What kind of fan am I?

[sistermagpie]

I just came across this fabulous quote from teratologist about analyzing the Re-Animator movies. Re-Animator being a movie that contains such classic dialogue as, "Who's going to listen to you? You're a talking head."

Teratologist says:

Re-Animator, Bride of Re-Animator, and Beyond Re-Animator are arguably the films most likely to cause a prominent American author to spin violently in his or her grave. They're based on the works of H.P. Lovecraft, but they contain very little by way of Deep Thoughts About Man's Place in the Universe and a whole lot of the sort of zombies that Shaun of the Dead was sending up. They are close to the epitome of dumb entertainment. I love them, and the reason I love them is because I can readily dissect them.

And like all dumb, 'it's just entertainment' entertainment, you arguably stand a much better chance of seeing where the collective head of some portion of society is really at by dissecting these works than by dissecting works that were written by self-conscious types with one eye on the critics. It's like observing critters in the wild instead of in a cage in the lab - if the (cue Marlin Perkins/ Mutual of Omaha Voice) Magnificent, Solitary Author is pursuing his or her life cycle blissfully unaware of the people hanging around in the background with lab coats and cameras, s/he will give us a truer picture of what material emotionally resonates with that portion of the public that thinks they just want to be entertained. If you dissect Umberto Eco and J.K. Rowling, you'll learn what Eco thinks from Eco (and that's fun), but you'll learn what's lurking in the hindbrain of Western society from ripping apart Rowling, precisely because she is under the impression that she is writing something that isn't very deep, and therefore isn't working to censor or fancy up the things she just assumes are true about society - and because we have evidence that these unfancied-up hindbrain thoughts resonate with millions of people throughout the world.

If that isn't absolutely fucking fascinating, and a real pleasure to figure out, I don't know what is.

Ah,

Being a "fan," I've realized, really has nothing to do with being a fan in terms of loving or hating something, since fans are known for ranting as much as raving. There's a reason comic book guy's trademark line on The Simpsons is "worst [insert thing here] ever." Me, I've never been much for squeeing. Which is not to say I look down on it. It's just not something I get into. I get into analyzing stuff in...whatever way it is I analyze it.

To give you an idea of what I mean, once a friend of mine grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me because I was working myself into knots trying to work out the hidden meanings of Grease 2, and looking that closely at anything starring Adrian Zmed was just wrong. I just can't help it. I guess it surprises me when anything like this is questioned in fandom because I always thought fandom was where you went when you did stuff like that. You leave the larger community because you're a geek and nobody else likes this stuff, and you find people who are interested in discussing whether Scully got her cross for Christmas or for her 15th birthday and what difference it makes. Maybe you could even get into an argument about it.

In fact, I assume this must be what makes one a "fan" because it's sometimes the only definition I fit. At the moment I seem to be in the HP-fandom, yet I've never been a fan of the books in terms of, you know, really liking them. That's not a dismissal of the books as crap or something that sucks. They're just not books I ever enjoyed that much. They're not a personal love, book-wise. But there was stuff in them I wanted to talk about with people, so I wandered onto the Internet and found other people who liked talking about them too, with me. It seems silly to say I'm not in the fandom, exactly, even if I got into it in a strange way.

I've been thinking, though, about being a fan and how fans shouldn’t judge books on what they should be, according to us, but on what they are. I think that's true--it's a losing battle anyway. How can you judge something for what should have been? I remember saying that plenty of times in LOTR fandom regarding the movies--you can't judge the movies that got made against some fantasy movies in your head that would have been perfect but we'll never know. Otoh, I'm surprised by what sometimes seems like the idea that it's wrong to use a story to discuss your own opinions on something that story brings up because, I guess, to me this is part of fandom and part of what makes people love a book. If I'm talking about LOTR, for instance, I would presumably talk about what Tolkien seems to be saying about the world and things he believes to be true. In my experience as somebody who writes and edits for a living that's a big part of what stories are; a way of communicating an idea to someone. And as teratologist so brilliantly puts it, this is sometimes most obvious in fun stories where you just go with your instinct. I know my agent has pointed out things that are "my thing" that I write about, conflicts that interest me, values that come up again and again. Authors are often pretty open about things like this if they're called on it. Maybe they didn't intentionally set out to say, "This is what I believe," but when asked they often will say, "Well, yes, I guess I do feel that this is so..." Or maybe they'll explain how you misunderstood--that happens to. But there's a reason people make jokes like, "You've read one Thomas Hardy you've read them all." Holly Lisle puts it like this

