Since the early 1970s, film and television fans have made short films of their own, evolving a form of underground or ‘guerrilla’ filmmaking that draws its inspiration, characters, settings and themes from films such as Star Wars (1977) or television series such as The Prisoner, Star Trek or Xena: Warrior Princess. Sometimes these fan films involve scripted performances; more often, they consist of extracts from a source text which are re-edited to form new narratives. They are shown at private gatherings, conventions and, more commonly these days, are available online for download. Such texts occupy a liminal area between production and consumption, industry and audience; they disrupt culturally inscribed expectations about the antagonistic relation between, and mutual exclusivity of, the commercial mainstream and the underground.
In the writings of scholars such as Henry Jenkins and Constance Penley, derivative fan-produced texts are discussed as interpretive and creative reclamations of beloved cultural texts and of cultural production from the tyranny of the culture industry (which, crucially here, profits from but does not care about its products). But such notions of creative fan practices as modes of heroic antagonism are, I will argue, largely a construct of scholarship. As most fan websites demonstrate, fans knowingly and enthusiastically support the culture industry that produces their beloved objects. As producers of their own creative texts, fans demonstrate not the status of the radical outsider but rather a sense of involvement that refuses any absolute distinction between commercial culture and the culture of everyday social experience. Fan productions, I suggest, are less a remedy for the failings of official ‘cult’ culture than a reflection of the very basis of its appeal; they are neither ‘resistant’ nor ‘oppositional’ but integral to commercial culture’s operations and emblematic of a commercially inflected culture of interactivity.
The flawed, unforeclosed and fantastical texts beloved of fans appeal precisely because they are flawed, unforeclosed and fantastical; their explicitly unfinished nature offers fans broad scope for creative intervention. Such interventions may be made for their own sake – for the sheer pleasure of creation – but they are usually also intended for an audience. In some instances, fan producers have even more pragmatic ambitions; the films and other cultural texts they produce are not creative responses to any official text but appropriations of its imaginary as inspiration and raw material for projects intended to catapult the fan producer into a Hollywood career. The goal is professional, mainstream filmmaking; the hijacked cult fiction is simply a resource. In this chapter, I investigate how media and scholarly constructions of fans as ‘deviant’ and ‘resistant’ consumers function to assert, police and uphold opposed categories of official and unofficial culture, production and consumption, the mainstream and the underground. Fan culture, I will argue, is a liminal phenomenon that confounds the very boundaries that define it and serves as a reminder that not-Hollywood is not the same thing as contra-Hollywood.
PREDATION
There is definitely a possibility that I will be killed in my attempt to get Reagan. It is for this very reason that I am writing this letter now…
This letter is being written only an hour before I leave for the Hilton hotel. Jodie, I’m asking you to please look into your heart and at least give [me] the chance, with this historical deed, to gain your love and respect.
I love you forever.
When John Hinckley shot and wounded Ronald Reagan in 1981, the incident looked at first like a political assassination attempt. But the subsequent investigation and trial revealed neither a disaffected voter nor a professional assassin; instead, the would-be killer was a disturbed young man acting out a violent fantasy built around the 1976 film Taxi Driver. Obsessed with actress Jodie Foster, Hinckley had been stalking her for some time before he finally tried to gain her attention and love by enacting his own version of Taxi Driver’s fictional Travis Bickle’s (Robert De Niro) attempt to kill a senator. At Hinckley’s trial, his defense counsel’s closing argument described his actions as ‘those of a totally irrational individual, driven and motivated by his own world which he created for himself, locked in his own mind, without any opportunity to have any test of those ideas from the real world because of his total isolation.’2 In the news reports published at the time, Hinckley was represented as the epitome of the deranged loner obsessed with celebrity and desperate to turn his dark fantasies into reality. He was a Killer Fan.
