Fan Culture @ Swarthmore

Since we are watching Amok Time this week it seemed appropriate to bring up fan vids. Fan vids, are videos made by fans, particularly music videos that show slash. One major example is Kirk/Spock slash fan vids. Most of them cut together different bits of episodes (particularly from Amok Time, which is why I thought of it) with a song playing over it to create the slash story. Some bring in other bits of film (m/m sex scences) but many just re-edit the “canon material” ie episode footage, in an inventive way to tell a totally different story. Definately a different medium for fan fiction that theoretically only uses the canon. The link below is a Kirk/Spock video set to the Nine Inch Nails song Closer

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PwpcUawjK0

The first thing that one notices when watching the “Get A Life” Saturday Night Live skit with William Shatner is its disparaging portrayal of Star Trek fans. In the first part of the sketch—which unfortunately we were unable to locate—“one man laughs maliciously about a young fan he has just met who doesn’t know Yeoman Rand’s cabin number” (Jenkins, 9). We thus see fans portrayed as collectors of trivial and obscure bits of knowledge from the canon, who establish a social hierarchy within the fan community based on the mastery of this knowledge. The implication is of course that the fans are “losers” in real life and therefore turn to fandom for an opportunity to be “winners”, in this case to secure a high rank within this social hierarchy. The other implication is that this knowledge is of little use aside from being an indicator of fan status and that these people are wasting their time focusing on it.

As Henry Jenkins notes, William Shatner’s tirade in this skit expresses and enforces common stereotypes about fans, particularly Trekkers. Shatner describes Star Trek fans as immature and socially inept beings who instead of leading productive lives in the real world, live vicariously in a fantasy one structured around a particular text. But the scathing portrayal of Trekkers doesn’t end with this rant; when Shatner returns and tells the crowd that everything they just witnessed was actually a “recreation of the evil Captain Kirk from episode 37, ‘The Enemy Within’”, they accept this all too willingly. The implication is that the Star Trek fans are gullible and eager to crawl back into their fantasy world and escape the truths of reality once again.

At a second glance, Saturday Night Live’s “Get A Life” sketch may appear to be fannish, even as its most obvious message is anti-fan. It is using a popular text (Star Trek, and Shatner’s portrayal of Captain Kirk) to craft its own meanings, and is somewhat subversive in the process; consider Shatner’s exasperated return to the podium at the insistence of the booking agent. The joke, in the end, was not only on the fans, but on Shatner (whose message in the sketch is that of the dominant culture). This pro-fan reading does not so much contradict Jenkins’ reading as it does expand the reading by altering the focus of analysis, a fan tactic in itself.

Despite the fannish character of the sketch’s ideology, SNL’s methodology shows it to be operating on a level that is more strategic than tactical. The studio had the funds to secure Shatner as a performer and had the airtime on a broadcast medium that reached thousands. Either of these would have been out of reach for a fan community of the time. The Trekkers of today are equipped with such a broadcast medium, so it makes sense that they would use it to reinvent the “Get A Life” sketch (see the b/w recut below posted below), to defend their reputations. That a self-proclaimed “hard fan of the Star Trek series” (see “About This Video” here) would post this video is a mystery to me—indeed, without this fan, the “Get A Life” sketch in its original (if pared-down) form would not be easy to find. Is the posting of this video an acknowledgment of existing stereotypes? An instance of pointing out “extreme otherness” to justify one’s own “relative normality” (Jenkins 19)? Maybe even ironic fandom of the very thing that is othering fans?

The sketch:

The fan rewrite: