Fan Culture @ Swarthmore

Don’t Look Back (1967) was a film by D.A. Pennebaker that followed Bob Dylan’s life at the height of his celebrity in 1964. It portrayed him as an arrogant, elusive, cool character, and contributed to his image as a socially conscious poet. Despite the documentary-like shooting style, the authenticity of the performance is put into question.As the Sconce article claims, celebrity blurs the line between reality and performance. It claims that a celebrity used to be famous because he was talented in some way. Today, Sconce claims, celebrities act as entertainment by being famous — it is their job to be obnoxious, vacuous, and talentless. This is entertaining and lets consumers both envy and admonish the celebrity. A celebrity is now meta/meta-famous. In this Don’t Look Back clip (at the bottom of the post), it is unclear whether Dylan is posing and being especially angry just because he knows he’s being filmed. To what extent is Dylan’s fame due to his talent (music) and to what extent his caustic personality?

Sconce, furthering Baudrillard’s work, claims the Real has collapsed to be replaced by a self-referential Symbolic order. This basically means that no longer does the media refer to some “real” world, but that all media refers only to other media in a symbolic network, and that an Imaginary order (fantasy, culture, etc.) is created only from this network.

The difficulty of distinguishing between the Real and the Symbolic in celebrity fandoms is illustrated in another Bob Dylan film, I’m Not There (2007). It attempts to portray Dylan as a fragmented character, assigning each facet its own actor, many of whom are not actually similar to Dylan. The film combines rumor, story, and fact to create six different representations of Dylan. In doing this, the film acknowledges that the celebrity of Dylan is not solely located in Dylan himself. Rather, he is the idol on which fans’ experiences, subjectivities, and cultural perceptions are projected.

The film explains Dylan in terms of both how he “really” is in a biographical sense, but also “who” he is based on the mythos and media portrayals around him — both are given equal time in the film.

Which model of celebrity fandom (Don’t Look Back’s direct-cinema approach or I’m Not There’s hyper-reality approach) is most applicable to other celebrities? Do fans use cults of celebrity as modes of escapism, or are the dynamics more nuanced? Is this concern with celebrity as problematic as Sconce implies? He claims, for example, that California is culturally attempting to become the celebrities it houses. Are these sweeping criticisms valid? Have symbolic media orders taken over for reality? Do Californians really view the rest of the country as cold and bitter? Has celebrity gossip really replaced the news?

With regard to Bob Dylan, is it really a good approach to view him as a media creation (as in I’m Not There), or try to portray him in an unmediated (direct-cinema) way?

I’m Not There
Don’t Look Back

This week’s viewing is “Who the Hell is Pete Doherty”, a BBC documentary about an extremely popular musician in England. He was a lead singer/songwriter for bands The Libertines and Babyshambles. He is often a feature of the tabloids due to drug use, band conflicts, criminal charges, and his dating supermodel Kate Moss.

In the documentary, Pete is given ample time to “defend” himself. Questions to think about are:
1. What does Pete have to say about the celebrity culture surrounding him? Is he accurate? Is it as harmful as he thinks it is?
2. How “honest” is Pete being? Are we finally seeing the “true” Pete, or is he playing yet another role, despite the film’s advertisement as a documentary.
3. What role does Pete play in the lives of English music fans?