Writing fiction is standing on the edge of the abyss of ignorance, looking across at the cliffs on the other side, and saying, "With nothing but words, I am going to build myself a bridge that takes me from here to there . . . and when I'm done, other people will be able to cross over that same bridge." It's an act of ultimate hubris, but of ultimate courage, too, because the abyss can eat you, and will if you slip.
So which bridges are worth building? You can't cover the whole abyss. You can run a thousand lines from one side to the other if you live long enough, and you won't even cast a shadow on the voracious ignorance that lies beneath. All you can do is span the darkness with your slender threads, and build them strong enough that people can traverse them, and make them interesting enough that people will take the risk.
Which bridges are worth risking life and limb and hope and soul to create? Only those that take you to someplace you have not yet been.
And how do you decide which bridges those might be? You ask yourself the following question: To what questions in life have I not yet found a satisfactory answer?

Sometimes having your manuscript analyzed --and here I think Original Writing is very different from fanfic because for some reason having someone else's text can remove you from view just a bit--is very much like a therapy session.

It's pointless, therefore, to say that any author should have written *our* story instead of his or her own. The same brain that created the characters and the beginning is going to write the ending. Ultimately that will probably make for the best story it can be, I think. But at the same time, it surprises me when it seems like this means somebody can't argue with whatever point of view seems to be being put forward. For instance, plenty of people read LOTR and remain completely convinced that Sam was the True Hero in the sense that he should have carried the ring to Mount Doom, and if he had he would have been able to destroy it because of his humble good-nature (already proven when he carried the ring briefly before). I've had this discussion with people before. To me, the idea doesn't work--nobody could destroy the ring, any lone ringbearer without a companion wouldn't have made it, there's a reason Frodo was right for his job and Sam was right for his job, yadda yadda yadda. But the point that person is arguing, imo, isn't so much that Tolkien wrote the wrong story the wrong way, but that they see and organize the world very differently. For them it's not just that they want Sam to be the big hero because they love him, but because that would say something about life that validates the way they see life. For them, there will always be that phantom ending, because it is the true answer to the questions the author raised.

That, to me, is part of fandom too. Probably more so if you're dealing with any canon that isn't finished, since we don't know really know what the author is saying until the author says it. It seems impossible to have a fandom without it, really, since fandom is not just about interaction between audience and story but also a community of people interacting with each other through the story. I think that's why, in my experience, people tend to gravitate towards people who respond similarly to the canon, because this is often because they have similar ideas about other things. Mostly everybody I was close with in XF fandom loved Mulder, and thought the idea of The Enemy as The Other was a lie, because the monster was always reflected in us. It seems impossible to think you'd bond with someone over such an abstract thing, but I think it just came out in what you talked about. In LOTR fandom I made close friends with hobbit-folk who liked talking about compassion--it's not all that different. It's easier when your canon happens to share the same priorities, but we don't always get to pick the canon that draws us. But fandom usually thrives on just these kinds of disagreements.

Comments

[black-dog.livejournal.com]

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. :)

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

Actually I would agree about Re-Animator being exactly what it intended, but having not seen the sequels I can't say that line is wrong. Heh--in fact, I remember seeing that movie right after 2,000 maniacs, so compared to that it was quite polished!

I may have made the alternate reading of LOTR more rigid-sounding than it is, but I'm not sure. It's not always about being unable or unwilling to understand the author's own pov. In speaking to people about the LOTR ending, for instance, it didn't seem like it was always that people felt this was the way Tolkien *should* have written it (unless people were just being snarky and saying, "I can't stand that Frodo; push him over a cliff, Sam"), but more that they felt it was a given that this other possiblity was true because that's the way the world worked.

Sometimes that works out into a reading where the person claims this is what the author meant. For instance, I remember reading something where the critic felt that what Tolkien's point was not that Frodo did the right thing in showing compassion to Gollum and so that carried him through when he inevitably failed, but that Frodo made a mistake in not letting his humble servant carry the ring. Frodo was too proud, so almost blew it and that's why he was kind of punished.

