Fan Culture @ Swarthmore

Our discussion of Jenkins’ definition of the ‘nomadic reader’ got me thinking. Jenkins specifically defines nomadic readers as producers that “assert their mastery over the mass-produced texts which provide the raw materials for their own productions” (23). This definition fascinated me, because it has implications for a number of published (and even critically acclaimed!) works.

Alan Moore is a well regarded writer of comic books/graphic novels; his work Watchmen was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 greatest English-language works of fiction produced since1923 (the only comic included on the list), and one of his stories was the basis for the film V for Vendetta.

One of Moore’s recent works, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, has given rise to two sequels and a terrible, terrible Sean Connery movie. The first volume of the series featured a number of early 20th Century pulp-fiction characters (Mr. Hyde, Captain Nemo, etc.) banding together against the Sherlock Holmes villain Moriarty. Moore expanded upon the idea with subsequent volumes, however, and eventually the series would include characters from works by Virginia Woolf, Kurt Vonnegut, H.P. Lovecraft, P.G. Wodehouse and William Shakespeare, among countless others. The books are very entertaining, both as stories and a game of ’spot-the-character’. If anyone’s interested, I found a website of dubious legality where you can download all three volumes; you’ll need a .cbr file reader, which you can easily find on Google.

Moore uses these characters, not to expand upon the original sources, but to actually develop his own unique text. I don’t think it would be helpful to get into the details of the plot, but Moore creates a remarkably coherent whole from his diverse sources. He develops a consistent fictional ‘universe’ from countless texts. As he describes in an interview:

“The planet of the imagination is as old as we are. It has been humanity’s constant companion with all of its fictional locations, like Mount Olympus and the gods, and since we first came down from the trees, basically. It seems very important, otherwise, we wouldn’t have it. Fiction is clearly one of the first things that we do when we stand upright as a species – we tell each other stories. Now, Nature doesn’t do things for decorative purposes, except like giving peacocks wonderful plumage so they can attract a mate, but since there seems to be little point to telling each other stories all the time — except there must be. We have depended upon them and to some degree the fictional world is completely intertwined and interdependent with the material world. A lot of the dreams that shape us and, presumably, our world leaders, are fictions. When we’re growing up, we perhaps base ourselves on an ideal, and even if that ideal is a real living person, there is every chance that living person may have based themselves on a fictional ideal. This is actually ground that we do cover in ‘The Black Dossier,’ and in the final soliloquy, which is delivered by Duke Prospero. We’re talking about this very thing: the interdependence between the world of fiction and the world of fact. It is something that interests me, and has come to dominate my thinking on the series. I’m not exactly sure why, but it feels as if it might be important.”

Yet however thoughtfully developed and skilfully written these stories are, its hard to categorize them as anything but fan fiction (albeit one sold through the Warner Brothers corporation and made into a multi-million dollar motion picture). Moore did not create these characters or stories, and in despite his critical acclaim as an author he is no more justified using them than a 13-year-old fan-fiction writer is. (In a poetic final twist, it seems that the terrible, terrible League film has actually managed to spawn its own fan fiction.)

I discuss Alan Moore because he’s the most obvious example of this phenomena, but there is a long, long list of published and acclaimed authors reworking other writers’ stories. Among the examples I can think of off of the top of my head are John Gardner’s Grendel, which tells the story of Beowulf from the antagonist’s perspective; March, in which Geraldine Brooks retells Little Women; and Gregory Maguire’s novels, particularly his popular Wizard-of-Oz reworking Wicked. Shakespeare borrowed from historical events and mythology in his plays. Even James Joyce’s Ulysses owes its structure and a number of its themes to Homer’s Odyssey.

My point, if I have one, is that fandom and the fannish interpretation of texts has a significant place in the development of Western culture. It is easy, and sometimes appropriate, to dismiss fan productions as wish fulfillment or escapism. But the internalization and reinterpretation of texts by other creators has produced interesting and vital work (and, in the case of Joyce and Shakespeare, sometimes outright masterpieces). More than anything else I am reminded of Hall’s explanation of the active text, by which creator and consumer exchange ideas in an endless cycle; viewed from this perspective fandom, or at least fannish engagement with text, is an inevitable and vital part of our creative culture.

