On Film Franchises and the Long History of the Shāhnāmah
Creativity, Story-Telling, Tradition, and Corporate Capitalism
You’d have to be living deep under a proverbial rock not to be acutely aware of the sheer cultural dominance—here in America and around the world—of the film franchise take-over of not just cinema but many other areas of cultural life and capitalist consumption. Marvel franchise characters have proliferated at a dizzying rate, in stand-alone films, in television shows, in video games, and in plastic toy avatars; there is a new Star Wars show or film it would seem every few months. Besides the really big franchises there are smaller (if sometimes aspirational of grandeur) ones drawing in their own audiences; my children have become aficionados of the Ninjago franchise of shows, toys, and other cultural artefacts, produced by the Lego company (yes, the ubiquitous building blocks of our collective childhoods). Their introduction to this particular franchise (which, evidently, Lego had not actually intended to become a long-running franchise at all but rather sort of stumbled into long-term success with it) was in fact accidental, the discovery of some minifigures among bricks donated to our family, their interest unfolding from there, the intricate but child-accessible lore and story lines of the Ninjago series and books giving them impetus to develop their own story-lines and scenarios using their own Legos. Perhaps as a result of having evolved out of a line of building toys, this particular little franchise is, for our kids at least, well suited for a sort decentralized elaboration, ‘fan fiction’ using both the literal and the metaphorical building blocks supplied by the original makers.
But I digress. The rise of the mega-franchise over the last couple of decades has eclipsed all previous iterations and historical foundations of franchise-building, to the point that some eighty percent of cinema revenue—eighty percent!—is derived from franchise films. There are many reasons, social, economic, and technological, for this metastasizing of Marvel, Star Wars, and a handful of other similar film franchises, but instead of addressing those reasons and the wider socio-cultural implications, I am going to direct your attention to a much older superhero ‘franchise,’ itself a particularly successful example of premodern ‘franchise building’ avant la lettre: the famed Persian-language epic the Shāhnāmah, often translated as ‘the Book of Kings’ though it encompasses considerably more than royal Iranian history, encompassing besides ancient kings of the Iranian and neighboring lands lots of heroes of super-strength, villains of almost cartoonish badness (as in there is a character who literally has evil snakes growing out of his shoulders), ferocious supernatural creatures, magic, world-building, all kinds of good stuff which audiences have enjoyed for a very long time indeed. As for what precisely to call the Shāhnāmah in all its diversity (on which I’ll elaborate below) and the wider sphere of cultural production associated with it, I’d like to propose that this textual and cultural tradition of the Shāhnāmah is best seen as a type of franchise akin to those of our own world, with the ‘how’ of its centuries-long ‘franchise building’ often differing crucially from how franchises are built and controlled in our own world.
I hit on this term in the course of work over the last few months studying the textual tradition of the Shāhnāmah ‘proper’ (as we’re going to see, just where the Shāhnāmah as a text begins and ends in relation to other ‘spin-off’ tales is not a simple matter); I should preface what follows by noting that I am not an expert in Persian literature or in the internal intricacies of the Shāhnāmah itself, though I do think that at this point I’ve at least a good handle on the overall terrain of things. That said: my colleagues and I in the Open Islamicate Texts Initiative were approached earlier this year by a virologist, working at a sister institution, who presented us with his idea of doing a project looking at the phylogeny of the Shāhnāmah tradition, something he had long been interested in himself. We—myself and a number of other team members and associated groups and projects—are currently working on handwritten text recognition technology that will, God willing, make large-scale analysis of massive manuscript textual traditions possible in a way that currently is not, hence our virologist colleague’s interest in collaborating with us. Our goal is to ultimately perform the kind of phylogenetic analysis used commonly in the realm of biology, and occasionally in that of culture, to trace the evolutionary trajectories of organisms, viruses, genes, textual traditions, and so forth. The Shāhnāmah seemed especially ripe for such analysis, as it is surely one of the most variable, if not the most variable, discrete ‘texts’ of the premodern Islamicate world. Like many—though not all—epics of the Islamicate world it is composed primarily of poetic couplets, the number of which in a given manuscript version can vary from around forty thousand to around eighty thousand, a range so great that one wonders whether calling it a discrete text even makes much sense.
The original iteration of the epic is attributed to the medieval poet Firdawsī, though even in the oldest stories of its composition Firdawsī was himself continuing the work of a prematurely deceased predecessor, rescuing as it were the nascent franchise from cancellation. Over the next thousand years the original iteration of the epic would be ‘rebooted’ hundreds if not thousands of times by scribes—or should we call them authors? compositors? directors?—who took the original material and rearranged individual couplets, changed up the wording, moved sections around, and not infrequently added entirely new material, either of their own composition (or perhaps of oral storyteller composition, the Shāhnāmah taking place in that milieu as well) or by incorporating other, related pieces of epic literature. For much as George Lucas’s 1978 original space opera has now spawned a veritable galaxy of canon and non-canon story iterations on screens great and small, the Shāhnāmah soon came to have orbiting around it many spin-offs, some picking up story-lines left hanging or underdeveloped in the original narrative, others exploring the lives of briefly mentioned characters, along with imitations of the Shāhnāmah dealing with quite unrelated topics. Other, similar epic ‘franchises’ also came to exist alongside that of the Shāhnāmah, sometimes with ‘cross-overs’ taking place: the Hamza-nāmah, ostensibly dealing with the adventures of a relative of Muḥammad, would prove to be one of the most popular.
Along with the sheer range of textual variation—which we hope to explore and map chronologically and geographically in greater detail in the near future—the Shāhnāmah ‘franchise’ would be expressed in a vast visual world, examples of which I’ve sprinkled through this essay. If you’ve come across Persianate miniatures before, odds are very good at least one of them came from a manuscript version of the Shāhnāmah. Again, the stylistic and thematic range is vast, differing along chronological, geographic, and even class axes, spilling out of the confines of the manuscript into stand-alone pictures and, in more recent times, into the sprawling coffeehouse art of Qajar and post-Qajar Iran, image, text, music, and oral storytelling tending to mix together in ways hard to disentangle today. Themes and selections and images from the Shāhnāmah and its franchise spin-offs have appeared in architectural contexts as well, as visible in the medieval tile-work below, which once decorated a Seljuk palace, within which the Shāhnāmah no doubt provided a model of identity and practice.
And while the Shāhnāmah is often today seen and presented as the Iranian—or, depending on who you ask, Persian—‘national epic,’ it having indeed played an important role in modern nation-building, historically it is far better described as a Persianate epic, the -ate bit of historian jargon in fact importantly pointing at a cultural role greatly transcending nation-state boundaries. Persian was, until not all that long ago, a language of art and literature and story across a region that stretched from the Ottoman Balkans all the way to China, Persianate ‘cultural products’ circulating not just at elite levels but at all levels of society, either in the original literary Persian register or in forms translated into local vernaculars (or other literary registers such as Ottoman Turkish or Urdu). Rather like today’s mega-franchises, then, the Shāhnāmah, as one of the foundational components of this semi-global Persianate sphere, may have originated in a particular place but did not remain confined to it but had purchase well beyond the historically Iranian lands.
That ‘global’ reach brings us to some crucial differences between the Shāhnāmah ‘franchise’ and contemporary movie franchises. Some are trivial: so far as I know there are no medieval or early modern Rustam action figures (though I’d love to be corrected on that point!), even if the world of the Shāhnāmah did penetrate into marketable items to some degree (luxurious illumined manuscripts not least of all). Of more importance is the matter of time frames: the Shāhnāmah and its related epic universe has been around for a long time, as in literally a thousand years, and the franchise shows no signs of stopping in fact, even if it does not have the cultural dominance of old. The ‘reboots,’ ‘spin-offs,’ and other cultural products then have emerged at a much slower pace, compared to, say, the endless proliferation of Marvel character arcs and Batman reboots. But perhaps the most crucial difference is that whereas it is major studios with multi-billion dollar budgets and vast workshops of capitalism churning out product that direct the course of each mega-franchise, the Shāhnāmah was and is not ‘owned’ by anyone; as we’ve seen, referring to Firdawsī himself as ‘original author’ is not really quite correct (‘franchise originator’ is unlikely to catch on, even if it is somewhat more accurate). Scribes, performers, painters, patrons, and others felt a great deal of freedom in changing the content up, in effectively ‘rebooting’ the story many times through inclusion of new material, exclusion of material (abbreviated Shāhnāmahs were quite popular for a range of reasons, not least of which surely that they were cheaper to produce), and so forth. Change also happened in an even more organic fashion, through the mechanisms of evolutionary transformation typical of the manuscript tradition broadly—scribal errors, attempted corrections, and other interventions of an unconscious or semi-conscious variety. Not only were there obviously no such things as copyright or armies of intellectual property lawyers restricting re-use, in relation to the Shāhnāmah and other epics traditions there were also few social pressure to maintain a largely stable canonical text, in the way that such pressures and mechanisms existed for, say, the Qur’ān or for canonical ḥadīth collections. And while it was the political and economic elite who could afford to sponsor the most spectacular instances of the Shāhnāmah tradition, the ‘franchise’ unfolded and evolved at every level of Persianate society, via cheap manuscript copies, the performances of storytellers in the market, the interventions of artists, and so on.
It is certainly true that even in our world of perfectly reproducible (well, almost—but that’s another story) digital media, studios with absurdly deep pockets, and rigorous intellectual property right laws, all coordinated within a global capitalist system, from-below creativity and re-use and modification still emerge out of the stuff of corporate franchises. Whether via internet memes or the production of fan fiction or the undirected imaginative play of children, people find ways to appropriate and remix and modify franchise culture. But while, say, meme culture might occasionally filter up into corporate headquarters (‘it’s Morbin’ time!’), no group of fans could, say, download the latest Marvel movie, film their own scenes and insert them into the original, then release their modified version into theatres alongside the original—well, maybe they technically could, but they’d likely be facing prison time as a result or at least devastating fines.
