My Secret Life as a Slasher

So, my dirty little secret is finally out in the open. A few weeks ago, I did a podcast interview for Emma Grant at Slashcast about slash fan fiction and spoke openly about the fact that I have one published story out there in a relatively obscure little zine called Not What You Think. As a gift to all of my readers out there in LJ-Land, I figured, now that the cat is out of the bag, that I would share some excerpts from the story itself and for the rest of you, I figured I might use this to offer some reflections on the nature of slash as a form of critical commentary, an issue which I raised here in the blog a few weeks ago. The story is called "Golden Idol." It was published, if you can call it that, in 1998 and promptly disappeared into obscurity. Here's how the story starts:

'Another Idol has displaced me,' the fair young girl in the mourning dress exclaimed, her eyes misted with tears. 'If it can cheer and comfort you in time to come, as I would have tried to do, I have no just cause to grief.'

He gasped, stung by her sudden revelation. She knew! Nancy had found out the secret that he hadn't uttered aloud even in private, and if she knew, who else might know? Did he? He trembled at the thought and then tried to mask his discomfort with a half-felt denial.

'What idol has displaced you?'

He wanted to probe, hungered for an answer, and yet feared to find out how much she knew. He was certain in any case that she would not be able to put what she knew into words. His secret, as he had always known, was unspeakable and so her language was circumspect. She hinted at things without saying them directly.

But how could she know? He had always acted the part of the perfect gentleman with her, since that day long ago when they first spoke of marriage and began to imagine a future together. He had taken her to dances and let her show off her new beau to her blushing friends. He had brought her flowers and had dinner at her house. As time passed, they had moved from speculations of marriage to treating it as something that would happen someday, then soon, then in a matter of months, whenever he got his affairs in order, whenever he was sure he would be able to support them. He was eager to believe that things could work out between them, that they were in love, even if he often had trouble finding those feelings inside himself, even if his emotions towards her lacked the intensity with which romantic love was described in books or songs.

He danced the dance -- did it matter so much that he didn't really quite hear the music? He held her hand, on occasions when it was deemed appropriate, and stroked it softly, admiring her slender digits, running his fingers ever so gently along her wrist. He kissed her playfully on the ear when that was appropriate, uncertain if this was too much of an advance for someone in their position or not enough of one. He always played the part, always aware of an audience that included her but also many others. He tried to convince her (not to mention himself) that all of this came naturally, spontaneously, grew from honest emotions (which he was increasingly doubtful that anyone in his position really felt.)

Note: Not What You Expect is now back in circulation if you wish to order it and read the entire story, you can do so here.

Yet somehow he knew he was lying, and more to the point, somehow she knew he was lying. That much was certain. The sham was unveiled, and with its demise had ended his hopes of settling comfortably, easily, respectably, into married life. Perhaps she had known even before he had known himself. But that only increased his guilt since this meant that perhaps she knew him better than anyone else and had come to understand his emotions, his thoughts -- even his desires? -- from the inside out.

The seconds seemed to linger in the air, and she was not responding to his question. She looked at him with hurt, perhaps a little anger, though less than he would have expected under the circumstances. Did he imagine a little pity in her eyes, or was it dread? He waited and she waited and then he asked again, "What idol has displaced you?"...

"A golden one," she said, again speaking ambiguously, telling only what was necessary to extract both of them from their painful circumstances, moving forward with a dignity that was mixed with more than a little denial.

A golden one. How tangled that one remark seemed to him at that moment, for there were two economies at stake in this discussion. There was the economy of business, of profits and loss, of red ink and black ink, of ledgers and columns; and there was the economy of desire, of things saved and spent, of things consumed and yet remained to be consumed. There was the gold, silver and copper that he could hold in his hands and count, and there was the gold, silver, and copper that he desired and yet could never touch -- the gold of Jacob's wild shock of hair pulled up in a tail, the silver of his eyes so keen and shrewd, and the copper of his glistening skin flushed with sweat. And there was the gold that passed between them, the coins that had touched the skin he dared not touch and that passed into his own hands still warm from Jacob's body.

He tried to pretend that they were speaking only of crowns and shillings and so protested that the world was unjust in issuing almost as much reproach to those who worked hard for their money, who labored and earned and saved and counted and stored away their money, as they did to the poor and worthless, lazy and lame. Perhaps she was, after all, simply protesting the many hours he spent at his work, the hours he neglected her to earn money. Yet he knew he could not extract himself that simply.

The time he spent earning money was not only time he had not spent with her; it was time he had spent with Jacob. He always found excuses to prolong it. They worked side by side in silence, often for hours on end, so close to each other that he could feel his partner's breath on the back of his neck. He would lose count, counting instead the ebb and flow of his partner's breathing, straining to hear the sound of his heart beating, to be aware of his body, until Jacob would speak, jarring him back to consciousness, pulling him back to the world of bargains and investments. Jacob never rebuked him for his dreaminess, for his inattention to the hard facts of the matter at hand but laughed softly, a gleam in his eyes.

If the hour was late and the day's work had been sufficiently profitable, they would close the big leather books and walk out into the streets together, stopping at their private club for a few drinks. Those who knew them rarely saw one without the other, and after a while, many of them had trouble remembering which was which. They had been partners in business for a little over a year at that point. Still he had trouble remembering when it had started since those arrangements had become so comfortable that it was harder and harder to imagine when they had not been together. He had already forgotten what it was like to be alone -- to be without a partner, to be without a fiancée, to be working for old Fezziweg as a clerk, to be away from the warm glow of Jacob Marley.

Part of the pleasure of publishing the story for the first time in the context of a multimedia zine was to let people slowly discover for themselves who this story was about. I got the idea for writing a Scrooge/Marley slash story while listening to a tape of Patrick Stewart's one man show version of the Christmas Carol. Suddenly, for the first time, the scene when Scrooge breaks up with his finance Nancy had popped out at me. It was one of the few times in the entire novel that we hear from someone who can see inside Scrooge and really understands what he is thinking. Normally what characters say about Scrooge is projected onto him from a more distanced perspective. I was intrigued by this phrase, "a Golden Idol," and the way that she presents this "idol" as if it were a flesh and blood rival for his affections. She most likely is referring to his workaholic tendencies and to his greed, those traits we most associate with Scrooge, yet what if she wasn't? What if there really were a secret rival who stood between Scrooge and his intended bride?

Every line in this scene comes directly from the novel. What I was doing here was recontextualizing Dicken's original language to offer up an alternative interpretation of what the characters might have been thinking -- this integration of original dialogue and internal monologue is a common literary device in fan fiction. I was rewriting it for the purpose of critical commentary and in the process, I was trying to include as many elements from the original novel as possible while offering explanations for the character issues which have long concerned literary critics writing about the book. Even the idea that the partnership between Scrooge and Marley might have a homosocial/homoerotic undertone would not seem radical in the era of queer literary criticism. (For more on this point, see the slash chapter in Textual Poachers). But from an academic perspective, the fact that I used a fictional form rather than an analytic essay to construct this argument might have seen nonconventional.

The Victorians had been very interested in using economic vocabularies to talk about the expenditure of bodily fluids that took place through sexual encounters and so I played with this to describe the relations between the two men.

Let me continue further with the scene we started:

He had met Marley years before when they had been schoolboys, he an upperclassman who tried hard to teach the young Jacob his proper place but instead had been charmed by the lad, captivated by his quick wit and warm smile, fascinated by the workings of his mind, and stirred by his developing body. They had enjoyed a closeness then that no adult could know, become intimates in every sense of the word, sharing everything, withholding nothing, until the whole school was atalk about their crush, until the threat of scandal had loomed large on the horizon and begun to play upon even Scrooge's mind. Then his father, perhaps hearing gossip, perhaps getting a report from the schoolmaster, withdrew him from that school, took him home and 'made him a man.' His father was harsh and unloving, knowing little of matters of the heart. His mother had died when he was young, so there was little to bring joy into that house. His young sister, sweet little Fan, had done her best to reconcile the two of them, not really ever understanding the differences that kept them apart. Inevitably, voices were raised, harsh words were uttered and neither man could find reconciliation. When he had been younger, after his mother died, the old man had beaten him, punching him in the ribs, slapping him in the face, until he ran away and hid. Yet when he had returned home to find a father who no longer drank and who had discovered religion and so had learned to contain his violent rage, Scrooge found that some things hurt even more than fists. His father prayed for him every night and made certain that he knew that he knew that he had fallen far short of the old man's sense of what was proper, normal, respectable. His father's harsh whispers, not able to confront the problem directly, not able to forget it either, bruised him with their intensity. His eyes, stone hard, merciless, unforgiving, cut into his flesh.

At last Scrooge left, seeking his fortune elsewhere, looking for some place where he could escape his forbidden feelings for Jacob and avoid his father's wrath and judgment. He had gone to work at Fezziweg's, starting as a young apprentice and gradually gaining more responsibilities. Scrooge found in the red-faced, round and jolly man a second father, one as kind-hearted and generous as his own father was bitter and brutal. Fezziweg trust him and through his trust, Scrooge had learned to trust himself again and had opened himself up to friendship, this time with a young man named Dick Wilkens....

Dicken's novel includes surprisingly few elements, tell us relatively little about Scrooge. We are expected to see him from the outside -- as a cranky old man -- and not from the inside -- as someone who is described as deeply lonely, even as a boy. I wanted to use this story to examine that loneliness and to use that loneliness to explain what happened between Scrooge and Marley.

Part of what interested me was the doubling that occurs in the book as we see Scrooge as an old man watching himself within scenes that occurred when he was a much younger man and the sense of powerlessness he must have felt reliving those moments without being able to change them. And this led me deeper and deeper into thoughts about being haunted by memories, about wanting to say things that had gone unsaid or do things that hadn't been done. As I thought about what kind of slash story I could construct about Scrooge and Marley, I realized it needed not to be a love story per se but about the story of a romance that almost happened and that Scrooge, so much concerned by the judgment of the world, had backed away from. It became a story about how one internalizes homophobia and how it blocks one from the experience of one's desires.

Scrooge, no an old man, his face hardened into a caricature of itself, had trouble remembering times in his life when he had not been alone, cut off from the others around him. As a young boy, crying in the school house rather than return home to his father, he watched through the window as a parade of mummers passed, bursting with Yuletide spirits. As a young man, having at last found his one true friend, he was forcefully removed from the boarding school by his father and isolated once again, this time in a suffocating realm of Bible verses and condemnations. As a young clerk working for Fezziweg, trying to play the part of the respectable adult, he learned that the illusion of friendship and community could be maintained only if one didn't inspect it too closely or demand from it more than it was prepared to give. As a young suitor, he fumbled to convince the world that he was very much in love; as a young businessman sitting at night in the club by himself, he pretended not to care that no one invited him to join him for a drink.

My story contains very little sex in the end -- this is unusual for slash but not unheard of. What interested me was the emotional life of the characters and that is certainly the driving force behind most slash. I have them make love one time in a burst of enthusiasm on Christmas eve and then have Scrooge, alone in the dark, feel shame and crawl away, never to speak of the experience again. The closeness they feel is shattered by their efforts to consummate their relationship sexually (the reverse of what happens in most slash). And this prepares us for the last phases of their life together.

In his later years, after that fateful night when everything had come apart for them, Scrooge and Marley became simply a business concern. The two old men worked side by side yet scarcely spoke as they pored over their books. Marley came to communicate with him only through his clerk, Bob Cratchet. In the years since Marley's death, there was no more hope for them, no possibility of changing what had been said or finishing what had gone unsaid. Marley had died, and he had gone on living, though he had by that point become so paralyzed that he could scarcely be called alive. He went through life snarling at those who demanded form him what was no longer his to give, angry at those who enjoyed the happiness and good fellowship that he was denied, and harsh towards those who wanted what he had without being prepared to pay the brutal price.

I was fascinated that Marley returns from the dead to communicate with Scrooge and then shows him nothing of their life together, even though on other levels Dickens hints that this must have been the most defining relationship of Scrooge's life. One reason why people initially struggle to imagine a Scrooge/Marley story is that we never see Marley in his prime, as a young man, and have only the image of the rotting corpse with the slack jaw and the chains. So, in the story, I have Scrooge trying to read through the lines, looking for the scenes that Marley doesn't show him, and in the end, this is the level on which they communicate with each other.

He was confused. What was the meaning of any of these scenes that the Ghost had brought him to witness? Why these scenes, not others? What pattern was being slowly but surely developed form these fragments of time, bits of old memories, many of which he had long ago forgotten? It seemed to him that these choices missed the point somehow, did not fit within the narrative had had constructed to make sense of his own life, seemed to point consistently to a life he had not lived and the lies that he had tried to tell the world. But where was the truth? Perhaps some outside observer might look upon these as turning points in his life, but surely Marley, of all people, knew better.

Marley had returned from the dead -- for that was certain, Marley was dead, dead as a doornail, dead as a coffin nail, dead. Yet he had come back to him, at no small cost he was certain. To what purpose, what end?

Marley had sought to warn him about the cost of denying the world its due, about the price he had paid for hardening his heart and shutting out his feelings. He was prepared to learn that lesson as best he could and act upon it insofar as was appropriate.

But these were the wrong moments. Removed from context, they made little or no sense. He could witness the actions, hear the words, but he could not feel the emotions. The people around him meant even less to him than they had the first time. Could the truth of anyone's life be summed up in a few scattered moments without looking at what had come before and after? Were the words that had been said so many years before adequate to the occasion when he was powerless, as a mere witness, to rewrite them, to modify them, to speak them again but try to convey their meaning more fully? What mattered ultimately, he feared, was not what he had said and done but what hadn't happened, the silences rather than the utterances. What mattered were the gaps which fell between the scenes that the world chose to remember. That had always been the problem....

The Ghost had not offered him the chance, which he would gladly have taken, to relive that moment when he saw Jacob again at his club, that firm embrace, that happy reunion, or the time when they agreed to become partners, or those heady first days as a company when the two together gained the success that had been denied them both separately and they felt as if the world were out there waiting for them to pluck it like a bauble. The Ghost didn't let him hear Marley's laughter again or see his smile or watch the sparkle in his eyes. Instead he was forced to watch himself pretend a love he did not feel and try to accept the release Nancy was offering him with appropriate grace and appropriate regret.

None of that mattered. At that moment all that mattered was Marley and the time they had spent together and the scenes the Ghost was omitting from this journey down memory's crooked pathways. It was as if Marley had never existed, had not been part of his life -- the best part, the most important part, the only true and meaningful part. It was as if Marley was shoving him away with all of his might towards the life that might have been his if he had simply forsaken his unnatural love and conformed to what was normal and expected of him.

Everything in the next passage is there in Dicken's novel. There's a lot that seems psychologically odd about Scrooge's relationship to Marley if we read the novel closely yet these are the passages that get skipped over in the dramatization of the story. This is a good example of how slash writing requires the marshalling of evidence, the presentation of data, which supports the slash interpretation -- again, like other forms of critical commentary. The actions I describe are in the book; the motives I ascribe to them come from my analysis of the book through the slash interpretation.

Scrooge could not bring himself to paint out Marley's name on their sign, so he still went by Scrooge and Marley some seven years later, and people still came there looking for Marley and settling for Scrooge. He could not bring himself to fire Cratchet, even though his very presence was painful to him, since it reminded him of the times when he and his partner were unwilling or unable to speak to each other. He snarled at Cratchet and he punished Cratchet because he needed to strike out at someone and Cratchet was at his mercy. He wanted Cratchet to go away and take the memories of Marley with him, but he could not fire him, no matter how much he grumbled about giving him a day off at Christmas or using too much coal to light the wood stove. He couldn't fire Cratchet because, for all of the sad memories he provoked, Marley had hired him, had trusted him, had valued his friendship, and he could not undo what Marley had done. Scrooge moved into Marley's house to be close to him, to feel the presence of his spirit in the things the man had accumulated, and Scrooge slept, when he was able to do so, in Marley's bed, the bed curtains still hanging there as they had that night. He grew to hate Christmas as he did no other day of the year because it had brought him nothing but misery and stood as a reminder of how out of favor he was with the world's expectations.

In the end, I am impressed by the healing which Marley offers Scrooge in returning from the dead and offering him back memories of his life while it is still possible to change. Several writers have theorized that slash is a genre about nurturance, about men trying to heal each other of the pains caused by their repressed sexual and emotional lives, often in the forms of nursing each other back to physical or mental health. Seen through this lens, Marley's return to Scrooge is a great romantic gesture -- certainly embodying the idealized notion of romantic male friendship that many writers have found in slash.

Marley had come back from the dead to speak with him again, after all those years of silence, those years when the office had been like a tomb and those years when Marley had been buried in his tomb, as if it mattered, in the end, whether the silence between them was shared with a body that was living or dead. What must Marley have gone through to win that right denied so many other doomed souls, to return for even a moment to the world of the living, to intervene in the affairs of men and set them right again, to try to heal Scrooge before it was too late. But then Marley had always been a gifted negotiator and a good man for a bargain.

Marley had, miracle of miracles, come back for him, to him, still cared about him, still loved him above all men, still cared about what he did and what he felt and what fate befell him, still remembered the days and hours of his life and still lamented the times that they had not spent together or that, spent together, had come to nothing but painful silence.

So there you have it - a slashed up Christmas Carol, just in time for the holidays. I would offer the whole story but I no longer have it in an electronic form, only in hard copy. But I wanted to at least retype these bits to give you some sense of what the story was like and what it taught me about the nature of slash.

The Craft of Science Fiction

Those of you in the Boston vicinity may want to make your way to the MIT Media Lab's Bartos Theatre this Thursday for what promises to be a fascinating event -- "The Craft of Science Fiction" -- which will feature of a reading by Four time Nebula Award winning writer Joe Haldeman (The Forever War) and a discussion of his work. I will be moderating the event which is being hosted by the MIT Communications Forum from 5-7 pm. Those who can't make the event can catch the streaming audio version which will go up on the Communications Forum website several days later. Something of the tone of the discussion may be suggested by some comments about science fiction's place in contemporary culture which Haldeman penned for the CMS newsletter:

Whatever its shortcomings, actual science fiction (as opposed to fantasy tricked out with space ships and ray guns) is a bastion of rationalism. The universe works by rules, even if those rules are imperfectly understood. Problems are solved not by wishing things were otherwise but by trying to understand what is actually wrong and taking action to change it. We live in a world where wishful thinking and magical thinking prevail at the highest levels of leadership. Our own government thinks it can control reality by denying scientific evidence. We're in a war that at least one side justifies by ferocious religious dogma. More Americans believe in ghosts than in evolution. For that matter, more than half believe the story of Creation in the Bible are literally true and are waiting for the Rapture. Belief in oddball ideas like faith healing, extrasensory perception, communication with the dead and haunted houses have

all been on the increase in the past decade. These people don't read science fiction, or at least they don't read it well. But they may read books that are shelved in the science fiction section, or go to movies that call themselves sci-fi....

Basically, Haldeman, a hard sf guy to the Nth degree, is drawing a distinction between science fiction which he sees as a fundamentally rationalist mode of literature (and thus as a tool to teach scientific reasoning) and sci-fi which he thinks is increasingly faith based and mired in fantasy. For Haldeman, science fiction is both a mode of popular science education and a form of social commentary. And as such, he feels it does increasingly important work in the face of what he sees as anti-science attitudes at large in the country today. As I said, lot's here to talk about.

Almost a decade ago, Joe Haldeman and I organized a science fiction reading series at MIT which brought to campus such writers as Octavia Butler, Bruce Sterling, Orson Scott Card, Frederick Pohl, Neil Gaiman, and many others. We paired national figures with local authors from the greater Boston area such as Ellen Kushner, James Patrick Kelly, Allen Steele, and Alexander Jablakov. Buried deep on the Communications Forum website are a series of essays I wrote about the science fiction writers we featured as well as transcripts of the public conversations we hosted. What follows is an excerpt from the essay I wrote at the time about Haldeman's work -- particularly about how his experiences during the Vietnam War shaped the themes of his science fiction writing. It should offer good background reading for anyone planning to attend this event. You can also read the transcript of a conversation between Haldeman and fellow hard science fiction writer Gregory Benford.