The Kirk/Spock video of Kathy’s last post caused some controversy in 2006 when it was uploaded to YouTube without its creators’ permission. The people who make and distribute fan videos have maintained a general standard of secrecy about it, for various material/legal reasons, and some were irritated at what they saw as their complicated art being flattened and misread without the context that gave it meaning. (This fan sums it up: “I’ve done the whole show-vids-to-nonfans thing, and most of them are boggled and confused. They’re not seeing the same vids we are.”) Henry Jenkins wrote an excellent post on the affair, which I really highly recommend at least skimming before/after you watch the YouTube link.

Of course, I confess, I’m always interested in the analysis fans themselves have to offer regarding their own situations, so I dug around for some fan commentary on the situation.

Metafandom is a popular digest-style roundup of fannish discussions happening on LiveJournal. (We often call those discussion “fannish meta”: hence the name.) These conversations range from the trivial to the deeply philosophical, fandom-specific or genre-spanning. The digest’s moderators try to be as inclusive as possible, so there’s a lot of noise to wade through, but when any big controversy hits LiveJournal media fandom– whether it’s about racist re-casting of characters in alternate-universe fanfiction, “clip theft” in fan videos, or the mores of fanfiction about real people– you can find traces of the discussion as it went down by looking up Metafandom’s archives.

So I visited the archives on the same day of Jenkin’s blog post, to see what the fans were saying. Scroll down to “Fan Vids”: a smattering of opinions about the visibility of fanvideos– a form of art long underground as a matter of course– in the age of mainstream internet media. This fan and this fan digest the Jenkins post for their readers– I’d especially recommend glancing at the comments to those posts, where other fans praise or criticize some of Jenkins’s individual points. This post, and its comments, shed a little more light on the historical reasons that video-makers dig privacy.

Finally, one of my favorite essays on the subject: this post (by a Swarthmore graduate!) will offer a bridge for us in the coming weeks to Convergence Culture and other discussions about money and fandom (which I am fascinated by from a feminist perspective). She quotes, from the very first post I linked to:

It’s been bothering me increasingly in recent months, as fanvids get posted on YouTube (not by the creators), that my non-fannish friends link to them as just another cool internet video. Of course, how would non-fannish folks recognise the incredible violation of fannish etiquette involved in posting a vid to YouTube? They’re insider creations, not intended for general consumption, and so why would non-insiders know the etiquette involved?

And answers:

Well, first what it is is we have to start adjusting to the fact that we’re not insiders anymore — the world got really small really fast, and we are right there in the spotlight, or, as Punk put it, they can see us now. We’ve been on the cutting edge, “hiding” on the internet with our creations, but here in Web 2.0, the user-created web, we can’t hide anymore, we are the internet. And so of course people are going to try and find ways to popularize us — eventually, they will try and find ways to use us to make money.

She herself gets followup from new posts like this, this, and this one (which I quoted at the very beginning of this post).

At any rate– I hope I’ve given you a sense of the conversation that goes around LiveJournal fandom under the skin of big controversies. We talked a little bit in class about the voice of the subject as represented in ethnography like Seiter’s or Radway’s. I think it’s appropriate here to check in with some fannish voices, to accompany Henry Jenkins wearing his ethnographer’s hat.

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:

This summer I became obsessed with the bad movie phenomenon that has been taking off all over the internet. If you aren’t familiar with what I am talking about check this youtube video out.

Originally I was just checking out the videos out for a quick laugh but eventually I found myself doing a little bit more research on some of the forums at BadMovies.org and reading about what these “fans” were talking about.   Interestingly, Troll 2, the film lampooned in the youtube video for awful dialogue delivery, has developed a substantial cult following partially due to the success of viral videos like the one mentioned above.   Michael Stephenson, the child actor in the film, is currently directing a documentary film called The Best Worst Film Ever which follows the film’s cult standing and staple at late night cinemas around the country as well as annual Q&A sessions between the filmmakers, actors and fans.  We’ve talked a bit about the tendency of audiences or fandoms to gather around content they don’t necessarily think is particularly good (I.E.-sarcastic fans of Heroes or Saturday morning cartoons). This pseudo-franchising that has happened with Troll 2 and similar terrible slasher-esque cult favorites (Sleepaway Camp, Prom Night) is indicative of this new trend which has fans re-appropriating and redefining their respective content.  Check out this “trailer” for Troll 2 which has been entirely re-edited as a feel good, festival independent darling. I have always found fan cultures of terrible media really interesting and it’s funny to see that viral media has helped redefine these fandoms by making mass presentations of fan media easier.

