The reception of Dr Horrible - and the material conditions of reception

Anouk Lang's paper in the current issue of Narrative investigates the initial reception of Joss Whedon's low-budget musical, Dr Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. Lang does this by examining a staggeringly large corpus of online responses: something approaching a quarter of a million words of text, harvested from discussion threads referring to the work. Because Dr Horrible was released in three parts, Lang was able to observe the formation and frustration of viewers' anticipations in real time. She finds that though many viewers were initially disappointed by the musical's unhappy ending, a consensus view later overcame this disappointment by re-assigning the musical as a whole to a different genre: the origins story (in Thomas J Roberts's terms, not strictly a genre but a 'formula'). All this makes Lang's paper a very worthwhile contribution to narratology and to genre theory, and (of course) to reception studies. As Lang writes, the material she analyses

offers examples of individuals making sense of stories and allows us to see how certain sense-making tools are deployed: how readers use genres to orient themselves to what a text can be expected to deliver; how character identification works to influence the experience of a text; the kinds of hermeneutic moves that occur within an interpretive community; and the difference in how readers understand a text part-way through its telling compared to its end, to name just a few. Among the most striking insights in the data was the centrality of genre as a tool in the sense-making arsenal of many of the Dr. Horrible viewers.

Lang 2010, p. 377

Fascinating though this is, it is not what I find most interesting about the paper. To me, it seems that Lang's major contribution is rather the opportunity she gives us to think carefully about importance of the particular material conditions of any text's production, distribution, and reception. On one level, she does this simply by carrying out her analysis on a economically unusual work. Dr Horrible was financed by Whedon himself and distributed free over the internet, with the cast and crew effectively being paid in IOUs. The reason for this was the Writers' Strike of 2007-2008, which was itself partly motivated by a dispute over the remuneration owed to writers for online distribution of content. In this context, Dr Horrible can be seen as an assertion of the writer's creative independence from the studio system - or perhaps one should say, of the star writer's entrepreneurial independence from the studio system that produced him - in the brave new world of digital distribution. Numerous revenue-generating Dr Horrible products have since been released on the back of the free online version's success, thus demonstrating that this independence was no fantasy. And in this respect, one might want to see Whedon as having very briefly taken on the mantle of a 21st century Alexander Pope.

When read in this context, Lang's analysis of Dr Horrible's reception is even more illuminating. Web 2.0 is not a neutral medium: it does not simply reveal the reception of the work. That reception was, Lang shows, communal, with its communality being facilitated by Web 2.0 technology. Moreover, though Dr Horrible was released internationally and for free, technological (which is to say, economic) and educational (which in many cases is also to say, economic) factors appear to have played a key role in mediating its reception. Consider the following:

A comparatively high level of adherence to the conventions of written English such as grammar and spelling, in addition to displays of linguistic capital - such as the ability to produce witty, arch, or linguistically deft comments (see Bury [2008, p.] 292) suggest that many of the contributors had at least some level of tertiary education. Many made reference to white-collar jobs which gave them access to a computer; a number of others referred to university courses. In the course of discussions about accessing the text online, many identified their location, with the majority of participants located in the US and others in other industrialized nations such as Canada, the UK, the nations of Europe, and Australia.

Lang 2010, p. 379, emphasis added

Consider these observations on the geographical, educational, and social situation of Lang's research subjects in the light of her argument that the interpretive and appreciative strategies they applied to Dr Horrible were educationally instilled. Might schooling at the higher levels of a western educational system be as important to enjoying Whedon's 'freely-available' text as a broadband internet connection is to accessing it (and its fan-created paratexts)?