Joe Haldeman (1943- )

"Life begins in a bloody mess and sometimes it ends the same way, and only odd people seek out blood between those times, maybe crazy people."

-- Joe Haldeman

Joe Haldeman's vision of the universe was profoundly shaped by the Vietnam War. Vietnam surfaces as a theme, a backdrop, or a reference point in many of his stories. Born in Oklahoma and raised in Puerto Rico, New Orleans, Washington D.C. and Alaska, Haldeman was drafted in 1967. He fought in the Central Highlands of Vietnam as a combat engineer with the 4th Division. He received a Purple Heart for severe wounds he suffered during the war.

Haldeman's wrenching personal experiences enable him to write about war with a rare, brutal honesty. What's intriguing is that while many of his obsessions are with the past, his favorite way of exploring those issues is through representations of the future.

His first novel, War Year (1972) was a realistic account of the war. His second, The Forever War (1975) read the conflict through the filter of "space opera," and in turn, radically rewrote the conventions of that subgenre. Bran Aldiss has described the core Space Opera formula:

"Ideally the Earth must be in peril, there must be a quest and a man to watch the mighty hour. That man must confront aliens and exotic creatures. Space must flow past the ports like wine from a pitcher. Blood must run down the palace steps, and ships launch out into the louring deep. There must be a woman fairer than the skies and a villain darker than the Black Hole. And all must come right in the end."

This formula shaped science fiction's representation of war -- from the lusty pulp sagas of E.E. "Doc" Smith to Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers and George Lucas's Star Wars trilogy. The "Space Opera" subgenre depended upon a peculiarly American conception of war, grounded in idealism, optimism, technological power and a simple black-and-white morality. But, the Vietnam experience changed how Americans understood the nature of war, and Haldeman's Forever War demonstrates how absurd many of the old cliches look to someone who had seen real combat duty.

His writing is blunt, earthy, and anti-heroic. His battle sequences are as technically detailed and vivid as any in science fiction. But, his war is anything but a glorious adventure. Haldeman depicts war as the pathetic slaughter of an enemy incapable of defending itself. More of his characters die in accidents training for battle (or of shock when they must confront the horror of their own actions) than in their initial military action against the Taurans. Much of their time is spent waiting and only a fraction is spent ducking and covering, trying to stay alive in the face of enemy attack.

The causes of the "forever war" are murky; his protagonists are fighting against an enemy they can not comprehend. No one really knows what started the war or why the stakes are so high.

The book's anti-hero never has any real sense of what he is fighting to protect. Private William Mandella is a draftee, chosen because of his superior intellect and education. (Of course, during the Vietnam era, college boys were exempted from the draft!) He feels himself to be fundamentally unsuited for military life, yet the military gives him few options except to re-enlist, blacklisting him from all other employment.

Using ships that travel faster than light, the fighting takes him light years from earth. The campaigns take a subjective time of months, but span centuries in human history back home. Mandella is one of the few who survives nearly 1,200 years of war. He has no family, few friends and those few can be killed or transferred at any moment. As the war progresses, he has little or no chance to understand the men placed under his command, since they are products of Earth cultures about which he knows nothing. Late in the book, Mandella poignantly calculates whom he might save in an emergency:

"The thought did dip into my conscience that I could gather up eleven people and board the fighter we had hidden safe behind the stasis field....I even went to the extreme of making a mental list of the eleven, trying to think of eleven people who meant more to me than the rest. Turned out I'd be picking six at random."

Under such circumstances, war becomes meaningless, a situation no one controls, as the protagonist learns as he moves from raw recruit to commanding officer without ever getting a firm grasp on the events around him.

Truth is, of course, the first casualty of war. In The Forever War, Haldeman gives us several intriguing glimpses of how public opinion is artificially shaped to build and maintain support for the prolonged fighting. In the war's early years, soldiers are pumped with hypnotic suggestions to insure that they conceptualize the war and the enemy in propagandistic terms, images which are triggered by a centralized command just as the troops move into combat:

My mind reeled under the strong pseudo-memories: Shaggy hulks that were Taurans (not at all what we now knew they looked like) boarding a colonists' vessel, eating babies while mothers watched in screaming terror (The colonists never took babies; they wouldn't stand the acceleration), then raping the women to death with huge veined purple members (ridiculous that they would feel desire for humans), holding the men down while they plucked flesh from their living bodies and gobbled it (as if they could assimilate the alien protein)....A hundred grisly details as sharply remembered as the events of a minute ago, ridiculously overdone and logically absurd. But while my conscious mind was rejecting the silliness, somewhere much deeper, down in that sleeping animal where we keep our real motives and morals, something was thirsting for alien blood, secure in the conviction that the noblest thing a man could do would be to die killing one of those horrible monsters. I knew it was all purest soyashit, and I hated the men who had taken such obscene liberties with my mind, but I could even hear my teeth grinding, feel my cheeks frozen in a spastic grin, blood-lust.

These images mirror common themes in wartime propaganda, including those promulgated by publications like Reader's Digest throughout the Vietnam War.

Those back home receive no more reliable information. When he returns home after his first hitch, Mandella tries to correct misperceptions about the war, but finds his words re-edited or fabricated by the news media: "He had kept me talking and talking in order to get a wide spectrum of sounds, from which he could synthesize any kind of nonsense." If Mandella is not exactly the hero we anticipate from a space opera, the news media transforms him into one for the purposes of shaping popular opinion.

Worlds, the first of a major trilogy, offers Haldeman's take on the student "revolutions" of the 1960s. His protagonist, Marianne O'Hara, comes to NYU from an off-world colony to major in American Studies and finds herself pulled deeper and deeper into political conspiracies. What begins as a "research project" in comparative political and economic cultures ends up being a matter of life and death. She is never sure whether she is working for or against the overthrow of the government, struggling to find the truth despite constant manipulations of information from all parties. Haldeman places no more faith in revolutions than he does in war.

The problem of communication between alien cultures runs through his work, often with good intentions ending badly for all involved, as in the slaughter that ensues as a result of an ill-considered and ill-informed ethnographic expedition in "Seasons." As a Xeologist in "Seasons" explains:

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, old style, there were dozens of isolated cultures still existing without metals or writing or even, in some cases, agriculture or social organization beyond the family. None of them survived more than a couple of generations beyond their contact with civilization.... The records are fascinating not only for the information about the primitives, but also for what they reveal of the investigating culture's unconscious prejudices. My own specialties were the Maori and Eskimo tribe and (by necessary association) the European and American cultures that investigated and more or less benignly destroyed them.

"A Tangled Web" offers a more comic (and somewhat more optimistic) take on what happens when businessmen confuse mastery over a language with understanding of an alien culture. The message seems to be that if we could so badly misunderstood our enemy in Vietnam, we are ill-equipped to deal with even more alien cultures who come to us from other worlds.

"Ghosts," memories of the war, haunt Haldeman's writing. A recurring theme in his fiction is the image of characters circling through the same traumatic event, again and again, trying either to achieve some moment of clarity or to avert fate. In "The Cure," the protagonist restages the same disturbing dream many times, trying to find an ending free of bloodshed. Images of brutal violence -- a rotting body in the jungle, the smell of burning flesh, the gurgle of blood -- surface in many Haldeman stories, appearing, often with startling intensity, when we least expect them. The war's impact on Haldeman's fiction can be seen in his titles, such as Planet of Judgement, All My Sins Remembered, Study War No More, Vietnam and Other Alien Worlds, and 1968.

Haldeman writes across many different genres, ranging from supernatural horror to hard science fiction, from psychodrama to broad satire, from spy thrillers to Star Trek novelizations. Yet underlying most of his stories is a sense of discomfort and dread. "The Cure" opens with a virtuoso passage, evoking almost all of the major genres of popular fiction, yet in each the protagonist seems doomed to an all-but-certain death.

His protagonists must often struggle with wounds (both psychological and physical) frequently linked to their wartime experiences. In "The Hemingway Hoax," a series of time paradoxes allows the protagonists to shift consciousness from body to body across a string of parallel universes. Each of his bodies was wounded in a different place during the same wartime incident. An inch higher or lower marks the dramatic difference between sexual potency and life-long pain. "Images" describes a healing erotic encounter between a man and a woman, each badly scarred, each so self-conscious about their bodies that they have cut themselves off from all sexual outlets except voyeurism.

Many of these shattering experiences result in profound alienation from the body. The protagonists in The Forever War become estranged from their own flesh, when new limbs are grown to replace amputated parts; no one else can tell that their bodies have been altered, yet they still have difficulty bonding with their "prosthesis." A doctor warns two lovers, both amputee patients, that "you're going to constantly trigger memories of pain and loss for each other." "More Than the Sum of the Parts" pushes this theme further, showing how the cybernetic replacement of human flesh results in a gradual loss of all ties to the human body.

On Hobbits, Hiro, and Other Matters

Today, I wanted to call attention to several online resources which will be of interest to the Aca/Fan community.

Hoping for Hobbits

A week or so back, I got an e-mail from Kristin Thompson telling me that she and her oft-times collaborator and my graduate school mentor, David Bordwell, have launched a new blog. Together, Bordwell and Thompson have written and continually updated what is certainly the most important textbook in cinema studies, Film Art: An Introduction. If I got started describing the full range of their contributions to cinema studies, I'd be here for a long long time: this dynamic duo, individually and collectively, are enormously prolific, cranking out a big scholarly book about once a year, and between them, they have expertise on the entire world cinema. Whatever they turn their attention to, they master thoroughly and break dramatic new ground. In fact, I am teaching a contemporary cinema class at MIT this term primarily as an excuse to dig deep into Bordwell's most recent book, The Way Hollywood Tells It. So, I will be reading what they have to say in their blog about cinema and other media matters with great interest.

So far, they have tackled a range of topics, including some really provocative comments by Bordwell on Scorsese's The Departed and its relationship to Internal Affairs, the Hong Kong film upon which it was based, and by Thompson about contemporary cinema and the push towards interactive narrative, to cite just two examples.

Thompson is in the process of putting her finishing touches on a forthcoming book about Peter Jackson and the making of the Lord of the Rings trilogy called The Frodo Franchise. I was lucky enough to read an early draft of the book and found it an absolute treasure. Thompson had access to pretty much every key contributor to the LOTR films: she turns out to be a very engaging storyteller but also is able to put what happened into a much larger context of shifts in the contemporary film industry -- including some very good writing about the ways Jackson courted the fans of the original Tolkien novels and the forms of fan cultural production which have grown up around the franchise. (In a recent post, Thompson struggles with whether or not she is an aca/fan in the ways that I have been using it here but she is certainly someone with a fan's mastery over the books and films and with a long standing passion for the content. When she tells me about going behind the scenes in New Zealand to meet with the production team, you do get the sense that there's a fannish tingle going up her spine.) I will be doing an interview with Thompson about the book once it is released in 2007. But she is already updating her account, using the blog to share some great insights into the announcement the other week that they will indeed be producing a film based on The Hobbit and that Peter Jackson is currently considering whether to direct it. She takes us back through the complex history of negotiations around the rights for the film, describes all of the many Peter Jackson projects that have been announced in recent months, and pulls together many of the scattered interviews with Jackson which shed some clues about his thinking in regard to the timing of the various projects.

Here's some of what she has to say:

Could someone that busy take on The Hobbit as well? Jackson's talking as if he could. In a long interview posted on Ain't It Cool News September 16, he said that no one had contacted him about making the film, but he was already tossing out ideas about bringing back some of the characters from LOTR to fill out the plot. A week later, Jackson chatted with EW.com, sounding even more enthusiastic and brushing aside the idea that his current lawsuit against New Line (over DVD payments) would be a factor: "I'd love to make another film for New Line. And certainly The Hobbit isn't involved in the lawsuit." He also pointed out, "We've still kept the miniatures of Rivendell in storage, and the set of Bag End, Bilbo Baggins' house, has also been saved" ("Action Jackson").

So how could he do it? Whether with an eye to a possible Hobbit project or not, Jackson has organized his projects in a remarkably flexible way. Halo (to be distributed by Universal in North America and Twentieth Century Fox abroad) and The Dam Busters (co-financed by Universal and StudioCanal) are being directed by others, and an executive producer doesn't necessarily have to do a whole lot of hands-on work. As Jackson pointed out to his EW interviewer, Steve Daly, "That's one of the reasons we're producing a number of things now rather than directing. Producing is fun and it's not as all-consuming."

As to the "Temeraire" series, that is a long-range project that Jackson speaks of putting into pre-production when Halo and The Lovely Bones are substantially finished. He's not sure yet whether he'll direct the resulting film or films. The Lovely Bones is not all that far advanced, either, with Jackson, Walsh, and co-writer Philippa Boyens having only recently finished a first draft of the script. The rights for both of these projects are owned entirely by Jackson and Walsh, with no studio yet attached--which means they have no deadline. In another remark that sounds calculated to encourage MGM and New Line, in the same interview Jackson remarks, "We're not imposing any deadline on ourselves with all these projects. They'll take as long as they need to until we're happy with them." It sounds a lot like he's hinting that they could also be put off if another attractive project comes along.

It sounds an awful lot like this was written by an aca/fan to me.

Holding Out for a Hiro

In Media Res is another great new online resource which will be of interest to the aca/fan community. In Media Res is being organized by the editors of Flow and by the Institute for the Future of the Book. As their FAQ explains:

In Media Res plucks fragments out of the media stream and revolves them in a critical conversation.

Every week, a different media scholar will present a 30-second to 2-minute clip accompanied by a 100-150-word impressionistic response. The goal is to promote an online dialogue amongst media scholars and the public about contemporary media through clips chosen for either their typicality or atypicality in demonstrating current narrative strategies, genre formulations, aesthetic choices, representational practices, institutional approaches, fan engagements, etc.

Jason Mittell and I were asked to provide content for the launch of the site. I chose to focus on the segment from Heroes when Hiro, superfan/superhero, teleports from Tokyo to Times Square and discovers that his experiences are already being enshrined in a comic book, 9th Wonders. You can watch the clip and read what I have to say at the Media Commons site. I will just note that I wrote about this series here midsummer, after getting a sneak look at the pilot, and Heroes has more than lived up to my expectations for a television show which takes an indie comics slant on the superhero genre. It has emerged as one of the most popular new series this season with good reason.

Jason, who is a sometime reader and contributor to the blog, focuses on a telling moment from 30 Rock which he suggests both parodies and enacts the synergies that are defining contemporary media culture.

A fan friend described the 100-150 word essays as an academic form of drabble. Drabble is a highly condensed form of fan fiction where writers take on the challenge of conveying a complete story in just a few hundred words. I know that I found it very difficult to say anything original and interesting about the clip in such a tight word count: I ended up cheating and going to around 250 words -- this is probably no surprise to regular readers of this blog.

In Media Res is taking a bold stance on intellectual property rights:

MediaCommons is a strong advocate for the right of media scholars to quote from the materials they analyze, as protected by the principle of "fair use." If such quotation is necessary to a scholar's argument, if the quotation serves to support a scholar's original analysis or pedagogical purpose, and if the quotation does not harm the market value of the original text -- but rather, and on the contrary, enhances it -- we must defend the scholar's right to quote from the media texts under study.

This goes well beyond, for example, what MIT's lawyers have allowed on the Open Courseware initiative. I know many of us are going to be watching closely to see what happens here and keeping our fingers crossed.

Check It Out...

It's been a while since I have reported back on the various colloquium events we have been hosting through the CMS program but I wanted to remind folks that we are preparing our events for download as podcasts this term. I heard from some people at the Flow conference that they are finding these to be useful resources or just interesting things to listen to while jogging. Here's a few of the events I haven't linked to here before.

Chris Boebel and David Tames talk about MIT's new efforts towards video podcasting, a project called Zig Zag.

Scott Donaton, associate publisher and editorial director of the Ad Age Group and author of Madison & Vine talked about why user-empowerment is the key trend in business, and the ways marketers are adapting to it, including the rise of branded entertainment.

A roundtable discussion on New Media and Art put together by my MIT colleague Beth Coleman and featuring Lauren Cornell, director of Rhizome.org; and Jon Ippolito, media

Announcing: The Futures of Entertainment Conference

The Comparative Media Studies Program is proud to announce an exciting forthcoming conference, The Futures of Entertainment, to be held at MIT on Nov. 17 and 18. The event is designed to bring together leading thinkers from across the entertainment industry to speak about core issues around media convergence, transmedia storytelling, user-generated content, and participatory culture. Speakers confirmed so far include The Long Tail's Chris Anderson, Flickr's Caterina Fake, DC Comic's Paul Levitz, Warner Brother's Diane Nelson, Big Spaceship's Michael Lebowitz, social networking researcher danah boyd, television scholar Jason Mittell, and many others, including representatives from MTV, Cartoon Network, Bioware, and other leading companies in this space. The event is free and open to the public but we ask that you preregister since seating will be limited. The event is being hosted by the Convergence Culture Consortium. Here's a more detailed description of the themes for the scheduled panels:

Television Futures

New distribution methods, new revenue strategies and changing modes of audience engagement are transforming how television works. Off- and post-broadcast markets make 'old' television valuable as a continuing source of income and suggest new ways to reach viewers. Digital video recorders threaten the 30-second commercial but offer the possibility of more detailed information about audience members. Some television producers may reach out to consumers directly rather than going through the networks and networks are using online distribution to generate buzz about new shows before they reach the air. Creative responses to these challenges are re-writing how we understand what was once just the box in the corner.

User-Generated Content

Media culture is becoming more participatory, rewriting the relations between media producers and consumers. New tools and distribution platforms, a changing cultural ethos, and innovative corporate approaches to user-generated content are turning viewers into active participants. Innovation may occur at the grassroots level yet influence decisions made within corporate media. Yet, are media companies ready for the grassroots creativity they are unleashing? What challenges does greater user-participation pose to both producers and audiences? What corporate policies enable or retard the growth of user-generated content?

Transmedia Properties

The cultural logic of convergence lends itself to a flow of narratives, characters, and worlds across media platforms. Moving beyond older models based on liscensed ancillary products, transmedia extensions are now seen as expanding the opportunities for storytelling, enabling new kinds of entertainment experiences, building up secondary characters or backstory. Transmedia extension may also create alternative openings for different market segments and enable more extensive contact with brands. The great potential of transmediation is to deepen audience engagement, but this requires greater awareness of the specific benefits of working within different platforms. How are media companies organizing the development of transmedia properties? How are storytellers taking advantage of the "expanded canvas" such an approach offers? How do transmedia strategies impact the new integration between brands and entertainment properties? What new expectations do transmedia properties place on consumers?

Fan Cultures

Once seen as marginal or niche consumers, Fan communities look more 'mainstream' than ever before. Some have argued that the practices of web 2.0 are really those of fan culture without the stigma. Courted, encouraged, engaged and acknowledged, fans are more and more frequently being recognized as trendsetters, viral marketers, and grassroots intermediaries. Fan affinity is being seized as a form of grassroots marketing, representing the bleeding edge of brand and property commitment. The sophistication of fan-created products rivals the professional products they honor, sometimes keeping defunct properties alive long after their shelf life might otherwise have expired. How is the increasing importance of fan behavior re-writing the media landscape? What kinds of accountability should media companies have to their most committed consumers? What kinds of value do fans create through their activities? What are the sources of tension that still exist between media producers, advertisers, and fans?

Not the Real World Anymore

Virtual spaces are more than sites for emulating the real world. They are becoming platforms for thought experiments -- some of which involve fantasies we would not like to enact in the real world, others involve possibilities that we may want to test market before putting into practice. Much more than simulacra of Real Life or a 3D version of text-based Internet communities, online worlds represent new sites for considering questions of community and connectivity. Marked by user- creativity, online worlds balance, sometimes precariously, the rights of users with the rights of sponsoring organizations. As we move closer to the cyberpunk vision of a wholly parallel 'metaverse', questions of power, community, and property are coming to the fore.

More information is forthcoming but for some provisional information and to register for the event, check out this website. I hope to see many readers of the blog at this event which promises a front line perspective on many of the trends I discuss in the books.

