The descriptor ‘vast’ has unavoidable spatial connotations, and thus it is perhaps unsurprising that such narratives invite themselves to be encountered as sprawling networks, and to be read through ideas of navigation and travel. However, it might also imply a certain temporal enormity – the perpetual unfolding of a massive serial narrative, and the enduring travels of the audience who follow it over a long period of time.114 In my earlier discussion of Sheets-Johnstone’s categories of movement, I noted that while two described spatial qualities, two described the temporality of movement. Any kinaesthetic reading must necessarily be attuned to the temporality of movement, as well as its spatial qualities and dimensions.
We can see the tight relationship between temporal and spatial movement in a metaphor that Lost showrunner Damon Lindelof repeatedly returns to when describing his experience of constructing his vast narrative: tap dancing. For Lindelof, tap dancing is a somewhat artificial form of movement, something one is forced to do when forward progression is impossible – namely, when network pressure forces a series to remain on the air beyond the natural scope of the story. In an interview for the podcast On Point, Lindelof concedes that while ‘tap dancing is very interesting to watch for a certain period of time’, you do not want to ‘do it forever’.115 Here, Lindelof implies that the most desirable form of movement is smooth and goal-oriented, suggesting that the serial narration of the vast narrative should move cleanly from one horizon to another. This is a particular evaluative claim, one I will return to unpack in more detail towards the end of this
114 My thoughts on seriality as an ‘unfolding’ narrative are indebted to John Tulloch and Manuel Alvarado’s work on the quintessential British example of a vast narrative, Doctor Who, which they describe as an ‘unfolding text’. See Tulloch and Alvarado, Doctor Who: The Unfolding Text (London: Macmillan, 1983).
chapter. Yet overall, Lindelof’s point raises some issues and ideas crucial to my argument. I find it particularly interesting that he chooses to use an embodied metaphor to describe the process of authoring (and consuming) vast narrative worlds. We can read this as yet another testament to the significance of embodied reading strategies in both the creation and the consumption of vast narrative television. Yet he also links the metaphor
specifically to serial narration, which raises the question as to whether kinaesthetic reading might be particularly relevant, or particularly emphatic, for the massive seriality of the vast narrative. I now turn to consider how the unfolding qualities of movement might be employed by television’s unfolding texts, and to what extent a kinaesthetic reading strategy might be used to negotiate the experiences and affects of consuming serial fiction.
As a narrative form, a serial is a continuous story released in smaller units over a period of time. Jennifer Hayward defines it as an ‘ongoing narrative released in successive parts’,116 and Linda Hughes and Michael Lund as a story unfolding ‘over an extended time with enforced interruptions’.117 Although elements of seriality have been a part of art and narrative for as long as these forms have existed, the serial emerged as a recognisable cultural form with the rise of mass consumption and mass audiences in the nineteenth century. Roger Hagedorn argues that because the serial encourages brand loyalty and sustained consumption patterns, the form always emerges at moments when a medium becomes a mass medium.118 If, as Hagedorn suggests, serial texts always ‘serve to promote the very medium in which they appear’,119 then they may have something to tell us about the preferred reading strategies associated with particular media forms.
When television was introduced in the mid-20th century, the serial form had already been a mainstay of 19th century novels, newspaper strip serials in the 1930s and
116 Jennifer Hayward, Consuming Pleasures: Active Audiences and Serial Fictions from Dickens to Soap Opera (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1997), p. 3.
117 Linda K. Hughes and Michael Lund, The Victorian Serial (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991), p. 2.
118 Roger Hagedorn, ‘Doubtless to Be Continued: A Brief History of Serial Narrative’, in To Be Continued: Soap Operas Around the World, ed. by Roger C. Allen (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 27-48 (p. 29).
