50: Funko Pop Culture

This weekend we packed up a few bags to drop off at Goodwill as a part of spring cleaning. It's mostly clothes and household goods, an assortment of the usual stuff, but I also threw a few awards-season swag items in there. I'm not really a swag person, although I'll use a branded pen if you handed me one. Boxes stuffed with branded promotional materials feel like bribery; I don't need a t-shirt or candy or an art book to judge whether or not your movie is any good. Just send me the screener and let the art speak for itself.

One of the pieces of swag that ended up in the donation bag was a Funko Pop figurine. If you've been in a Barnes & Noble or a comic book shop, you've seen a Funko. They're little vinyl figurines with chibi proportions, more face than anything else, designed to look like characters from movies and comic books. The Funko I gave away this weekend came in an awards-season box promoting Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio, a stop-motion animated film that went on to win the Oscar for Best Animated Feature. The characters in Pinocchio look like they've been hand-carved from wood, a craggy aesthetic miles removed from Funko's smooth, bland surfaces.

My problem with Funko Pops is that they're a distillation of "content" in physical form.

"Content" is a catchall word. It could mean writing, images, or video; the idea often gets rolled up with advertising in the term "branded content." "Content," when treated as such, is ethereal, designed to be consumed and then discarded for the next piece of "content," regardless of the actual format or intent. The word proliferates on the internet specifically, although I'm pretty sure I've heard of movie theater preroll being referred to as "content" as well. It can't be a physical item. There's no specificity in the term, and therefore no care taken to engage with the actual work that's been produced and consumed. "Content" is a term that helps package up the otherwise difficult-to-classify in order to sell it to a prospective audience–the consumers of the "content."

Catchall terms like "content" are easier to track and quantify than needing to slice things into their genre or format. I get the appeal of wanting one word to describe whatever it is you're pushing on your platform. When you're talking about the whole of social media, it's easier to just say "content" than it is to specify TikToks vs tweets, blogs vs podcasts, to say nothing of genre. But the moment everything gets boiled down to "content," the audience gets simplified too. The catchall term lends itself well to selling entertainment to a four-quadrant audience: it's more palatable to classify a Star Wars or a Marvel movie as "content" than it is, say, an experiemental film that's been uploaded to Vimeo.

You're more likely to see Funko Pop figurines of Star Wars or Marvel movie characters than anything else, although I know there are plenty of niche Funkos floating around. The best one I ever came across was of a specific Orc character from Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. There were dozens of copies of the same figurine stacked high on sale: no one wanted a Grishnákh Funko, go figure. Funkos are more or less limited edition vinyl figurines, so they're intended to be collected, but they're also mass produced cheaply enough to cost roughly $12 a pop. They still need to be recognizable popular characters, all while fitting roughly the same–literal–mold. Funko manages this by boiling those characters down to their most recognizable physical traits, converting them into blank-faced, empty-eyed, corporate-approved physical manifestations of "content."

I have no idea whether the Funko Pops in the promotional box helped Pinocchio get its Oscar. I doubt it; the movie's enough of a technical and artistic achievement that it's perfectly well capable of standing on its own. But the Funko in the box is a symptom of the need to sell something, to package it up in a palatable enough form that the consumer will at least give the movie the benefit of the doubt long enough to flip the TV on. Guillermo del Toro's sensibility is antiauthoritarian and individualist; he's not interested in repeating the same beats from previous adaptations of the story, and the movie's at its worst when it does perform those beats out of a sense of duty. Marketing Pinocchio with a Funko Pop figurine is such a fundamental misread of del Toro's entire deal that I can do nothing but laugh–and throw the figurine in a donation bin.

What I talked about:

For Seeing & Believing podcast, Kevin and I reviewed Ari Aster's Beau Is Afraid, which is out this weekend. I admire Aster's work a lot more than I like it, but this latest film had me feeling even more ambivalent than usual. For our Watchlist segment, Kevin chose Coraline, a movie I've been meaning to catch up with for quite some time now. I wasn't disappointed.

We also released a Patreon bonus episode for Seeing & Believing, in which I discussed the original Rocky with our producer Jonathan Clausen.

What I watched:

This week I rewatched Babette's Feast for an upcoming podcast appearance. It's a lovely movie, and the kind of straightforward literary adaptation that's easy to underestimate, but it packs an emotional wallop and articulates a lot of complicated themes about grace and love and the appreciation of art.

What I'm reading:

Infinite Jest: I'm starting to play chicken with the calendar; at this rate I won't finish this year, but I'm thinking about reading the book more, which we can chalk up as a feint toward progress.

I did pick up my old Trigun omnibus this week, though. Good manga!