Carrying On Like Mortal Enemies
On the afternoon of May 26, 1987, a New Jersey state trooper doing routine stops on the Garden State Parkway pulled over a rental car carrying two men. The infraction was an open can of St. Pauli Girl beer, part of a six-pack from a nearby convenience store. When the window was rolled down, the trooper smelled marijuana. The driver admitted there were a few joints under his seat.
“Hands on the hood, feet back, and spread ’em,” the driver later remembered the trooper saying. Then he radioed for backup. Handcuffing the driver took two pairs of cuffs; he was a very big man. The troopers then pulled the passenger from the car and searched his bag. They found a vial of white powder. The passenger was arrested too.
They were taken in separate cars to the police station, where the driver was identified as James Edward Duggan Jr., better known by his professional wrestling identity, “Hacksaw.” The passenger’s ID said he was named Hossein Khosrow Ali Vaziri, but even the arresting officer recognized the popular World Wrestling Federation character The Iron Sheik. The powder tested positive for cocaine. But within a few hours Duggan was released, and so was Vaziri, the latter after signing an appearance bond. They returned to their car and continued southbound to Asbury Park, where they were scheduled to beat each other up before a crowd of thousands.
Or at least, that’s the story according to Hacksaw. He claims the Iron Sheik had pressured him into a ride when they arrived at the airport together earlier that day. The beers were the Sheik’s idea. And Hacksaw hadn’t realized that drinking while driving was frowned upon in New Jersey, having just come from the more permissive Louisiana. He felt terrible about it.
Not so, claims the Iron Sheik in a 2013 interview. And after the arrest, he says, Hacksaw simply called his father, who happened to be the chief of police in the city of Glens Falls, one state away, and got them released. They made it to the match in time for its eight p.m. start and put on a great show in which he helped Hacksaw to a spectacular win. Then they got back in the car, bought another six-pack, grabbed some McDonald’s, went to a bar, and ended the night partying in a hotel room with some of their female fans.
It’s difficult to tell if the chasm between the two versions is a true difference in memory, or just another part of the stage character each performer had spent so long perfecting.
In the theatrical world of professional wrestling, Duggan was a “face,” short for baby face, a hero character. The wrestler the audience is supposed to root for. Despite a degree in applied plant biology, Hacksaw, the character he played for the World Wrestling Federation (WWF), had a brawny, patriotic, good-ol’-boy persona. He often entered the ring carrying a two-by-four piece of wood and an American flag.
The Iron Sheik was a “heel”—the character the audience was supposed to root against. Vaziri was an actual Tehran native who had spent time coaching the US Olympic wrestling team before joining the pro wrestling circuit. He had played a number of face characters, but eventually found fame as a heel by adopting a heavy accent, growing an evil mustache, and wearing a costume that looked vaguely Middle Eastern. The character successfully fed off anti-Arab sentiment during the 1979 Iranian Revolution and Iran hostage crisis; his gimmick was to antagonize fans with anti-American taunts before each match. It worked especially well when he was matched up with all-American faces such as Sargent Slaughter, Hulk Hogan, and Hacksaw.
In the spring of 1987, the two characters were supposed to be in the middle of a feud: the Iron Sheik’s evil foreigner versus Hacksaw’s red-blooded patriot. Just two months earlier they had faced each other in Wrestlemania III, a pay-per-view event that broke all previous attendance and revenue records. Several million fans watched the Sheik put his signature camel clutch hold on face character Jim Brunzell, causing Hacksaw to retaliate by smacking the Sheik with his two-by-four. There was what may have been a missed dropkick early in the match by another face against the Sheik, but the Sheik was able to “sell” the move anyway, reacting as though he had been badly hurt by a superior opponent.
For the two characters to now get caught together, in the same car, without some type of in-story plot device to explain it, was trouble.
Hacksaw expected the incident to blow over. He remembers telling his wife when he called that night, “Honey, we got busted today, but I don’t think anybody knows.”
She called him back the next morning at his hotel. “Jim, everybody knows! The phone’s been ringing off the hook here! All your friends have called to check on you, and it’s all over the news.”
Hacksaw called his father. Then he called Vince McMahon, the WWF’s CEO (and sometimes in-story face of WWF management). He was immediately put through. “Jim,” said the voice on the other end of the line, “what have you done to us?”
By the following week the media were reporting that both actors had been fired for “drug violations.” Newspapers around the country crowed. “[They] won’t be hitting each other on the head with steel chairs anymore,” gloated a column in the Chicago Sun-Times. “The ‘heroic’ Hacksaw and ‘villainous’ Sheik, who have been carrying on like mortal enemies in arenas across the country, committed the deadly misdeed of being caught having a good old time like a couple of buddies.”
At a TV taping in Buffalo on June 2, McMahon issued a furious warning to the remaining wrestlers. He pounded on his podium and exhorted them again and again: mandatory drug testing for cocaine would begin immediately, and faces and heels must absolutely shun each other in public. “This job is bigger than a six-pack and a blow job! Duggan and Sheik will never, ever work for the WWF again!” Of course, it’s unclear if the CEO was speaking in or out of character.
The word “kayfabe” describes the pretense that pro wrestling is a sport, not a performance. To maintain kayfabe is to stay in wrestling character at all times, and to insist on the legitimacy of its plot lines and trappings. At the time, kayfabe was the official policy for all WWF wrestlers, even though the choreographed nature of matches was an open secret. “Are those guys really going to kill each other like they claim?” “Is that dude in the mask honestly going to beat up the guy in the cape using a giant clock?” “Did he really just throw him into that rail and then jump on him, or was it staged?” “Is he actually hurt or just pretending?” “Is that real blood?” Without fans asking themselves those questions, even if only subconsciously, perhaps McMahon feared that the willing suspension of disbelief would dissolve.
Modern professional wrestling shares its roots with early traveling-circus sideshows and burlesque. It’s a theatrical performance that combines scripted plot elements, improvisation, soliloquy, colorful characters, and over-the-top physical choreography. While there is a real sport called wrestling where the goal is to use grappling and holds to immobilize an opponent, early on enthusiasts learned that it was safer, and more exciting, to turn the wrestling ring into a type of stage where a carefully scripted performance of athleticism could take place. For years, various promotional groups had employed casts of “wrestling performers” to choreograph battles against one another, each group with its own writers, costumes, and championship. When television went mainstream in American households, it was the perfect platform for wrestling’s storytelling. Such was the competition for airtime that soon there were only two major promotional organizations left. One of them was the WWF (now the WWE), majority owned by Vince McMahon. By the mid-eighties he had helped to convert wrestling from a circus sideshow into a huge cultural influence.
“Don’t they know it’s not real?” is the oft-repeated question. Of course the audience knows it’s not real. But what of it? Lawrence McBride has spent years examining pro wrestling culture. “It’s like sitting around and talking about Santa Claus not being real. Yeah, but that’s not the point. It’s not fun to sit around and talk about that. It’s fun to go to the show and cheer for the wrestler you like.”
When audiences see a magic show, it’s fun to pretend that the person on stage really is a sorcerer and to gasp at the miraculous feats. It doesn’t mean they truly believe that the laws of physics have been suspended. Pretending that the action in the wrestling ring is real is part of the experience.
“The thing about a wrestling show,” McBride explains, “[is that] you will go there and everybody in the audience [is] borderline uncomfortable. And they’re kind of joking, and they’re all cracking wise. ‘This is funny. Everybody knows this is fake. This is going to be a joke and we’re going to make fun of it.’ Then the show starts and every time—every time—within five minutes the crowd has gone through this complete change. They are just screaming. They want the good guy to win. They want to see the bad guy get annihilated.”
Fans of wrestling will sometimes go to great lengths to proclaim their belief in a fake reality. “They like to say, ‘What do you mean, fake? It’s not fake.’ Everybody has fun saying that,” says McBride. “They don’t believe that, but everybody loves it.” In one recent incident, the notorious heel Triple H stopped in the middle of the show and broke character to go comfort an upset child in the audience. He gave the young fan a hug and ruffled his hair. “Hey, buddy, it’s OK,” he told the kid. “I’m just playing around.”
Wrestling fans who understand what’s going on behind the scenes are sometimes called wrestling’s Smart Fans or, by some, Internet fans, since the rise of the Internet has contributed so much to their proliferation. Smart Fans appreciate not just the spectacle of wrestling, but the technical, literary, and dramatic challenges that go into staging and performing such an over-the-top theatrical production. They analyze and debate the techniques behind the wrestling choreography. When a performer falls to the ground, Smart Fans look for the tiny blade he’s using to cut his forehead to make the damage look more convincing. It’s Smart Fans who follow the plot leaks and who know what will happen in each fight. It’s Smart Fans who know which feuds are scripted and which ones probably represent real animosity. It’s Smart Fans who understand each performer’s backstory and the dramatic influences that shape his or her signature moves. As McBride puts it, they are the ones in the crowd saying, “Oh yeah, he’s on TV now, but remember when he was working in Alabama and his gimmick was being an evil dentist?”
Smart Fans are such a part of pro wrestling that the sport has developed a number of tongue-in-cheek in-jokes just for them. Throwing an opposing wrestler through a table without massive bodily injury would be a ridiculous, nearly impossible move in real life. So at least once during most pay-per-view wrestling shows, someone gets thrown through the “Spanish Announcers Table,” a trick table set up for the purpose of shattering into spectacular splinters while the commentators run for cover. It’s a running gag to pretend there is a “safe” table to destroy, rather than allowing wrestlers to throw their opponents through the English Announcers Table (which is, assumedly, more sturdy). Wrestlers sometimes even feign confusion if the Spanish Announcers Table somehow makes it to the end of the match intact.
Which begs the question, if everyone understands that pro wrestling is a show, not a contest, what’s in it for the fans?
Henry Jenkins, a legend in modern fan studies, has explored the issue over the last two decades. In the nineties he noted that wrestling gives its primarily male working-class audience an important outlet for storytelling and emotional release. It has all the hallmarks of a good soap opera, a traditionally feminine genre. The characters embody struggles of race, economic disparity, class, and sexuality. The narratives often reflect an attitude of anti-intellectualism; the good guys are simple and masculine, while the bad guys resort to trickery and cheating to win. All of this might feel comforting in a world that increasingly grants more status to brain over brawn.
Today’s pro wrestling fans reflect a much wider demographic, and that doesn’t even include the large audience of fans who enjoy it ironically. To label it as a “masculine melodrama,” as Jenkins did two decades ago, may still be accurate, but that isn’t all it is.
Wrestlemania!
Bar Nine isn’t quite full. At eight p.m. it’s still possible to flag a waitress and order wings (twenty minimum) and a Budweiser, although the place is filling up by the second. A part of the bar has been cordoned off with couches and a giant screen showing Wrestlemania 32, the once-a-year climax of a number of WWE storylines, seeded throughout the previous months. The bar audience is a mix of men and women, most in black T-shirts. There’s a group of well-groomed hipster men sharing a plate of wings toward the front.
On the screen, Shane McMahon is taking on the Undertaker in Hell in a Cell. In a nicely scripted interaction two months ago, Vince McMahon, Shane’s real-life father, agreed to give Shane control of the “Monday Night Raw” weekly wrestling programs if Shane could beat the Undertaker, a wrestler with a supernatural-themed gimmick. It may seem like an unlikely plan for long-term corporate business strategy, but in-story it makes complete sense. So far the gentlemen have beaten each other with a wide variety of metal objects (chairs, stairs . . .), and the action is getting tense.
Now Shane is climbing the outside of the chain-link cell wall! Ten feet up. Twenty feet up. “Shane, what are you doing? How much does your legacy mean to you Shane! Not this! Please!” shouts the announcer. “For God’s sake, get him down! What the hell is he thinking!”
“My God, is he going to jump?” shouts a hipster in the bar, jumping from his chair.
“No! You can’t do this!” yells the announcer. All the group near the front are out of their seats, frantically taking pictures of the screen on their cell phones. The women in the corner are hiding their faces in their hands.
“Dammit, Shane, stop it! Don’t do this! No!” the announcer yells.
He jumps! The Undertaker rolls out of the way at the last minute. Shane plummets into the announcer’s table, collapsing it into splinters. “For the love of mankind!” shouts the announcer.
“Is he dead? Is he dead?” shouts the hipster.
He’s not dead! The bar jumps to its feet shouting its applause.
Soon the match is over. Shane lies ostensibly broken on the mat. “Monday Night Raw” will remain, in-story, the property of Vince McMahon. A medical team, or perhaps a group of actors playing a medical team, rushes across the stage to place Shane on a backboard. But what’s this! As the crew hurries him toward the exits, Shane’s shaking arm is rising, rising in the air! He’s giving the crowd a thumbs up sign! “Wow!” says the announcer. “Wow!”
“Shane is, like, fifty! I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it,” murmurs the hipster.
The action in pro wrestling is scripted, but that’s not the same as safe. The hand signals and vocal cues the wrestlers use to subtly broadcast their intended choreography to each other in the ring can’t change the fact that it’s still quite dangerous. Few long-time wrestlers make it through their careers without at least one or two body-shattering injuries, and deaths are not unheard of. Legendary wrestler Bret Hart writes in his autobiography, “The most important rule of all was to protect my opponent, not myself, because he was putting his trust, his life, in my hands.”
The authenticity of wrestling as a spectacle resides not in whether or not it’s a sport, but in the veracity of the acting. Sometimes the only way to make something look like it really hurts is to make it hurt. When a wrestler is thrown into a table, even a trick table, trying to land carefully can ruin the whole thing.
“The Smart Fans have this deeper aesthetic sense of, ‘Look at this guy, he’s bleeding now.’ You know that this is a staged event. We know that he willingly did that, and he’s doing that for us. It’s almost moving, this sort of love for the guys who are willing to injure themselves quite dramatically. They’re like a network of people who go out there every month and put their bodies through these incredible performances for the show, as a gift to their fans,” says McBride.
All Fans Are Smart Fans
“Cultural dupes” is the phrase that Marxism assigns to consumers who desire an item solely for its context. According to the theory, consumers are like little children: they accept marketing claims at face value. They’re not sophisticated enough to realize when they’re being fooled. Consumers have no idea that their decisions are being manipulated for profit by those in control, people who wish to distract them from more important issues, like overthrowing the kaiser. In espousing the cultural-dupe theory, Marxism, that most anticlassist of philosophies, perhaps betrays a little latent classism. It is condescending to assume that consumers only feel as they do because they don’t know any better. While fans do rely on branding—both internal and external—to inform their allegiances, they’re certainly not mindless puppets to it.
All fans are, at some level, Smart Fans. They understand that the objects they care so much about have been carefully constructed to appeal to them. Fandom entails choosing to buy into a context that is, at least partially, always fiction. Darth Vader isn’t really trying to take over the universe. The singer Johnny Cash wasn’t actually an impoverished and brokenhearted convict cowboy, no matter how many times he sang about it. We know that Oreos decided to launch an organic version of the company’s classic sandwich cookie because it saw an unfilled need in the marketplace, not because it suddenly decided that its customers deserved better ingredients.
Even the most hardcore of fans understand that the world will not end if their favorite band breaks up. But it’s certainly enjoyable to pretend it will. In early 2015 it was fun to insist, in the most dramatic of terms, that if the singer Zayn Malik left the boy band One Direction, it was the end of the universe, and there was no reason to go on living. Of course, it wasn’t, and there was; few people really believed that the laws of physics would be suspended because of the professional choices of any one singer, no matter how dreamy. If the hyperbole found in blogs and social media following his departure had been true, there would have been few survivors.
Almost all fandom involves some form of making believe. In the 1995 novel City of Dreadful Night the main character believes that he is being stalked by the spirit of Count Dracula. And yet he grudgingly admits to himself that if he wanted to, he could choose not to believe it. This is probably a feeling familiar to many a fan. Most are aware that the object they have such real, deep feelings for is very rarely, in the strictest WWE sense, real. They understand that they are being “duped” and they find value in playing along.
As long as they are getting something important out of the relationship, fans are subconsciously making the decision, moment by moment, to ignore the inherent commercial reality of their fandom. Authenticity is a fan group’s most dangerous Achilles’ heel, but when deployed correctly, it makes fans complicit in their own enjoyable self-deception.
Chris and Cliff, Together at Last
In late 2012, State Farm brought together two long-lost twin brothers separated at birth: Chris Paul, the Los Angeles Clippers NBA player, and Cliff Paul, his identical twin brother and State Farm Insurance agent. Chris grew up to be an NBA star, three-time NBA assists leader and respected team player, while Cliff ended up helping his fellow citizens connect with quality insurance coverage.
In a commercial, fans see Cliff being separated from Chris at the hospital, their independent (but seemingly equally happy) childhoods, and their modern-day reconnection. Cliff and Chris pass each other in an elevator and experience a moment of recognition. The announcer explains, “When assisting is in your blood, you know it.”
Viewers were enthralled—was Cliff really Chris’s long-lost brother? Fans tweeted “I want Cliff to be my agent!” and “How do I hire Cliff Paul?” Sports websites and public forum sites saw message threads popping up with titles like “Is Cliff Paul real?”
By early 2013, Chris and Cliff had fully reconnected, with Chris tweeting out thanks to Cliff for his pregame pep talks. NFL player Drew Brees posted a congratulatory message to the two brothers. TNT basketball analyst Kenny Smith remarked on meeting Cliff in person. Fox sports broadcaster Erin Andrews called it the “year of #twinsanity,” thanks to the brothers’ reunion. Cliff and Chris appeared together at the 2013 NBA All Star Weekend. By the 2014 event, Cliff himself appeared on stage with entertainer Nick Cannon.
In later spots, Cliff and Chris appeared together teaching their sons—who were exactly the same age—about assisting in their similar roles in their two similar NBAs, the National Basketball Association and the National Bureau of Assists. With each appearance, Cliff Paul’s notoriety grew. He amassed tens of thousands of Twitter and Instagram followers and posted daily on both platforms.
Of course, Cliff Paul is very obviously Chris Paul donning a pair of black-plastic-framed glasses. It seems unlikely that many people were truly taken in by the tongue-in-cheek nod to the Clark Kent/Superman–style transformative powers of eyewear. And in fact no true deception was ever really contemplated: as author Chuck Klosterman pointed out on ESPN radio, “Why do they both have the last name ‘Paul’? They were adopted by different families who both had the same last name?” Danger Guerrero, on Uproxx, noted, “Uhhh wouldn’t Cliff’s birth mother have known she had twins?”
Cliff became a cultural phenomenon nonetheless. He had a Nike Jordan shoe (Chris Paul’s shoe, but in Argyle). He made an appearance in NBA 2K14, the 2K Sport’s best-selling NBA video game, where the brothers could play one-on-one against each other. At one Clippers game, attendees held up thousands of Cliff Paul masks in the stands.
But why? Why care so deeply about the “twins,” when they were so blatantly and openly the product of a campaign to promote auto and homeowners’ insurance to basketball fans?
The character is the creation of the New York–based advertising agency Translation. Marcus Collins, who was involved with the project, believes the attraction came largely because the question of whether or not Cliff Paul was real was engaging. The concept was to keep fans guessing. Hardcore fans know everything about a player—there’s no way they would be unaware of a twin. But introducing him as a “long-lost” brother led to a potential gap in knowledge, a gap that introduced the tiniest possibility of reality. Building credibility through on-screen appearances together and tweets from reputable celebrities made the possibility even more real.
