Last night I watched a video essay on YouTube that argued the central flaw of most of Disney’s newer slates of film came down to a misuse of intertextuality. Intertextuality is when the text of one work impacted by the text of a previous work. It can be used as a powerful tool to explore themes and idea raised by the original work either in that work’s own text or as interpreted by the new text. An ideal example would be Tom Stoddard’s play Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead which follows as its central character Rosencrantz & Guildenstern two minor characters from Hamlet and uses that conceit to explore concept of narrative and fiction.

The essay argued that lazy utilization of intertextuality in the Disney live action remakes and the extended Star Wars trilogy resulted in a cheap ‘fan service’ rather than using the references to earlier works to comment either those previous pieces or to deepen the content of the new ones. The exception for Disney being the Marvel Cinematic Universe which stretching across more than 20 films and ten years is a grand experiment in intertextuality and uses those connections to paint deeper, richer, and more engaging emotional lives for its characters.

This leads me to think about my own debut novel Vulcan’s Forge. I shall avoid spoilers for the plot of that story but I will touch on how it itself is a work of intertextuality.

The protagonist of Vulcan’s Forge is Jason Kessler and on the colony of Nocturnia his job is to use mass media, principally film, to create, sustain, and reinforce the colony’s culture derived from mid-twentieth century Americana. To promote an idealized version of that culture, which honestly is more mythology than history, some films are elevated in their importance while others are banned as ‘corrupting.’ Jason, an ill fit for this suffocating version of American culture, is dismissive of some films and longs for the forbidden fruit.

Ideally, and only someone who has read the novel and also is unaware of the films it references can answer if I succeeded, the story can be read and enjoyed without understanding the film references but on an intertextual level the movies that Jason derides and the ones he adores informs the readers of the nature of Jason’s character.

Hopefully my use of intertextuality expands and deepens Vulcan’s Forge but even if I missed the mark making all of those film references was damn fun.