Triumph of a Time Lord (Part Two): An Interview with Matt Hills

Last time, I ran the first of a two part series featuring an interview with Matt Hills, a leading British thinker about fan culture and genre entertainment, discussing the revamped Doctor Who series. Hills is currently hard at work writing a book, Triumph of a Time Lord, which discusses the retooling of this classic British series for new audiences and new times. In the first installment, I focused on questions concerning the series's relations to its most hardcore fans, discussing the argument that the new Doctor Who represents what happens when fans take over control of a media franchise. But that's really too simple an explanation for all of the changes which have happened here. This time, I asked Hills to drill down on how the changes in the series format reflect trends in British and global television production as strategies to broaden the viewership of the programme. As with last time, Hills assumes readers are relatively familiar with the contents of both seasons of the new Doctor Who -- and makes frequent and telling references to individual episodes. He's pretty careful not to kill the drama for poor Americans who haven't had official access to all of the episodes this season (and haven't figured out how to order them from UK Amazon or download them from some extra-legal source.) But if you've really remained in the dark about what happens this season, you may not want to read this since there are some major plot developments that get discussed here.

Of course, there are going to be spoilers afloat in the Doctor Who community at this point: it is really absurd to have such long delays in the distribution of the series between the United Kingdom and the United States, two countries seperated by a common language, at a time when information flows so fluidly across national borders along various digital networks. Television fan culture is now global and producers run a high risk when they muck about with the temporality of information flows!

To what degree do you think the new Doctor Who has been conceived for a global rather than a national audience? I gather there were complaints early on about

the "Americanization" of Doctor Who because of shifts in the format. Have those concerns settled down?

If anything, I'd say that UK fandom has shown a certain pride in the show's volume of overseas sales - back in the day, this always used to be cited as a barometer of the old series's popularity. There are still some residual and highly proprietary attitudes among a few UK fans, though, who very much perceive the show as 'theirs', which isn't always helpful. The history of Who has frequently been one where certain groups of fans have contrasted its supposed "Britishness" to the allegedly "American" values of, say, the likes of Star Trek. And that hasn't totally gone away, even in an era where fans can internationally access the same production information, and spoilers etc, at pretty much the same time via web-based communities like Outpost Gallifrey.

I think one sign that the show has absolutely been conceived of as a global vehicle is its comparative reliance on London as a setting. Filming in Cardiff has frequently doubled for London - even causing some consternation to drunken passers-by on those late-night occasions when the Welsh capital city has been 'dressed' as London: I overheard one Welshman shout "how rude!" as he lurched past a London underground sign which the production team had erected in the city centre for the filming of 'Rose'.

Contemporary London helps to sell the show's Brit identity abroad: it makes sense as a setting for international audiences much more readily than other UK cities would. The 'showreel' used to promote series one to buyers and advertise it on-air to audiences, included that scene of Big Ben being demolished by an alien spacecraft: 'marvel as an international icon of tourism is trashed' was evidently just as strong a subtext as 'we've actually got decent special effects'.

And Cardiff's first appearance was, of course, in 'The Unquiet Dead', which compensated for this by capitalising on the BBC's reputation for costume drama (again, something likely to help sell the show overseas). This combination of 'cool London' - set up in the very opening montage of the series - and 'heritage'/period drama settings makes the show a likely candidate to travel well. And the emphasis on clear storytelling (by Who's standards) and iconic monsters are also both tokens of a global ambition, as are the occasional inserts of media coverage within invasion stories, which the show has been increasingly careful to internationalise, so that fictional US newsflashes, for instance, are seen on-screen alongside UK ones.

The 1996 US-UK co-production of Doctor Who was far more self-evidently "Americanized" than the current series. There, the TARDIS had a "cloaking device", and the Doctor kissed his 'companion' in a more straightforwardly romantic manner compared with the various contrivances Russell T. Davies has used to justify this event. And though some fans may feel the latest show has been "Americanized" in the sense that it's followed in the wake of US TV successes like Buffy, or adopted a story arc approach characteristic of shows like The X-Files, in fact elements of the new series' format can be traced back through previous Russell T Davies' screenplays and even his own Who novel - the emotionally complex, hard-hitting, and beautifully condensed Damaged Goods - as well as being indebted to developments in other Who novels: for example, the matter of groups of people (conspiracy theorists) trying to track the Doctor was raised in the Virgin novel Who Killed Kennedy, and is not simply or directly a reaction to developments in genre 'realism' in US cult TV (even if some of these 1990s Who novels may, themselves, have been written in the shadow of The X-Files). And the self-reflexive depiction of fandom (done far more directly than 'Love & Monsters') is carried out in Kate Orman's Virgin novels Return of the Living Dad and Room With No Doors, in which a fan actually discusses negative fan stereotypes and asserts that he wanted to "get a life" by emulating the Doctor. Given that these adventures were written for, and sold to, a fan niche market, it's not at all surprising that they moved ahead of the new series in terms of explicitly addressing fandom as a subject. But there is a very strong argument that far from simply reacting to American cult & quality TV, the new series is partly reacting to developments there (and production values) and partly reacting to developments within an international community of professionalised fan writers.

If the series were conceived of more centrally for a national rather than global audience, then I'd argue that it would display far more of a sense of UK regionality than it does. Even Christopher Eccleston's "all planets have a North" Doctor has been rapidly replaced by David Tennant adopting an estuary English (or London-ish) accent in line with his Casanova performance, and the international sales that presumably garnered. And Peter Kay's Bolton accent surfaces in 'Love & Monsters' only when he is under heavy monster make-up, seeming to suggest that the producers wanted to reinforce the point - yes, this is still Peter Kay the famous comedian, even under all the prosthetics. Otherwise, the dominant norm in the new series of Who is that its characters and settings are London-default and largely speak in 'received pronounciation' or Queen's English: plus ca change. UK regionality is suppressed because of its irrelevance to a global audience: the fact that the series is made by BBC Wales has made relatively difference to its material form, though it has undoubtedly been a great boost to the Welsh TV industry, which - much like UK fan audiences - has again shown considerable pride in its success. And I think that takes me back to where I came in on this answer!

Doctor Who has been perceived as a children's program in the U.K. but largely watched by adults in North America. Do you think the current series retains this focus on children viewers? How have the producers sought to balance between these two likely audiences?

In the UK, the new series has been credited with 'reinventing' or 'rediscovering' the family audience for prime-time TV drama. Press reports have made much of this, and the general sense appears to be that the success of the show has challenged industry wisdom, which had previously stressed the break-up of trans-generational audiences into different age-based 'niches' who would hardly ever watch the same programme together. The show has also been successful in terms of the relative gender balance of its audience: it really does seem to represent all things to all people right now!

So, though the old series may sometimes have been deemed a kid's show - or 'children's telly that it was almost OK for adults to enjoy' - this depiction seems to have fallen by the wayside rather. To be honest, I think the old show was always something of an oddity in terms of its unusually broad appeal: when it was pretty much at its height in terms of popularity in the 1970s, it always bridged a massively wide range of ages - audience data given in The Unfolding Text (1983) proves that. And the reinvented series is no different, typically balancing its 'adult' and 'child' appeals very carefully so as to work as a cross-over show.

One of the key shifts is the massive influx of family-based storylines, many featuring child actors and characters in major roles. Not only does the show work hard to represent the Doctor and Rose as desirable travelling companions - the brief being that audiences should like them and want to befriend them - it also uses families in a variety of ways. Yes, there's the Tyler family and Mickey, but even beyond this, the family really is omnipresent. The Slitheen aren't just an alien race, they're a family group. And the human family in 'Fear Her' confront an alien which is alone, cut off from its kind and its own vastly extended family. 'The Empty Child'/'Doctor Dances' revolves around the question 'Are you my mummy?' of course, and 'Idiot's Lantern' also centrally features a family dynamic. The majority of new series' stories involve family crises - even the parallel world of 'Age of Steel' is viewed through very much through the lens of family. And in 'Fear Her', the Doctor alludes to his own family, something which the series may well build on.

There's also more than a hint of family-type relations in the warmth and affection between the Doctor and Sarah Jane in 'School Reunion', and Rose talks of getting a mortgage with the Doctor in 'The Impossible Planet'/'The Satan Pit', which though it may carry some romantic implications, is also about the idea of elective rather than biological 'family'.

There are limits to the series' portrayals of family though, and the way these can work to bridge different generational audiences. While childhood is well represented - frequently giving younger audiences an identification figure in addition to the Doctor and Rose - the show has neglected older audiences and characters. The first Doctor, back in 1963, was a 'grandfather' type: the casting of Eccleston and Tennant seems to view the nominally lead character as necessarily youthful and energetic, if not unconventionally 'sexy'. Age and ageing don't seem to play well in this new series: the inclusion of some slightly older characters in the Graeme Harper-directed 'Rise of the Cybermen'/'Age of Steel' (in the forms of Mrs Moore and Lumic's henchman) appear to be indebted to Harper's own role as the 'elder statesmen' of directors, and his use of a repertory of actors whom he's worked with across his career. 'Fear Her' and 'Idiot's Lantern' do also feature grandmother characters, though in relatively minor roles. On the whole, the cross-generational world of new Who is one where youthfulness remains at a premium.

The show has also sought to balance appeals to younger and older audiences through its patchwork of different tones. One minute slapstick or broad humour, the next political satire, and the next pop-culture referencing: Davies's show-runner role has lent the programme a deftness of touch, making it much more of a combinatorial matrix of darker and lighter moments than ever before. This may again be something learnt from the best of contemporary and recent US TV.

But again there are limits, always limits. Despite this leaping to and fro between different tones, nothing too 'adult' should intrude: sex exists only as a euphemism or an implication, and death is curiously bloodless. Much of the new series still has to happen off-screen, or through unfolding subtexts.

Writers do sometimes seem to view these limits as boundaries to be toyed with, however. Steven Moffat's award-winning series one script may use the euphemism of 'dancing' for the Doctor's apparent sex-life, but it does so with such insistency, if not nakedness, that the idea that this is a "subtext" really seems to melt away. At the very least, there is only a wafer-thin line between 'coming right out and saying it', and the strategy which Moffat pursues. And he introduces Captain Jack Harkness, a bisexual character - OK, he's science-fictionally coded as 'omnisexual' - into a prime-time "family" show... without any tabloid newspaper outcry.

Forget 'reinventing' the family audience against industry wisdom: this was the greatest achievement of series one, in my opinion. What might have looked, in some ways, like cosy viewing - oooh, the BBC does war-time period drama, and Rose is wearing a Union Jack flag - was really cutting-edge television with a sharp twinkle in its eye, and a mischievous banana in its pocket (bananas are good). I couldn't believe the production team had got away with it - but they not only did so, they did it with style to spare.

Perhaps this tightrope-walking hasn't just been about 'balancing' different audiences. It's also been about challenging where, exactly, the lines should be drawn between audience 'niches', and between 'child' and 'adult' viewers. And although some older fans have decried the Slitheen fart gags, the inclusion of farting in TV drama has, on some occasions outside the world of Doctor Who, acted as a marker of 'quality television'. For example, the Jimmy McGovern-created BBC series, The Lakes, featured at least one scene of repeated farting by way of marking out its 'realist' and inclusive intent - it was as if the star writer was saying, 'hey, you don't hear much of this in TV drama, do you, but I bet you do plenty of it in real life, right?' And arguably, Russell T Davies wasn't just playing to the child audience with a whiff of toilet humour, as older fans have complained: he was also daring to include such material, making this sort of moment and tone an example of 'sophisticated' risk-taking with dramatic seriousness, and simultaneously an instance of 'childish' glee or rebellion against good taste. The old series didn't boast alien races farting while the Doctor sought to save the world.

Another point in its favour: 'Aliens of London' also features what may well be the fastest (intentional!) tone-shift in Doctor Who history: from farcical comedy to pure, pure tragedy in the time it takes for poor, poor space piggy to be gunned down.

Honestly, give international Who fandom about ten years, and these episodes ('AoL'/WWIII') will be acclaimed as classics...

Much of the interest of the new series has centered around Rose, who has to be

one of the most popular companions of all time, as well as being key to bridging between Doctors Nine and Ten and thus knitting together the two new seasons. Rose's emotional life and secondary relations have been much more central to the series than previous companions. Is there a concern that her departure may adversely impact the series in a way that is very different from the departure of the other companions or for that matter, the shifts in casting of the various Doctors?

The production team seem to be putting a specific gloss on this departure, namely that it simply indicates one of the strengths and core values of the Doctor Who format: that the Doctor's adventures will always go on. The show is bigger than any one star. Eccleston's departure, and Tennant's successful first season, would certainly seem to lend grist to this mill, even if it suggests that in the context of the fast-moving contemporary media industry, Doctor Who may never again see an actor in the lead role for more than three or four years.

Though Rose and her family have been crucial to the new show's success, it looks as though the programme will return to its roots in 'similarity and difference'. In other words, giving the 'companion' a family has worked well: solution - bring in a new family with a tweaked and slightly different dynamic, but still recognisably following the by now established template. Rose's departure was also, of course, seemingly the narrative end-of-the-line for the rest of the Tylers, with Jackie and Pete reunited in that alt-universe at the end of 'Doomsday'.

I think the challenge presented here is the same sort of challenge which Who has always responded to across its run, whether new or old series; how much novelty do you inject with a change of cast, and how much sameness do you play safe with? It sounds as though the new companion, Martha Jones (Freema Agyeman), will again be London-based, continuing the metropolitan bias of the new series which has already worked so well to sell it globally. The latest character's family apparently includes a brother - so at the very least, there are already new narrative possibilities opened up by the likes of sibling rivalry! But these possibilities are clearly very much constrained by a need for continuity and sameness - just as the change from Eccleston to Tennant couldn't afford to make radical changes to the format. Film and TV critic Kim Newman commented on this in his recent 'BFI TV Classic' book dealing with the series, observing that given the success of the new series, it is highly unlikely that its producers will want to make radical changes, at least in the foreseeable future, to what's now a proven hit formula and a flagship BBC product.

Arguably, Doctor Who's biggest format shifts have come in the past when there have been major upheavals in the TV industry - whether this was the shift to colour TV in the UK in the seventies, or the industry perception that fragmented target audiences were more important than a 'mass' audience which took hold across the eighties, and caused Who to be self-consciously positioned in the UK as a 'cult' show with its own dedicated but dwindling fan-base who would watch it no matter when it was scheduled. By contrast, with the new series sparking an interest in the UK in the 'family audience', and doing remarkably well in multi-channel, digital TV households - its high production value special effects and multi-tonal approach seem to have made it collective required viewing on the main 'cinema'-style TV in many households - it is in the rare position of being a trend-setter at this point, rather than having to react to industry changes.

Given all this, I was still sad to see the Tylers vanish out of series two's story-arc as a job lot. I think it would've been interesting to confront the Doctor with his responsibilities to Jackie, had they both been trapped together on 'our' side of the universal fault-lines. What would she have made of him finding a new travelling companion, someone who was effectively replacing her daughter? Would she have hated the Doctor for cutting her off from Rose forever? Though the end of 'Doomsday' certainly felt like a full and satisfying resolution - a proper ending, which if I hadn't already known better, would've had me speculating it was the end of the 'Russell T Davies era' - I think there was potential for many more loose threads.

That's the price you pay for a big ending, I guess. It does mean that the show's newfound emotional realism now won't be able to develop its post-companion theme in such full-blooded ways. Instead, Rose's absence will no doubt be referred to, but in a more anodyne and less dramatically-compelling, threatening manner. And given the Doctor's repeated promises to Jackie that he would keep Rose safe, a headline failure for him would've really been something to focus on and pick away at. However, it would also have been too dark, probably, for the current format - too much family angst and not enough uplifting optimism!

Some have commented on the different emotional dynamic of the new series - more romantic, melodramatic, operatic, pick your term, compared to the emotional reserve one associates with some of the earlier Doctors. What factors led to this shift in tone?

Three words: the female audience.

There, thought I'd finish with a succinct answer!

Oh, OK, it isn't quite that simple, but almost. A key aim for the new series, from what I've heard, was to make it a TV drama 'brand' achieving very close to gender parity in its audience. What the show absolutely could not afford to be was 'science fiction for the boys'. It had to appeal to women via its re-branding. So it was that early promotional images played up action-adventure and pretty much removed science-fiction from the advertised genre mix, making the show about the Doctor and Rose and their thrilling, transcendent escape into space and time.

Part of that ambition was to integrate modes of storytelling which would appeal to male audiences with those appealing to women - it being taken as read that you can't definitively characterise sci-fi as 'boys' stuff' and melodrama as 'for girls' (though there are gendered patterns in media consumption, which is why broadcasters think in such terms). Making Rose's role basically equal to that of the Doctor was only part of this process. Techno-babble was banned, as was 'outer space' sci-fi - the fear being that audiences wouldn't 'relate' to visions of the far future. There's some anecdotal evidence to support this sort of assumption - I interviewed female fans for one research project recently, and a number of them spoke about finding Buffy 'realistic', but said that they hated certain Star Treks for their 'lack of realism'. Some generic hybrids, and themes, obviously play better than others, whereas some genre imagery, such as science-fiction construed as spacecraft, seems to turn off specific audiences - such are their prejudices and opinions.

Where new Who has done 'outer space' it has generally sought to anchor this in relation to immediately recognisable present-day concerns and themes - whether looking satirically at abuses of journalism and TV news in 'The Long Game', or Big Brother reality TV in 'Bad Wolf'. And though 'End of The World' and 'The Impossible Planet'/ 'The Satan Pit' buck this noticeable trend somewhat, they each have their present-day points of identification: in the former, Rose phones home, and the show ends with a walk through a present-day city (Cardiff, again doubling for London). And the latter two-part story was, surely by design rather than accident, originally broadcast in the UK either side of media fuss about it being the 6th of the 6th of 2006 - hence accumulating free media publicity and tying into the absolutely contemporary, even as it depicted a far-future space opera dealing with demonic forces. This sort of planned tie-in also indicates, for me, the almost unprecedented extent to which the new series is planned and rationalised as a continual media event.

As well as desperately seeking the female audience, and not wanting to alienate anti-sci-fi viewers, the new series' emotional dynamic is also evidently part of its critique of the original, and part of its attempt to fit into norms of contemporary 'quality' TV which tends to offer genre and tonal hybridity unified around core emotional content and a detailed 'series memory' rewarding audience loyalty. I've heard it said that the new romanticism of the programme is simply about fitting into a more openly emotional context in the UK - post-Princess Di - but this strikes me as incredibly lazy copy-writing, to be frank. Britain hasn't suddenly changed that much; I don't find myself knee-deep in extravagant emoting on a day-to-day basis. No, the series has changed in response to US and UK TV industry patterns in 'quality' content, as well as fans' criticisms of plot-holes and emotional absences in the old series: it certainly isn't a mirror of some supposedly vast social upheaval in the UK! What it is, is a very cleverly constructed and managed brand, which is far more intently controlled and policed for consistency than ever before.

In essence, it's the 'MacDonaldization' of what used to be a rather rickety old cult Brit show.

I mean this in a non-pejorative and analytical sense (American sociologist George Ritzer has written about MacDonaldization, at some length): the new series delivers a consistent series of pleasures, just as one would properly expect from a brand. Already in an episode like 'Fear Her', there's a sense of the writer - Matthew Graham - looking to tick the boxes of what should go into a "new series" pitch: strong family story and child-actor presence; monsters-of-the-week in the guises of an animated scribble and the possessed Chloe; emotionally uplifting, with the Doctor rescuing the Olympic flame; a little quirky moment encapsulating one of fandom's critiques of the original series (why does the TARDIS always land facing the most convenient or easily accessible way out?). It's not that any of this is ersatz, or even self-parody, just that it seems a touch too much like self-imitation pursued in the interests of serving up the same, established and regulated format. Old-school Doctor Who's defining quality was probably, above all else, its sheer patchiness; new Who would never dream of stooping to such radical inconsistency. It's a far more disciplined and rationalised beast, down to every last emotional beat. But no doubt it's just a phase the show's going through - after all, regeneration has always been its greatest strength.