The murders of American television actress Rebecca Schaeffer and ex-Beatle John Lennon by stalkers, the stabbing of tennis player Monica Seles by a deranged supporter of Steffi Graf, the mass suicide of members of the heavily Star Trek-influenced Heaven’s Gate cult and countless similar – though usually less deadly – incidents have all been, in Henry Jenkins’ words, ‘explained according to a stereotypical conception of the fan as emotionally unstable, socially maladjusted, and dangerously out of sync with reality.’3 Such events are as rare as they are extreme but, predictably, they account for almost every occasion where fandom makes the news headlines, with the effect that whenever fandom enters the public domain it seems to be in connection with madness and violence. The vocabulary and conventions used in such reports repeatedly outline a personality profile that blurs together social inadequacy, delusional psychosis and fandom, as if they were equally weighted aspects of a single psychopathology. In this paranoid, media-constructed world-view, fans are always loners and losers, trapped in a perpetual adolescence, emotionally and mentally volatile, incapable of distinguishing between fiction and actuality. They are constructed as fantasists, fanatics, obsessives, erotomaniacs, deluded individuals reacting violently against a world which refuses to conform to their fantasies. Instead of describing mentally disturbed individuals whose veering insanity has settled upon a particular celebrity or cultural text, media accounts imply ‘that there is a thin line between “normal” and excessive fandom’4 by continually recycling a stereotype of the fan whose devotion has erupted into an inevitable telos of violent enactment. Murderous delusion ceases to be the affliction of a particular individual and instead becomes both symptom and signifier of fandom itself, both cause and effect of fans’ apparently excessive and deviant responses to cultural objects.
The sinister stereotype of the delusional predatory fan reflects not only the details of specific, isolated cases but also a wider uneasiness about fandom’s unruly relation to the boundaries that regulate popular cultural consumption. Like the media scares around films such as Child’s Play (1988) and Natural Born Killers (1994), which identified ‘copycat crimes’ as evidence of cinema’s occult power over vulnerable audience members, accounts of celebrity-stalkers, killers fans and mimetic crimes reflect anxieties about the uncontrollable and unpredictable consequences of the media messages that saturate the cultural sphere. In this light, media fans seem wilfully to disregard the unwritten rules that regulate cultural consumption, engaging in aberrant practices that bespeak an irrational and excessive engagement with and investment in devalued cultural objects such as celebrities, pop music, television series, films and ‘trash’ genres such as science fiction, fantasy and horror.
Fandom is here interpreted as an over-attachment to the childish world of play and a refusal of fully committed participation in the ‘proper’ and ‘serious’ adult world of responsibility, pragmatism and economic productivity. As Jenkins observes:
Whether viewed as a religious fanatic, a psychopathic killer, a neurotic fantasist, or a lust-crazed groupie, the fan remains a ‘fanatic’ or false worshipper, whose interests are fundamentally alien to the realm of ‘normal’ cultural experience and whose mentality is dangerously out of touch with reality.5
Not content simply to passively consume what commercial culture provides, fans make unauthorised and ‘inappropriate’ uses of cultural texts, reading them in ways that seem alien to non-fans and threatening to a culture industry that has a vested interest in controlling the meanings that consumers make of its products. Fans combine conspicuous, enthusiastic consumption of official texts and spin-offs with their own creative and interpretive practices. Fans are viewers who do not merely watch films or television programmes but also write fan fiction and cultural criticism, produce fan art, scratch videos, websites and so on, and who seek out other fans with whom to share their enthusiasm. Such activities violate culturally constructed and carefully policed distinctions between make-believe and reality, play and work, childhood and adulthood. Fans are distanced from ‘ordinary’ consumers because their modes of consumption are considered excessive. Fan-producers do not qualify as ‘genuine’ artists or auteurs because their creativity is regarded as derivative, amateur and non-profit-making. No matter how great fans’ expertise, they are not considered aficionados because their specialised knowledge accrues to demeaned popular cultural objects rather than to the valued high culture of opera, literature or art. Fan critics are not considered scholars because their subject matter is deemed trivial, their expertise subjective rather than critical and their knowledge and analyses valueless without the validation of formal training and a formal context. Fans dedicate their time, energy and resources to activities that bring no financial return, no tangible outcomes or benefits, but are rather an end in themselves.
