Pastiche as the core of transmedia storytelling on the example of Joel Schumacher’s Batman films

This paper focuses on visual aesthetics as a narrative tool that creates a certain transmedia connection between different works and eras, using Joel Schumacher’s Batman Forever (1995) and Batman and Robin (1997) as examples. Batman is a modern myth that has evolved over 80 years, during which time a great deal of content has been released through different media (including film adaptations), across a variety of genres and styles. Schumacher’s films, on the one hand, are ideological and narrative continuations of Tim Burton’s films (“Batman”, 1989; “Batman Returns”, 1992) and, on the other hand, visually refer to the aesthetics of the so-called “camp” - a transformed vulgar grotesque oriented to the tastes of the mass audience, and, accordingly, to the cult series of 1966 (“Batman”, 1966), made in a similar style. The problem of the study is that superhero works are not consistent with each other on a narrative level (which is the core of transmedia storytelling according to Henry Jenkins), thus not allowing for a complete understanding of the superhero myth. The aim of this paper is to determine how the cultural and visual-aesthetic potential of Schumacher’s films through pastiche not only perfects the myth of Batman in cinema, but also creates a connection with other works through its visual narrative, representing the most canonical and perfect interpretation of this myth. Through the pastiche, as a stylistic and visual imitation of several previous works and a link to the contemporary era, Schumacher showed the involvement of his films not only with Batman as a myth, but also with the corpus of other texts about the superhero, thus creating a transmedia connection between Batman films. Thus, pastiche, as a combination of certain elements of different works on a visual level, can be the core of transmedia storytelling, something around which the connection between works and different eras is made. The author declares no conflicts of interests.

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