-- Matt Hills, Cardiff University

HillsM2@cardiff.ac.uk

Thanks again to Cynthia Jenkins and Henry Jenkins IV for their help in formulating these questions.

Triumph of a Time Lord (Part One): An Interview With Matt Hills

For the past decade or so, I have had people come up to me and treat me as though I were an expert on Doctor Who. This is because I co-authored a book with Doctor Who expert John Tulloch (Doctor Who: The Unfolding Text) called Science Fiction Audiences: Watching Doctor Who and Star Trek. I provided the sections on American Star Trek fans and Tulloch wrote the sections on British and Australian fans of Doctor Who. I hate to say it but I really didn't like the classic Doctor Who very much, though my wife and son were hardcore fans. My son dressed up as Jon Pertwee when he was a wee lad, much to the confusion of our midwestern neighbors who had never heard of the actor before. But when Doctor Who returned, I fell hard -- again, perhaps not as hard as my wife and son -- but hard enough. So, I reached out to my friend and colleague Matt Hills of the University of Cardiff to share with us a British fan's insights into what has happened to the new series. Wisely, I let my wife and son frame the questions. Hills wrote Fan Cultures which is perhaps the most important new book on fandom since... hmm, what was the name of that book again. There's a conversation between the two of us about generations of fan studies in my new book, Fans, Gamers, and Bloggers, and as you will learn below, he is now hard at work on a new book about the Doctor. So what follows taps Hills's special expertise as a fan and academic obsessed with this particular series.

I am going to run this interview, which is quite long (no doubt a shocking development for readers of this blog) but also quite rich, in two installments. This part focuses heavily on the relationship of the new series to its long-time fans, reading the new Doctor Who as a prime example of what happens when the fans take over the franchise. Along the way, there are lots of minor spoilers so for those of you who have not seen the second season, read this at your own risk. I don't think there are any fatal spoilers here but it's death by papercuts. And in any case, the more you know the individual episodes, the more you are going to get from his more specific comments.

Tell me a little about your relationship to the series and how you came to be

writing a book about the new production.

I've been a fan of the series since I was at least three years old - according to family stories, I used to be quietly absorbed in watching long before I learnt to talk! So, I suppose I've been a fan longer than I can actually consciously remember. My earliest proper memories of the show are of watching 'Genesis of the Daleks' on its original transmission, and 'The Deadly Assassin', both of which must have made a big impression. Davros really did terrify the younger me, even in 'Destiny of the Daleks'. And Tom Baker's eventual departure in 'Logopolis' formed a major part of my childhood emotional life...

As for how I came to be writing this book about the 'new' (2005--) series - Triumph of a Time Lord: Regenerating Doctor Who in the 21st Century - well, it was really just something I felt I had to do, given my previous work on fandom and science fiction TV, and my love for the show.

I was fortunate enough to get the chance to discuss the idea, however briefly, with Russell T Davies. He was absolutely supportive, and welcomed the notion that scholars might want to study the programme's latest version.

One interesting snag, though, is that because I'm not doing the book as an official BBC publication, BBC contracts apparently mean that production personnel are not able to grant me interviews. This is what I've been led to believe, anyway. It seems to be a very different situation, and a very different moment, to when John Tulloch and Manuel Alvarado were writing Doctor Who: The Unfolding Text back in 1983 - they interviewed a wide range of then-current and former production personnel. It strikes me that right now, something like Doctor Who, especially with the success it's had, is much more intensely about information control and 'brand management' than it ever was before. It's almost as if there is a kind of info-war taking place - sometimes between the lines, and sometimes bursting into full view - between producers, fans and academics.

So, this book will probably have to be written without behind-the-scenes access, which is a shame in a way - but it's not as if working from 'the text' has ever stopped academics before: there's still masses of interesting things to be said about the new show and its audiences from different kinds of media studies perspectives.

I've ended up working with I.B. Tauris because of their excellent track record in publishing books on US and UK cult/quality TV: I've contributed to their books about Angel and a forthcoming one on CSI, and they've also done things like Reading the Vampire Slayer and Reading Desperate Housewives - spot the trend in titles! I wanted to avoid 'Reading' in my own title, though: it sounds a little limiting. And as I argued in Fan Cultures (2002), my very dense first book, being a fan is about so much more than 'reading' a beloved TV series. By now, I think 'reading' is a rather old-school academic concept or metaphor for what we all do in relation with television shows.

I.B Tauris have also recently published James Chapman's excellent study Inside The Tardis, which focuses on the 'classic' series of Doctor Who. My own book will be a little more theoretical than James's: he begins, only semi-humorously, by likening cultural theorists to Daleks and Cybermen, which I find truly astonishing. For me, 'theory' isn't ever going to be the monster of the piece. I begin my manuscript by suggesting that the ideals and politics of media theory - which often involve championing the underdog and challenging systems of power - are actually really much closer to the ideals of the Doctor himself. And in any case, Who fan writers and luminaries such as Paul Cornell, Lawrence Miles, and Tat Wood have been making very interesting use of so-called 'theory' in their work for years. Like the best of their writings, I'm aiming to provoke fandom, and sometimes challenge received wisdoms, but not disappear up my own fundament at the same time (hmmmm, famous last words, there!).

From the perspective of American fans of Doctor Who, the past decade has been something of a black hole with relatively limited new content. Yet, in the United Kingdom, Doctor Who was kept alive in various ways - from radio broadcasts and books directly based within the franchise to a variety of media projects which were thinly veiled references to the Doctor. Can you describe something of this process?

This seems to have been dubbed 'the wilderness years' by some fans: basically, the period between the original show's cancellation in 1989, its all-too-brief return in 1996, and then on through to 2005. From my perspective as a UK fan, the TV show may have been off-air, but the franchise (if we're going to call it that) was always active. Some of the best stories ever produced have, arguably, actually happened in original Who novels and audios - things like Paul Cornell's Human Nature or Rob Shearman's Chimes of Midnight. It's not at all surprising that the new television series, in episodes such as 'Dalek' and 'Rise of the Cybermen'/'Age of Steel' has occasionally taken inspiration from these other imaginings of the Doctor.

I'd hazard the observation that the series of Virgin novels really helped, if not forced, Doctor Who to develop beyond its original TV series format and limitations (and yes, despite the fan belief that Who is the ultimate flexible TV format, it clearly does have, and has had, its limits...). And in a sense, that growth was one of the most important things ever to happen to the programme. The fact that it has more emotional depth and resonance in its latest production may be partly down to contemporary changes in TV drama, and partly down to Russell T Davies's less stridently gendered vision for the show, but I'd say it also has a lot to do with what happened to Doctor Who when it was off-air, and when a generation of writers who (mostly) loved the programme sought to address the limits and blind-spots of the original TV series, as well as just having fun with the characters.

Along with the Virgin novels, and the later BBC range - which, for me, really took off with the arrival of Lawrence Miles's stunningly revisionist Alien Bodies - there's also been the ongoing Big Finish series. These were all licensed Who products, created by fan-professionals for fan-consumers. And there were also the more tangential Who-based dramas that you refer to - often taking place without the character of the Doctor, and featuring various more-or-less surrogate characters such as 'The Stranger' (not much of a leap there) or Lockwood, both in assorted BBV productions. Fan producers are continuing to make some great Who-based dramas: for example, Magic Bullet have done a few audios featuring Sutekh (Gabriel Woolf). And this has produced a rather odd paradox whereby it's the less clearly Who-branded fan product which explicitly refers to old Doctor Who monsters, while the official series has used the same voice artiste (Gabriel Woolf) but has only very vaguely implied any possible continuity going back to Sutekh. It's a reversal of what you might expect - namely, that the 'official' show would exploit and explicitly name its continuity references, whilst the slightly more tangential fan products would be forced to make veiled references. Instead, the official series has started to favour these sorts of thinly veiled mentions, whether to Davros or Sutekh, really as a way of winking at long-time fans without alienating the newer audience.

It can be very instructive to watch some of the fan-produced videos from around the time of the 'wilderness' years alongside the new series. Auton and Auton 2 are currently available as reissued DVDs: while each is a highly worthwhile watch, they absolutely depend on the detailed continuity surrounding their monster. By contrast, the use of the same foe in 'Rose' is played out as pure iconography rather than continuity. The Autons are brought back for their immediate visual impact - and to hark back to older audiences' nostalgic memories of the programme's 'golden age' - not for any continuity-fest. They aren't even named in the episode. Again, though you might expect the new series to capitalise on its continuity, this has been handled very, very carefully right from the outset.

'Continuity' has almost become a dirty word, as if any strong continuity back to the original series is a step too far, or instant continuity-porn. The series isn't afraid to exploit its icons - its strong visual images such as monsters' appearances or the look of K-9 - but this imagery has consistently taken precedence over continuity. I'm almost tempted to suggest that Elisabeth Sladen's wonderful reappearance as Sarah Jane Smith would never have happened if the actress had, today, been virtually unrecognisable as her former self. Fortunately for the story 'School Reunion', Lis Sladen today looks uncannily like Lis Sladen from 1970's Doctor Who. Just like the Daleks, Cybermen and K-9, there was no call for a radical change of look: iconography, and the pull of nostalgia, again won out over excessive continuity. Of course, once the production team start bringing back the likes of Peter Davison and Tom Baker - both of whom now appear quite different to their time on the show - then my argument won't hold, but I can't imagine either happening any time soon! The moment Tom appears will be the moment the show tips over into pleasing its long-term fans rather than looking for a mainstream, mass audience...

Some have suggested that the new series represents fans taking over the franchise. Russell T. Davies comes out of fan culture. Where does his fannish side come through most loudly in the current series?

I think the argument that the show has undergone a fan take-over is an absolutely compelling one: it's a case of what you've called 'textual poachers' - fans outside the official production process doing their unlicensed and supposedly less 'legit' things with a show - becoming a whole new generation of 'textual gamekeepers'. I would guess that that process has some precedents (even in relation to the 'classic' series of Who), but I'm not sure it's ever quite happened as thoroughly as with this latest version. All sorts of people working on the programme have professed their fandom, including producer Phil Collinson, whose fan credentials have come to the fore through such things as the podcast/web-based episode commentaries he's participated in. The majority of new series writers have also been fans of various stripes, so it's not at all something restricted to Russell T. Davies - though, of course, he has always been incredible vocal about his Who fandom, even down to using clips from 'Pyramids of Mars', and the K-9 prop in Queer as Folk (not to mention the series' less-than-realist and Who-indebted ending).

You might expect fans, who are also major industry players, taking over a show to lead to obvious differences. I'm not sure that it has. Certainly, as I've already started to indicate, it hasn't lead to a massive surge in constant continuity references. I think the fannishness that now underpins the programme has emerged, if at all, in two ways: in the manner in which the old show's shortcomings have been critiqued, and in the tendency to settle, at the same time, for a new formula.

Updating a TV series - changing it, reinventing it - can involve responding to perceived failings or problems with "the original". In that sense, I'd say that new Who is very much its own 'critical reading' of the classic series. Though 'reading' may be limited as a academic metaphor, it does accurately capture some of what media producers do when they give 'notes' on a script, or when they think about how to build on a show's previous successes and failures. Russell T Davies doesn't need media studies or TV studies to tell him that there were things that didn't work in old Who: he already knows that instinctively as a dramatist, and communally as a fan.

How has the new series criticised the format of the old?

Firstly, by suggesting that the Doctor's companions don't just walk out of their existing lives to travel with him, but bring some baggage and prior human connections with them. This is a challenge to many basic assumptions made in the old show, where 'companions' were usually just that: an allocated role in the script of the day, typically devoid of any human back-story which played an active role in the Doctor's ongoing adventures (after their introductory tale or first few stories, anyway).

Secondly, by recalling that the Doctor travels in time. Watching the old series, you would be forgiven for thinking that this was merely a device for getting the character into different adventures: time-travel was featured as an integral part of the story only relatively rarely, and in the 1996 TV Movie it was reduced to little more than a narrative cop-out.

A certain Douglas Adams remembered that Doctor Who was ostensibly about a time-traveller when he contributed 'The City of Death', but in later years this was hardly the norm. And though the UK fan response to series one's 'Aliens of London' has been less than ecstatic in some quarters, the pre-credits sequence for this episode has been, for me, the sharpest and most thrilling of the new series. Like Douglas Adams at his creative best, it remembered that time-travel could be a downright tricky - if not absurdist - business. In fact, this opener, and the Eccleston Doctor's uncomfortable apology to Rose for his bungling, seem just as much of a tribute to Adams as did the entirety of 'The End of The World'. The most likely inheritor of Adams's crown as Who-genius and sci-fi humorist, Steven Moffat, also puts time-travel narratively and emotionally at the heart of his series two contribution, 'The Girl in the Fireplace', and Paul Cornell's tear-jerking 'Father's Day' does likewise in series one. Some fans may feel that Doctor Who is 'less sci-fi' than it used to be - i.e. there are fewer alien worlds and societies - but in terms of its use of time-travel as a story driver, rather than a handy device, it has possibly never been more convincingly science-fictional than it is now!

And thirdly, there's the fact the Doctor's accretion and accumulation of "victories" has also been challenged, most obviously in the episode 'Boom Town'. Surely there was a major blind-spot in a series whose hero apparently put things to rights on a planet, or at any one time, and then promptly disappeared into the ether? What of the defeated 'monsters'? What happens after the Doctor has departed for another (weekly) adventure in time and space? And doesn't anyone notice that the Doctor has been popping up throughout Earth's history and sorting out alien threats?

This lumbering plot-hole, or general story problem, has been addressed from the word go by Russell T. Davies, both through the introduction of a fan-like character Clive (Mark Benton) in 'Rose' who had been tracking the Doctor's earthly appearances, and in series two's 'Love & Monsters', as well as in a developing story arc whereby the general population of the Earth have become aware of the existence of aliens (from 'The Christmas Invasion' onwards - this being referred back to in 'School Reunion' and 'Love & Monsters').

The influence of fan culture, then, appears most readily in the form of criticisms of the original show, and production or storyline 'fixes' which aim to make the show critic-proof, or at least more internally coherent and hence not immediately dismissable on a point of logic. If iconography has been preferred over continuity, then so too has internal consistency generally been favoured over in-jokes.

Some fans have alleged that Russell T Davies's scripts have sometimes shown a tendency to collapse into deus ex machina endings - with the 'God in the machine', or rather the obvious hand of the scriptwriter, coming to the aid of the hero all-too-conveniently. This has provoked fierce online fan debate over whether the new series' stories are as riddled with plot-holes as those of the original show: demonstrating that fans, at least, are still worried about the possibility that general audiences might spot some inherent silliness in 'their' show.

Perhaps the most obvious candidate for this sort of fan criticism is 'New Earth', where intermingled brightly-coloured liquids magically avert an outbreak of zombification. However, what fans miss here is that this supposedly 'magical' resolution is really a version of a children's game like 'it' or 'tag', where the "lurgy" is transmitted or taken away by touch. It's a kind of narrative short-hand, literally: an embracing of primitive thought which probably works best for the child audience, just as the coda where Cassandra dies in her own arms (another beautiful remembrance of time-travel) probably works best for an adult audience. Attacking this sort of thing for 'plot-holes' misses the point that Davies is scripting for a range of different audiences. If anything, the peril or the pitfall of 'New Earth' is that it doesn't adequately integrate its child-like and more adult moments and motifs, unlike, say, Steven Moffat's Hugo-winning 'Empty Child'/'Doctor Dances'. It's not the plot-holes that are the problem: it's the clear segregation of 'stuff for the kids' and 'grown-up' emotional resonance - though this is not a problem that all of Davies's scripts suffer from, as his series one and two finales more-than-amply demonstrate.

I suggested a little earlier that Davies's fandom shows though both in his critique of old Who and also in his own establishment of a new format. So, what is this new set of limitations, and how does it relate to Davies's fandom?

In a word: monsters. Davies seems to be especially in love with a certain phase of the series - around the eras of Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker, when the show was respectively focused on clearly-drawn tales of alien invaders rampaging across the Earth, and gothic monsters emerging from various shady ids. Earlier in its run, the programme had attempted 'straight' historicals (i.e. there were no monsters, just characters drawn from history), and later on it seemed to dispense with clear narrative altogether in favour of strangely condensed multiple threats and layers of storytelling (e.g. 'Resurrection of the Daleks'; 'Ghostlight'; 'Curse of Fenric'). Here, bits of different generic plots were stapled together, either as an example of post-modern self-reference, or post-script-editing laissez faire - 'let's chuck in a bit about android doubles'; 'there aren't any traditional monsters in this'; 'what about adding a bit about the end of all life on a future earth?'

Davies's 'golden age' is apparently one of relatively uncomplicated monsters. And though he offers a 'critical reading' of much of the old series, he also proffers a very devoted re-creation of the feel of its type of cod-space-invasion and reheated-gothic. Every story has its monsters; neither series one or two have had the courage to depart from this template and risk a 'straight' historical. And, as of yet, the new series hasn't widened or deepened its palette and range of genre borrowings - there's been no time-travelling spy story; no outright psychological thriller; no crime tale or noir filtered through the series format; no intimate epic following a group of friends or budding politicians across their lives, with the Doctor intervening to save humanity from political corruption, or just from one bad decision. There's no reason why the series couldn't tell these types of stories and still be recognisably new Doctor Who. Or rather, there is a reason: the show's reinvention is seemingly in thrall to its previous fan-perceived 'golden ages', settling into a certain set of formulas, whether this is the 'celebrity historical' (a 'name' from British history, e.g. Dickens or Queen Victoria, is combined with an alien menace) or the space opera. Even at its most experimental, as in perhaps 'Love & Monsters' and 'Boom Town', the show still uses monsters as a sign of 'proper' Doctor Who-ness.

If anything, the new series has massively intensified its dependence on monsters by using them as mid-series publicity "relaunches" (Daleks in series one; Cybermen in series two) and as series finale audience-grabbers. Paradoxically, this almost domesticates the show's monsters, making them a matter of audience familiarity, safety and branding at the same moment that they are supposedly terrifyingly monstrous. A truly human monster - a psychopath, a serial killer, a despot or tyrant - seems to be simply too dark and too threatening for the new show's format to contemplate, even if it can tolerate moments of "humanity" in its Slitheen combatants, as well as pantomiming monstrosity in the guise of mad scientist John Lumic. Van Statten is probably one of the new series' darkest turns, and even he doesn't really take centre-stage, instead serving to magnify the threat of just one Dalek in comparison with his greed and ruthlessness.

Davies has also engaged in 'setpiece' or fan-pleasing showdowns such as the Doctor regenerating after a battle with the Daleks, and the Daleks and Cybermen going head-to-head. Yet again, pure continuity is a dirty word - here, it is the unusual (in fact, pretty much unprecedented) loading or addition of established, singular elements which speaks to and from fandom: regeneration and Daleks!; Daleks and Cybermen!; and, through the implied back-story of the Time War, the Daddy of all neo-continuity recombinations - Daleks versus Time Lords. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the highly fannish Time War (along with 'Bad Wolf') was not especially foregrounded in Russell T. Davies's original pitch document for series one (published as part of the Series One Companion), but it has certainly appealed very strongly to fans. And the Dalek-Cyber confrontation was rationalised by Davies in his Doctor Who Confidential commentary on these episodes as being what his "eight year-old self" would've loved, i.e. that this battle was designed to especially appeal to the child audience. What this missed out - I would suggest purposefully - was the extent to which Davies was also deliberately upping the ante in terms of giving fandom what it had dreamt of for years - as well as doing something which received wisdom held could only ever be 'fanwank'.

Here's a mission-statement you'll probably never hear Russell T. Davies admit to in any promotional and publicity material: what he really, really wants is to prove that 'fanwank' is the new black.

One of the second series episodes, "Love & Monsters," directly represents what many perceive as a fan community. What kinds of images of fans emerge there and what has been the response to this episode from British fans?

Oh dear; I've got my 'Best Of...' ELO CD playing as I type this! Really. 'Love & Monsters' has probably been the single most divisive episode of the new series - some fans seem to love it, and others feel that it isn't "really" Doctor Who, though quite how that argument can be sustained, I don't personally know.