There is also a wider narrative of anxiety at play here that reflects a growing uneasiness about the ubiquity and ungovernability of communications technologies. As digital technologies increasingly put the tools of production and information-access into the hands of the public at large, so come spectral and sinister forces to haunt the outer reaches of commercial and governmental control – the shadowy high-tech ranks of cyberstalkers, hackers, crackers and hacktivists, cyberterrorists and virus-writers. While the objectives and practices of these groups differ, all apparently possess both an illicit expertise and an agenda that is neither contained nor sanctioned by the ordinary channels of commerce or government. Individuals and groups that make ‘unauthorised’ uses of technologies, cultural texts and information occupy a volatile cultural space. They exhibit a mastery of technologies and information whilst remaining mobile and unaccountable. Fans also merit a place in this catalogue of liminal and contrary interventionist subcultures which disregard cultural and legal prescriptions that dictate and police who should make use of what resources, how and for what purposes.
The liminality of fandom renders it conceptually transparent and uncertain, its epistemological evasiveness a vehicle for fearful and/or political fantasies projected upon it from without. Its liminality is seductive, a quicksilver play of possibilities allied to the subversive glamour of transgression. But, like all transgressive phenomena, its endless deferral of final meanings renders it susceptible to meanings imposed upon it from without. Its ambiguities attract interpretations dedicated to categorisation; it must be diagnosed, fixed, brought into certain relation to the categories it confounds. It must be contained within the formal binaric structures that organise and fix hierarchies of production and consumption.
SEDITION
The 1990s saw the publication of a number of studies of fan cultures by scholars such as Penley and Jenkins, whose analyses explicitly reject notions of fandom as psychopathology and instead emphasise and celebrate its unruly creativity. Drawing upon wider associations of fandom with unauthorised, illicit engagements with popular cultural texts, these writers reconstruct the ‘deviant’ fan as a maverick folk hero whose creative and interpretive interventions constitute strategies of resistance against capitalism’s colonisation of and control over popular culture. Penley draws upon de Certeau’s ‘politics of the everyday’ to argue that the fan practices of interpretation and creative intervention are ‘tactics’ which ‘are not designed primarily to help users take over the system but to seize every opportunity to turn to their own ends forces that systematically exclude or marginalize them.’6 Fandom retains something of the edginess and danger attributed to it by the ‘deranged fan’ model, on;y here its ‘violence’ is not directed towards the bodies of celebrities but rather is an activism directed at the authority, if not the systems, of commercial producers and texts. In order for this formula to work, fans must be positioned outside the gates of official culture, where they are at once disempowered and rebellious subjects. The twin themes of agency and powerlessness run throughout Jenkins’ Textual Poachers:
Fandom constitutes a base for consumer activism. Fans are viewers who speak back to the networks and the producers, who assert their right to make judgments and to express opinions about the development of favorite programs.… Fandom originates, in part at least, as a response to the relative powerlessness of the consumer in relation to powerful institutions of cultural production and circulation.7
Fans remain ‘losers’, trapped at the wrong end of a massive power differential; but here they are at least valiant losers, doomed Davids firing their slingshot at an imperturbable Goliath. There is an old mythology at work here, a romantic re-casting of the fan as heroic underdog engaged in pitched battle with more powerful enemies. This story of fandom is part Beowulf, part Class War.
Just as the work of Penley, Jenkins, et al. retains a sense of fandom as ‘deviance’ by setting fandom apart from ‘legitimate’ modes of consumption (i.e. those sanctioned by a broader cultural consensus about how texts are to be received and used), so too does it reassert boundaries between fandom and the culture industry, consumers and producers, between amateur enthusiasts and the slick machinery of professional commercial production, readers and unassailable texts. It is a widely accepted tenet of cultural studies that category boundaries are artificial constructs that dissolve under scrutiny, false and rigid structures inscribed upon continuums in order to fix hierarchies and inhibit movement across them. But in ‘resistant’ models of fandom, these boundaries and categories are restored in order to project a radical politics of opposition onto fandom. Fans, according to this model, cannot interact with fictions generated and circulated by the culture industry. Rather, they must react to texts already constituted and fixed in their final form, always exterior to the objects with which they seek intimate connection, able to participate in cultural production by ‘scribbling in the margins’ of the text but not to affect its substance since the text is always already complete in itself before it enters the public domain. It may be ‘poached’ or ‘scavenged’ from only after the fact, its constituent elements appropriated as the raw materials for fans’ own visions, but the text itself remains discrete and inviolable. It must remain intact if is to be opposed; resistance requires an inflexible object to push against.