Fans were given the ability, the gift, of questioning their take on reality, even if only a little bit. No one ever hid the fact that Cliff was a made-up celebrity—the New York Times ran an article on the “fake twin” campaign before it even launched—but fans enjoyed participating because it was a fun and engaging narrative.
Blurring the line between real and not real, true and made-up, is the purpose of play. It allows us to imagine unlikely scenarios and say, “But what if . . .?” Traditional wrestling and car insurance are both a little boring. But playing with the audience’s concept of authenticity distances products from the rules that normally apply. In effect, it frees both objects from their “adult status.”
The novelty of a mundane concept suddenly transformed into something new and delightful is a powerful engagement tool. On a neurological level, when humans are confronted with an unexpected change in a familiar pattern, their brains experience a spike in dopamine, the happiness chemical. The more dopamine in our brains, the less we’re likely to get hung up on a product’s more potentially troubling attributes, such as how much money Vince McMahon is making off each bloody forehead and sprained ankle. Playing with concepts of authenticity decommercializes a product and makes it safe for fans to personally identify with it.
Of course, encouraging an audience to pretend that there’s more to a fan object than just its monetary potential can be double-edged. Right now the self-deception serves a happy purpose. Later on, who knows?
The Bobble Hat Crisis
The TV program Firefly began airing in September 2002. By the holidays, it had been canceled. Its creator, Joss Whedon, had imagined a seven-year run, but the Fox network had barely shown two-thirds of the first season before pulling the plug.
The show takes place on a renegade starship, its captain and crew lying low after supporting the losing side of a multiplanet civil war. Although their rebellion against the callous bureaucracy may have failed, their spirits remain uncrushed. Now they eke out a vigilante existence at the edges of society through shady (yet moral) activities, still hanging onto their freedom through a mix of wits, resignation, honor, and bloody-mindedness.
Despite its early demise, the show made quite an impression with fans. Whedon, who had already hit it big with shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, had brought much of his loyal fan group with him, and Firefly’s Space Western premise brought in new devotees. After the cancellation, fans mounted an intense lobbying campaign to convince Fox to change its mind. They raised money and wrote postcards. Fox was unrepentant, and no other network wanted to buy it. Firefly, it seemed, was gone for good.
Yet for years the fandom lived on. Fans dubbed themselves “Browncoats” after the nickname for the losing side of the show’s central military conflict, and spread the word. Message boards, social groups, and websites multiplied too quickly to count. Fans raised money for charity and created fan films and documentaries. The first run of the DVD of the series sold out within twenty-four hours of its preorder announcement.
In 2006, Universal Pictures decided to fund the feature-length movie Serenity, which brought back the cast for a storyline based on what would have been the series’ second season. The movie was a financial wash, making just $39 million gross ticket sales against an estimated production cost of exactly that amount, but the fans didn’t seem to mind. By definition, Firefly fandom appeals to people who love a good lost cause. As Entertainment Weekly put it, “Martyrdom has only enhanced its legend.”
Firefly fizzled a little post-Serenity. Then, in 2012, Fox seemed to remember its long-ignored investment.
In the show, crew member Jayne Cobb is a muscly tough guy who, in one unaired episode, unexpectedly shows his softer side when his mother sends him a silly hand-knitted hat. It’s orange. It has earflaps and a bobble. For years, Browncoats had been knitting their own versions to wear to conventions, meet-ups, or, occasionally, even outside. The hat had become an important tribal marking to help them identify fellow enthusiasts. Because the episode was never aired during the initial broadcast, only serious fans understood the symbolism.
Like the crew they admired, a number of Browncoats scraped by through the marginal commerce of selling hats to each other. At one time, a search for “Jayne hat” on the handicrafts website Etsy turned up dozens of entries. eBay had even more. Even Whedon weighed in on the cottage industry in knitwear, explaining the love of Jayne’s hat at Comic-Con: “[It’s] the fact that it’s got that homemade feel, because people can make it themselves. Also, it’s very flattering.”
At the beginning of 2012, Fox licensed the hat design to Ripple Junction, an apparel company, which began mass production of Jayne hats. It sold them to the large-scale e-retailer ThinkGeek. Its version was both nicer and, for the most part, less expensive than any of the handmade hats available.
Shortly thereafter, the listings for homemade hats began disappearing from Etsy. The timing was certainly suspicious—fans asked, was Etsy following through on requests from Fox or Ripple Junction about the unsanctioned headwear? Soon it was confirmed, as store after store received notices from Etsy informing them that Fox’s intellectual-property director had demanded the removal of their products. The notice also included a warning not to discuss the situation with others. “Are You A Firefly Fan Who Makes Jayne Hats? Watch Out, Fox Is Coming For You,” warned a headline in The Mary Sue, a popular geek website.
Did Fox have the right to capitalize on a property that had so unexpectedly ballooned in value? Certainly. And it also had the right to stop others from doing so. Yet what ensued was an uproar that might seem disproportionate to the cause.
