Reboot Culture & Revising Reality

I think it’s fair to say that William Proctor is the world authority on reboots. I’ve followed his articles for a few years, and he’s now written the definitive book on the topic. Reboot Culture was published last November — after Nat Goldberg and I had submitted the final draft of our Revising Reality, which launches at the end of May.

Though we couldn’t cite Reboot Culture, Revising Reality does build on it by applying its fiction-based narrative revision approach to the real world. I recently reached out to William Proctor — who goes by Billy in his emails — to praise his work and share ours. I enjoy what they have in common and where they diverge.

Billy opens by noting the “surge in alternate uses of the computer term ‘reboot,’ a surge that has seen the term deployed in new contexts and new signifying practices. Most pronounced in press discourse, the term has taken on a dizzying array of applications, employed for all manner of purposes and topics.” For his purposes (made explicit in his subtitle Comics, Films, and Transmedia), even “as a narrative concept” the term “remains one of the most widely misused, misunderstood, and misinterpreted concepts in recent years.”

Nat and I noticed the same when first writing about comics reboots for a chapter in our first book, Superhero Thought Experiments (Iowa 2019). We therefore offered an especially precise definition when revisiting and significantly expanding our analysis in Revising Fiction, Fact, and Faith (Routledge 2022). Revising Reality is friendlier to non-academics, so offers a simpler approach. We also swap terms, as we explain in our intro:

“Though ‘remake’ used to refer to new versions generally dates to at least 1890, its primary use now relates specifically to film and related media. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it may have been first applied to the musical The Desert Song in a 1936 Variety article about a new stage production of the 1926 Broadway show. The term ‘reboot’ entered the vernacular in the 1970s, referring then only to computers, until its meaning was in its own way sequeled to include films. The OED cites the possible first usage in a 1998 Cedar Rapids Gazette article about ‘the reboot of Superman that wiped away nearly 50 years of continuity.’

“’Reboot’ is the preferred term in comics and may have first appeared in print in a 1994 post on a DC UseNet message board. Some use ‘remake’ and ‘reboot’ interchangeably. In a 2023 New York Times review of recently rebooted TV shows (Night Court, Scooby-Doo, That ‘70s Show), Elizabeth Nelson notes both the ambiguity and overlap in terms: ‘’Reboot” is one of those coinages that burrows into the lexicon without ever being fully explained (at least to me), but it has clearly supplanted ‘remake,’ migrating over from the language of computing.’ Respecting precedence, however, we opt for the earlier term.”

Billy of course opts for “reboot,” clearly distinguishing it from “remake”:

“Unlike remakes and adaptations, both of which function as ‘announced and extensive transposition[s] of a previous work’ (Hutcheon 2006, 7), what ‘may be said to identify a reboot is the fact that it initiates a series of texts’ (Gil 2014, 25–26, my italics).”

The “series of texts” is a smart point, which Nat and I set aside for the overall shared point that Billy describes:

“Unlike other serial processes, however, each of which extend ‘an already existing narrative sequence’ (Wolf 2012, 381), reboots instead ‘restart an entertainment universe that has already been established, and begin with a new story line and/or timeline that disregards the original writer’s previously established history, thus making it obsolete and void’ (Willits 2009).”

He also goes well beyond narrative, exploring the concept as an “economic strategy mobilized to discard, supplant, or nullify an established serial continuity by beginning again from square one.”

Nat and I explore a range of entertainment universes (Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Marvel, DC, Ghostbusters, and even Roseanne) in our first chapter, noting how fans wield the power to reject remakes/reboots and other revisions, before applying thems to nonfiction for the rest of the book. Billy’s definition reveals the core challenge: in the real world, you can’t “nullify an established serial continuity by beginning again from square one.” You can only pretend to by passing off a new set of details as historical facts.

So where Reboot Culture delves into the multi-reboot histories of fictional characters like Superman and Batman, Nat and I look at the remade histories of real people like Paul Revere and Ronald Reagan.

According to current mythology, Ronald Reagan cut taxes, reduced the deficit, shrunk government, and punished illegal immigrants. The actual Ronald Reagan instead raised taxes eleven times, grew the federal deficit by 142%, increased the U.S. gross domestic product, and proudly granted amnesty to three million undocumented immigrants. The mythological Reagan is a work of fiction that remakes or reboots the actual Reagan by replacing him.

That reboot doesn’t start from “square one” though. It instead inserts the fictional Reagan into the past. Reboot Culture describes a related phenomenon from the Batman franchise:

“Batman V Superman may reboot the Dark Knight as diegetically independent from Nolan’s films, but it does not ‘begin again’ by reproducing the origin story. In fact, Affleck’s Batman has been in operation for some time, yet another reference to Miller’s DKR and its depiction of a grizzled, battle-worn Dark Knight. From this perspective, I would argue that it is a different type of reboot, one that begins a third wave of Batman films midway through the story, or at least midway for Batman as Man of Steel rebooted Superman from ‘year zero.’ For these reasons, I would describe Affleck’s Batman as an in media res reboot, with Batman V Superman enacting a double function as both sequel to Man of Steel and a reboot of Batman.”

The Reagan myth isn’t exactly an “in media res reboot,” since it occurs entirely in an imagined past — arguably the same nebulous golden age evoked by the “Make America Great Again” slogan. Since it doesn’t start either at the origin or in the middle, maybe we should call it an “aftermath reboot”?

Whatever the term, I wish it intruded only in fiction.