John Fiske notes a contradiction at the heart of ‘resistant’ models of fandom:
Fandom… is a peculiar mix of cultural determinations. On the one hand, it is an intensification of popular culture which is formed outside and often against official culture, on the other it expropriates and reworks certain values and characteristics of that official culture to which it is opposed.8
Fandom is here constituted as a collision of the ideological meanings ascribed to it. Ascriptions of ‘resistant’ or ‘oppositional’ motives to fans serve to snatch fandom back from its boundary-confounding liminality, harnessing it to a politics that prefers subversion to collusion. The object is to instate fandom as a species of counterculture, with fandom clearly positioned as the desirable ‘other’ set against the bad object of commercial cultural production.
PHANTOM MENACES AND DIGITAL CINEMA
There’s a city in the clouds
Where they’re keeping my crew.
A Jedi’s gotta do what a Jedi’s gotta do.
Darth Vader, I’m coming for you.
Star Warz Gangsta Rap (2000)9
Fans have always produced creative and critical texts of their own. Penley describes this phenomenon in terms of an active, dynamic folk culture that refuses a passive relation to commercial culture and goes beyond a politics of interpretation. Making a case study of Star Trek ‘slash fiction’ (i.e. fan fiction that proposes an erotic relationship between two characters of the same sex, taking its name from the slash in ‘Kirk/Spock’ or ‘K/S’ erotica), she argues that fans
are not just reading, viewing or consuming in tactical ways that offer moments of resistance or pleasure while watching TV, scanning the tabloids, or selecting from the supermarket shelves.… They are producing not just intermittent, cobbled-together acts, but real products (albeit ones taking off from already-existing heterogeneous elements) – zines, novels, artwork, videos – that (admiringly) mimic and mock those of the industry they are ‘borrowing’ from while offering pleasures found lacking in the original products.10
Penley’s suggestion that slashers respond to a ‘lack’ in the original products, answering it with products of their own, is a telling one. As in other studies of fan cultures, fan productions are interpreted entirely in terms of fandom; they are creative responses that owe their genesis solely to their creators’ devotion to the source text. Official cultural products remain at the heart of this ‘shadow cultural economy’,11 which evolves around, draws upon and responds to them. However, as I will suggest below, it is equally possible to argue that fan productions are not an attempt to address failings and ‘lacks’ in official texts but rather are a reflection of the possibilities presented by them.
The nature, quality and dissemination of fan-produced texts have depended, in large part, upon the technologies of production and systems of distribution available to their creators. In Textual Poachers, Henry Jenkins describes how, in pre-Internet days, print copies of fan fiction and fanzines were distributed among fans by ordinary mail. Penley observes how, at one time, an anti-professional fan ethos upheld an ideal of amateurism: ‘the strong pull towards “professionalism” is described by fans in terms of getting “hooked” or “contaminated” by the writing and editing process.’12 But times and technologies change. Most fan-producers use the best of whatever equipment is available to them in order to create the most polished products they can. The arrival of affordable VCRs, portable video cameras and basic home editing suites allowed fans to tape, re-edit and dub films and television series. Video technologies proved both cheaper and far easier to use than the old Super-8 film cameras that preceded them as domestic production tools. From the outset, ‘scratch’ videos (in which clips are edited together to form a new mini-narrative, essay or themed compilation over which, usually, a music soundtrack is dubbed) have been the most common form of fan ‘film’ production. These were screened at conventions and other gatherings and copies sent out, usually at cost price, to fans who requested them. For obvious reasons, they achieved only very limited circulation.
For Fiske, the key differences between official culture and the ‘shadow cultural economy of fandom’ are
economic rather than ones of competence, for fans do not write or produce their texts for money.… There is also a difference in circulation; because fan texts are not produced for profit, they do not need to be mass-marketed, so unlike official culture, fan culture makes no attempt to circulate its texts outside its own community. They are ‘narrowcast’, not broadcast, texts.13
The two major distinctions identified by Fiske are, then, the amateurism of fans versus the profit-making imperative of the culture industry, and the means and breadth of their circulation and distribution. Once again, the liminality of fandom is contained through the imposition of binaries (amateur versus profit-making, narrowcast versus broadcast) that uphold ideologically inflected and clear-cut oppositional distinctions between different zones of cultural production.