What is most interesting to me about the episode is the fact that it has not only given rise to opposed fan opinions, but also to entirely opposed interpretations of how it represents fans. Those who focus on the Victor Kennedy (Peter Kay) character argue that the ep attacks fans as obsessive, possessive types who destroy what they love by seeking to regiment and control other fans' activities. In this account, Victor Kennedy stands in for a kind of hierarchy-obsessed 'superfan', and so challenges socially-organised fandom to reform its ways. And it is clearly possible to interpret the majority of LINDA - certainly, those who are absorbed - as rather lacking in social ability: these are evidently misfits and outcasts. A relatively early scene which depicts each of the group in turn also appears to poke considerable fun at their artistic, creative and scholarly achievements, almost as if Davies the professional scriptwriter is pouring cold water on many fans' creative but amateurish, unprofessional efforts.

Against all of this, there's the character of Elton Pope (Marc Warren), which the script and production are consummately careful to depict as 'normal'. It's as if his normality can only be purchased at the cost of projecting negative fan stereotypes more or less heavily across other members of the LINDA group. It needs to be remembered, as well, that this allegorical interpretation of the episode is never directly licensed - the term 'fan' is not used to described these "followers" of the Doctor, and in their world he is a real rather than a fictional construct.

But, through the figure of Elton, fandom is affectionately reclaimed as a positive thing; as a source of solidarity, as a defence against traumatic memories and feelings, and above all, as a space for cultural creativity. Elton is a textbook 'good' fan. These representations of fandom may sound rather gendered, concerning pathologically "powerful" versus "normal" male characters whom women either support (Ursula's love for Elton) or are subordinated to (we witness Victor absorb a number of female 'fans'). However, Davies's notes for the episode indicate that Elton's character was originally to have been a woman, and perhaps the loss of a more conventionally 'feminised' fan in favour of a 'normal' fanboy shouldn't be entirely lamented.

In the end, though, perceiving the episode as a fan allegory slightly closes down its richness and its possibilities - especially as one of its strengths is to challenge the usual dramatic device whereby characters in genre TV seemingly endlessly flag up and discuss their past traumas. Here, it is Elton's silences, elisions and gaps - moments where he literally does nothing other than stare listlessly off-camera into space or where he motions to switch off the camera - which carry and convey his emotional hurt. And, as a result, when his childhood trauma is revealed, it seems to come almost out of nowhere rather than having been prefigured; a whole system of silences suddenly breaks down. There's a kind of emotional truth, power and realism to Elton's silence and his busy-doing-nothing which much TV drama frequently fails to achieve, let alone 'genre' TV. And the episode is also among the most self-reflexive of the run so far, with Elton virtually speaking in scriptwriter Davies's voice, and asserting that he's put the most exciting events at the start of his story. In Triumph of a Time Lord I compare this episode to Davies's much-heralded instalment of The Grand which focused on just one character (the barman Clive) speaking to his father. Both adopt a kind of kind of intimate, oral storytelling mode, making much use of voice-over and subjective POV. It is something which also crops up in the to-camera opening in Queer as Folk, and in Bob & Rose, not to mention Rose's unusual voice-over at the beginning of 'Army of Ghosts' and 'Doomsday'.

While emphasising the emotional bond of oral storytelling, 'Love & Monsters' definitely appears to chastise those fans who oppose the show's newfound emotionality - Victor Kennedy asserts that he doesn't like to be touched "either literally or metaphorically". And this is his great failing; he can't be emotionally moved or touched - i.e. impinged on from without - he can only greedily devour and incorporate external objects (which is all people are to him). 'Love & Monsters' must surely be the favourite Doctor Who episode of psychoanalysts everywhere! Yet its representations of fandom are, I would say, relational: it depicts fandom positively, but only in relation to other negative portrayals, leaving audiences to negotiate and navigate between the good and the bad in order to reach their own (often conflicting) conclusions. Not quite a Rorschach test for fandom, it is nevertheless an apt space for audiences to project in their own prejudices or positions on what it means to be a fan.

With the relaunch of Star Trek, there was a splintering of the fan community with some remaining "loyal" to the classic series and others embracing the new entries in the franchise. To what degree has that occurred around the relaunch of Doctor Who?

It's hard to say, because the fans who are very 'anti' the new series may have drifted away from organised fandom, or may not have bothered to voice their dislike online. There has been much debate, though, about the perceived strengths and weaknesses of the new series, some of which has shaded into what have been caricatured as 'pro' and 'anti' Russell T Davies camps. Such splintering is, I suspect, much more about creating an easy shorthand for different groups of fans to bash each other with, then it is about real debate. The dominant sense would seem to be that most fans love old and new Doctor Who, and value each for their very different identities. In this respect, a lot of fans are good media historians, acutely aware of the different production and industry contexts which have fed into the making of different eras.

Who may have been helped in this by the fact that its 'classic' series was always marked by the recasting of lead and supporting cast. Whereas Star Trek: TOS was really defined through its iconic lead actors (with far less variation than Who), Doctor Who has always been a little more changeable and much less identified with one central cast - Tom Baker's pre-eminence in the US notwithstanding. Fans have therefore got very used to championing certain Doctor Who stories or actors while attacking others: as a result, the fandom is much more decentred than simply revolving around 'classic' versus 'new' factions, I'd say, because of the show's long initial run and its many reinventions from the 1960s onward.

Having noted all that, I am personally aware of some fans - a very small number - who have simply stopped watching the show, saying it's just not for them any more, and that it isn't the Doctor Who they've loved all their lives. It may be that for these people, the pleasures of the show were so powerfully linked to a certain phase in their own lives, or to a sense of appreciating something outside the media 'mainstream', that the show's reinvention, rebranding, and newfound commercial omnipresence have put it beyond the pale. Sometimes being a fan is about a lot more than simply appreciating any one TV show: it can also mean making a statement about the obscurity (or not), and the individuality (or not) of what are felt to be one's defining tastes.

-- Matt Hills, Cardiff University

HillsM2@cardiff.ac.uk

Fan Fiction as Critical Commentary

This has been my week for dealing with law professors -- having engaged in a conversation with Yale Law Professor Yochai Benkler last week at the MIT Communications Forum, I was pleased to find a review of Convergence Culture over at the blog of the University of Chicago Law School written by Randy Picker. The first and second parts of the review mostly provide a detailed, accurate, and positive summary of the key points from the book, targeting those passages which may be particularly relevant to people interested in the legal implications of participatory culture. The last segment, not surprisingly, gets into the book's discussion of fandom and intellectual property law. I thought I would use my post today to respond to a few of Picker's key points there. Now let's be clear that I am no expert on the law. My wife happens to have a law degree from the University of Wisconsin and we both take some interest in developments in the area of intellectual property law and regulation of free speech. I suspect I know more than most laymen about these matters as they impact fan culture and the other sites of grassroots participation I have written about. But I would be a fool to try to debate the fine points of the law with a scholar of Picker's stature.

Fan FIction and Fair Use

Picker writes:

Jenkins pushes (p.190) for a reformulation of fair use "to legitimate grassroots, not-for-profit circulation of critical essays, and stories that comment on the content of mass media." But he clearly wants more, as he recognizes that most fans aren't that interested in producing work that the law is most likely to protect (parody or critical commentary of the sort seen in The Wind Done Gone), but who want instead to write about Ron and Hermione kissing.

Let me spell out a little more precisely what I argue on page 190 in the book:

Nobody is sure whether fan fiction falls under current fair-use protections. Current copyright law simply doesn't have a category for dealing with amateur creative expression. Where there has been a public interest factored into the legal definition of fair use -- such as the desire to protect the rights of libraries to circulate books or journalists to quote or academics to cite other researchers -- it has been advanced in terms of legitimated classes of users and not a generalized public right to cultural participation. Our current notion of fair use is an artifact of an era when few people had access to the market place of ideas and those who did fell into certain professional classes. It sure demands close reconsideration as we develop technologies that broaden who may produce and circulate cultural materials. Judges know what to do with people who have professional interests in the production and distribution of culture; they don't know what to do with amateurs or people they deem to be amateurs.

For me, the phrase, the public right to cultural participation is a key concept underlying the book's discussion. If I had my way, the right to participate would become as important a legal doctrine for the 21st century as the right to privacy as been in the late 20th century. I argue elsewhere in the book that a right to participate might be abstracted from the combined rights listed in the First Amendment and the right to participate would include the right to respond meaningfully to core materials of your culture. In that sense, I might go beyond our current understanding of fair use.

But a key point here is that I regard all or at least most fan fiction to involve some form of criticism of the original texts upon which it is based -- criticism as in interpretation and commentary if not necessary criticism as in negative statements made about them. Not being a legal scholar, I have had trouble producing a more precise definition of what constitutes critical commentary for the purposes of Fair Use. I'd be curious if any reader could provide a workable one for the purposes of this discussion.

For the moment, I am relying on my understanding as someone who is in the criticism business. I reviewed a number of guides for critical essays written at writing centers at major universities. What they seem to have in common is the following: a critical essay puts forth an interpretation of the work in question, one which includes debatable propositions which are in turn supported by the mobilization of some kind of evidence -- either internal (from the work itself) or external (from secondary texts which circulate around the work). All of them make clear that critical commentary may, in fact, embrace the ideas included in the original work as well as take issue with them.

Hand Holding, Snogging, and Critical Commentary

My discussion of critical commentary in the book continues:

One paradoxical result [of current copyright law] is that works that are hostile to the original creators and thus can be read more explicitly as making critiques of the source material may have greater freedom from copyright enforcement than works that embrace the ideas behind the original work and simply seek to extend them in new directions. A story where Harry and the other students rise up to overthrow Dumbledore because of his paternalistic policies is apt to be recognized by a judge as political speech and parody, whereas a work that imagines Ron and Hermione going on a date may be so close to the original that its status as criticism is less clear and is apt to be read as an infringement.

So, yes, I am concerned about stories where the characters hold hands or snog and not simply those where same sex couples end up in bed together or when the story is told from the perspective of He Who Must Not Be Named. This goes to the very nature of fan culture: fans write stories because they want to share insights they have into the characters, their relationships, and their worlds; they write stories because they want to entertain alternative interpretations or examine new possibilities which would otherwise not get expressed through the canonical material. These interpretations are debatable -- indeed, fans spend a great deal of time debating the alternative interpretations of the characters which appear in their stories.

Fan stories are in no simple sense just "extensions" or "continuations" or "extra episodes" of the original series. Unlike the model critical essays discussed by the various university writing centers, the insights about the work get expressed not through nonfictional argumentation but rather through the construction of new stories. Just as a literary essay uses text to respond to text, fan fiction uses fiction to respond to fiction. That said, it is not hard to find all kinds of argumentation about interpretation woven through most fan produced stories. A good fan story references key events or bits of dialogue to support its particular interpretation of the character's motives and actions. There are certainly bad stories that don't dig particular deeply into the characters or which fall back on fairly banal interpretations, but the last time I looked, fair use gets defined in functional terms (what is the writer trying to do) and not aesthetic terms (what they produce is good or bad artistically). Fan fiction extrapolates more broadly beyond what is explicitly stated in the text than do most conventional critical essays and may include the active appropriation and transformation of the characters as presented but even here, I would argue that the point of situating the characters in a different historical context, say, or in another genre is to show what makes these characters tick and how they might well remain the same (or be radically different) if they operated in another time and place. Fan fiction is speculative but that does not mean that it is not at its core interpretative.

Elsewhere, I have argued that fan fiction emerges from a balance between fascination and frustration. If the original work did not fascinate fans, they would not continue to engage with it. If it did not frustrate them in some level, they would feel no need to write new stories -- even if the frustration comes from an inadequate amount of material. In most cases, the frustration takes the form of something they would change in the original -- a secondary character who needs more development, a plot element that is underexplored, an ideological contradiction that needs to be debated. And in that sense, fan fiction is often critical of the original in the looser sense that it expresses some concern about the story it tell.

Commercial Competition

As Picker notes, I do acknowledge the rights of creative industries to protect themselves against commercial competitors even as I would argue for a broader definition of fair use for amateur media makers who circulate their works for free. As I note in the book,

Under the current system, because other companies know how far they can push and are reluctant to sue each other, they often have greater latitude to appropriate and transform media content than amateurs, who do not know their rights and have little legal means to defend them even if they did.

In so far as they impact fan fiction, the studio's intellectual property "rights" are the product of intimidation and chilling effects and not based in any real legal doctrine; so far there is no case law which speaks directly to the fair use or parody status of fan fiction. Unfortunately, so far, the various public interest law organizations, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, have been more willing to protect the rights of Napster to facilitate illegal downloads than the rights of fans to publish stories which comment critically on the characters of Harry Potter. And a teenager confronted with a threat from a major studio that could bankrupt their family tends to fold rather than seek legal counsel.

My distinction between commercial competitors and amateur cultural production leads Picker to make the following observations:

Jenkins asserts that IP holders attempt to use IP rights to control authoritativeness. I think that is probably right, but authoritativeness is much more organically tied to the author herself. So I don't think that Jenkins provides any examples of fans hijacking the canon from the author. This is almost a question of market share. In a world without fan fiction, Rowling had a 100% share in the Harry Potter creation market. With fan fiction, her share is smaller, but I suspect that it is still in the high 90s. This isn't about sheer number of words written--fans could quickly surpass an original author--but more about reading share and mindshare. Every fan will read HP VII, but what fraction of those has read whatever is the leading non-official Potter text?

Actually, I wouldn't read this simply in terms of market share. It is almost certainly true that the commercial text will outdraw any texts fans are going to be able to produce. Moreover, anyone reading the fan text is in almost every case going to end up reading the commercial inspiration for that work -- after the fact if not before. The fan work depends on a reader with at least some superficial familiarity with the original and one could argue that fan texts may extend the shelf life of the original by generating new generations of readers.

Canon and Fanon

But again, it doesn't stop there: I would suggest that most fans take the "canon," that is, the official texts (in almost every instance) provide the base line for the conversation. The author makes a statement about the characters; the fan writer proposes alternative interpretations of the characters. That's why fans draw a distinction between canon (the original text) and fanon (the works produced by other fans which may or may not be constraining on subsequent interpretations).

There are instances where fans reject canon but it is most often in cases where subsequent developments in the series go against what fans took to be something foundational to their experience of the program. Fans reject canon when canonical authors contradict themselves or violate the spirit of their contract with the readers. I discuss one such instance in my earlier book, Textual Poachers, around the series, Beauty and the Beast, where plot developments tarnished aspects of the series which fans had been taught were sacred in earlier episodes and were rejected by a sizable section of fandom. The value which fans place on canon has to do with the moral economy that emerges around the series and only holds when the producer plays fair with her readers.

My concern is not just that the original texts exert a certain authority over fans. It is that the producers use that authority to police fan interpretations, normalizing some and marginalizing others. In the book, for example, I discuss the ways that Lucas's official Star Wars film contest adopts seemingly neutral rules which a) only grant to fans those rights it would be most difficult for the company to restrict -- the right to make parodies or documentaries and b) have the effect of making the works of male fans highly visible while pushing the work of female fans underground.

Picker continues:

IP matters here in the sense that if commercial competitors could write Harry Potter stories, a non-Rowlings text might do well. A commercial house would engage a professional writer and could put its marketing muscle behind the story. That would look a lot like Lucasfilm with its sixty best sellers, except that we would have more competitors. But I don't think that copyright is driving control over the canon against fans. The fan texts would have to achieve greater mindshare to become canonical.

It is possible to imagine a commercial competitor producing a text which generates a good share of the market -- especially given, as Picker notes, the likelihood of aggressive marketing but also given the possibility that the competitor really did their homework and were more willing to provide fans with what they wanted. But the new text might still not be read as canon, would be judged against the original, and would likely be perceived as a rip-off which tarnished rather than enhanced the experience of the series. One should not under-estimate the degree of loyalty fans will feel towards original creators or their desire to see themselves as protecting the integrity of favored works. There would be very few works produced by commercial competitors which would carry the same cultural authority whatever their commercial fates may be.

Picker continues:

When we don't observe licensing to extend the story, it seems unlikely that fan fiction competes with the authoritative texts or with licensing opportunities in adjacent markets. So Rowling licenses for movies, but she isn't building--yet--the Harry Potter Extended Universe. Lucasfilm has done exactly that, and, in that context, fan fiction may compete with officially licensed versions and represents a missed licensing opportunity

Hmm. My hunch is that in practice, fan fiction rarely decreases the amount of commercial content any given consumer consumes regardless of whether there is commercial content available. When fans get really interested in something, they want to suck in as much information and insight as possible. But I would be hard pressed to know how to prove this. He's right that the more broadly extended the universe becomes, the lower the likelihood that any given fan will consume all of that material. Very few people have consumed every story associated with Star Wars or Star Trek. Yet, this would be true for people who did not read fan fiction as well and I'd wager that the people who read fan fiction are likely to consume more not less of the commercially produced material than fans of the series who do not read fan fiction, just because they have a deeper engagement of the material over all, and because the fan fiction is likely to send them back to the primary text in search of evidence with which they may adjudicate conflicting claims about the characters and their motivations.

Erotic Criticism

He continues:

As Jenkins describes it (p.150), Lucasfilm has been most aggressive in trying to block erotic stories involving the Star Wars characters. (I haven't gone looking but my guess is that if we permute and combine Han/Leia/Luke/Chewie, we can come up with a full-range of variations.) This is like parody in the sense that we think that it is outside of what the author would be willing to agree to, but probably unlike parody as it may not operate as a commentary on the original text. As the parody case makes clear, copyright has been willing to protect as fair use the use that wouldn't be licensed voluntarily.

Again, we come back to a core question I identified earlier: for me, all fan fiction constitutes a form of critical commentary on the original texts and indeed, erotic fiction seems most often interested in providing a critique of the constructions of gender and sexuality found in the original works. This is part of what distinguishes fan erotica from much of the pornography that circulates in our culture: it is not anonymous sex; it uses sex as a vehicle to investigate the psychology of the characters and as such, it may be the form of fan fiction which most clearly comments on the original text. Fan erotica does more than comment on the original text: it clearly has mixed motives but there is very little fan erotica that is not also involved in critical commentary in some form.

This is a fascinating legal discussion -- though as I suggest in the book, I am more apt to put my faith in the short term in companies liberalizing their policies towards fan fiction because it is in their economic interests to do so. We are already seeing this shift happen with very little fanfare. The Powers That Be are recognizing that fans create value by generating greater interest in their works, expanding rather than diminishing the market. I often argue that fans can be seen to appreciate a favorite show in two senses: they like it and they add to its value through their various creative and emotional investments. They do invisible work which is increasingly valued by media producers and as a result, we are seeing studios start to turn a blind eye to fan fiction and in a few cases, actively promote it. This will result in a liberalization of fan fiction in the short run which may or may not help to settle the legal issues in the long term. Can they give us free access to walk across their land for a period of time and then reverse course and start prohibiting access or charging us rent? The law would seem to give us some contradictory messages on this point

The World of Reality Fiction

In Convergence Culture, I included a sidebar about the remarkable fan fiction produced by Mario Lanza. Lanza is a fan who gets to consult with and often receive fan letters from the characters who populate his stories. Lanza writes fan fiction involving the contestants featured on Survivor -- a series of engaging, richly detailed, psychologically nuanced original "seasons" cast with "all stars" known to readers from their previous appearances on the series. At the time he started writing reality fan fiction, the idea of combining elements of reality television with narrative fiction might have seemed more than a little odd. Today, though, there is a growing body not only of amateur but also professional fiction which borrows elements from reality television. I asked my son, Henry Jenkins IV, to share with my readers some of his impressions about this emerging genre. Henry recently graduated from the University of Arizona where he studied media and creative writing. He has already published several essays of his own media analysis, including one in Nick Sammond's anthology, Steel Chair to the Head, which traces his experiences growing up watching professional wrestling, and another -- a father/son dialogue on Buffy the Vampire Slayer -- which is included in my new book, Fans, Gamers, and Bloggers. He has been very active in the spoiling and fan writing communities around Survivor through the years and so brings an insider's perspective to this topic.

