Tintin as Spectacle: The Backstory of a Popular Franchise and Late Capital

Abstract:This article frames the Tintin franchise in terms of its evolving transmedia modes of cultural production and consumption as a story of commodification that is metonymic for key developments of the twentieth century, particularly in relation to capital and its inextricability from mass media. Drawing on elaborations of Marx's notion of commodity fetishism, it argues developments in the early to middle decades of the twentieth century can be viewed revealingly through John Crary's speculative explanation as to why Guy Debord chose 1927 as the precise birthdate of his Society of the Spectacle. Fredric Jameson's analysis of late capitalism's developmental phases through the Fifties to the Eighties supplies supplementary frames for the mid- to late twentieth century. I argue that Tintin's progressive conscription into late capitalist spectacle reflects and reinforces these broader processes of commodification within intermeshing global culture flows, and in doing so reinscribes the cultural dominants of the twentieth century itself.