Digital technologies represent a quantum leap in the domestication and democratisation of the means of production and distribution. For a relatively tiny amount of money, anyone can potentially become both producer and distributor of their own films. Equipped with a reasonably good PC, a video card, some editing software and a basic level of expertise, fans can upload official films or television series from an ordinary VCR and digitally rework them to produce an original variation on the source material. More sophisticated creations – involving animation, or special effects or scripted, live-action filmmaking – require only some additional software or a digital video camera. Of equal consequence are the distribution and promotion possibilities presented by the Web. Where once fan-produced films reached only a tiny audience of other fans, the Web and streaming technologies such as Realplayer and Quicktime now allow fan-producers to archive their films on websites where they can be accessed and downloaded by anyone. Digital technologies have immeasurably increased the size of the audiences for such films. While these audiences are still nowhere near the hundreds of millions who watch blockbuster Hollywood films or syndicated television series, they are nevertheless substantial, as are their implications for clear-cut binaric distinctions between ‘producers’ and ‘consumers’.
Successful crossovers from fan to professional production are of course rare, but by no means unheard of. Alan McKee describes how a number of fans of the British cult television series Doctor Who went on to write the official series’ novels, edit the official magazine, script episodes and, in one case, even produce the series.14 Melissa Good, a popular author of Xena: Warrior Princess fan fiction, has achieved success on a number of levels. Her ‘über-Xena’ novel Tropical Storm has been published and film rights purchased by a production company. (‘Über’ fan fiction draws inspiration from ‘official’ texts but radically transforms their fictions, changing characters’ names and identities, relocating them to different times and places and engaging them in original storylines.) In 1999, Good was contracted by Renaissance Pictures to script three episodes of Xena: Warrior Princess. She now works full-time as a professional television scriptwriter in Hollywood. Rap artist Bentframe’s Star Warz Gangsta Rap, for which Allergic to Life Productions made an animated music video, attracts thousands of visitors to his MP3 site, earning him revenue both from the number of downloads – for each of which Bentframe earns a small MP3 royalty – and through sales of CDs of his music advertised on the site.
Troops (1998) is a Cops-style Star Wars spoof which documents an ordinary evening on the Tattooine beat for Imperial Stormtroopers, complete with droid-stealing Jawas and a domestic dispute involving a young runaway named Luke.15 Created by cel-animation archivist Kevin Rubio for $1,200, Troops proved a massive hit when Star Wars fan website theforce.net archived it for download. Drawing upon characters, settings and events from the Star Wars films, Troops is precisely the sort of text that gets described as a creative reworking of a beloved cult object: a fan film, a creative engagement born of love and shared with other fans. However, Rubio himself reveals a rather different and more worldly motive: ‘It was designed to get us attention and to get us some work.’16 In Rubio’s case, the bid for professional recognition paid off:
George Lucas, the Jedi Master himself, is a fan. Mark Hamill called to set up a personal screening with Rubio.… After Troops was posted to the Star Wars fan page www.theforce.net, traffic to the site increased by 500 per cent. All of which explains why three talent agencies and six production companies, including DreamWorks, have called to set up meetings with Rubio. ‘It’s brilliant for the money,’ says Roy Lee, director of development for the production house Alphaville (Michael). ‘If he could do this with $1,200, what could he do for a million?’17
Matthew Ward, the 21-year-old writer/director of another Star Wars-inspired short film, presents a similar case. Ward’s Death of a Jedi (1998) was made for an Introduction to Film and Video class he took at college.18 Its success won Ward an internship with Industrial Light and Magic (an affiliate of Lucasfilm). Tellingly, Ward explains his film not in terms of his Star Wars fandom but in terms of his love of filmmaking:
Death of a Jedi wasn’t made to make a statement about film-work but instead to show how a couple of guys could tell a story.… After you’ve worked so hard creating the idea, placing the actors, shooting the scene, editing, post, etc… seeing the piece in its final state, as you once imagined it, to see the idea come to life… that’s the most gratifying part of all of it for me.19
To those motivated to see it, and who make a point of looking at it from particular angles and in the right light, these short films may be interpreted as instances of guerrilla cinema, constructed from the illicit booty of smash-and-grab tactics that raid popular culture for resources. But such interpretations, which seek to valorise fandom as a species of counterculture, emphasise fan creativity as acting both through and against official culture and constituting an alternative to it. They uphold notions of official and unofficial, insiders and outsiders, ‘them’ (the producers) and ‘us’ (the consumers), the exploiters and the exploited, commercial culture and folk culture. Such binaries obligingly position capitalism as something ‘they’ (the producers) do; they attribute motives of cynical profiteering to Hollywood and of pure love to fans, as if there could be no middle ground, no interactivity and no movement or affinity between the realms of commercial and underground production.