Fox had misunderstood the motivations of its audience. Fan activity had kept Firefly relevant throughout Fox’s decade-long neglect, and it was fan interest that had turned the Jayne hat into an iconic symbol. Some of the Etsy hats were destined for babies. Or chemotherapy patients. The craftspeople who found themselves targeted and penalized often knitted their hats from a place of love.
“I hope you are proud of yourselves,” wrote fan-store Firefly Cargo Bay on Facebook in a post that received more than 1,000 likes within a day. “I personally think you suck for even thinking of licensing the jayne hat. You. Just. Dont. Get. It.” Another fan complained: “They can be legally, morally, and ethically in the right and still have this stink to high heaven.” Even Adam Baldwin, the actor who had played Jayne so many years earlier, weighed in on Twitter, joking, “All Your ‘Jayne’ Hats Are Belong To Us!”
Most sellers, fearing legal action, removed the listings from their stores. The remainder renamed them with tongue firmly in cheek, branding them with headlines like “See Spot Run With Not Jane Hat,” “Ma’s Earflap Hat,” and “Controversial Hat With A Backstory.”
By early April, the outrage showed no sign of slowing. As a major retailer of the hat, a heavily criticized ThinkGeek felt the need to defend itself. “We just wanted you to know that Think-Geek had nothing to do with the C&D notices,” it pleaded on its company blog. Criticism continued. Shortly thereafter, ThinkGeek wrote a long entreaty to placate their fans, starting: “Browncoats, we hear your concerns. . . .” ThinkGeek had nothing to do with the legal notices, they said, but to assuage the outrage, the company opted to donate its profits from the sales of the hat to a Firefly-based charity called Can’t Stop the Serenity for as long as they stocked the hats.
It was a drastic step; ThinkGeek had helped to develop the hat with Ripple Junction. To forgo their profits on the Jayne hat effectively voided months of work. Yet, this financial hara-kiri may be all that saved ThinkGeek from more serious repercussions had the condemnation continued to snowball.
By targeting Browncoat hat sellers, Fox committed two major sins in the eyes of fans: They violated one of the fan group’s most cherished cultural norms, the ideal of the plucky misfit holding its own against a heartless bureaucracy. And they also violated the group’s social hierarchy. They were penalizing their very top-tier fans for, effectively, being overly loyal.
Although none of this was directly ThinkGeek’s fault, doubtless the website hoped that humbling itself would appease the browncoated masses. After all, they still had another two dozen Firefly-themed products in stock to sell to them.
Loyalty to the Message, Not the Medium
Fandom results from a tenuous bargain. Fans choose to buy into a premise only as long as it serves their needs. They actively decide if, and how far, they’re willing to be duped.
All fandom involves a willing suspension of disbelief. But no matter the level of loyalty a fan expresses for a fan object, the true loyalty lies with the concepts the object represents. These are two completely separate allegiances. Fans are willing to remain loyal to the thing they love only so long as they are not forced to confront its true commercial nature.
Even with a rich and well-developed context, few brands can brush off details that directly oppose the narrative they represent. When a chasm opens up between the values a fan object claims to embody, and the values of the fan object as a commercial entity, the balance is upset.
Firefly fans felt positively about the television show, a set of episodes with attractive actors, nice special effects, and witty repartee. But in the end they connected with the show’s theme of self-determination. Their emotional response was to its “victory of the underdog”–themed stories. As long as both content and philosophy were harnessed toward the same goal, fans were happy. But as soon as the two were in opposition, fans were quick to call foul. All fans are, at some level, Smart Fans. They can tell the difference between their two loyalties.
This tacit compromise underlies the outrage that occurs when a “feel-good” brand is accused of misconduct. Allegations of poor working conditions in factories owned by context-heavy brands such as Nike or Apple hit us hard, while the same allegation at, say, a paper mill or a copper piping factory might not. Both Nike and Apple go to great lengths to cultivate an aura of excitement, self-improvement, and wealth. There is something inherently inauthentic about juxtaposing those feelings with reports of impoverished or underage laborers.
Authenticity is the glue that allows fans and fan-object owners, two actors with potentially conflicting motivations, to unite toward a single cause. Brands that attempt to co-opt an existing fan group’s practices without taking on the core values of the group as well are doomed to controversy.
It is possible that no mass-marketed version of the Jayne hat would ever have sat well with Firefly fans, regardless of how delicately the marketing had been handled. Lip service rarely works because fans have made the most important investment possible: their personal sense of self. What might seem to the fan-object owner like a harmless commercial play can in fact affront a fan’s very identity.
Multiple fan objects can give someone the same sense of self, and it’s trivial for a fan group to jump ship to another fan object when betrayed. Every allegation of poor labor standards at a Nike factory is a boon for other fitness-lifestyle manufacturers, even those who aren’t necessarily designing sportswear. It is not hard to imagine many a Browncoat in the wake of the hat debacle deciding that Star Wars, with its similar narrative of space-aged rebellion and adventure, was more their style.