1940s, the chapter plays of pre-1950s cinema, and radio programming. The first years of television were largely dominated by single plays, but the serial became more established as the medium grew in popularity. During the 1960s and 1970s, US television was
dominated by episodic series in prime time, and continuous serials during daytime scheduling. The serial form reached prime time in the 1980s as what Horace Newcomb refers to as the ‘cumulative narrative’, which employs seriality for the purposes of character development while still largely retaining an episodic narrative structure.120 As Newcomb argues, these serial elements were largely intended to maximise the ratings and mass appeal of particular dramas, rewarding regular viewers without sacrificing new ones. With the rise of cable television, which multiplied textual output and fragmented audiences, serial form became more pervasive across the medium as a whole. Like Newcomb, Robin Nelson identifies a semi-serial structure in dramas in the late twentieth century: the ‘flexi-narrative’, in which episodic television incorporated aspects of serial narration, such as multiple storylines.121 This trend – the increasing merger between series and serial forms – continued as channels sought to establish loyal consuming audiences in an age of televisual plenty. Today, ‘quality television’ is largely synonymous with seriality; namely, a specific form of seriality that relies on what Jason Mittell terms a ‘shifting balance’ between episodic and serial narrative.122 This brief history demonstrates that, as Hagedorn attests, seriality tends to emerge within television at particular
moments of redefinition.
Unsurprisingly, many scholars draw a link between the features of seriality and those of television itself. The format’s particular rhythms of episodicity and seriality – the relationship between part and whole – are key to the foundational theories of the
120 Newcomb coined the term in relation to Magnum PI (CBS, 1980-1988), but it could also be
applied to programmes such as Dallas (CBS, 1978-1991). See Horace Newcomb, ‘Narrative and Genre’, in The SAGE Handbook of Media Studies, ed. by John Downing (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2004), pp. 413-28 (p. 422).
121 Robin Nelson, TV Drama in Transition: Forms, Values and Cultural Change (Houndsmills,
Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), p. 30.
medium, from Raymond Williams’ flow to John Ellis’s segmentation.123 John Caughie believes that the dominance of serial narration in television arises from its ability to exploit the ‘interruptibility’ of the medium itself, in which the enforced interruptions of the narrative align with the enforced interruptions of advertising and domestic
demands.124 Lucy Mazdon describes seriality as ‘highly televisual’, uniting the aims of the industry (promoting loyalty), textual structure (flow and segmentation) and audience expectations (reading in instalments) in a way that ‘mirrors the television experience in general’.125 If the experience of seriality and the experience of television seem to occupy much of the same territory, such as routine consumption and segmentation, then seriality might also intersect with the frames through which we are invited to make sense of those experiences – namely, television’s kinaesthetic reading strategies.
I believe that there is something about seriality that makes it particularly well suited for television’s kinaesthetic reading strategies. Seriality possesses a rhythm that reverberates with an embodied experience of movement – a rhythm of unfolding
progression combined with interruption and segmentation. The embodied experience of movement is often conceptualised as collections of smaller segments (such as steps, gestures, or actions), yet still remains a continuous experience. For even without actively progressing forward through space, movement is always a dynamic, unfolding action. It gestures beyond itself, pointing towards a particular direction or aim, and creating a projective sense of both space and time. Of course, this is not to argue that movement is always explicitly goal-oriented; movements can exist along the whole continuum of direction and aim, sometimes circular, often untargeted, and at times unrealised entirely. Yet regardless of the shape and direction movement takes, it is always an unfolding process. Erin Manning refers to this quality as ‘pre-acceleration’ – a force of potential that
123 See Williams, Television, and John Ellis, Visible Fictions: Cinema, Television, Video (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982).
124 John Caughie, Edge of Darkness (London: BFI, 2007), p. 51.
can ‘be felt before it actualises’.126 By this, she means that movement always opens out to subsequent gestures and possible trajectories, always hints at its future extensions in the present moment. In this sense, if kinaesthesia involves sensations of continuity,
anticipation and expectation – dynamics that are also fundamental to seriality – then serial narration might naturally lend itself towards a preferred kinaesthetic reading strategy.
