Fan Culture @ Swarthmore

So given the topic of our first response papers and the enduring topics of fan interactions with media we have been discussing, I thought I’d bring up an ongoing story in the Star Wars fan world.

A film called Fanboys was filmed in early 2006 about a group of Star Wars fans that journey to George Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch before the release of The Phantom Menace in order to steal a copy for their friend who is dying of cancer and will not make it till the world premiere. Sounds like a pretty reasonable film premise…. albeit a bit similar to the “Free Hat” episode of South Park.

Well the film basically kept getting delayed until eventually reshoots were done by a different director almost a year after filming had ended due to scheduling conflicts. After all of this, a version of the film was edited which removed the cancer plotline altogether after certain test screenings found the subplot ‘depressing’.

When the news broke about this on Aint it Cool News and Darkhorizons, a petition was started by a group of fans to “Stop Darth Weinstein” – Harvey Weinstein’s The Weinstein Company is releasing the film -to ensure that the original version is released to theaters. The petition has picked up mainstream coverage including articles in the Daily Telegraph, Vanity Fair and the New York Post as well as less visible coverage through facebook and myspace petition groups.

I find this whole ordeal really interesting as it shows a level of dedication and assertiveness sometimes lost upon fans. It’s refreshing to see fans who care so much about their text are willing to work so hard to protect a little film like Fanboys. It remains to be seen if their efforts will actually have any effect as currently both versions of the film have been shown to test audiences and it is still unclear which version will get a release but in any case their petition has made a significant impact and is yet another example of fans exercising power over their texts.

Furthermore, much of our focus upon fan interactions with media has been upon the transformative aspects (I.E.-Slash as redefining character relationships,  fan productions of non-canon or loose canon storylines, etc) but we have not discussed at length the degree of power fans can exercise over their text’s future.  This form of power seems remarkably relevant given our discussions of the relationships between producers and fans; when a producer can have power over fan produced content such as in the FanLib example.

Today’s “Doonesbury” comic deals with some issues that I’ve been thinking about in relationship to the vidding discussion, namely, who gets to define fair use?

Currently in the Doonesbury story arc, characters are enrolled in “The Poetry of Barack Obama”. The context of this particular comic strip is the recent contention that Obama lifted some of the text of his speeches from a political ally (Mass. Gov. Deval Patrick). Regarding this practice, Hillary Clinton said: “Lifting whole passages from someone else’s speeches is not change you can believe in. It’s change you can Xerox.”

The comic, however, takes a different tack, putting the reacquisition of language in a more fannish context, utilizing the language of hip-hop and music remixing. Or does it? Any Trudeau fans? Is this comic critical of rewriting practices? Critical of the academy’s reading strategies? Does the fact that (stereotypical deadhead/stoner–here, in an orange shirt) Zonker, endorses the “collaborative” assignment, mean anything?

P.S. The Universal Press Syndicate guidelines allow educators/students the use of 7 images per year free of charge, providing they are used in an academic context. Not that I’m endorsing one particular fair use policy over another, but it’s nice (for me, the blogger) to know that this post is doing nothing illegal.

I don’t mean to piggy-back on Brandon’s comment in class today about ethnicity issues surrounding the fandoms we’ve studied thus far…

But…

I can’t stop thinking about it.

Kathy had the last word in class today (Kathy, speak up if I misparaphrase you): Star Trek takes a stab at addressing the ethnic issue by giving Deep Space Nine a black captain, Benjamin Sisko, as an attempt to draw in black viewers.

However, a multicultural cast does not a multicultural show make: having a black character does not mean that the show will tackle issues pertinent to the black community. In a discussion we had on the way to lunch, Diana pointed out that Star Trek has attempted to break the racial divide since the very start with Uhura, a groundbreaking character because she was a black woman in a role of (debateable) power on television. We continued on to discuss how Uhura as a black character was, quite frankly, white-washed and placed in a form that would be easy for a majority white audience to swallow. The problem, we concluded, is that Star Trek, and many other shows, have not progressed from that early model.

Shows that attempt to target the minority community are aired either on cable or on basic broadcast channels that suffer from lack of viewers (the channel that comes to mind is UPN, now called My9, in New York—it’s known for showing black sitcoms and was nearly pulled from the air, sparking a huge debate in New York over the silencing of minority voices within various media mediums). That is not to say that the major broadcasting networks such as ABC or CBS, which have primarily white viewers, haven’t tried to target the minority market. The George Lopez Show was a fairly successful show on ABC for a number of years, but was eventually cancelled in favor of other (re: whiter) shows. I personally couldn’t stand the show because, as was said previously about Uhura, I felt that the show took the Latino family and made it palatable to a white audience and, in the process of doing so, sacrificed certain elements that would have made it more attractive, and identifiable, to the Latino community (sometimes it’s just not enough to see a Latino face on television–you have to believe it’s real, and The George Lopez Show just wasn’t real to me). The show (or the producers of the show?) chose instead to tailor their network line-up to appeal to their most reliable market which happens to be dominantly white.

When thinking about why it is that the fandoms we’ve been studying is mostly comprised of white middle class Americans, maybe we should consider what it is about the texts themselves that attract a certain ethnic following. Not to be cynical, but is there an avarice on the part of the producer to play towards the tastes of the ethnic majority? And what happens when a certain fandom becomes deeply associated with a certain group? For example, white fans of hip-hop are referred to by the pejorative “wigger”; on the flip side, growing up in a predominantly Hispanic and black neighborhood in the South Bronx, I was often accused of “acting white” because I liked Friends and listened to bubblegum pop music.  This isn’t only limited to the question of ethnicity–these same questions can apply to the issue of gender within fandom…

I don’t know, I can’t think of a proper conclusion. I’d like to hear what you guys think.