiction is an unendorsed example of a paratext, one that highlights elements of a show or film that are very important to a certain fan community, but perhaps less so to the official interpretation of text. Some of the more indepth studies really stand out, such as the discussion on how the DVD extras of the Lord of the Rings reinforced the official stance on the "fellowship"-like process that created the films. And Gray's argument that the Star Wars action figures released between the films of the original series were in large part responsible for marking Star Wars a masculine, boy-oriented universe is similarly interesting. Gray's expansion of the term paratext leaves a lot of room for expansion in pop cultures studies at large, especially since he only considers the paratexts of film and television. The circulation of a Facebook meme or the fan-remixes of a newly released single also constitute paratexts that reframe the original. And videogames are almost pure paratext, existing in a fog of previews and prelease hype that starts long before the actual game is released.

Because his topic is so potentially broad, Gray's discussion remains somewhat broad as well. It's a strength of the book--again, his goal is to open up more paratext studies in pop culture studies--but also a weakness, as it tends to lack focus beyond that general goal. All in all, it's a very useful theoretical first step, supported by some quality individual studies.