Part of it is probably emotional--you like a character and you want him to be important and the best. But part of it is I think not getting or not going along with some of Tolkien's own ideas, like it's just hard to not think that optimism and competence is what one should aspire to. You're almost discussing two different levels at once. On one hand you can be talking about what happened in the story or what the author intended, on the other you're talking about...truths you believe to be self-evident or something. Unfortunately, when people conflate the two you sometimes get into this weird place where somebody seems to be saying that if they're right that this is what a particular story is saying, then they're right about the world. Does that make sense?

[black-dog.livejournal.com]

It does make sense, and for me, at least, it brings to mind some examples that might at first seem a bit disconnected. But the key phrases here are, first: it's not just that they want Sam to be the big hero because they love him, but because that would say something about life that validates the way they see life. And then: if they're right that this is what a particular story is saying, then they're right about the world.

We might be talking slightly at cross purposes, here, and if I'm misreading you I apologize. But what's intriguing me here is the whole phenomenon of people being unable to assimilate threatening world-views. When I was an undergraduate, I tried to take an economics course and recoiled from it. It just seemed full of poisonous and evil assumptions! I absolutely could not tolerate it or get into it at the time. Now I would see it just as an intellectual problem, a series of hypotheses or models worth testing empirically, even if I had emotional or moral feelings about their implications.

I also remember, late in college, talking with a friend about a third friend who was determined on a very high-powered business career. "He just wants to hang out with the people who run the world," I said, kind of facetiously. And the person I was talking to got very upset about that, was obsessed with denouncing the "falseness" of our mutual friend's ambition, insisted that there was no such thing as a category of people who had real economic power, who had to be reckoned with in that way. I can't really convey her argument because I never found it coherent, but it was clear that she was feeling very threatened and offended and hostile.

I just find this an interesting phenomenon. At a certain stage of life, perhaps a certain stage of personal development, ideas and empirical generalizations about the world can be highly threatening, or highly reinforcing, in a way that has little to do with their demonstrability, and more to do, perhaps, with one's urgent personal efforts to develop coherent and tolerable hypotheses about how the world works. I'm not judging or condemning; it's an interesting thing for what it says about human nature, and, thankfully for rational discourse, I think it's eventually transcended. But it's a phenomenon worth noticing and naming. And since we're sharing a fandom with a lot of very young people, it's an issue that comes up with time to time in critical analysis.

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

I do think youth can be a big part of it, definitely--and also I've noticed even with myself that sometimes you might not even realize you're doing it. In that book The Alienist I remember there's a moment where the Alienist character refers to some kind of fallacy he realizes he's accidentally committed, which is one where you sort of assume something about your experience that is personal is universal. In his case, for instance, he's dealing with a killer with an abusive mother. But he assumes the killer must have had no mother to have been abused, because his experience growing up was that his father abused him and his mother tried to protect him. Intellectually he knows that this does not have to be the case for everyone, but it's not something he thinks about when he jumps to his conclusions. shusu explains it well below when she talks about a phantom limb and accidentally hitting something personal.

When you're dealing with a writer or fiction it can maybe be even more strange, because the writer's going to be working on his/her own assumptions. So maybe what's close to that person's heart is not close to your own. The point the author is making might be something different than what you're hearing.

In fandom it's best when we can have discussions, imo, where two people can really talk about where they're coming from and both examine what their biases are and why. I know I find it really exciting.:-) Like recently I was talking to somebody who struck me as really out there--I couldn't get into her mindset at all. But we didn't disagree on everything. It was more we had things we agreed on and just jumped off them a certain way. I feel like this is something that's becoming more evident in HP fandom lately--it seems like different people have opposing views when it's really more like we probably agree on most core principles but stress different aspects of them or something.

Of course you'll never figure that out if you're threatened by the mere idea that someone else could think different than you do, and many people are literally threatened by that. It's something a lot of people luckily grow out of, but maybe not all. Some people do seem to find it more disturbing to really believe that somebody else doesn't agree with something they think is a foundation of truth. Like this person I was talking to tended to even use very absolute language that appealed to a common sense everyone shared: everybody knows basic right and wrong; some people are just evil. It wasn't that she never made sense, but the way she was seeing things just didn't seem to allow for differences between people, either subtle or large.

