Sliding Signifiers and Transmedia Texts: Marsha Kinder’s Playing with Power

Lisa M. Heilbronn

Department of Sociology
St. Lawrence University
<lhei@slumus>

 

Kinder, Marsha. Playing with Power in Movies, Television and Video Games; From Muppet Babies to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Berkeley: U of California P, 1991.

 

What are we talking about when we talk about media “effects”? This may be one of the most pressing questions to face those who want to approach the media from an interdisciplinary (and in the case of communications studies one might also say intradisciplinary) perspective. Are we addressing behavior? ideology? psychology? Playing With Power is an ambitious attempt to discuss children’s media use in the broadest possible theoretical, social and economic contexts. Marsha Kinder attempts to connect the behavior effects of these media (absorption in the video game or television program, consumption patterns, eye-hand coordination, etc.) with their ideological effects (consumerism and patriarchy chief among them) by linking both to the psychological and cognitive effects of video on developing children. She does this using an approach which combines consideration of entertainment industry policy and decision-making with the decoding of cultural texts. This is laudable, particularly when the analysis also attempts to take into account consumer interaction with the text as both commodity and symbol system.

 

The book has five chapters and a substantial appendix detailing two field study/interview situations with children. The subject matter covered in the chapters spirals out from a core of psychoanalytic, cognitive, and cultural theory through increasingly complex media situations to break off with a consideration of global political economics. Its fundamental goal is the exploration of “how television and its narrative conventions affect the construction of the subject” (3). The structure is designed to represent the “strategy of cognitive restructuring” it studies.

 

This is, to a degree, a personal quest. Kinder uses her son Victor’s development of narrative and involvement with interactive video as the keystone of her study, and includes his friends among her interview subjects in the appendixes. Her son and other “postmodern” children value the interactivity of Saturday morning television and video games, and the commodities associated with them and are bored by the unified subject represented by conventional film. This interests and concerns Kinder. Much of her discussion is implicitly organized around the contrast between “the unified subject, associated with modernism and cinema; and the decentered consumerist subject, associated with postmodernism and television” (40). She weighs each subject in terms of its position relative to this dichotomy. Transmedia intertextuality, for example, “valorizes superprotean flexibility as a substitute for the imaginary uniqueness of the unified subject” (120).

 

Kinder suggests that “readers who are less interested in theory” skip over the theoretical section of the first chapter. This section is only a scant twenty-three pages as it is. This may represent a bid for a popular audience more interested in reading about the toys which fascinate their children and the industry which produces them than in the differences between Kristeva and Piaget. However, this leaves the reader with a slim foundation for much of the later analysis. For example, the theoretical section states that “intertextual relations across different narrative media” (2) are the primary focus of the book, but the reader is given only one paragraph with quotations from Bakhtin and Robert Stam on intertextuality. There is even less information provided on the meaning of signs, signifiers, and what Kinder calls “sliding signifiers.” There seems to be an implicit assumption that the reader is already familiar with such concepts, and with the work of Beverle Houston and Susan Willis which informs the discussion.

 

More space is devoted to stitching together Piaget’s theory of genetic epistemology, (6-9) and psychoanalytic theory (9-15). However, Kinder leaves certain key questions unresolved. After pointing out that cognitive theory “does not perceive gender differentiation as the linchpin to subject formation within the patriarchal symbolic order,” and that she believes this “`naturalizes’ patriarchal assumptions” (9), Kinder states that she will “position this cognitive approach within a larger framework of post- structuralist feminism” (10). How will she do this? By appropriating “from both models . . . ideas particularly useful for theorizing this dual form of gendered spectator/player positioning at this moment in history” (10). This begs the question: Kinder makes a flurry of allusions to the work of David Bordwell, Edward Branigan, Louis Althusser, and Jacques Lacan, but there is no sustained argument to demonstrate that her two theoretical models can be reconciled.

 

Without a strong theoretical foundation, Kinder’s claim in Chapter Two–that Saturday morning television creates a gendered, consumerist subjectivity–becomes problematic. Her analysis of the intertextual content of shows such as “Garfield” and “Muppet Babies,” and the programming strategies behind them is very enjoyable. But does a commercial for a building set specifically for girls really imply “that all other similar toys are intended exclusively for boys,” so that “if the young female viewer already owns a set of building blocks, then, it instantly becomes inappropriate and therefore obsolete” (50-51)?

 

Kinder also develops the concept of “animal masquerade” in which we

 

alleviate anxiety and gain an illusory sense of empowerment by bestowing our conception of human individuality onto animals . . . by letting them substitute for missing members of the dysfunctional family

 

and which she claims “help[s] us see beyond the waning nuclear family and the growing influence of the single mother by ‘naturalizing’ alternative models for human bonding” (73-4). The discussion as a whole is often quite compelling, but disturbingly ahistorical. What of Aesop, Winnie the Pooh, Uncle Remus, Coyote Trickster and other names associated with animal tales throughout history? How much can we hang on consumer society and postmodernism? The argument would be stronger if it differentiated between earlier types of animal masquerade and the particular type of commodified animal figure she is discussing.

 

The strongest chapters are Three, on the Nintendo Entertainment System, and Four, which focusses on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and their transmedia success. Kinder gives a lucid and gripping account of the development of the video game and particularly of Nintendo’s success in implementing “`razor marketing theory’ . . . a strategy of focusing on the development and sale of software (whether a game cartridge, a Barbie outfit, or a razor blade) that is compatible only with the company’s unique hardware” (91). The cognitive perspective works well here. Kinder’s discussion of Vygotsky’s “zone of proximal development,” and her argument that video game-playing can cause cognitive acceleration, are convincing (111-119). The feminist psychoanalytic theory in the section on “Oedipalization of Home Video Games” is less convinving. Kinder jumps from the highly qualified assumption that the “marketing of video games seems to be primarily to those with, potentially, the most intense fear of castration” (102), to a unqualified assertion that video games are “oedipalized.” By this she seems to mean that their violent content appeals more to boys than girls because (although she offers no evidence) it “can help boys deal with their rebellious anger against patriarchal authority” (104). But the “oedipalization” becomes causal–it “accounts for certain choices within its system of intertextuality” (104). Although Kinder states her belief that “within our postmodernist culture and at various developmental stages of this ongoing generational struggle between parents and child, other media situated in the home such as television and video games substitute for the parents” (22) the book needs far more evidence before it can support this claim.

 

Kinder then turns to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles supersystem, defining a supersystem as a network which

 

must cut across several modes of image production; must appeal to diverse generations, classes, and ethnic subcultures, who in turn are targeted with diverse strategies; must foster `collectability' through a proliferation of related products; and must undergo a sudden increase in commodification, the success of which reflexively comes a `media event' that dramatically accelerates the growth curve of the system's commercial success. (123)

 

She makes excellent use of journalistic sources, and makes the phenomena comprehensible. The gender analysis in this section–discussing male and female masquerade and the ways in which TMNT as “the ultimate sliding signifiers” (135) reveal masculinity to be culturally constructed–seems well supported.

 

The final chapter, which discusses the growing “network of commercial intertextuality” (172) formed by CNN global news coverage, Japanese acquisition of American “software,” and HDTV was interesting. It is subtitled an afterword, and as such seems somewhat tentative and tangential to her argument. It lacks discussion of the claims that international marketing leads to a declining emphasis on dialogue and a focus on the visual and violent as the commodities reach a transnational audience with little in the way of a shared culture.

 

Kinder includes two appendixes which cover small “empirical studies” she conducted in July of 1990. Although she states explicitly that the studies (one based on eleven interviews with children from five to nine, the other on twelve interviews with children from six to fourteen) “provide neither a solid basis for the ideas expressed in this book nor an adequate test of them” (173), she notes that they are included because they “raise new issues (such as the effect of ethnic, racial, class and gender differences on children’s entrances into supersystems like the Teenage Mutuant Ninja Turtle network)” (173). In fact, there is nothing in the interviews themselves which raises issues of ethnicity, race or class. These dimensions are raised by Kinder earlier in the book when she introduces the concern that if video games do contribute to an acceleration of certain stages of cognitive development, the middle class who are better able to afford Nintendo systems and other computer systems in the home, will be differently advantaged. I would say that, as presented, the studies supply no information on this point. (For example, there is no information on how the class status of her second group of subjects, approached at a video game arcade, was collected.) Gender differences are more apparent from the data. Were I the researcher, I believe I would have opted to omit the material.

 

This book is extremely ambitious. It is to be commended for its open-minded approach to what some observers find the greatest item of concern regarding interactive video–the child’s absorption in the system and the commodity culture which surrounds it, and for its attention to the “latent” effects which are less commented on–reinforcement of patriarchal gender roles and global economic systems. It contains some excellent references, provocative theory, and excellent program and film analysis. It raises interesting questions, and should stimulate the reader to review and challenge the assumptions s/he holds about children and media.