Finally an excuse to put Brenda Dickson on the blog…
February 8th, 2008 by aweintr1I’ll start this post off by saying that relating it academically MAY be a stretch, but I think anyone who takes the time to watch these youtube clips will understand. Both are parts of a video made by 80’s soap opera celeb Brenda Dickson. In each she tells viewers her point of view on fashion, makeup, excercise, and diet. They are long(ish), but totally hilarious.
Clip 1:
Clip 2:
Questions concerning the Clips:
1. These clips are examples of media made for fans of a particular celebrity (presumably because she isn’t in character in the film.) How do these fans affect the theories made by Seiter of soap opera fandom? Do the fans of celebrities in a given fantext exist in the same fandom as the fans of the text itself?
2. On Youtube, most people watch this clip ironically, which is how it became viral. What does it mean to be an ironic fan? Is there a difference in fan practice? In trying to decide the answers, keep in mind that many of the fans have created new fantexts by restaging the video parodically (For Ex: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goOsKCok6FM&feature=related). As someone who isn’t typically involved in fantexts, I was also wondering if there is usually a tongue-in-cheek element inherent in most of the practice? While I understand that people take the quality of slash/het seriously, is there still some sort of a joke involved? If not, is that one of the differences between fan practice and ironic fan practice?
3. Finally, do viral videos like these exist as separate fandoms or are they all part of a common one? Given that there are TV specials devoted to airing sets of these clips (see The Soup). I’m inclined to think that their may be a viral video fandom, and that I may be a fan of them.
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
First of all, I’d like to say that I thoroughly enjoyed watching these clips. When watching videos such as these, the ironic fan will ascribe very different meanings to the texts than were intended by the producers. What I find interesting with these videos is that, using Barthes’s model, the consumer takes a readerly text and interprets it in a writerly fashion. These texts are clearly “readerly”; they consist of Brenda Dickson telling us “this is what I wear”, “this is how to work out”, “this is how to wear make-up”. But the ironic reader doesn’t watch these videos to learn how to apply lipstick, he or she focuses on the cheesyness, the extremely tacky fashion, the poor narration, and the soap opera star who clearly skipped acting school and thinks she’s giving people insightful advice. The modern ironic reader takes all of these things as representative of 80’s pop culture, which we often view with a sense of irony and amusement. In this sense, I would consider ironic fandom to be fandom nonetheless, at least using Barthes’s model: fandom is transforming readerly into writerly texts.
This brings up another interesting connection to one of the models we’ve seen: the concepts of denotation and connotation. In the Brenda Dickson video, her style of dress (including her work-out unitard) denotes flashiness, impracticality and the quality of being over the top. But on a connotative level, it signifies 1980’s style and pop culture, which we tend to think of as cheesy and often over-the-top. It is in this connotation that the joke lies; if we weren’t able to draw a connection between this video and a specific subculture it probably wouldn’t be considered as funny.