The kinaesthetic logics of the cliffhanger
The features of seriality are epitomised in the form’s archetypal endings: the cliffhanger, or the heightened moment of suspense that ends a serial segment. The cliffhanger is a well-established narrative device and is a staple of all manifestations of serial narration, regardless of medium or genre. It is motivated by clear economic imperatives, reinforcing brand loyalty and ensuring that the audience will return to consume the subsequent instalment. In television, the cliffhanger exists across different scales: they are most commonly found at the end of an episode, but attenuated versions can end individual scenes or acts within an episode, and season finales often use very intense ones, designed to maintain interest and engagement over the long hiatus period. The cliffhanger mentality exploits two of the key features of seriality: its segmented, interrupted structure, and its entrenched refusal of closure. Cliffhangers thus perfectly embody the particular rhythms of seriality, in which ongoing movement is marked by interruption.
Yet the cliffhanger is also an embodied metaphor, evoking a precarious mode of suspension. While this does relate to the history of the narrative device (Thomas Hardy’s serialised novel A Pair of Blue Eyes ended one instalment with its protagonist hanging from a cliff face127), its persistence as a metaphor suggests that it may have a fundamental connection to the serial experience. To once more return to my contention that the metaphors we use tell us much about our embodied experience, I believe that the
cliffhanger attests to the importance of kinaesthesia in the experience of serial television. The embodied, kinaesthetic experience embedded within the metaphor – a state of bodily suspension – may tell us something about how it feels to experience a televisual
cliffhanger. However, few accounts of seriality’s cliffhanger logic address its embodied elements, preferring to focus on narrative, story, or cognitive accounts of attention or concentration. For Sarah Kozloff, serial television organises its narrative structure according to the segmentation of the schedule,128 and for John Caughie, seriality ritually disrupts the attention of the audience.129 While neither of these arguments is necessarily flawed – the cliffhanger does suspend the narrative, and it does forcefully redirect the focus of the audience – Kozloff and Caughie’s work is clearly based in the belief that television is inextricable from its live broadcast context. Yet today, television is
increasingly encountered through and created for DVD formats or streaming services, a viewing structure that lacks the ritual interruptions of broadcast television. In order to more thoughtfully consider contemporary seriality, then, I want to redefine television’s serial interruptions as those of interrupted movement, particularly embodied movement, as read and experienced through a kinaesthetic reading strategy.
Many television cliffhangers explicitly use instances of halted action, for the body in motion has a particular power to gesture beyond itself. Jeremy Butler frames action as a sort of pivot point in the soap opera cliffhanger, in which characters are ‘interrupted just as they are about to commit murder, discover their true paternity, or consummate a romance’.130 Here, Butler places thwarted action as the key to the cliffhanger mentality of serial fiction, thus hinting at its kinaesthetic power. Game of Thrones exploits the
kinaesthetic impact of thwarted action in its cliffhangers. ‘Walk of Punishment’ (3:3), ends with Jaime Lannister (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) attempting to use his family’s wealth to secure his release from his captor Locke (Noah Taylor), a mercenary hired by Roose
128 Sarah Kozloff, ‘Narrative Theory and Television’, in Channels of Discourse, Reassembled, ed. by Robert C. Allen (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), pp. 67-100 (p. 90). 129 Caughie, Television Drama, p. 205.
Bolton (Michael McElhatton). Locke, offended by the bribery, severs Jaime’s right hand. The sudden, abrupt burst of violence is all the more shocking for coming at the end of a relatively slow-paced scene. The conversation between the two men occurs mostly in tight close-ups with relatively long durations, evoking a growing sense of tension. Tension is, to return to Sheets-Johnstone’s categories of movement, a function of the projectional quality of movement – the way in which movement unfolds, or how its ‘tensional quality is kinetically manifest’.131 The sudden ending of the scene transforms the scene’s sustained projectional rhythms into an abrupt cut, one that severs both the extensions of the text and of Jamie’s body (although one more permanently than the other).
Much of the shock of this scene does emerge from the visceral impact of its body horror. Yet its affective power cannot be separated from its position at the very end of the episode, and as such, is deeply intertwined with the kinaesthetic affect of the cliffhanger. Dee Reynolds defines kinaesthetic affect as a product of movement’s projectional qualities, involving the ‘impulse towards or anticipation of movement rather than actual movement’. Andre Lepecki more broadly sketches the kinaesthetic affect of movement, suggesting that Western thought privileges smooth, reproductive movements precisely due to their pleasant affects, as opposed to the negative feelings of ‘kinaesthetic
stuttering’.132 I would argue that the painful suspense of the cliffhanger emerges from such a kinaesthetic stuttering. In his review of the episode for The A.V. Club, David Sims
concisely, if colloquially, reflects this:
‘…that was truly shocking in that holy shit Game Of Thrones way where it smash-cuts to black and credits and you vainly scream for more, more, more.’133 Sims subtly draws a parallel between the ‘smash-cuts’ of the editing and of Locke’s sword, and between Jamie’s anguished scream and the scream of the audience. I am always
131 Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, ‘From Movement to Dance’, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 11 (2012), 39-57 (p. 46).