[black-dog.livejournal.com]

Oh I didn't mean to suggest, by any means, that we ever entirely grow out of unexamined irrationalities or blind spots. I think this is, specifically, why argument and debate is such a joy, and can be such a process of self-discovery through engaging other people. And part of the fun is just speaking frankly enough to reveal those blind spots, so they can be more effectively targeted by one's opponents. What I'm talking about, really, is more the phenomenon of "immunity" to argument, an absolute resistance to engaging contrary ideas. Which is a much narrower issue, and maybe wasn't your own point, so we may be off on a private tangent of mine. :)

The case of reading is an interesting subset of the general argument, because if you let the text stand in for the author's argument, you and the author don't really get to engage in a back and forth -- the text is just there, and you have to make the best of it. (Which may be one reason why talking about texts with other people can seem like such an exhilarating supplement to reading them.) And yes, there are cases where you and the author are so far apart that it's just hard to engage the text. I always find that depressing and disappointing, partly because of my master working hypothesis that the author is always onto something I'm not. But sometimes a text just falls flat for a particular reader, despite the best efforts. And sometimes I'm even inclined to sadly drop my master hypothesis and decide that the author is probably an ass, after all -- though that's usually about a feeling that you totally understand them, that you've been there yourself and found it to be a false or dishonest place.

But I agree that the great fun of any interaction, and the ultimate source of almost all comedy, is the fact that very often we are not hearing or seeing what other people are saying. And I agree with you that sometimes that perception of that failure can really set people off in an unproductive way in argument -- it's as though, you're free to disagree with me, but at least acknowledge that you hear me! And if you don't, then grrrrr!

I guess what I want to make a distinction between is the failure of communication and the refusal of communication, if that makes sense. And things that fall under the heading of refusal are, I admit, things that personally I am not at peace with, things that I have unhealthily intense feelings about even now. Probably because I see them as the root of fundamentalisms and intolerances and interpersonal abuse of all sorts. I find I am happy to confront alien and strange opinions but am frustrated by failures of dialogue, a failure of commitment to a basic mutual acknowledgment and engagement. For example, it should be possible at least in principle for a discussion to change my mind, to secure at least conditional assent to a proposition if one's arguments are persuasive enough -- which makes the contest interesting, because of course often one tries and loses. But the flip side of "I'll believe whatever I need to" is "anyone can believe whatever they want," which is just as wilfully nihilistic, I think. I sometimes get impatient with perspectives that seem to radically deny, just as a matter of will rather than argument, the value of argument itself, reducing it to an exchange of equally valid opinion rather than a process of weighing relative evidence and persuasiveness. Though a rigorous argument to that effect would be fun to engage. :)

I agree that argument is necessarily an open process, unending, yadayada. But scratch a relativist, and I think you will often find a disappointed metaphysician still bitter about losing divine access to the truth, and haunted by the idea that the only alternative to an ironclad guarantee is complete nihilism. And that, I think we'd both agree, is naive.

Hmmmm, I sense we are both, at a subtextual level, riding our own favorite hobbyhorses here, and it's kind of nice to trot along these paths with you once again! :)

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

*Hops on hobbyhorse* Howdy, pardner!

What I'm talking about, really, is more the phenomenon of "immunity" to argument, an absolute resistance to engaging contrary ideas.

I do think that definitely exists as well. I sometimes wonder if this can be a skill that people fail to learn when they can, and then they wind up just unable to engage contrary ideas. Like, I've met people who seemed literally incapable of seeing things from a different pov, and more than once I learned they'd been raised or still were a religious fundamntalist. Being taught that there is one relatively simple truth and that it was evil to doubt it, and that one should see anyone challenging it as the enemy, seemed to seriously affect one's ability to engage contrary opinions on any subject. My roommate works in education publishing and so sometimes runs into this problem--like sometimes she's not allowed to use the word "imagine" and fantasy as a genre is right out. (So they wind up teaching kids about the fantasy genre using the "Arthur" books, which are completely realistic stories except that Arthur looks like an anteater.)

And sometimes I'm even inclined to sadly drop my master hypothesis and decide that the author is probably an ass, after all -- though that's usually about a feeling that you totally understand them, that you've been there yourself and found it to be a false or dishonest place.

