Fan Culture @ Swarthmore

By Illy Quintano and Abby Graber

Fan Artifact: Christopher Walken

His IMDB page.

In their essays on the camp and cultish, Susan Sontag and Umberto Eco respectively focus much of their analysis on the idea of form over content. Sontag’s definition of camp is explicitly “neutral with respect to content” (Sontag, 277); it is basically an aesthetic concept. Similarly Eco’s exposition on the cultish aspect of Casablanca focuses on the construction of the film itself: what is important is that the film is composed entirely of tried and true archetypes. The actual content of those archetypes is relatively irrelevant. Both Sontag and Eco mention communities surrounding camp and cult objects, but ultimately they emphasize the location of campiness and cultishness within the objects themselves.

Our fan object, Christopher Walken, both exemplifies Sontag and Eco’s concept of camp and cult and points to where their theories might be underdeveloped. Walken is in many ways similar to Greta Garbo, Sontag’s quintessential camp actor. Like Garbo, Walken does not play characters, he plays himself. The direction of fan adoration is focused on Walken, not on the contact of the character he plays. Thus it is easier to respond to Walken on the screen as an “instant character” (Sontag, 286), and one expects no further development. Because audiences are responding to Walken and not the character, they often make the leap to his past roles. Watching Christopher Walken, one can often get the pleasurable sense of déjà vu that Eco attributes to cultish viewing. Christopher Walken is an archetype of himself. Finally, Christopher Walken fans often disaggregate Walken films into the parts Walken is in and everything else. For example, the way the famous “Watch-in-my-Ass” monologue has been extricated from Pulp Fiction. This exemplifies Eco’s “Unhinging” theory: Walken causes films to become unhinged.

However, although Sontag and Eco briefly mention the community aspect of the cult and the camp, most of their writing seems to view these aspects as being located in the object. We think that the community surrounding the cult or the camp deserves more attention. Urban Dictionary’s definition of “cult”, for example, says a “film or book that has a large non mainstream following over a long period of time”. Here, the emphasis is on the following, not on the film or book. This could also certainly be said of the cultishness or campiness of Christopher Walken. Part of fans’ pleasures comes from their membership in an exclusive community of people who “understand” and are intelligent and devoted enough to recognize his sardonic and dry humor as a type of genius. Liking Christopher Walken is like sharing an inside joke among friends. There’s clearly a dialectic between who Christopher Walken is and the fan response to him that creates him as an object of camp and cult fandom.

Here are some questions we think come out of our fan artifact presentation and Tuesday’s readings:

1) Are campiness and cultishness the same thing?

2) How arbitrary are these definitions?

3) What is the relationship between the size of the object’s audience and its cult/camp status?

4) Does camp/cult mean “unskilled”, or does it require a certain aesthetic sensibility as Sontag claims?

5) Is there a difference between a cult object, a camp object, and a fan object?