#DoingItWrong
Marketers who are more used to one-way communications may forget that, when a fan group has been insulted, it’s a far deeper issue than just antagonizing a customer. Fail a customer and she probably just chooses not to buy again. Insulting a fan group is a personal affront. Fans have the motivation, time, and social capital to fight back.
Audience engagement, encouraging users to participate in brand-related activities, is a magic box that, the theory goes, somehow transforms enthusiasm into dollars. Of course, in real life, it depends on the type of engagement and what it’s being used for.
“Use this hashtag on Twitter (or Instagram, or Tumblr, or Facebook) to share your stories about . . .” is such a common refrain that few marketers bother to ask what’s in it for the fans. Like authentic fan practices, the “use this hashtag” method relies on a fanlike activity the audience is already doing: sharing their opinions, participating in the context about a brand, and socializing with each other. Yet these marketing campaigns use an authentic fan practice for an inauthentic purpose. It’s a rare brand that anticipates making changes to its product or marketing as a result of customer tweets.
Most campaigns of this type are an attempt to turn fans into billboards. A self-aware brand may highlight the “best” stories it receives, thereby giving the participants status within the fan group, but even such half-hearted marketer responsiveness is rare. In general, the interaction serves no one but the brand owner. Like Jayne’s hat, a real fan practice has been co-opted for corporate use. Target the wrong audience of participants, and they will get angry.
The fast-food giant McDonald’s is a brand badly in need of popular support in the United States. Even its most committed fans may refer to it as a secret vice or guilty pleasure. Falling sales, a volatile stock price, and the rise of healthier alternatives have forced the burger seller to scramble. A positive tweet from a respected friend could remind people that McDonald’s hamburgers are still around, and that lots of people do still eat them.
In 2012 the brand launched the hashtag #McDStories on Twitter. Even the most health-conscious among us might still have fond memories of attending a McDonald’s-themed birthday party as a child, or scarfing a McDonald’s burger with teammates after middle-school soccer practice. Each 140-character-long story posted by a happy fan to Twitter would propagate to that fan’s friend group and perhaps beyond. Just the action of “coming out of the closet” as a McDonald’s fan might influence others to try the food again.
The problem with inviting audience members to use their personal social networks for corporate exposure is that there’s no way to control what is in fact exposed. In this case more audience members semed to want to share unhappy McDonald’s stories than happy ones. Tweets ranged from the cautionary (“Dude, I used to work at McDonald’s. The #McDStories I could tell would raise your hair”) to the downright direct (“One time I walked into McDonald’s and I could smell Type 2 diabetes floating in the air and I threw up. #McDStories”). McDonald’s pulled their paid promotion of the hashtag within two hours, but, alas, the jeers took months to vanish. As Forbes put it, “Twitter has the audience with the most sensitive B.S. meter of any popular platform.”
Of course, any organization might attempt to push its own agenda on its audience, only to realize that the audience has a very different one. In 2014, the New York Police Department tried to polish its image with some hashtag outreach. #MyNYPD was supposed to act as a label for happy photos involving New York’s finest. Their audience disagreed, flooding the hashtag with graphic pictures of recent police brutality and violence. The reaction wasn’t totally unexpected, particularly because taking pictures of the NYPD was one of the very offenses that had, in some highly publicized cases, apparently been considered arrest-worthy.
To experience an authentic fan relationship, a fan object must acknowledge the real user experience and motivations of its fans, not the corporate fantasy of what that experience should be. Fans need to be understood, even in situations where there is no chance of catering to them. It is impossible to “sprinkle some authenticity” on a marketing technique.
Fandom at its best is a story of fan/fan-object collaboration, not co-option. A brand owner should adopt the perspective of a fellow fan, working together with his fan group to develop and support something they both feel deeply about. It doesn’t necessarily require in-depth ethnographic studies or complicated crowdsourcing platforms to discern how fans feel. Both of these techniques run the risk of “othering” fans, treating them like some exotic tribe who need to be carefully examined, labeled, and categorized.
Feeding Us Our Memories
One tactic might be to simply hire some fans and let them drive the interaction policy themselves. But an even better one would be for creators to work toward creating a fan object that they do, in fact, sincerely love and understand in a fanlike way. While that level of authenticity is rare, it’s still probably the best way to truly empathize with the real fan experience. Strategy that comes from a place of true enthusiasm and affection beats an outsider’s facsimile of it every time.
Like many transplants to New York City, Sarita Ekya and her husband Caesar spent their first few months living in their East Village sublet eating their way through the neighborhood.
“I was like, wouldn’t it be great if there was a place that did mac and cheese? There has to be one of those,” Sarita remembers saying. “Lo and behold, we started Googling around, and we’re like, ‘What? There’s no place that just does mac and cheese?’ We really fell in love with the idea.”
S’MAC, or Sarita’s Macaroni and Cheese, does one thing. Granted, it does a dozen variations of that one thing. In the early days, the line often went out the door of their New York City East Village location all the way down the block to Second Avenue. The restaurant would sometimes run out of food halfway through the evening.
