The Mainstreaming of Fannish Behaviour

[heidi]

Did you read the article this week about the upcoming episode of Cold Case which is based on a selection of Springsteen songs? The episode, news articles report, was written around, or based on, Springsteen songs through the ages.

An ex-jock sits around a bar talking about his athletic glory days as we hear "Glory Days." Four high school friends skip school and drive around listening to "No Surrender," a song about skipping school and driving around. A couple enters an unhappy marriage to the sounds of "Brilliant Disguise," a song about a young couple keeping secrets from each other. The husband leaves the wife and steals a car as we hear "Stolen Car," a song about... well, you get the idea. Though "Cold Case" takes place in Philly, the plot veers off to the Jersey Shore just long enough so "Atlantic City" can pump up a scene about a mob shooting.

Is this the commercial equivilent of songfic?

If someone told you they wrote a story about her family being the inspiration for The Graduate, and that in the movie version she'd be played by Jennifer Aniston, would you say "self-insertion, Mary-Sue"? Would you say "meta"? Would you say "Hey, that's in a theater near me right now!"

The person who wrote in to Since You Asked on Salon Magazine this week admitted to an obsession with celebrity gossip and perhaps an over-reliance on IMDB. The advice columnist responded by saying, Perhaps you could embark on something akin to fan fiction, using the gods and goddesses of our media world as characters in tales of your own creation.

Cary doesn't seem to be aware of the term RPF (real people fanfic, as I am sure some of you are aware), but could her suggestion be read as anything else?

Of course, movies that refer to other films are nothing new - remember Scream? And Miami Vice built a story around Glen Frey's Smuggler's Blues back in, what, 1984? 1985? And I've read novels with celebs are characters - one of my favorite books is Peter Lefcourt's Di and I, about a screenwriter who falls in love with - and runs off with - Princess Diana.

It's not something new to the mainstream. In my estimation (and YMMV) it isn't edgy or subversive, but I know others may disagree. If you still think that it is, why do you think so? In what context is it, because I am sure there are some. Is it the NC-17 arm of things that would still be deemed "unmentionable-in-public"? Or is it sort of like ordinary sexual behaviour before Kinsey - people didn't know what was normal, so they fretted that everything they did was abnormal, wrong, edgy or unmentionable?

Wow, I think this is the most meta I've posted in a year. Or at least six months. Anon posting is on, IPs are being logged but I promise not to check on anything that isn't a full-on threat of death or serious violence.

Comments

[photosinensis.livejournal.com]

If someone told you they wrote a story about her family being the inspiration for The Graduate, and that in the movie version she'd be played by Jennifer Aniston, would you say "self-insertion, Mary-Sue"? Would you say "meta"? Would you say "Hey, that's in a theater near me right now!"

The answers to those questions would be (in order): yes, yes, and I've even seen it.

[heybritney.livejournal.com]

I don't know if you ever checked out that broadway show, 'Movin' on'? It was essentially the same thing, but ballet with some one's music... i forget whose though.
i think what's so disconcerting about it is that it's so public. writing and sharing that stuff is stuff that people usually only keep in their own little heads, something that's private. not only the usually sexual content of it but also...
obsession is such a taboo thing in this culture, and sometimes i can't understand why. it's natural, we all do it and it's actually a good thing - obsession and passion is what drives the best accomplishments of the world, what creates successful people. it's just looked down upon so often, i think people are scared of the risk; of dedicating yourself so completely to something.
fanfic is an intersection of these two; the climax of awkward things that are just a part of human nature that we as a society have trouble coming clean about.
i'm fine with being absolutely obvious about the second one, i admit easily that i become obsessed by things, and who cares? it drives life for me. but the first one is still difficult... it seems personal; not something that i would feel sharing with the world.

[vampirespider.livejournal.com]

It's Billy Joel *g* And an excellent play.

Meanwhile, Sean Penn's 1997 (I think?) movie Indian Runner was also based on a Springsteen song. It's not a new thing, exactly.

[troubleinchina.livejournal.com]

I once read a short story that you may like, called "Once and Future". Without ever actually *stating* who it was, it was Lady Diana in the afterlife, being greeted by Merlin after he tragic death, and a reinterpretation of her life as the latest incarnation of Arthur. It took some really interesting views on things, and was a very nifty combination of RPF and fanfiction set in Arthurian legends.