What follows are his thoughts about reality fiction:

To the impartial observer reality television fiction sounds about as reasonable as tofu turkey. Both are wince inducing contradictions of an irreverently modern consumer culture in which seemingly clueless marketers cater to niche audiences with a cheeky disregard for tradition. The same literati crowd who rolled their eyes and sighed when CBS producers borrowed George Orwell's phrase to create the low culture Big Brother would probably sniff indignantly at me if I told them about my efforts to write an original Survivor novel. "Reality cannot be fictional. Please, go away."

But on the Survivor Sucks message boards, by far the most active for reality television fandom, dozens of amateur writers have tried their hand at penning the next great American Survivor novel. Only a few have produced novel length works of any real literary value but much like science fiction fandoms, for which zine trading has at times been a viable cottage industry, the interest is there and a cannon of great fan authors, archived works and literary conventions has been compiled by consensus.

The earliest Survivor fan fiction, not surprisingly, was badly written pornography. But Mario Lanza, a family man, computer programmer and aspiring comedy writer from Southern California, was the first to really popularize fan fiction in reality television circles. His four novels, All Star Survivor: Hawaii, All Star Survivor: Alaska, All Star Survivor: Greece and Survivor: Okinawa, were all of a Stephen King-esque length (about six hundred pages) and are still considered the gold standard by which all other authors are judged.

The All Star novels speculated about what might happen if the best and most memorable characters from the early seasons of the show were put into competition with each other. They were sort of the equivalent of comic book fans speculating "Who would win in a real fight, Batman or Aquaman?" They could also very easily be perceived as having generated the fan buzz producers' cited in their decision to try the concept out during their eighth season.

Mario's fourth novel, Survivor: Okinawa, cast real fans (including myself) in the role of the castaways, chronicling a month long game that took place online. The contestants competed in real time with the conditions mirroring those of the real competitions as closely as possible considering that we were all stationed thousands of miles apart. Daily reports were required explaining how we had contributed to the work around camp, strategy meetings took place off and on all day, a certain number of points could be allocated or reserved from each competition and most importantly the tribe that lost the Immunity Challenge would have to vote one of their members out of the game.

The mood of the game was surprisingly, at times almost disturbingly intense with real egos at stake. The knowledge that every word one said had the potential to be judged by the entire fan community put a lot of pressure on people to avoid being played for a fool and the result was a constant atmosphere of paranoia. Almost all of the contestants participating ended up with very mixed feelings about having done so. The ones who were voted out early were embarrassed and the ones who lasted the longest endured such prolonged angst that they needed a vacation by the end of it. Mario unflinchingly turned thousands of pages of conversation transcripts and emails into his most ambitious novel yet and the competing fans developed fans (and detractors) of their own.

As a side note, Mario was not the first to hold such a competition. He himself had only recently been a competitor in Survivor: Tonga, a game run by a Brown student named Rafe Judkins who would shock everyone when he himself was chosen as a contestant on the real life Survivor: Guatemala. Many both in the online community and the cast of the show consider Judkins the best strategist of his season and his online game no doubt allowed him to run an insightful simulation of what might occur on the island

Afterwards many tried to follow in Mario's footsteps but very few succeeded because no template was established for what Survivor short fiction would look like (nor for any other reality series) and the commitment and endurance necessary to write a six hundred page novel was simply beyond most of the amateur writers. Countless projects were begun and then abandoned a few chapters in (to a chorus of boos). A climate of cynicism reigned among readers who had been suckered in once too often and the low readership further discouraged fan authors.

One of the few truly successful efforts to follow Mario's was a series started by a young fan known only as GuatemalaFanfic or GF. He used a different template than the All Star model that many had attempted to emulate and instead of writing the story as literature he attempted to recreate the style of the show as accurately as possible. He wrote his episodes in sixty minute script format, throwing in moments of inaudible dialogue, background conversation and song cues. He also took careful analysis that other fans had done of the way that the producers told stories - when they focused on the characters that would succeed and when they focused on those who would fail - and challenged his readers to observe what templates his was using and how the game would play out. He also differed from Mario's formula in that instead of bringing together characters from different seasons of the show he used all of the characters of the season that was currently being broadcast, writing a kind of alternate history with a different set of storylines and outcomes.

Much like GuatemalaFanfic I had been an avid fan of Mario's All Star novels, enjoying them at times more than the actual series, and like GuatemalaFanfic I was determined to beat the master at his own game. So I began writing Survivor: Belize, a novel adhering as closely as possible to what I imagined the standards and specifications of original television novels to be, with the hopes of selling it for publication to CBS' publishing company. Because it would most likely have been perceived as slander to put words in the mouths of real life individuals I created a completely original cast of characters.

My biggest challenge came in introducing sixteen characters at the same time without the audience throwing up their hands in frustration. This is, of course, a challenge any reality series faces but I didn't have the benefit of using audio/visual clues such as contestants' faces and voices as memory jogs. I eventually decided on a two pronged approach for tackling these issues. First, I wouldn't try to familiarize audiences with all sixteen characters at the same time. I would take a page from the series' book and focus only on a manageable number of characters in each episode, working everyone in eventually as the numbers began to dwindle later in the story. Secondly, I would use visual clues by inserting a section of my contestants' headshots and biographies, mirroring the CBS.com website in style and content. Since most of the characters were based on people I knew, anyway, finding appropriate models wouldn't be hard.

I was in the middle of working on my project just before Christmas last year, toggling between my word processor and my online shopping, when I ran into a product line that made my jaw drop -original Survivor novels. There they were on Amazon.com, recently released. Not sure whether to be encouraged or discouraged I ordered a set to put under the tree.

This set of novels differed significantly from my own idea in that they were aimed at preteen readers and they followed a Choose Your Own Adventure format. Since I'd been a huge fan of the Choose Your Own Adventure books when I was in grade school these provided a charming bit of nostalgia but my concern that making the castaways all ten or twelve years old would really water down the story proved valid. Not only did the writers' take the teeth out of the game - providing the contestants with lots of kid friendly food, having them compete in little mock challenges and leaving strategy simple if explained at all - but the character development was wafer thin.

The most interesting thing about the books was easily the format, which allowed the reader to flip to one page or another depending on who they wanted to be booted from the game or which challenge they wanted the castaways to compete in. But because the writers tried to cram so many different possible routes into a 120 page book they had to cut each version of the entire game down to a miniscule number of pages that could not sustain a solidly built story. While aiming the series at younger readers is a surprising but not inherently stupid idea I feel like the series' editors choice to low ball the series was ill advised. A notable percentage of Mario Lanza's All Star novel fans were of the age that these books seemed to be aimed at but they never complained that they were overwhelmed by the difficulty of the content or bored by the grown up nature of the contestants.

A few weeks ago I ran into a book review in Time Magazine for Carolyn Parkhurst's Lost and Found, a literary novel about "an Amazing Race style reality show" which, we were told, explored the human condition in a way "crappy" reality series never could. Despite being annoyed at the anti-popular culture bias of the review and mildly disappointed that someone else had once again preceded me I was dying to pick up the book on my next trip into town. I wanted it to succeed where the young reader novels had failed, to capture the sense of excitement of great reality television, the immediacy and unpredictability. I wanted to see how Parkhurst tackled all of the questions I'd been working through in the first hundred and fifty pages of my spec novel. Would she capture the impression of reality with adverbs and imagination?

The answer? Only somewhat, but Lost and Found is a pretty good book anyway. Where it succeeds is in vividly portraying a small number of core characters' psyches, a crucial aspect of almost any story. Where it fails is in capturing the appeal of reality television as distinct from other forms of storytelling. There's virtually no suspense about the outcome of the game in the entire novel. A lot of the supporting characters are never so much as given a chance to speak. That obviously isn't a goal the writer sought and failed at, it's something they never tried to do.

The book's ambivalence towards the subject matter was fairly interesting and from my vantage point seems frank without being unfair even if it came across as slightly apologetic. Parkhrurst's reality television producers are cold blooded and opportunistic but her other characters understand that and, in all but one case, don't seem offended by it. They all have motivations of their own for taking part. Just like in real life some, such as the so-called 'ex-gays', compete in order to present a sociopolitical agenda before an international audience; others, such as the former child stars, do it to gain visibility in the entertainment world; while still others, such as the mother and daughter team, do it for the adventure and the escape from their ever day lives. In order to gain a sense of perspective on the industry Parkurst collected stories from two former competitors, Shii Ann Huang (Survivor:Thailand and Survivor:All-Stars) and Zachary Behr (The Amazing Race); and consequently some of the details, such as the camera operator who no one wants to work with because of his offensive smell, ring true.

One creative choice Parkhurst makes that seems a central issue of such novels is to focus on the mechanics of the production directly (and constantly) rather than avoiding the subject. Crew members such as camera people and handlers are supporting characters. The host is frequently described while she prepares for her next monologue. A production meeting is transcribed at one point. The Survivor Choose Your Own Adventure novels, by comparison, act almost as though there was no television production, focusing exclusively on the action 'inside' the TV box.

I myself found it useful at points to reference stages of the production that didn't appear on screen such as the casting interviews and the airing of the episodes but considered that level of self-reflexivity fair game because the show's host, Jeff Probst, talks openly about such things in media teleconferences and at the live reunion shows. Parkhurst tends to use descriptions of the production primarily in the pejorative sense to talk about the artifice of reality television where as I am more interested in the dual experiences of the castaways who are both experiencing some very real challenges such as hunger, exhaustion and the social game and at the same time going through the emotional mill of being put on display in front of seventeen million people.

At one point one of my characters is really torn between voting out a woman who shares her mother's cultural values or one who's everything her mother is against. She knows that her family and their entire neighborhood is going to one day be watching this play out on television and they're going to judge her for the choices she makes; and that leaves her sleepless at night. To me putting the game in such a context doesn't detract from the reality of the emotion, it adds to it.

Reality television fiction is at a really interesting point right now because the rules haven't been established yet. Does one use the same number of contestants as you would on a reality series or is that too many to keep track of? Do some shows work better for prose than others or not at all? If a short format isn't going to try to cover an entire game then what should it look like? How does one write a novel covering an entire game without exceeding a standard 350 page book length? Can new series be created for fiction and, if so, could a work of reality fiction ever be optioned for television production? With Battle Royal and Series 7 we're already starting to see how movies could recreate reality TV. But what other types of movies could be written that playoff of that idea? The opportunity to shape the conventions of the micro-genre is there for whoever steps up to the plate.

How to Watch a Fan-Vid

I am always fascinated when some bit of bottom-up generated "content" starts to get momentum and gain greater public visibility. This past few weeks, I have been observing a ground-swell of interest in a Star Trek fan video set to Nine Inch Nails's "Closer." Many of you will have already seen this video. It has already been featured by Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing, by Susie Bright, and by Salon's VideoDog among others. As someone who has done work in the past on Star Trek fans, I have received multiple pointers to this video from friends all over the world. Many of the people who sent it to me and certainly many of the bloggers who have pointed to it seem to have little or no awareness that there is a much larger tradition of fan-made videos or that the video makers, T. Jonsey and Killa have produced a larger body of work that circulates within the fanvid community. As artists, they are known for their sophisticated techniques and intelligent use of appropriated materials as well as for their diversity of approaches to their subject matter.

It is the nature of YouTube that the work which appears there could come from almost anywhere and that it is often consumed outside of its originating content: YouTube is the place right now where work travels from one grassroots community or subculture to another. There are real advantages to such a site since it results in cross-influences and more innovation, experimentation, and diversity, yet there are also losses to this process of decoupling amateur media from its original contexts of production and consumption.

Technical Innovation and Grassroots Media

Given that I have been following the development of fan-made music videos for more than fifteen years now, I thought it might be helpful if I spelled out some of what I saw when I looked at this particular segment. Through the years, I have watched dozens of hours of these videos, produced within a broad range of fandoms. In fact, my book, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, published in 1992, already contains a full chapter tracing the aesthetics and production practices surrounding fan music videos.

At the time I wrote that chapter, fan music videos were made using two vcrs and patch cords. The only real way for most participants to edit the material was through transferring from one machine to the other. The biggest challenges artists faced were rollback and rainbow lines. Making videos under these conditions took a great deal of preplanning and an even greater amount of patience. The best video artists were perfectionists who would redo their projects many times to insure the smoothest transitions. The typical video could take six to eight hours to produce and more elaborate ones might take a great deal longer. Despite these technical limitations, some of the top video makers produced many hours of these videos which they would show primarily at fan conventions. There was some limited distribution -- they would personally copy the videos one by one for people who asked really nicely. They actively discouraged recopying of their material to pass to others because it would further degrade the quality of their work but of course, a good deal of underground trading of this content took place. Digital production tools have allowed for greater formal complexity and visual sophistication, including layering of images through lap dissolves, superimposition, multiple frame shots, and other digital manipulations, subtle manipulations of speed, lip-syncing of words and images and other forms of "mickeymousing," and so forth.

Fifteen years ago, I was presenting the work of these video makers at places like Interval Computing and the MIT Media Lab arguing that we should be paying attention to what these amateur media makers were doing when it was hard, nearly impossible, to accomplish so that we might predict affordances that should be built into the next generation of media tools. Today, we are seeing amateur media makers everywhere. Sites like YouTube have emerged to support their work and there is a public interested in seeing amateur-made work almost without regard to its origins or genre.

The Aesthetics of Fan Music Videos

I wonder if this particular song video would have generated the buzz that it has if it was not set to the music of Nine Inch Nails. The urban cool and the rough-hewn images of this video contrast sharply with people's expectations about the aesthetics of Star Trek fan art. In popular mythology, Trekkers are geeks, not rockers. The earliest fan music videos might have reconfirmed those stereotypes: the most commonly used songs were slow-paced and sappy, pop not rock, though artists explained this was in part because of the difficulty of doing rapid edits using the tools that they have had at their disposal. As these fans have embraced new digital tools, the overall pace of fan made videos has quickened. This, and the emergence of a younger generation of fans with taste for alternative music, has broadened the choice of songs. We are seeing many more hard-edged songs find their way into fan culture.

For the book, I interviewed a pioneering video artist, identified in Textual Poachers as MVD. MVD described her videos as "half-and-half things," neither "a Reader's Digest of the shows we love" nor "fancy pictures to entertain the eye while we listen to our favorite music." She explained:

Images pull out the words, emphasize the words, just as the words emphasize the pictures. If I've done a good job with a video, I can portray an emotion and I can hold that emotion throughout the song. I can bring a new level of depth to that emotion through my images and I can make you think about the program in a different way.

MVD suggested that the best fan videos could produce "layers of meaning," being accessible at first glance to anyone with a casual familiarity with the program, offering a deeper experience to anyone who knew the program well, and a still deeper experience to someone who has been part of the fan community's discussions around the show or read through the fan fiction surrounding a particular set of character relationships. MVD drew a distinction between convention videos, designed to be watched publicly in a general audience, and living room videos, designed to be watched in an intimate space by a group of friends who are already deeply immersed in the lore of a particular fan culture:

They can't take the complex ones in a large group. They get hyper. They aren't concentrating that deeply. They want to all laugh together or they want to share their feelings. So it's got to be obvious enough that the people around them will share those emotions....The living room video is designed to be so complicated that you'd better know everything about the show or it isn't going to make much sense. These videos are for a very small in-group that already understands what you are trying to say. It's like fan writing. You don't have to build up this entire world. You can rely on certain information.

MVD, at the time, could not have imagined what it might mean to watch a fan-made music video totally outside of the cultural context which fandom provided -- to come across it on YouTube or Boing Boing and not have any access to the conversations which shaped these particular appropriations. For one thing, "Closer" is apt to be understood within fandom as a "constructed reality" video -- that is, it creates a new story by linking together shots from the original series as opposed to using those shots simply to interpret or provide an alternative emotional perspective on events already depicted in the aired episodes. Such "constructed reality" works are extremely rare because they are so difficult to do well.

Such works certainly interpret the original series but not in a sense that would be recognized by most Literature teachers. They are not simply trying to recover what the original producers meant. They are trying to entertain hypotheticals, address what if questions, and propose alternative realities. Part of the pleasure of fan made media is seeing the same situations through multiple points of view, reading the same characters in radically different ways. The same artist might offer multiple constructions of the characters and their relationships across different works -- simply to keep alive this play with different readings.

As one fan quoted in my new book, Convergence Culture, explains,

What I love about fandom is the freedom we have allowed ourselves to create and recreate our characters over and over again. Fanfic rarely sits still. It's like a living, evolving thing, taking on its own life, one story building on another, each writer's reality bouncing off another's and maybe even melding together to form a whole new creation. A lot of people would argue that we're not creative because we build on someone else's universe rather than coming up with our own. However, I find that fandom can be extremely creative because we have the ability to keep changing our characters and giving them new life over and over. We can kill and resurrect them as often as we like. We can change their personalities and how they react to situations. We can take a character and make him charming and sweet or cold-blooded and cruel. We can give them an infinite, always-changing life rather than the single life of their original creation. We have given ourselves license to do whatever we want and it's very liberating.

"Closer," like other fanvids, was constructed as part of a conversation which the fan artists were having with the original text, with its authors, with other fans, and with themselves, whereas the video as seen outside of this context seems singular and unique. Or conversely, the video is read symptomatically -- as speaking for all Star Trek fans when in fact, it borrows in some ways and breaks in others from the norms of this community.

Recurring Images

MVD was one of a number of pioneering video makers who took on the responsibility to pass their skills onto other women interested in working in the medium. She would host slumber parties at her house in Western Massachusetts where women would bring their vcrs and tapes and learn from each other. As I suggest in Convergence Culture, a lot of fan culture looks like folk culture processes applied to mass media content and these gathering have the feel of traditional quilting bees.

Through this process, the community started to distill the hundreds of hours of episodes around a series like Star Trek into recurring shots which carried a greater deal of emotional resonance and meaning to members of the community. These shots get used again and again, combined in new ways, mixed with different songs and lyrics, taking on different connotations and associations. The best of them remained highly potent. When I first watched the "Closer" video, I was struck by what a high percentage of the shots used there were part of the vocabulary of fan music video producers of fifteen years ago. Don't believe me -- check out the photographs from MVD's "I Needed You" which I reproduced on pages 240-243 of Textual Poachers. Almost all of them appear in "Closer."

Slash This

One reason that so many of these shots reappear is that they evoke a particular interpretation of the original material. Keep in mind that in many cases, these videos are watched by people who are also reading fan fiction and thus have come to understand the relationship between Kirk and Spock within the terms of the fan subgenre known as Slash. I was struck by how many bloggers referenced slash in relation to this video -- the term is now known, but not widely understood, by many outside of the fan community itself. In Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers (which collects my previously published essays on participatory culture), I include "The Normal Female Interest in Men Bonking," a collection of brief theoretical and critical statements about slash as a genre made by slash fan readers and writers which help to explain the persistence and popularity of this cultural practice.

For the moment, let's say that slash is a form of fan-generated romance which centers on the relationship between two same sex (most often male) characters appropriated from the realm of popular fiction. Kirk and Spock were probably the original slash couple but slash did not become slash until the idea of same sex relations moved from Kirk and Spock to a whole range of other pairings. Before that, it was simply K/S with the slash standing in for a sexual relationship. K&S would have referred to a passionate but asexual friendship between the same characters. The people who write and read slash are mostly women -- women of varied sexual orientations and interests -- who see their work as bringing to the surface emotional dynamics that were masked in the original material.

Think about all of the times that Kirk would woo some blue-skinned woman and then abandon her again, insisting that his obligations to his ship and his crew would outweigh his personal romantic interests. Then consider what happens again and again across the series and the films whenever Spock is put at risk. Kirk will sacrifice his ship, his crew, his rank, everything he has, to get Spock back. There's no question that his emotional commitment to Spock is the most important relationship in his life, even if the two men rarely speak directly about what that friendship means to them.