Much then of what we’ve covered here is to suggest that the franchise format is successful for reasons that predate industrial capitalism even if it is not deeply bound up with, even defined by, that system in extremis: a franchise universe provides not just heroic and interesting characters but an entire interconnected world which they populate, and nearly endless possible story lines building upon certain previous givens or trajectories, story lines that appeal to a pretty general human love of heroic figures, adventure, marvelous places and things, and the like. There is a degree of stability but also of continual generation built in, which differs from canonical Scriptures, say, in that the latter permits almost endless exegesis, lived practice, and so forth, but cannot be added to or literally deliberately modified. The franchise is a sort of stable dynamism that both captivates the imagination and provides routes for it to unfold and develop within and through. Modern film franchises, then, have been able to successful capture and fence-in, for the most part, these dynamics, profiting enormously from them and shaping them largely at will, aided not just by the contours of the capitalist economy but also by the nature of the technologies at hand.
There are other important differences, too, that we could pursue further, such as the fact that—at the risk of sounding overly elitist—the Shāhnāmah is, across all its iterations, genuine art, of an enduring value and a sophistication that few if any modern franchise iterations can claim even in their most exalted iterations (I’ve enjoyed Andor as much as anyone else of my cultural class, but will anyone be watching it a thousand years from now? probably not). To pursue that line of thought would involve much bigger debates than I’ve the expertise or energy to engage in here. Suffice to say, one of the drivers of mediocrity in modern franchises is the need to capture global markets, but to do so with a basically unitary, unmodified product (give or take some censored or excised scenes based on local state regulations or mores). If the Persianate world was one in which Persian literature and art and culture were experienced both ‘directly’ and through translation—literal and metaphorical—the modern franchise largely depends on very literal semantic translation produced from the corporate center. It is primarily a product to be consumed, and thus must be engineered to meet as many tastes as possible; the recipe cannot be seriously adjusted, or adjusted at all, for every particular location. Iron Man looks the same on every screen even when he speaks different languages; whereas Rustam and Kay Kāvus and all the rest took on local shape and color, even while maintaining to some degree their points of reference visually and semantically to the ‘core’ tradition (and often continuing to speak in Persian, translation an aural ‘value added’ component).
While it might sound a little cliché to say, it is true that contemporary franchise-dominated popular culture doesn’t have to be this way—on both a social and (in the digital age at least) technological level. The Shāhnāmah tradition, and indeed the great sweep of Persianate culture over the last one thousand years, points to alternative ways for a big ‘universalizing’ franchise to exist and to flourish, but in ways that allow creativity, artistic refinement, and localized adaptations and spin-offs, even—especially, perhaps—in technological conditions far less developed than those to which we now have access. I have been tangentially involved in the last couple of years with small-scale but technologically adapt projects to, in different ways, ‘reboot’ or otherwise draw upon the legacy of the Persianate epic tradition in non-academic, ‘popular’ ways that are technically adroit, though, unfortunately, those projects have yet to really take off. The headwinds of corporate cultural hegemony remain very powerful; no small-scale producer can really compete with multi-million dollar special effects budgets and wall-to-wall multi-domain advertising. Alas, the internet has both permitted the proliferation of cultural producers while also making their findability and long-term sustainability even more random and tenuous than before. That said, audiences can change, can grow bored, develop unexpected tastes, and, yes, legal regimes can also change. There is nothing ‘natural’ or materially substantial about intellectual property rights, after all, the cornerstone of modern movie franchise empires, and a future with different rights regimes is possible.
To return to my children’s engagement with the—relatively minor in the great scheme of media titans—Lego Ninjago franchise, the most strikingly positive aspect of it, both built-in (the media franchise part was developed originally to sell building toys, after all) and emergent, is the way in which the children are actually encouraged by the shape of the franchise itself to develop the given characters, motifs, and story-lines (many of which are after all echoes of far, far older traditions, including medieval epic) in their own free imaginative play. Such creative appropriations and developments ‘from below’ of what are essentially corporate products continue to take place even in a world of copyright law and take-down notices, and hopefully suggest that the story-telling impulses, the dynamics of epic traditions, and the multi-media hero franchise will be around for a long time to come in new and unexpected modes of being, well after the last Marvel movie plays on the big screen.
If you made it this far, there is chance that you would be interested in a spring reading group I am hosting virtually, History of Islamicate Text Technologies, which will tackle, via readings of a diverse range of books and articles, some of the same sorts of issues and questions addressed above. If that sounds interesting, have a look at the description in the link, and email me if you’d like to participate. While the main audience is fellow academics of Islamicate history, anyone with an interest and a willingness to participate is welcome to join!
Proof, speaking of Persianate and modern nation states, have you read The Making of Persianate by Alexander Jabbari and his article on aeon: https://aeon.co/essays/what-we-lost-with-persianate-modernity?