The Ontology and Literary Status of the Screenplay:The Case of »Scriptfic«

Abstract

Are screenplays - or at least some screenplays - works of literature? Until relatively recently, very few theorists had addressed this question. Thanks to recent work by scholars such as Ian W. Macdonald, Steven Maras, and Steven Price, theorizing the nature of the screenplay is back on the agenda after years of neglect (albeit with a few important exceptions) by film studies and literary studies (Macdonald 2004; Maras 2009; Price 2010). What has emerged from this work, however, is a general acceptance that the screenplay is ontologically peculiar and, as a result, a divergence of opinion about whether or not it is the kind of thing that can be literature.Specifically, recent discussion about the nature of the screenplay has tended to emphasize its putative lack of ontological autonomy from the film, its supposed inherent incompleteness, or both (Carroll 2008, 68-69; Maras 2009, 48; Price 2010, 38-42). Moreover, these sorts of claims about the screenplay's ontology - its essential nature - are often hitched to broader arguments. According to one such argument, a screenplay's supposed ontological tie to the production of a film is said to vitiate the possibility of it being a work of literature in its own right (Carroll 2008, 68-69; Maras 2009, 48). According to another, the screenplay's tenuous literary status is putatively explained by the idea that it is perpetually unfinished, akin to a Barthesian >> writerly text > Yes > Yes > No > scriptfic > scriptfic > scriptfic > Scriptfics > series > virtual series > airs << in the form of uploaded texts that usually either present an entirely original narrative (original virtual series), continue the storyline of an actual television series that has ended (virtual continuations), or use certain elements of an actual series as jumping-off points to tell an original story (virtual spin-offs).My central argument is that if the goal of theorizing the screenplay is to actually explain the evidence supplied by our practices, then theories that involve ontological claims about the screenplay's putative lack of ontological autonomy from the film and/or inherent incompleteness must be abandoned. I shall argue that virtual series traffic in screenplays that are ontologically autonomous works that have been finished by their authors in just the ways these theories claim they are not. If this is right, it follows that such accounts of the screenplay's ontology do not in fact offer reasons or explanations for denying that screenplays can be literature. This is because ontological claims are claims about the essential features of a given kind - that is, the features that the kind has of necessity.Virtual series screenplays offer strong evidence, I submit, that practitioners determine the boundaries of our screenplay concept, that our screenplay concept has changed over time, that we are now in an historical moment when some screenplays are complete, autonomous works, and that we are also now in an historical moment when some people write screenplays with the intention of creating literature while certain communities of readers appreciate them as such.