One of the most powerful moments in all of Star Trek comes in The Wrath of Khan when Spock finally puts into words his friendship for Kirk and gives his life to save the Enterprise. This scene seems key to understanding the emotional dynamics of slash, as I suggested in the Fans, Gamers, and Bloggers essay mentioned earlier:

When I try to explain slash to non-fans, I often reference that moment in Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan where Spock is dying and Kirk stands there, a wall of glass separating the two longtime buddies. Both of them are reaching out towards each other, their hands pressed hard against the glass, trying to establish physical contact. They both have so much they want to say and so little time to say it. Spock calls Kirk his friend, the fullest expression of their feelings anywhere in the series. Almost everyone who watches that scene feels the passion the two men share, the hunger for something more than what they are allowed. And, I tell my nonfan listeners, slash is what happens when you take away the glass. The glass, for me, is often more social than physical; the glass represents those aspects of traditional masculinity which prevent emotional expressiveness or physical intimacy between men, which block the possibility of true male friendship. Slash is what happens when you take away those barriers and imagine what a new kind of male friendship might look like. One of the most exciting things about slash is that it teaches us how to recognize the signs of emotional caring beneath all the masks by which traditional male culture seeks to repress or hide those feelings.

Slash is a form of erotic writing, which differs from traditional male-targeted pornography, because it is more interested in the emotional rather than the physical lives of its characters. Readers and writers get off imagining the characters having sex in part because they see sex as enabling a form of intimacy between these men which is denied them on the program and denied most men within our culture. The construction of slash depends on reading certain looks and gestures exchanged amongst the characters as showing some hidden emotional truths and so song videos are often presented as visual evidence in support of a slash hypothesis about the series. Fans can point to the screen and say that you can see it in their eyes, these men really care about each other.

How Far to Pon Farr?

The opening title to "Closer" asks "What if they hadn't made it to Vulcan on time." This title references a specific tradition of pon farr stories. Pon Farr is the Vulcan mating season which occurs every seven years and is deeply disabilitating (can drive people insane or kill them if they do not make it back to their home planet and mate.) This concept emerged in the Classic ST episode, "Amok Time," written by science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon. Many of the earliest K/S stories used pon farr as a device to push Kirk and Spock into bed with each other. Kirk surely would overcome his inhibitions about gay sex if doing so would allow him to save his friend's life. As slash became more widely accepted, there have been far fewer pon farr stories; the characters are no longer seen as requiring extreme situations to get them in bed together. So, in adopting this pon farr frame, "Closer" pays tribute to the foremothers of slash.

Pon Farr stories often contain suggestions of sexual violence -- as does "Closer" -- themes which remain highly controversial inside fan circles. I am certain that the images of sexual violence here (specifically drawn from the use of the Vulcan Mind Meld in the original series accompanied by lyrics about "violation," "desecration" and "penetration") account for why some viewers outside of fandom found this particular video disquieting. This video is disquieting to many fans because of its strong suggestion of rape.

Ose and More Ose

One striking feature of "Closer" is its angsty tone -- created in part by the choice of soundtrack, in part by the ragged and grainy reproduction of the images, and in part by the selection of images which stress the emotional distance rather than closeness of the protagonists. Fans have a term, "ose," that captures this emotional quality: it comes from the expression "ose and more ose" (i.e. morose).

A number of writers have suggested that they expected to laugh and were instead moved or disturbed by what they saw in this video. Fan music videos adopt a range of different tones -- some do indeed welcome the uncomfortable laughter when one first starts to reread these images outside of their original heterosexual inflections and start to appreciate the pleasure of appropriating these shots for alternative interpretations. Others affectionately poke fun at the protagonists, choosing their most foolish or clumsy moments or choosing images that look especially suggestive out of context. (T. Jonesy and Killa have produced a number of other Classic Trek vids which adopt these more comic and playful tones.) Others play it more seriously, teaching us to respect the emotional truths they find through their recontextualizing of these images. For me, "Closer" has a kind of emotional distance -- despite all of the angst -- that sets it apart from many other fan-made videos. Ironically, it is perhaps this emotional distance which has allowed many who are not Trek fans to embrace the aesthetics of this particular work. Many slash vids are hot -- this one is cool.

Porn Again?

Another striking feature of "Closer" is the insertion of porn shots amidst the footage taken from the original series. I have certainly seen this (relatively uncommon) practice among some fan music video makers but historically, such explicit videos did not circulate outside the fan community, so it was striking to see this practice out in public view. This is perhaps illustrative of what has happened as slash and fan vids have entered a networked culture. New people have been drawn to the form at a rate that strips the ability of the community to inculcate them into their norms. Old taboos are being shattered right and left often in highly public ways that would distress older fans who felt they had reasons for avoiding such public scrutiny.

Another striking aspect of "Closer" is that it is being circulated as publicly as it is. Several years ago, I sparked some controversy in the Star Wars fan cinema world when I argued that the rules of the official competition hosted by Atom films were gender-biased because they recognized forms of media production -- parody and documentary -- most closely associated with male fans and excluded outright those forms -- most notably music video -- most closely associated with female fans. Many of those angry by these statements asserted that they had never seen any films made by female Star Wars fans and that they were certain such works did not exist. I saw that as validation of my argument because I had seen a large number of music videos produced by female Star Wars fans which had not been able to get into public distribution. Those who had seen some of the music videos argued that they did not belong in the competition because they were "derivative," that is, because they used found footage. In fact, though, "Closer" shows pretty well that these fan media makers can generate original interpretations through their manipulation and recontextualization of these images. Whatever you want to say about it, "Closer" makes a statement about the original material.

When I did Poachers, the music video makers were the only fans who asked not to be named in the book: they were concerned because their raw materials drew clips directly from the films and television episodes but also drew songs from top recording artists. They felt most exposed to legal prosecution and felt they had the weakest case that their works would be protected under Fair Use.

Today, some of these women do share their videos via the web but without much fanfare, on sites that are only known within a relatively closed fan community. Fans have learned how to use the web to make their content accessible to those already in the know while decoupling their content from access via most search engine. It's quite likely that in the current case, the artists lost control over the circulation of "Closer" and that it went more public than they intended. That's also part of living in a world where amateur media often circulates virally and without any direct attribution. Few of the blogs which have mentioned "Closer" even acknowledge the artist's names even though they are featured prominently in the video itself and there may not have been an expectation that whoever posted it to YouTube needed to respect the artists' choices about where and how it should be distributed. We still accord much greater respect to commercial artists than grassroots artists. This is a video which has been circulating within fandom for some time without getting this level of public notice and so many fans have been started by its sudden visibility.

The circulation of "Closer" outside of the fan community is apt to be causing concern not only for the original creators of this material but also for many others within the fan community. I suspect their reactions are mixed.

On the one hand, it is exciting to see some work within this tradition get some public visibility and respect. On the other, its visibility increases the likelihood that the Powers that Be will come crashing down on the whole practice of fan music videos, there must be disappointment that it is being discussed outside of the larger context of many people producing work within this tradition, and there will be some concern that this work includes some controversial practices -- such as porn inserts or the themes of sexual violence -- that may further enflame the situation.

You may note that I am not offering links here to other fanvids. I have made it a policy not to send people to fan-produced material, even if it is on the web and therefore theoretically "public" without their permission. I am sending pointers to this video only because it is already the subject of such public circulation and discussion that not doing so would amount to closing the barn door after the cow have already gotten out.

Thanks to Cynthia Jenkins for her help in preparing this post.

Good News for Aca/Fen

Some of you have asked what the phrase, "Aca/Fan" means. Basically, it is a term I made up some years ago to refer to people like myself who have one foot in academia and one foot in fandom. It is a hybrid identity -- Aca for Academic, Fan for, well, fan. The fen in the title above is a longstanding bit of fan slang -- essentially the plural of fan. In my forthcoming book, Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers, I reproduce excerpts from a public dialogue I had some years ago with fellow aca/fan researcher Matt Hills for the now defunct online journal, Intensities. In that conversation, we talked a bit more about the relationship between fans and academics. Unfortunately, the interview itself is no longer online:

I think we need to consider different generations of scholars within fandom, and moments within which those scholars are working. I think there are at least three moments of fan studies that get conflated together as if they are a unified body of theory. There is a body of work that began to stress active audiences and the use of ethnographic methods, derived in part from sociological methods, and I would put early John Tulloch, John Fiske and Janice Radway in this body of work - they come from different places and so I don't want to lump them together as representing one totally unified body of work.

But it was important for these writers to be outside what they were writing about, to be free of any direct implication in their subject matter. They begin to acknowledge that audiences have an active role, but their prose is very depersonalized, there's often no acknowledgement of any affection they feel for the objects of study, or if there is, it's a token gesture. And there's sometimes an attempt to pull back from the fan community at the end of such writing and say, right, now we can arrive at the truth that the fans don't yet recognize about their own political activity. I've taken Radway to task for the closing chapter of Reading the Romance for that kind of gesture. That's the first generation.

I see myself and others writing at the same time, Camille [Bacon-Smith] to some degree , as a second generation that comes to a discourse already formulated around these axes of active/passive, resistance/co-opted. We're trying to find a way to alter that perception based on insider knowledge of what it is to be a fan, and struggling to find a language to articulate a different perspective that comes out of lived experience and situated knowledge. And it proves very difficult - there's a lot of resistance because the first generation are the readers responding to our manuscripts, the editors deciding whether they get published or not, the faculty deciding whether we get hired. So you end up struggling to negotiate between what you want to say, and what it's possible to say at a particular point in time, in order to get your work out at all. And there is a level of defensiveness there. When I was writing Textual Poachers I was so frustrated by how badly fans had been written about. As a fan I felt implicated in that writing and I wanted to challenge it; there are passages in the book that are just out-and-out defenses of fandom, and others that are trying to pull back and describe, analyze, critique....

Now, I think all of that work paved the way for a whole generation of aca-fen, as I like to call them; that is, people who are both academics and fans, for whom those identities are not problematic to mix and combine, and who are able then to write in a more open way about their experience of fandom without the 'obligation of defensiveness', without the need to defend the community. Therefore they can take up things like contradictions within it, disputes within it, re-raise awkward subjects that we papered over in our earlier accounts, and now there's a freedom to have real debate among ourselves about some of these core issues.

For those of you who have come to my blog in search of insights into participatory culture, you already know that I think fan culture is a particularly rich spot to understand ways that new media can be used to transform our relationship to mass media. I was asked about this by the fine folks at the British webzine, Big Shiny Thing, last week. Here's part of what I had to say:

Fans have been and are likely to continue to be the shock troops in this transformation of our culture -- highly motivated, passionately committed, and socially networked. They are early adopters of new technologies and willing to experiment with new relationships to culture. (We might also throw into this category other highly motivated groups such as bloggers and gamers.)

There are signs that fan culture practices and products are spreading throughout the culture. Recent statistics from the Pew Center of Internet and American Life found that more than half of teens online produce some form of media and many of them shared what they produced by others. They are part of the participatory culture I am describing. So are people who join discussion forms or sign up for RSS feeds to get more information about their favorite band or television program.

As writers like Will Wright and Raph Koster have suggested, there is a pyramid of participation. Not everyone will want to spend massive amounts of time generating new content -- some will simply want to engage with content others have produced. Not everyone will write fan stories -- some may share critical responses with the authors. Not everyone will want to spoil reality television programs -- some will simply enjoy the new relationships to the program the spoiler community helps to create for them. But the expansion of this participatory culture changes the context in which media content gets produced and distributed and thus it impacts all of us one way or another. Given this, I would imagine fans may still enjoy a privileged status in participatory culture but more and more people will benefit from the once invisible cultural work of fans.

New Blog on Online Fan Cultures

Given that, it should be good news to many of you that Nancy Baym, a prime example of that third generation of fan scholars I talk about above, has launched an interesting new blog focused around online fandom and designed to explore the intersection between fans and academics. Baym wrote one of the first and best studies of the ways that digital media was altering fan culture, Tune In, Log On: Soaps, Fandom, and Online Community (1999). She is a classic example of a scholar studying their own fandom and coming away with intimate knowledge that would be closed to many outside that community. For a more recent book that deals well with the question of online fandom, let me also recommend Rhiannon Bury's Cyberspaces of Their Own: Female Fandoms Online (a book that deals primarily with fans of Due South and The X Files).

Baym's new blog has so far been at its best focusing on music fans online -- a topic to which I confess I know just enough to be dangerous but which is clearly central to any discussion of online fans as niche markets. Among other topics, she's posted so far about the way such groups as ABBA, The Who, and the Dresden Dolls relate to their fan communities. Some of the most interesting material to date centers on Madrugada, a Norwegian rock band I had never heard of. Small wonder: As Baym explains, "none of their records has been released in the US, they never tour here, and the only people I know who listen to them learned about them from me." Yet the group's website has allowed her and other Americans to feel a connection to this group despite the total absence of any attempt to market their music in this country:

Last fall the band toured Europe. Fans on that forum recorded several shows themselves, spent a good deal of time not just creating torrents, but also in some cases remastering the recordings for best sound. Others posted photos they had taken. Living in the States, it was a lot closer to getting to see them live than I ever would have gotten without the board. There is an archive of back concerts that are periodically reseeded and traded again. I've amassed enough live Madrugada recordings through the board that I have a pretty good sense of what they were like on each tour of their career. This is done with the band's tacit approval, with the understanding that there is no money exchanged and nothing available for purchase is posted, points which the webmaster gently enforces when need be. Not only did it keep fans who weren't able to make this tour involved with the band long after their last release might have stopped getting playtime, but it also brought in fans who didn't like the recent release, fans who wanted to know what old songs were being played. So it kept fans they could easily have lost involved with them. Would it have worked if it were a board run by the band? Maybe, if they were able to resolve the copyright questions in ways they and those around them could live with. Would it have worked if it were a board run by their label or any other third party? It could, but it would take a good deal more than simply "creating a fan forum."

She also ran an interview with Reidar Eik, a Norwegian who lives in Berlin and who runs the semi-quasi-official fan website for the band. It sounds like Eik has been able to achieve a symbiotic relationship with the band and its management, with his fansite linked off the official website and providing services for fans that the artists themselves would not be able to meet. Eik sees such relationships as possible if one works with smaller, lesser known groups which are still struggling to find their market:

Focus on the small bands that really deserve your interest and the time you put into the project. If you go for a band like Radiohead, thousands have already made better pages than yours will ever be, but if you go for the local band who sound like they should be selling millions of copies, you will be the first. They might turn out to be 'the next big thing' and it will be great, or they might dissolve into nothing. But hopefully they have tried, and you went along for the ride.

I know I will be eagerly awaiting more insights into the world of online fandom from Nancy Baym in the coming weeks. It is good to have other aca/fen out there blogging.

New Book on Fan Fiction

On other fronts, I also wanted to toss off a recommendation for an impressive new book for those of you interested in reading more about fan fiction -- Karfen Hellekson and Kristina Busse's Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet. I had a chance to read this outstanding collection of new essays some months ago while it was still coming together as a book project and was proud to write a blurb. I have to say that I have been studying fans for more than twenty years at this point and I still managed to learn something fresh and new in pretty much every essay in this collection.

As Hellekson and Busse suggest in their introduction to the collection, their central focus is on fan writing as a collaborative, social process, one which involves not simply the interaction between fan and the inspiring text (which they see as the central focus of fan studies to date) but also the social relations between fan writers, editors, and readers, who work together to generate fresh perspectives and new experiences around pre-existing cultural materials. They emphasize fan writing as always a "work in progress" with a particular emphasis upon the writing and reading process as opposed to the cultural products produced within the fan community. While Baym and Bury write mostly about discussion lists as one manifestation of online fandom, these writers are much more focused on Live Journal as a new kind of space for the production and transmission of fan writing. There is a very interesting discussion of new forms of fan fiction as writers assume the role of fictional characters (including the personas of real life celebrities) and correspond with each other in character.

The book breaks a number of taboos which were respected by earlier writers, including an open acknowledgement of the once closeted practice of real person slash (that is, slash written about the real world personalities of media celebrities as opposed to the fictional characters they play in their movies) and a frank discussion of the erotics of women sharing erotic stories with each other. Both of these themes are apt to be highly controversial within the fan community itself -- so we can expect a certain amount of fireworks to surround the book's publication. I know a decade ago when I was writing Textual Poachers, I was specifically asked not to write about either topic and like a good anthropologist, I protected the secrets of my field community. The Internet has blown the cover on real person slash (even if it remains a hot topic among many fans) and the intimate nature of Live Journal -- where stories circulate alongside personal confessions -- has made the relations between fans (including periodic heated feuds) also a matter of public knowledge.

Many of the writers came together through their own Live Journal practices, which often merged the production of fan fiction with the theorizing of their own practices. The best writing here brings new academic tools to bear on fan writing practices (my favorites include some focus on earlier forms of literature which involved the active appropriation and rewriting of existing stories and some focus on fan fiction as a cultural performance which moves from the actor's performance of the character in the original material, the writer's evocation of that character through their fiction, and the reader's re-embodiment of that performance -- now transformed through the addition of new information -- within their imaginations.) As several of the contributors note, they are less interested in fan culture from an anthropological perspective and more interested in what fan fiction means as a form of literary production. Yet, the best essays also take advantage of what the contributors know as fans -- including a fair amount of autoethnography focused on their own reading and writing practices.

The final few essays move us from the web as a system for producing and distributing traditional texts to the use of games as a platform for the production of new kinds of fan culture -- including a very good discussion by Louisa Ellen Stein of the ways fans are making use of The Sims and by Robert Jones (the book's soul male contributor) on machinema. These chapters may be of interest to those in games studies who might not otherwise regard themselves as interested in fan culture and suggest the ways that the lines between different online communities are blurring as the practices of participatory culture have extended beyond their originating subcultures -- a theme with which I began this post.

Some of the writing may be heavy slogging for non-academic readers: These young writers are still trying to prove to their dissertation and promotion committees that work on fan fiction is a legitimate academic subject. Their need to credentialize -- a painful reality in academic life -- probably hampers just a little their stated desire to produce a resource which fans can use to better understand their own creative practices. But for those with the background or the inclination, there's a lot here to spark new thought about fan fiction.

Building Popular Buzz: What To Do, What Not To Do

This is the second of a series of guest blogs written by Comparative Media Studies graduate student and media analyst Ivan Askwith about his observations at this year's Comicon. Based on the evidence from this year's ComicCon, the entertainment industry is slowly starting to understand just how important a vocal fandom can be in the success of a new brand or franchise. As I indicated at the end of my last post, this growing comprehension is most evident in the largest "panel events" -- on the ComicCon schedule, this generally means those events held in Ballroom 20, Hall 6CDEF, and Hall H, which can seat anywhere from 2000-6500 spectators. Or, as the industry is learning to think of them, potential advertisers and advocates. Some presentations were more overt than others, but almost all of the largest scheduled events were closer in tone to a high-powered sales pitch than an intimate discussion between fans and creators.

That said, some presenters seem to have a more nuanced understanding of fan behavior than others. As Henry has already discussed on this blog, no one is currently cultivating fan participation more effectively, or respectfully, than New Line Cinema, in promotion for Snakes on a Plane. The panel for SoaP came at the end of a longer presentation from New Line, which featured previews of the Final Destination 3 DVD -- interesting insofar as it leverages the rarely-used interactive capabilities of DVD systems to let viewers determine the course of events at pivotal moments -- and the forthcoming Jack Black film, Tenacious D in 'The Pick of Destiny'. But the audience and presenters both knew that these were diversions from the main attraction: as the discussion about Tenacious D wrapped up, the energy in the crowd became palpable, and when panel host Kenan Thompson finally spoke the words -- "Snakes On A Plane" -- the audience erupted with enthusiasm and applause.

The entire presentation that followed demonstrated the same respectful appreciation of the internet fandom that has characterized the film's marketing campaign over the last several months. The presentation began with a video which flashed the words "Thanks to you.... Snakes on a Plane.... is already the summer's most talked about movie.... and it's not even out yet." This was followed with a several-minute montage collecting some of the best fan-generated content (spoofs, advertisements, posters, images, viral memes, etc), and used the winning entry from a fan-generated-soundtrack contest as the musical track. The video ended with another sequence of titles, which declared "Thanks to you, Snakes on a Plane is one of the most anticipated movies.... ever."

