This one’s my entire Masters course, the very best academic structure I’ve experienced: MSc Intermediality at the University of Edinburgh, being one among sixty or so to embark on the maiden voyage of Intermediality in any university.
What is it? Intermediality is about the spaces in between medial formats: the gaps, the overlaps, the crossovers, the allusions. Adaptation is a core concept, whether hopping from print to film or back again (novelisation). I focussed mostly on the interaction of print media and film, so that’s where the bulk of my expertise lies.
A relatable intro to the field is to think of the cultural register of entertainment media, so that’s what we’ll illuminate in this one. Medial registration is the scale of where each artistic or expressive medium ranks in public perception: of quality, of worthiness, of authenticity. Consider what it means to move from comics to movies. How a videogame can gain credibility with a literary backing (here’s looking at you, The Witcher, Pillars of the Earth, Call of Cthulhu, Beyond Good & Evil, and to an extent, Disco Elysium). By the same motion, reversed, this is why you’ll rarely see Matthew Stover’s incredible novelisation of Revenge of the Sith discussed in the same forum as the perfectly capable film. Why even only the die-hard Assassin’s Creed players will have touched Oliver Bowden’s literary interpretation. As far as the public is concerned, talking in broad strokes, the property has moved down the scale, down the register: it’s lost worthiness, lost canonical truth, and become near-enough merchandise.
Unless, of course, it’s non-fiction: art books validate the worthiness of their films or videogames. You might not find Stover’s Star Wars books in the same shop as the Art of… series, and those are some hefty, glossy, prestigious artefacts. Even in-world non-fiction places higher than direct novelisation: you won’t often find Hyrule Historia alongside the twenty-odd manga adaptations of almost every game in the Legend of Zelda series, even though those have been the passion project of two mangaka for literal decades. Again, I’m talking broad-strokes, people: don’t send me photos of bookshelves (because honestly, they’ll just look like my bookshelves…).
But intermediality is gaining ground in public awareness, even if the term hasn’t spread far enough. We’re in a rare space now where popular films are spawning videogame tie-ins that are actually being taken seriously, including the recent Indiana Jones and the Great Circle (sequel to The Sufficient Square and The Naff Triangle), and the upcoming 007: First Light, for which the very casting of its motion-capture lead has sparked legions of articles discussing the heritage of a franchise that draws a line back through film to…you guessed it…literature!
The new head of DC Studios, James Gunn, has announced that a series of videogames will be canon to his DC Universe: a project no longer strictly cinematic like the MCU, and therefore avoiding the awkward reception of games like Square Enix’s The Avengers, unfairly lambasted for doing its best to lean against the MCU without being able to canonically depict the same characters and designs. Am I reaching a bit there? No, because those same fans have adored the LEGO Avengers games, in which the freedom of that toyetic form, transposed into a videogame medium, allows for just enough reframing and remove from the films in style and age and tone to do the same half-referencing, half-allusion, half-copy. Same for Midnight Suns, and now for Marvel Rivals. So, what was the real crime of Enix’s version? The graphics went photorealistic, and it looked a bit too much like the films. Uncanny valley meets intermedial registration, and you’ve got angry fans and no money coming in.
Next time, I might just dump my entire dissertation, The Intermedial Myth of the Batman. Form an orderly queue, folks!