[ginsu.livejournal.com]

Perhaps you could embark on something akin to fan fiction, using the gods and goddesses of our media world as characters in tales of your own creation.

Well, yeah, that's Valley of the Dolls, which sold about 25 million copies.

These days it would be even easier, because you could write it up with the actual celebrity names and then do a simple search-and-replace as your final step.

[cruisedirector]

David Thomson wrote a couple of Hollywood mystery novels starring John Huston, Ingrid Bergman, etc. They're great reads and very fannish.

I think the line between parody and exploitation is very thin when it comes to RPF. Legally I don't think anyone knows where it is, because no celebrity has ever sued a fan over RPF the way people have sued over having their heads affixed to naked bodies of other people (and won). I expect that sooner or later, someone WILL sue, and then we will see if a court rules that fiction falls into a different category.

I worry a lot about the lack of disclaimers and the blurring of reality and fantasy. I freak out when I read that people are writing 12-year-old Daniel Radcliffe getting raped by Alan Rickman and posting in public archives -- if anything is sure to get HP fandom slammed down by the studio, it's something like that. It troubles me that if you type Viggo Mortensen and Orlando Bloom's names into Google, you get RPF archives on the very first page of hits -- my kids could bump into that just doing LOTR research if I don't stand over them to make sure it doesn't happen.

And I've met enough people via RPF who are ABSOLUTELY CONVINCED that Elijah Wood and Dominic Monaghan are lovers, just because there is a public consensus that says so, that I find it a little disturbing, particularly when they accuse other people of being homophobic just for saying that they think it's possibly not true.

Of course, people do the same thing concerning Brad and Angelina via People Magazine innuendo, but I find that rather disturbing too...

[snorkackcatcher]

Perhaps you could embark on something akin to fan fiction, using the gods and goddesses of our media world as characters in tales of your own creation

A film I'd be quite curious to see:

The Kiss of Mary Pickford

That's all. :)

[cathexys.livejournal.com]

i'd certainly agree that RPF is nothing new either in the fans' fantasies of imagining themselves with the stars or dreaming about the stars with one another...the fannish (as in media fandom) mainstreaming of RPF (which is when I'd begin to situate RPF as part of FAN FICTION) was indeed quite belated considering the amount of fiction that had been created and shared, het and slash.

meanwhile, the self-referentialiy and merging of fiction and reality comprises two of the central features of postmodernism (incidentally--or maybe not so?--about as old as media fandom :-)

as for the songfic...that's really interesting but is that really new (i'm sure we can find examples where songs and song lyrics have driven the narrative?)...personally, i'm more fascinated by the media convergence of making fans and our behavior and products part of the commercial process...and am not sure how i feel about it!

[ex-greythist387.livejournal.com]

meanwhile, the self-referentialiy and merging of fiction and reality comprises two of the central features of postmodernism (incidentally--or maybe not so?--about as old as media fandom :-)

Yes, certainly, for postmodernism--but though none of these characters has sex with another, Shakespeare installed Gower as the Chorus in Pericles (http://www-tech.mit.edu/Shakespeare/pericles/pericles.1.0.html), Chaucer alluded pretty clearly to Gower (his friend and literary executor) in the Man of Law's Tale, there's Caro Lamb's Glenarvon and other romans à clef that walk a dangerous line, lots of writers all over time offer dedications to patrons (or would-be patrons) by name which slide said patrons into the story....

Feh. :P

As cruisedirector says upthread, though, it's weird to see things made public relatively casually, to have them be accessible to so many.

[cathexys.livejournal.com]

first off, pretty much nothing pomo did was really new; however, it certainly tended to take it to extreme places. yes, roman a clef has existed for along time and people insert RPs, but I think the playfulness with which postmodernism purposefully falsifies historical facts and data and mixes them, often anacronistically, with the present is somewhat different, i think (hutcheon makes that argument quite convincingly in politics and poetics of postmodernism).

same goes, of course, for fan fiction, though i tend to include the economic aspects into my definition of fan fiction so that it clearly separates the use of television charaqcters of the sixties from communal medieval story telling. The argument has been made (quite convincingly, I think) to begin fanfic with the beginning of authorship, but to me the fan community is a vital feature (which still can trace back to the earlier decades of the past century...)