132 André Lepecki, Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement (New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 1.
133 David Sims, ‘Game Of Thrones (newbies): “Walk Of Punishment” (for newbies)’, The A.V. Club, 14 April 2013 <http://www.avclub.com/tvclub/game-of-thrones-newbies-walk-of-punishment-for-
struck by how my reaction to this moment is heightened by its position at the end of the episode, how my horror and pain responds to the sharp slice through both flesh and diegesis. By pairing the halted flow of the narrative with the freezing of bodies in motion, the cliffhanger evokes a strong sense of kinaesthetic affect, emphasising the particular gestural power of the cut of the cliffhanger. The cliffhanger metaphor thus begins to make perfect sense, for it emerges from our affective engagement with the rhythms of seriality.
As well as halting the movement of an episode or scene, the cliffhanger also simultaneously opens itself out to the future by deferring the promise of answers or resolution to the next instalment. Deferred resolution is key to serial narration, yet tends to be singled out in criticisms of the form. To return to Lindelof’s ‘tap-dancing’, seriality’s endless middle is usually seen as something to be avoided. A similar claim can be traced within the academic literature: Hagedorn dismisses narrative deferral as a marker of the capitalist drive to maintain consumption,134 and Tania Modleski suggests that the endless ‘search for tomorrow’ in soap operas forecloses a proper engagement with the ‘real social needs’ of the women who consume them.135 However, both of these arguments reiterate particular evaluative norms, again presuming that progressive, goal-oriented movement towards a defined end-point is the best form for both art and for politics. In contrast, Patricia Mellencamp more usefully recognises that such unpleasant feelings are key to our engagement with television, suggesting that ‘anxiety is television’s affect’.136
Consequently, just as I attempted to reclaim the painful tedium of Arya’s training earlier in this chapter, I believe we can position the anxieties associated with consuming serial narratives as a key part of these programmes’ reading strategies. The painful shocks and anxious stutterings of the cliffhanger are fundamental to its kinaesthetic reading
strategies.
134 Hagedorn, ‘Doubtlesss To Be Continued’, p. 28.
135 Tania Modleski, ‘The Search for Tomorrow in Today’s Soap Operas: Notes on a Feminine Narrative Form’, Film Quarterly, 33 (1979), 12-21 (p. 20).
The final episode of Lost’s first season, ‘Exodus Part Three’ (1:25), ends with Jack and Locke gazing down into the open hatch, having finally destroyed the door with dynamite. As Locke and Jack peer into the hatch, the camera slowly tracks away from their faces and down into the depths of the hatch, a movement that parallels the retreat of the audience from the text. This cliffhanger was powerful enough to sustain debate across the summer hiatus, with fans furiously speculating on what was in the hatch.137 Yet when season two returned, the show effectively took three episodes to properly resolve this cliffhanger. ‘Man of Science, Man of Faith’ (2:1) depicts the hatch descent from Jack’s point of view, ending with Jack encountering Desmond (Henry Ian Cusik) with a gun to Locke’s head. ‘Adrift’ (2:2) shows the same events from the perspective of Kate
(Evangeline Lilly) and Locke, both filling in some of the gaps and repeating some of the same sequences from the previous episode, before ending at the same point in time. ‘Orientation’ (2:3) opens with a third repetition of the scene between Jack and Desmond in the hatch, prolonging the resolution of the cliffhanger even further. This drawn-out resolution evokes a sense of frustration, tedium, and anxiety, and stretches the cliffhanger to its absolute breaking point.
The sense of frustrated movement is most evident in the middle episode of this