COMPLICATIONS: THE CONTINUED UNRULINESS OF FANS
How one reads the status of Rubio, Ward and their Star Wars-inspired films depends upon how much weight one attributes to their fandom and how much to their filmmaking. Are these primarily fans who have made derivative films and crossed over into the mainstream, or are they rather aspiring filmmakers whose fandom suggested the subject matter of their films and the direction of their careers? It hardly needs to be said that most of the ‘creative talent’ working in the culture industry consists of people who chose their careers because they had a love of film or television – because they were, in some sense, ‘fans’.
Producers who operate outside the mainstream of commercial culture – whether they be fans, independent filmmakers or any other of the myriad practitioners and creators commonly described as ‘alternative’ or ‘underground’ – frequently become the objects of romantic valorisations by scholars, who heroise and celebrate them as Robin Hood figures whose practices and works rescue popular culture from the greasy grip of capitalist enterprise and restore it to ‘ordinary people’. It is no surprise that some of the creators of so-called ‘alternative’ cultural objects choose to see themselves in the same flattering romantic light, as cultural outlaws, rebels, freedom-fighters, agents of ‘underground’ and ‘resistance’ movements, as if making a low-budget film were somehow equivalent to smuggling Jews out of Nazi-occupied France. Online fans, in particular, are not disempowered radical outsiders but – like Net users in general – a demographic that is predominantly white, middle-class, technologically literate and educated to degree level or above.20 They represent a population group that is neither capitalism’s detritus nor its bête noir but rather its bedrock.
One question that emerges from cultural studies’ conflation of disparate concepts, interpretations, ideologies and practices under the banner of ‘fandom’ is whether the term ‘fandom’ itself remains of any use. What, exactly, is described by a term that equally embraces crazed celebrity-stalkers, insatiable consumers, obsessive collectors of trivia and merchandise, cultural dupes, textual poachers, nerds, resistant readers and consumer activists? What use is it to talk about ‘fan practices’ when this concept accommodates a catalogue of ‘activities’ as diverse as cultural criticism, web design, story-telling, socialising, shopping, quasi-religious worship, filmmaking, stalking and murder?
Ien Ang writes of
the fleeting and dispersed tactics by which consumers, while confined by the range of offerings provided by the industry, surreptitiously seize moments to transform these offerings into ‘opportunities’ of their own, making ‘watching television’, embedded as it is in the context of everyday life, not only into a multiple and heterogenous cultural practice, but also, more fundamentally, into a mobile, indefinite, and ultimately ambiguous one, which is beyond prediction and measurement.21
The problems that Ang identifies in concepts such as ‘the television audience’ and ‘watching television’ extend to the production and consumption of popular culture as a whole. Our relation to commercial culture is neither monolithic nor binaric but complex, fluid and contradictory. Commercial culture is not exterior to our lives but woven into their fabric in countless ways; the strategies we use to negotiate its omnipresent and multifarious influences are not inherently strategies of resistance, which require us to take an impossible position outside our culture-saturated realities, but those of interactivity and informed involvement.
This is not to suggest that different zones of cultural production do not exist, or that ‘power’ is not unevenly distributed among them. But ‘culture’ is volatile and dynamic in ways that confound the stasis of the binary models that structure so much of our understanding of it, and which wishfully identify the ‘phantom menaces’ of resistance movements, countercultures and undergrounds wherever cultural production occurs outside the mainstream. As stated in the introduction to this chapter, not-Hollywood is not the same thing as contra-Hollywood.