for the way pro fic (esp. pomo) does sth similar to fanfic, see a great communal collection here

asfor accessibility...i wonder if the visibility of fandom and fanfic is simply another part of visibility of subculture in general. look at the way csi has a new sexual fringe group every other week...and i just posted on manga references in friday's book of daniel (sadly *not* based on doctorow's brilliant postmodern historiographic metafiction that could be seen as Rosenberg RPF--albeit AU :-)

[ex-greythist387.livejournal.com]

I'll freely concede that the examples I listed do not do the same thing(s)--historical contingency, etc. Perhaps it's only that the shorthand, offhand ways of discussing pomo fic activitiy end up too generalized, such that they sound much like earlier things that're (at the detail level) quite different. I mean, I see at-least-superficially similar playful mixings and historical falsification in twelfth- to fourteenth-century texts, especially in things sometimes called "political songs" (though they've no tune), but it's not canonical and it doesn't work well in translation anyway so I can't point you towards it....

There's clear senses of authorship before early modern subjects do their self-fashioning, never mind the "invention" of literary production as a profession in the eighteenth century. Obviously, though, writers' ideas of what authorship meant (personal authority, IP, whatever) have changed repeatedly. It's not just the ability to disseminate things widely--for England, less Caxton and Wynkyn de Worde (rise of printed books) and more the Stationers' Register of the next century. Nothing like banning / restricting a thing to engender more of it and to amplify audience.

So, like, technology enables things, but with different kinds of tech and different assumptions, producers of narrative have been doing basically the same kind of thing, off and on. Cog sci / psych issue, perhaps, rather than literary or cultural one as such?

[ex-greythist387.livejournal.com]

p.s. Thanks for the link--that's a lovely assemblage of responses.

[schnoogle.livejournal.com]

If someone told you they wrote a story about her family being the inspiration for The Graduate, and that in the movie version she'd be played by Jennifer Aniston, would you say "self-insertion, Mary-Sue"? Would you say "meta"? Would you say "Hey, that's in a theater near me right now!"

So that's what the movie is about! The ads here have been very vague.

--

Among my friends I've seen a growing acceptance of fannish things. My most non-fannish friend used "fandom" in a conversation recently, and we all watched a season of a TV show on DVD. A year ago I don't think my friends would have considered it.

On a wider scale, I can see fannish things in the NSW HSC (like HP NEWTS). In the exams are creative writing sections in which one can be asked to write fanfiction based on a book set for study. In 2004 I studied a book that was, basically, published fanfiction and I was then asked to write fanfiction for that book as an assignment. Of course, the word "fanfiction" is not actually used in these cases. The NSW HSC English Syllabus has recently been the subject of a lot of criticism for allowing students to study very recent texts instead of being restricted to recognised classics. I think it's interesting that with all the criticism and debate, no one brought up the fannish parts of the syllabus.

[sarcasticpixie.livejournal.com]

How was Di and I? I've only read one of Lefcourt's books (The Dreyfus Affair), and I was a little shaky on his style in that one.

[amelia-eve.livejournal.com]

Well gee, back in the early 14th Century Dante took a guided tour of heaven and hell (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Divine_Comedy) with the long-dead Roman poet Virgil. I'd say there's really nothing new under the sun.

[darthhellokitty.livejournal.com]

Meet Mary Sue herself, JT LeRoy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JT_LeRoy#External_links).

niffling

[singtoangels.livejournal.com]

Hey Heidi, just wondering if you could add me to the niffler community here on lj. Said it was closed to new members and to contact you.

Thanks,
Sing

here via metafandom

[my_daroga]

Wanted to bring up the genre of Sherlock Holmes pastiche, something which has been going on for quite some time, without the moniker "fanfiction," frequently incorporating not only fictional characters of Doyle's invention but real historical figures, including Doyle himself. Why is this not fanfiction? What's the difference here?

[midnightbex.livejournal.com]

I don't think it's something new to the mainstream at all. Look at how many books are out there which could be considered 'fanfiction'! And some are rather highly acclaimed - Grendel (a take on Beowulf) and Rosencrantz and Guildestern Are Dead (off of Hamlet) being two which come to mind off the top of my head. Most of pop culture is self-referencial, in and of itself it's own form of fanfiction.

[starryskies.livejournal.com]

I've always thought that Wicked is a glorious example of fanfic and I LOVE that. And then people write fanfic based on that. Fanfic based on fanfic. It's things like this that give me a reason to wake up in the morning.