Facting fiction: Revolution, the United Nations, and cultural politics of electricity

ABSTRACT

In the summer of 2013, the United Nations and NBC began a season-long collaborative campaign involving the primetime television series Revolution (2012–2014), a show about the global loss of electricity, to promote the former’s energy resource campaigns. The two entities collaboratively produced various texts and events encouraging audiences to learn more about United Nations energy initiatives and how people throughout the world lack consistent access to electricity. This essay offers a close, rhetorical reading of the collaboration’s paratexts, examining stated responses from actors, creators, interviewers, and panel participants within this content. In particular, I argue that contact between the paratexts and the “formative” text (that of the show’s narrative) can encourage viewers to think about electricity from the perspective of their own material practices, dependencies, and fears over losing the technological world. I examine how these invested viewers interpreted the United Nations’ efforts through such commitments. Naming a fictive world, and its feared loss, as metonymic of energy politics illustrates how meaning, emotion, and texts circulate, while also implicating the use of celebrity platforms for sociopolitical issues such as energy access.

KEYWORDS:

• Paratexts
• affective economies
• energy
• post-2015 development agenda
• celebrity advocacy

Notes

1. For work on the individual celebrity advocate, see Cooper (2008) and Partzsch (2015).

2. Although the series showed audience support for continuation (see: www.thepetitionsite.com/553/454/200/revolution-season-3/), the expenses of the show, including difficulty achieving effective product placement, proved insurmountable. To offer closure, a four-part digital comic series was eventually released in May and June 2015.

3. For those who only watched the show on the NBC network, Revolution informed viewers of their collaboration in the final shot of the series, which featured the UN logo, stated that 1.3 billion people live without electricity, and told people to visit action4energy.org to learn more and “help power the world” (O’Bannon, Grellong, & Beeson, 2014).

4. Seyedi often explicitly connects the following energy-related work to numerous MDGs: http://www.unfoundation.org/what-we-do/campaigns-and-initiatives/cookstoves/.

5. Numerous paratexts can be found circulating among Revolution audiences, such as fan-generated content romantically linking Charlie with General Monroe, or “Charloe.” See: http://www.thegoodshipcharloe.com/fan-fiction.html.

6. Ahmed (2004) discusses how all emotions are relational, involving this “towardness” and “awayness” (p. 8).

7. The constitutive element of paratexts in part lies in the materiality of their circulation. The collaboration’s paratexts, therefore, can be conceived as “materialities of authenticity” in which their seeming factuality appears in their circulation of juxtaposed imagery, metonymic comments, and so forth (Goodman & Barnes, 2011, p. 73).

8. For instance, in a separate collaboration, Bahareh Seyedi emphasized the unequal distributions of global energy access where 20 million New Yorkers consume as much energy as 850 million sub-Saharan Africans (Social Good Summit, 2013a), a type of comment conspicuously absent in the Revolution collaboration.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Brian Cozen

Brian Cozen (PhD, University of Utah, 2015) is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies, University of Nevada Las Vegas. This essay is a partial adaptation of one of Dr. Cozen’s dissertation chapters (Advisor: Dr. Danielle Endres).