Wither Fandom?

So it’s only five days before classes start up again, and as usual, I am madly trying to update my syllabus. What can I say? I’m a tweeker. If my syllabus were a celebrity face, it would look something like Michael Jackson at this point – reshaped, lightened in some places, darkened in others, unnaturally taut here, still a bit too slack there.

The problem with retooling – yet again – is that it often leads me in directions that I just don’t have the time to go in. Case in point. When looking for images of “Fame” and “Fandom” to tart up my webpages, I came across a film entitled Fandom that, by the look of the trailer, does much the same thing for fans that Trekkies did. Mocks them. Pathologizes them. Makes them objects of fear at worst and amusement at best, even as it sets out to “explain” them. And this is precisely what we set out trying to counteract when we began our own project. We wanted to “prove” (to ourselves as much as to others) that fans were intelligent, creative, big-hearted, passionate people and that fandom was not merely the bastion of nerds and basement dwellers.

I hope we’ve done that. I think we’ve done that. I hope that this semester I will finally be able to convince my students that fandom is not synonymous with the unmedicated. I hope I will have pulled the right bits taut so that the picture finally becomes clear – for their sake and mine.

Our Canadian Adventure – Part One

I don’t gush.  I’m not given to superlatives.  I don’t use words like “fabulous” or “awesome”.  Ever.  Which probably explains why I was left without words much of the time we spent on the Supernatural set on Friday.  It sounds inauthentic to say that everyone was kind, attentive, helpful.  It would sound hyperbolic if I tried to describe exactly how nice they were to us, how generous all the people we met were with their time and talent.   But to not be hyperbolic would be doing all those people a disservice.

And so I will gush.  And because I can’t seem to do anything lately without looking through a self-analytical lens, I will no doubt pick apart my own fraught relationship to the project that we seem to have brought to a conclusion this weekend.

Our hotel proved the first instance of the move to both squeal like little girls and take a step back and say “What?”. Academics, as a rule,  don’t travel in style.  (I still curse Chaucer for setting up the stereotype of the poor scholar who teaches for the love of the profession and not from any aspiration of monetary gain.  Thanks Geoff for setting the bar so damn low!!)  The hotel we were told to stay at proved the intimidating exception to that rule.  It was posh and I was not worthy.  The place announced its quiet mission to cater to those who were used to being catered to the moment the doors were thrown open for us.   As it turned out they were quite proud of their reputation of catering to the stars or those who just wanted to feel like stars by association.  We were informed in the “About the Hotel” literature that actors frequented the place and that if we wanted to see them in their natural habitat (ok, those were not the exact words used) then we need only hang out in the bar in the evening and wait.  Thrilling and puzzling at the same time.  Shouldn’t the presence of people who presumably want to lay low and relax after a long day of working remain discreetly uncommented upon, rather than be used as a selling point for the hotel?

Boundaries, once again, were becoming a theme.

Adventures to be continued . . .

Vancouver Dreamin’

Geometry fails. Every time we think we’ve come full circle, gotten back around to where we started, something happens to show us how wrong we were. Or perhaps once again, it’s language that fails. “Full circle” suggests that you’ve come back to the place you started, but that’s impossible (unless breakthroughs in time travel have been made that I am unaware of). The place you started is never a place you can get back to, in the same way lost innocence stays lost. It’s like finding out Santa Claus doesn’t exist or reading “Pierre Menard” for the first time.

The news that came on Friday night, the news we weren’t expecting and didn’t even bother hoping for, is a case in point. We’re heading to Vancouver again on Thursday, a little over a year after our last visit. At first blush it *feels* as if this is indeed “full circle”. The last time we were there was as fans and researchers. We’re still fans. We’re still researchers. But we have access now, and the process of gaining that access has changed us and the nature of the project. The place may be the same, but we’re not.

Vancouver gave us the name of the book, and the initial structure of the thing was decided while we sat in the airport on the way home, jacked on caffeine and the desperate need to process all we’d seen and done in a few short days, to talk it all out as quickly as we could, to put into words, to fix in place our experiences.

I’m wondering what this trip to Vancouver will give us – aside from what we already know it will. An interview with Jared and Jensen, a peek behind the scenes, perhaps another article for the magazine. And an ending for the book? A sense of closure?

Which gets me back to that circle, misleadingly holding out the possibility for closure that doesn’t really exist if points don’t meet, if the circle can’t be closed because it’s really not a circle at all. “Full spiral” isn’t an option. Geometry doesn’t allow it.

Do the aca-fans have a point?

I read a paper today from a student who was indignant about media bias and I found myself, strangely, asking him whether that was such a terrible thing? Aren’t we all biased, I asked. And hadn’t we grappled with the question in class of whether or not there was such a thing as unbiased writing? And yet, he resisted the idea that the bias could be so blatant, as if the more subtle variety would be the lesser of two evils? No, I wanted to scrawl across the paper – the more blatant the better!

Later I realized some of this may have been a defense mechanism. We’ve been at this “research” (I’m reluctant to take the quotation marks away – is real research supposed to be this much fun? Is it valid if it is?) for a year and a half, immersing ourselves in all things Supernatural. But there are times (ok, many times) when I question whether we’ve dug in a little too far, and wonder if that isn’t why all the aca-fans out there don’t keep that distance we were originally rebelling against for a reason. The anthropologists have gone native, we care too much, know too much.

At times like these, I berate myself for a while and then swing in the other direction. Do we need to be objective? Is it possible to write lucidly about something we love passionately? And if we don’t love it passionately, can we write about it at all? We’re still working these questions out.

Who we are and what we do.

The road so far . . .

The book is titled Stalking Fandom and that’s exactly what we’ve done for the last year and a half. We’ve been to fan conventions large and small, talked to bloggers, journalists, writers, directors, producers, actors, photographers, convention organizers, anyone and everyone we could get to who could give us some perspective on who the fans of Supernatural are and what they do. We’ve done silly things, embarassing things, amazing things. We’ve made some wonderful friends, and had our lives enriched in ways we could never have foreseen when we started this project. We’ve learned a lot about fandom and the people on both sides of the fourth wall, but we’ve also learned a lot about graciousness, generosity, and the kindness of strangers.

Now . . .