Besides being filling and inexpensive, mac and cheese as a meal taps into a rich vein of cultural nostalgia. Whether it’s the blue Kraft box of macaroni or a favorite aunt’s secret recipe, the dish is thick with personal memories for many people. Strangers who have no intention of ever visiting the shop sometimes write Sarita to describe how much they love macaroni and cheese. “It’s a little bit intimidating. It’s a food that’s in their mind, or in their heart, or in their body. You have to live up to this expectation. It’s not easy,” says Sarita.
A few blocks to the east of S’MAC lies Melt Shop, one location in a growing chain of grilled-cheese restaurants. Its origin story is not quite as whimsical, but just as effective, as its comfort-food compatriot: entrepreneur Spencer Rubin and his then-boss were working at a real estate development firm while they spent their free time brainstorming new business ideas. Melt Shop was born.
Because grilled cheese mines authentic childhood nostalgia, Melt Shop too ended up benefiting from simple happy childhood memories. Familiarity is key to the concept. “I think that’s why we’re seeing a resurgence of all these familiar concepts in new forms,” Rubin says. “We always strive to create cool ideas with unique twists, but always keeping approachability in mind. We don’t want people to walk through our door and say, ‘Ah, that place is too fancy for me,’ or ‘Ah, that place is out of my reach.’ ”
All fandom, be it for a celebrity, activity, piece of content, or brand, has a strong element of nostalgia. The very definition of fandom involves activities that allow the fan to relive a pleasurable memory or association. Nostalgia plays a bigger role in some fandoms than in others—it’s arguably the primary driver of brand fandoms such as Polaroid instant film and Surge soda, but in other cases it is one among many purposes. Fans might watch baseball because they love the game, but they also might want to feel close to a family tradition, or enjoy critiquing the athleticism of the game, or comparing different stadiums’ hot dogs.
Fans understand the difference between a respectful attempt to invoke memories of childhood comforts and a cheap attempt to appropriate those same memories. The very nature of many large-scale fast-food chains often necessitates a militant level of secrecy in their ingredients, motivations, and practices, not to mention a complicated layer of corporate bureaucracy to organize the whole thing. It’s no wonder fans react so badly when those same corporations demand to know their customers’ most cherished thoughts and recollections.
The best way to handle nostalgia is to be completely up front about its intent. In fan situations, transparency very often leads to trust. It’s certainly not the only method, but for the vast majority of fan objects, the better fans’ understanding of the thing they love, the closer they can feel to it.
The End of Kayfabe
On February 10, 1989, WWF representatives testified to the New Jersey Senate that pro wrestling was “an activity in which participants struggle hand-in-hand primarily for the purpose of providing entertainment to spectators rather than conducting a bona fide athletic contest.”
In acknowledging the open secret, pro wrestling was finally choosing to be transparent about its use of artifice. They would never again be able to claim that wrestling was a sport, not a show. At the same time they would also be freed from many of the regulations that govern true sporting events, requirements to which they’d formerly paid expensive lip service. Sports are heavily regulated. Theater is not. Gone would be the extra fees on WWF television appearances; gone were the prematch physicals and state-licensed referees. A generation later, modern cynics analyzing the effect of deregulation have raised another point: athletes have to be free of performance-enhancing drugs; actors don’t. It’s difficult to know in hindsight what effect the 1989 testimony and subsequent deregulation had on any potential steroid inquiry, but, regardless, it would be fully four more years before there was a large-scale probe into their use in pro wrestling.
It was the beginning of a new golden age for pro wrestling; the nineties saw it become more popular than ever. Just two years after firing two of his top performers over “drug violations,” Vince McMahon had created a new wrestling, one that was even more in tune with the over-the-top athletic theater fans cared about. The fake veneer of competition was gone. The golden era of kayfabe was drawing to a close.
In 1996, Kevin Nash, a heel who wrestled as “Diesel,” and face Scott Hall, aka Razor Ramon, were in the process of leaving the WWF. It was an emotional time for those who had followed the two popular characters’ careers. On May 9, in Madison Square Garden, Diesel was wrestling his friend, the face Shawn Michaels, in a steel-cage match for what might be their last-ever event together.
Diesel was down, lying on the mat. Michaels stood over him in triumph. Then Razor Ramon entered the ring and hugged Michaels. At first it seemed that he was congratulating his fellow face on his victory. But no, here came Paul Michael Levesque, the dastardly heel who would soon become Triple H, also entering the ring, and he was hugging Razor Ramon too! And then Diesel, who only moments before had been writhing on the mat in agony, stood up and hugged everyone.
The four wrestlers—faces and heels—turned to each other and engaged in what can only be termed an emotional group embrace, heads together, arms tight around each other’s bulging shoulders. This was no lonely car stopped by chance on an interstate. It was a deliberate break in character. They were friends, friends who would miss each other, and they wanted the audience to know it. They clasped hands and raised their arms in the air for a final curtain call, all four of them, faces and heels, together, as the crowd cheered and screamed.