Just a tangent -- when we were talking about "quality lit" a few weeks back, I was thinking about Re-Aanimator, and about the fact that Pauline Kael loved it and reviewed it favorably in The New Yorker. And her message was sort of: this movie was so perfectly what it intended to be, so perfectly fulfilling and fun on its own precise terms, that there was a kind of achievement in that that was worth recognizing and jumping up and down with pleasure about.
I'm not sure I would agree with teratoligst that the movie was either naive or unconscious in its effects. (I haven't seen the sequels, though.) Kael's point would be that the director knew exactly what he/she was doing, and did it well.
I'm puzzled by the idea of judging a book by what it "should be." The type of misreading of LOTR that you describe just seems pathological. I mean, it's one thing to disagree with a vision, or to criticize it, or even, fanon-style, to invent an alternative that you find more satisfying. All of that is huge fun, anyway. But to be unable to even assimilate a work in the first place suggests a psychological defensiveness and rigidity more epic than any Journey through Middle Earth.
I very much liked your idea, that the genesis of true fandom is that you find a body of work to be discussable, to provoke strong agreement and disagreement. It seems odd to have to defend this perspective against the sort of obsessive appropriation of a text committed by someone who only can read it in one highly personalized and distorted way, but I suppose that's a sociological observation about fandom, and one of the less pretty ones. :)
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Date: 2005-03-14 03:07 pm (UTC)I'm not sure I would agree with
I'm puzzled by the idea of judging a book by what it "should be." The type of misreading of LOTR that you describe just seems pathological. I mean, it's one thing to disagree with a vision, or to criticize it, or even, fanon-style, to invent an alternative that you find more satisfying. All of that is huge fun, anyway. But to be unable to even assimilate a work in the first place suggests a psychological defensiveness and rigidity more epic than any Journey through Middle Earth.
I very much liked your idea, that the genesis of true fandom is that you find a body of work to be discussable, to provoke strong agreement and disagreement. It seems odd to have to defend this perspective against the sort of obsessive appropriation of a text committed by someone who only can read it in one highly personalized and distorted way, but I suppose that's a sociological observation about fandom, and one of the less pretty ones. :)