I’m interested to see Stephenson’s film and find out how important brief and out of context clips such as the infamous “Oh my gosh!” scene have been to giving this film an entirely different life outside of VHS and sarcastic threads on Something Awful forums.

So, I was having an extreme senioritis afternoon yesterday and came across these two videos on College Humor. They both take scenes from a movie and place them in a different order and context so that the movie appears to have a totally different meaning than the original. The first clip uses scenes from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off to portray the film as a horror film rather than a comedy. The second clip does very much the opposite by making scenes from American Psycho appear to be part of a romantic comedy. These videos made me think of the Fiske reading and his definition of producerly texts in that these texts seem to have gaps large enough within them that entirely new texts can be produced in them. Even though we perceive these videos to be funny and sort of ridiculous because the new texts appear so different from the originals, we can still understand how these texts could make sense when the scenes are put into a new context. So, are these examples of texts being, as Fiske says, beyond their own control?

Ferris the 13th

American Psycho- Romantic Comedy

I’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:

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.

The FreeCulture convention I was talking about in class is called ROFLCon. It’s run by FreeCulture Harvard. Their goal is to bring every famous internet celebrity they can. The catch is that the person must only be famous because of the internet. For example, the LOLCat Bible guy is coming.

I’m going to try to get funding to go. If you’re interested, get in touch with me at bmazer1 or in class.

After reading the Hebdidge piece regarding subcultures, I was struck by how well he defined the process by which a subculture – or the content they are gathered around – becomes incorporated into mass media and culture. Basically when the “noise” becomes part of the definition of “sound”.

In class on Tuesday we even took this one step further when one of the discussion groups provided an archetypal example of this sort of incorporation; Hot Topic and gothic/punk culture. Hebdidge categorizes subculture incorporation with two key examples of how they may “breach our expectancies” (Hebdidge, 92). The styles that set apart these subcultures are most easily recognized and thus come first (I.E. – Makeup, dark hair, leather, etc). After these are made apparent in mass culture we come into contact with their greater implications of attitude and beliefs (I.E. – anarchy, satanism, etc).

The interesting fact about these subcultures, regardless of what their beliefs actually entail, is that they are almost always adapted and redefined for mass consumption. The Sex Pistols were signed by every major record label in the UK for at least some period before Virgin Records put out Never Mind the Bullocks. Sure they were dropped by two or three record labels before Virgin due to their legendary drug abuse, and destructive tendencies but the fact remains that they inevitably released the album to the greater public through the very social constructs they despised and to the same people John Lydon complains about almost daily on his radio talk show.

The price of getting your art out into the public means artists like Anti-Flag, Rage Against the Machine or even a Green Day means adapting your doctrines for a mass media audience. Would they prefer if their albums were printed entirely on recyclable materials and their tours were supported by non-corporate sponsors? Probably, but the fact remains that given the pervasiveness of media conglomerates and their control over media content, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to understand when RATM puts out albums through Epic Records and plays at Coachella.

After all, lead guitarist Tom Morello once famously said “When you live in a capitalistic society, the currency of the dissemination of information goes through capitalistic channels. Would Noam Chomsky object to his works being sold at Barnes & Noble? No, because that’s where people buy their books. We’re not interested in preaching to just the converted.”

Below are some questions you might write about in relation to Nurse Betty and/or the week’s readings. Feel free to respond to any of them here, or to raise other questions / share other perceptions about the film and articles.

• As I suggested in class on Tuesday, Nurse Betty has some similarities to Love and Death on Long Island: both seem to address the phenomenon of fandom, yet both do unexpected (and problematic) things with the idea of attachment and immersion in media texts and characters. Where do you see the two films “agreeing” and “disagreeing” in their conception of fandom? To what degree do these portrayals ring true for you, and where do they break down?
• Betty’s quest is triggered by trauma, suggesting that her “mission” is about escape into fantasy as much as in pursuit of a new life. What is the film saying about the psychology of fandom? Is Betty’s journey ultimately a positive and healthy one?
• Gender is very much on the table in Nurse Betty, as are — to a lesser degree — race and class. Where do you see the film addressing difference and identity, and when/where does it choose not to address them?
• What light do the Radway and Seiter articles shed on Nurse Betty? How closely do the readers of romance novels studied by Radway and the soap opera audiences studied by Seiter et al match up with what the film presents? What might account for the differences?