Yeah, and then there's always going to be other people who are in that place now and think it's great.:-) There are of course times when people think the author is saying something s/he isn't, like the time Neil Gaiman said he was thought to be making a very specific statement that had never occurred to him, but usually this sort of thing comes from reading a whole book or lots of work by that author and just getting where they come from.

Really, no matter how many characters a writer creates underneath they're all the same person, coming from the same head. An author can imagine him/herself as a different person with different values and a different personality but ultimately the author's limitations are their characters' limitations, and the author's blindspots are their blindspots. You can't write something you can't imagine yourself. It's like you were saying about Stephen King (and if you'd like to elaborate on that I wouldn't mind...;-) and how it's just after a while some basic ideas about how he sees the human race etc. can't help but become clear.

And things that fall under the heading of refusal are, I admit, things that personally I am not at peace with, things that I have unhealthily intense feelings about even now. Probably because I see them as the root of fundamentalisms and intolerances and interpersonal abuse of all sorts.

ITA. Sometimes in fandom people seem to be unwilling to hear what you say, and other times for some reason they can't. Other times, though, I know I've felt like if we could just get past what we superficially feel is being threatened about our ideas we'd see that the other person isn't really disagreeing with us but forcing us to think them through more thoroughly. That won't necessarily lead to the idea that everybody can think whatever they want and nobody can know what's right--it may just lead to you keeping your same ideas but making them more complex.

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

(con't)

But that can be hard to get across to people--I know I've had long discussions with people where, like, ten long posts in I'll finally be like, "Oh! Now I get what you're saying!" and see that they're right and I've been off-base all along, or just not really understanding what they were saying. There are some basic areas in HP fandom where so often it seems like people are either constantly creating strawmen of the other side to knock down (so you get posts about how it's so stupid that X group of fans says something that they never said but makes them sound really dumb) or allowing themselves to argue on the other person's terms so they're making themselves sound like they're saying something they're not--something closer to the strawman, in fact. Sometimes it's just more difficult to really get across what you're saying...

...actually, it always reminds me of this drawing. (http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~cfs/305_html/Gestalt/Woman.html)this drawing. So you get two people arguing that the woman is ugly or beautiful without realizing they're seeing two different women. No wonder people so often say, "Are they reading the same book I am?" In a way, they're not. But they still are. Confused?

I sometimes get impatient with perspectives that seem to radically deny, just as a matter of will rather than argument, the value of argument itself, reducing it to an exchange of equally valid opinion rather than a process of weighing relative evidence and persuasiveness.

Argh, yes. Especially when the person starts out claiming their stance is the best supported and then reaches for "my reading's just as good as yours" when they discover they really can't support it the way they'd like. Sometimes they'll throw in an accusation their free speech is being infringed as well, I've noticed. On a basic level, of course everyone's reactions are their own, but if you're trying to discuss a text with someone you can see why a reading that convinces a lot of people because it can be shown to be supported by the text is different than one that convinces people who happen to find that reading appealing for personal reasons.

[teratologist.livejournal.com]

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.

That's an interesting point, although I would argue that it's not necessarily an either/or proposition. The fact that the director was engaged in at least some meta-commentary on the genre is definitely true. At the same time, with some elements, it's hard to tell without getting inside the director's head whether the film is being unconscious in its own right or reflecting the extremely unconscious way those topics are often treated in the zombie genre as a whole. In the infamous disembodied head scene, there's obviously commentary going on, for instance, but is the choice to have Herbert West experimenting on the household cat also commentary, or just a reflection of the fact that cats are standard props to have around in this sort of film (and what does that convention say?)

I probably could have made an even better case for some of the other film adaptations of H.P. Lovecraft's work, but I've never been able to sit through any of them.

[black-dog.livejournal.com]

You raise an interesting question -- what, exactly, is the process by which a reader or viewer infers sophistication in a work that cultivates a deliberately "naive" surface. Not to be flippant, but maybe there's a clue in your last sentence -- "I've never been able to sit though any of them." -- A sophisticated director just does "naive" better, in a more fun way, than a truly naive one.

I think you just sense a consistent "rightness" in the effects, a controlling intelligence that takes maximum advantage of the possibilities and doesn't falter. The cat may be a common trope, but has anyone else used it to such memorable effect -- first to establish West's creepy disregard for boundaries, then for over-the-top zombie!cat action?