Based on the audience reaction, this isn't too far from the mark: the 6,500 seat Hall H was packed, with plenty of people standing in the back and even more turned away at the door, and the crowd responded enthusiastically to pretty much everything that was shown, said, or asked. Most of the audience "questions" consisted of variations on a theme -- the theme, in this case, being what a bad-ass motherfucker Samuel L. Jackson is.

In fact, one audience member straight out asked:

"What's it like, always being such a bad-ass mother fucker?"

To which Jackson replied:

"It's great to be able to live that out on screen, but, you know, I don't walk around every day thinkin' I'm a bad ass mother fucker. I'm just trying to make it through the day, most days, but I thank you for feelin' that way about it... You're a bad mother fucker, man, thank you. Thank you, thank you."

This was more or less the tone for the entire panel. However, one audience member did ask an interesting, albeit predictable question:

"Do you think that this movie will have a lasting effect on the way that the industry looks at internet hype?"

To which Jackson replied:

I hope that people in studios are looking and paying attention and trying to figure out how and why this phenomenon took place. I hope that there's some young filmmaker somewhere that knows, that understands that now they could put a premise on the internet -- 'my premise for this film is... boom... who has a scene?' -- and people will start writing the first scene for that particular film, and then they'll choose that scene. Somebody'll write the next scene, and they'll choose that particular scene, until they end up with a whole film, and then somebody will say, 'Who do you think should be in this film?', and then they go through that, and they come up with a whole cast list of people, and if everybody sends a dollar in, we can hire these particular people and shoot this particular film, and we'll have a film that's all-inclusive, that's something that a lot of people came together on, and had a collaborative passion about. And I think that would be kind of a wonderful thing to see happen. And hopefully that will be somewhere down the line... [audience applauds]

And while Jackson's scenario might be a little utopian for the near future, it suggests that he (and I suspect this carries over to many of the individuals working on this film) is beginning to recognize and respect the changing role of the audience, and the relatively awe-inspiring possibilities that emerge from the collective intelligence and energy of online fan communities. A collaborative online movie might still be some way off, but as to the more immediate question that was posed, it seems clear that this movie has already had a significant effect on how the industry looks at internet hype. Will it have a lasting effect? My guess is "Yes", in that it represents a substantial advance on the learning curve, as studios start to realize that there are right and wrong ways to engage with fan cultures.

Speaking of "wrong ways," I feel obligated to report that some presentations demonstrated far less tact in their attempts to engage would-be fans. During the World Premiere of NBC's forthcoming serial drama Heroes, which Henry has also discussed on this blog, Executive Producer Jeph Loeb (a comics legend in his own right for his work on Batman and Superman) instructed the audience that their job was to go home after the screening, get on the internet, and talk to everyone they know, as much and as often as they could, about how much they loved the show. While there's some room to encourage fans to be vocal in responding to a new show, I think it's a dangerous -- and potentially offensive -- move to instruct them to talk about how great a show is, especially before they've even seen it. (Of course, Loeb repeated the instructions at least twice more during the post-screening discussion, and closed with them as well.) But the guy sitting next to me gave a low, dismissive whistle during Loeb's first round of encouragement, muttering "Bad move", and (personal opinions of Heroes aside) I think he was absolutely right.

The fact is that studios don't need, and perhaps can't, instruct fans to be fans, you just need to be responsive and encouraging once they express appreciation for your work. If fans like what they see, they're going to talk about it -- it's part of the pleasure of being a fan. And if they don't like what they see, odds are they're still going to talk about it, but you're better off if they don't.

Can One Be A Fan of High Art?

A Tale of Two Checkovs Some years ago, I co-authored a book called Science Fiction Audiences: Watching Doctor Who and Star Trek with a British cultural studies researcher John Tulloch. We had interviewed different groups of consumers about their responses to Star Trek: The Next Generation and Doctor Who. In my own work on Star Trek fans, I focused on three core groups: the members of the mostly female fanzine writing community, a mostly male and highly technologically focused group of MIT students, and the members of the Gaylaxians, a group of Gay-Les-Bi-Trans fans who were interested in the show's social politics. Tulloch's work went back across several decades of interviews conducted on multiple continents and found a range of different thoughts and reflections on the series.

Then, Tulloch went on to another project that involved interviewing theatre goers at productions of Chekhov plays (the Russian playwright, not the classic Trek character). In our work on science fiction audiences, we found enormous variability in the ways that fans talked about their favorite series. For example, asked about the characters one by one, most of the MIT students defined them as autonomous problem-solvers, whereas most of the female fans read them as part of a social network with the other characters.

When Tulloch applied these same methods to talk to theatre patrons, however, he found much less variation in the ways they talked about the work they had just seen. Most of them fell back on a handful of things they had learned about the playwright in school or the kinds of insights that are most often to be found in the Cliff Notes style study guides to classic literature.

It is hard to say precisely why the range of interpretations of Chekhov were so restrictive -- was it because people are intimidated to talk about high culture and so they repeat things they know to be true even if they also see them as boring and unoriginal? Did they see the interview as a chance to impress the researcher with how well they had mastered their lessons? Were they less likely to appropriate from or speculate about the plots and characters and so had a less intimate relationship with them? Was this a product of contemplative distance and the aura of high art?

If high art is supposed to be so enriching and intellectually engaging, why do we respond to it in such predictable and predetermined ways? And if popular culture is supposed to appeal to the lowest common denominator, why does it generate such a broad array of different responses?

The Pleasures of Imperfection

IItalian critic Umberto Eco suggests that cult movies are rarely perfectly constructed nor are they treated with respect: "In order to transform a work into a cult object one must be able to break, dislocate, unhinge it so that one can remember only parts of it, irrespective of their original relationship to the whole." Most cult films fall apart in our hands and we have to work hard to make them cohere. It tis their incoherence that makes such works rich resources for reworking.

I have similarly suggested that fan culture is born of a mixture of fascination and frustration. The work has to fascinate us to inspire fan-like responses but if the work fully satisfied all of our desires, we would have no need to rework it in our imaginations. If you look at the most productive sites within any given fan culture, they often grow up around the very things that frustrate fans the most about the original source material. The author introduces a character and never realizes her full potential. We get a tantalizing bit of back-story and then it gets abandoned, never fully developed or integrated into the narrative. The character acts in a way that seems to contradict everything we previously believed about them. And so forth.

Yet, if great works of art are great because they represent the accomplishment of perfection or near perfection within a particular tradition, then perhaps they don't have the kinds of loose edges that we want to keep playing with. I suspect this is not really the case -- there are, for example, a fair number of fan stories about the characters and situations of Jane Austin for example, and critics, directors, and actors have struggled to make sense of some of Shakespeare's characters for centuries. Rather, I think we are taught to think about high culture as untouchable. We appreciate it. We may even love it. But we rarely approach it as a fan.

In his book, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America , Lawrence Levine describes the process by which Shakespeare's plays moved from being a living part of the culture of 19th century America -- where they were freely appropriated and performed by a wide array of different groups -- and became a sacred and untouchable aspect of our culture in the 20th century. Shakespeare was once thought to be emotionally accessible to all; increasingly, Shakespeare has become something we have to be taught how to appreciate, rather than something we instinctively love.

The Wondering Minstrels

These questions have come back to me in recent week as I have been reviewing a thesis currently being completed by one of the Comparative Media Studies graduate students Amulya Gopalakrishnan. Gopalakrishnan has been applying ideas from fan studies and work on online communities to explore the activities of the Wondering Minstrels:

The Wondering Minstrels is a poem-a-day mailing list of over four thousand people, the majority of whom have a South-Asian connection, but includes members from all over the English-speaking world. The group was formed in 1999 by a couple of Indian engineering students who felt the need for a 'more everyday experience of poetry' and to demystify the appreciation of it, and gradually drew in their friends and acquaintances, until it grew to its current dimensions. The poems are archived and open to commentary and discussion at any time. While the people who run it handle much of the regular poem submissions, those sent in by other members ('guest poems') reflect the heterogeneity and energy of the group. The accompanying comments pay attention to form and

technique, as well as biography and shaping context, but the guiding principle is individual connection with the poem, and some personal comment on why a contributor considers it significant or memorable....

For those who did not get a headstart at home, a community like Minstrels broaches poetry on its terms: as an everyday medium that speaks of ordinary lives and moments in an extraordinary way, one that simply draws attention to the world by drawing attention to language. Sending in a poem, or reacting to someone else's comments about a poem may be a way of tentatively dipping your toe in the vast ocean of notions built around literary works. Just like other fan communities, through conversation and correspondence, they can inaugurate a space that may prove more humane and democratic than the everyday world. The feeling-oriented, middlebrow aesthetic of The Wondering Minstrels is a conversation and counterpractice that challenges conventional classroom

approaches to canonical poetry.

In other words, Wondering Minstrels is a fan community which has grown up around the exchange of poems -- mostly works that are part of the Canon of western literature, though also including a broader range of materials -- poems from other parts of the world (including a fair number from the South Asian Diaspora), song lyrics, rap songs, and so forth. Part of what fascinates Gopalakrishnan about the group is precisely the ways that it cuts across traditional high and low splits -- treating Eminem alongside Elizabeth Browning.

Getting Emotional About It

If Tulloch's Chekhov patrons were surprisingly inarticulate about their actual emotional responses to the plays, these fans of poetry emote, gush, share their memories of childhood, suggest personal associations,

speculate about the motives, and generally talk a lot about the poems that are being transmitted within the community. Participants respect these poems but they do not hold them at a critical distance. These poems are part of their lives; they are tied to their earliest memories of schooling and home life; they are treasures they take with them as they move from one part of the world to another; they are things they want to share with others as part of the ongoing life of this thriving virtual community.

Gopalakrishnan was motivated to explore this group for two reasons, one intellectual, the other personal: first, she was concerned by arguments that pit digital media against literary culture (such as those advanced by Sven

Birkerts), seeing ways that digital culture can enliven and expand our experience of literature, and second, she had herself been a long-time participant within this community (like many of my other friends who write about popular culture texts, she is a fan writing about her own fandom.)

Here's how she describes her own early experience within the group:

when I joined Minstrels, the first poem I sent in was a poem I'd read in the Times Literary Supplement, by a Welsh poet named Sheenagh Pugh. I'd never heard of Pugh before, and indeed, she was relatively unknown at the time. When I sent in the poem along with my English-major attempt at analysis, I received an email from Pugh herself commenting on my comments, adding to them, mildly disagreeing, but eager to carry on the conversation. She later became a Minstrels member herself, and wryly responding to the disproportionate success of her own poem, 'Sometimes', admitted that she 'mistyped "sorrow" for "snow" and then decided I liked that better. I believe in letting the keyboard join in the creative process now and then. Anyway, here's the text, and if you like it, I'm pleased for you, but I'd be more pleased if you liked something else better!'

The Web makes interactions like that possible, and the juxtaposition of Pugh's comments and mine both framing her poem, neither of which claims ultimate authority, invites other readers to participate in the mystique of the poem's

artistry. Rather than destroying the aura of literature, this surrounding conversation only adds to it.

The Wondering Minstrels also suggests something important about the globalization of culture. On the one hand, the group draws heavily upon British poems which were transmitted around the world as part of the colonialist

educational project. In fact, since western schools have often moved away from these works, these poems may be more familiar to people in South Asian or other former Commonwealth nations than they are to people in the United Kingdom or the United States. It is the shared (if imposed) literary heritage that allows people around the world to participate in this forum. The same kind of infrastructure may, ironically enough, be provided by American popular culture, which circulates to countries worldwide, often driving out local media production, but providing a shared framework of meanings and memories that allows communications within a global network of fans. The same is certainly true as well of the "soft goods" -- anime, manga, and games -- produced and circulated by Japan and across parts of the work, the works of the Bollywood film industry may play this role. For a global community to operate, members have to have something in common to talk about. It almost doesn't matter whether the core material is high culture, low culture, or middlebrow culture as long as it allows everyone to participate from a more or less equal footing and as long as it provides an opportunity for each member to contribute a unique perspective to the conversation.

There is notthing about high culture texts that discourages this kind of intimacy and participation. Many of them were part of popular culture at the time they were created. Many of them can be pulled back into popular culture when read in the right contexts. Rather, their untouchable quality has to do with the contexts within which we are introduced to these texts and the stained glass attitudes that too often surround them. Gopalakrishnan has taught me that you can indeed be a fan of high culture.

Do Snakes or Fireflies Have Longer Tails?

Reader Avner Ronen compares the Snakes on a Plane phenomenon with what happened to Serenity. He notes:

I'm looking forward to this movie as much as the next net.geek, but I don't expect as much of a box-office surprise as many seem to be anticipating, because I've seen it before.

What am I referring to? Serenity. It would be hard to beat the online buzz Serenity was getting, and sometimes it seems like it's difficult to find a blogger who isn't a fan of the prematurely cancelled series Firefly, but all of that buzz and a good deal of critical acclaim still couldn't get people into the theaters.

He may well be right - it is very easy living at the hub of digital culture to imagine that all of the buzz we are hearing is generalizable across the population as a whole. But let's look for a moment at what happened with Firefly/Serenity and then, I will try to explain why I think Snakes on a Plane is in a somewhat different situation.

Praise Be the Whedon

Let's be clear that I am a big fan of Firefly and of Joss Whedon's other work in television and in comics. I think he's one of the smartest and most creative people operating within the media industry today. He has enormous respect for his fans and he has earned our respect in return. He had constructed a television series he really believed in.

He was watching a very dedicated, very resourceful fan community form around a television series which either got canceled because a)the ratings were low and it was not seen as having a broad general appeal or b)the ratings were low because the network had not successfully targeted its most likely audiences and given it a chance to develop the word of mouth needed to expand its core viewership. We may never know which of these explanations is the correct one - I suspect some combination of the two.

Whedon still wanted to produce the content; there was a group of people clammering for the content; but the networks didn't think there's a large enough audience to sustain a prime time broadcast series. This is a situation we've seen again and again in the history of broadcast media. I think it's about time we rewrote the rules.

Serenity and the Long Tail

We are now in the space which Chris Anderson has documented so well in his discussion of the Long Tail. In Anderson's account, media properties can succeed by appealing to niche rather than mass audiences if you can lower costs of production, publicity, and distribution, keep the content on the market long enough for consumer interest to grow, and count on the most passionate consumers to help spread the word about your brand. By those criteria, Firefly should be as close to a natural for the Long Tail as anything produced for television so far and the brisk sales and rentals of the dvds of the original episodes illustrated that point pretty well.

But Whedon got greedy - or someone got greedy on his behalf - and Firefly moved the wrong direction up Anderson's Long Tail - towards a blockbuster Hollywood movie which would have required even more viewers to be seen as successful than would have been required to keep the series on the air on a second tier network. Yes, it was way cool to watch those characters up there on the big screen but Whedon set the bar much too high for the existing market for his property and we all paid a price for his hubris.

To make something that felt like a movie, he had to produce something that didn't feel like a television episode, creating a story that turned the world of the series upside down. Along the way, he killed off some of the most beloved characters and lost some of the elements which many of us liked about Firefly in the first place. At the same time, he compressed a season's worth of plot developments into two hours or so of screentime with the result that he produced a work that was confusing to many first time viewers and that lacked the gradual character development that was the hallmark of Firefly. I still liked a lot about the movie but what I didn't like was the fact that it would seem to have pretty much closed the door to further development in the Firefly franchise -- at least in the foreseeable future.

The Road Not Taken

Imagine, instead, that he had moved in the other direction down the tail, towards the production of television style episodes directly for dvd. I've discussed such a system in relation to Global Frequency (a show that suffered an even more premature death than Firefly -- canceled before it even reached the air). CMS graduate student Ivan Askwith has advocated the use of the video ipod as a distribution platform for essentially long tail television. We have seen fan groups advocating such an approach for recently canceled series such as The West Wing and Arrested Development.

From the perspective of a producer like Whedon, who has a strong and existing fan base, this should be a very attractive proposition - make as many episodes as you want in whatever story structure you want with no risk that a network will stand between you and your audience, start making money as soon as the first product ships rather than waiting for syndication to turn a profit.

What would make it even more attractive would be to create a subscription based model so that readers paid in advance for episodes they wanted to see and they knew more or less what the core market was before production started. This would be hard to arrange for a totally new property: easier for a canceled series or for a show by a brand-name creator like Whedon. I'd pay now to guarantee access to original content by Whedon, sight unseen, a year from now. So would most of the other brown coats, I would bet. And if he had gone that route, we would have been able to enjoy many more hours of quality science fiction/western action on television, where it belongs, instead of burning up the whole franchise in two hours of big screen excitement.

Yes, there are risks involved -- if for no other reason than because no television show has ever made this transition into direct to dvd production. We can point to the example of a growing number of Disney animated features which have generated direct to DVD sequels with a fair amount of success with their core market. But the risks involved would have been lower -- financially at least -- than trying to turn a failed television series into a Hollywood blockbuster. Whedon could have done it if anyone could and if he had, a lot of other television producers would have followed his example.

What About Snakes?

Serenity had one of the most committed fan bases in media history and they would have followed Whedon anywhere but they weren't enough on their own to make a success on the tall end of the Long Tail. They needed to draw in lots of non-fans of the franchise. We might imagine that non-fans were resistant to the film now for many of the same reasons that they were resistant to the original series and we can add one more factor: they were reluctant to jump onto a film they knew was based on a series that they hadn't seen because they were afraid they were going to be lost. Whedon worked hard to make the film accessible and we were told he was going to do so, but guess what, lots of folks didn't believe him.

So, if we follow the logic of the Long Tail, success on one end of the tail depends on deep commitments from a relatively narrow fan base (that's what Firefly had) and on the other end, on superficial commitments from a broader range of viewers (and that's what Snakes on a Plane has.) I doubt anyone really has the same level of passion for Snakes as they have for Firefly. It's a fun lark -- a one night stand, a vacation movie romance. But it isn't a once in a lifetime passion.

But that's okay. What's bad/good about the concept is something anyone can quickly grasp. You hear the title and you chuckle. You see the preview and you are hooked -- or not. You don't need to have seen another media product to consume this one. There's a star - Jackson - with some box office reputation - remember, Serenity had no stars except those who were in the television series. It's got some draw as a straight out peddle to the metal action film with a good leading actor and some appeal as the best example of camp and kitsch to hit the screen in some time. Those are good reasons to think the film will have a broader appeal than Serenity - even if, especially if, it is nowhere near as good a movie.

Whedon bet that his fan followers could tell the public to turn out at the multiplex to see his movie. The producers of Snakes have used the audience to tell them how to market this movie and then have applied the capacity of a major publicity campaign to amplify that approach towards the general audience.

The Snakes on A Plane Phenomenon

I am watching with great interest the growing hubbub about the new suspense/disaster film, Snakes on a Plane, scheduled for release later this summer and expected by many to yield some of the strongest opening weekend grosses of the season. In many ways, we can see the ever expanding cult following of this predictably awful movie as an example of the new power audiences are exerting over entertainment content. Here's what I think is going on here:

Enter the Grassroots Intermediaries

First, the Snakes on a Plane phenomenon has been building momentum for well over a year now. In the old days, the public would never have known about a film this far out of the gate. They might have learned about it when the previews hit the theatre -- a phenomenon which itself is occurring earlier and earlier in the production cycle -- or even given the fairly low-brow aspirations of this particular title -- when the film actually hit the theatre. In the old days, this would have been an exploitation movie of the kind that Roger Corman used to crank out in the 1950s and 1960s and destined to play on the second bill at the local drive-in. The goal would be to use a easily exploitable concept, a vivid poster and advertising campaign to generate heat quickly: then get into town and out again before anyone knew what hit them.

But, these days, grassroots intermediaries such as Ain't It Cool News are feeding the public's interest for inside information, starting to generate buzz almost from the moment rights are purchased or stars cast for a forthcoming production. Much as day traders have used the online world to become much more aware of every tick and twitch of the Fortune 500, the movie fans are ever attentive to anything which might impact a film's performance at the box office.

Alerting the public to a film so far in advance is a high risk matter for the movie producers -- since people can form strong opinions based on leaked photos or footage on such sites and those first impressions can be hard to shake. (There was a reason why Corman wanted to get into and out of town quickly.) With Snakes on a Plane, the early fan response suggested that the whole concept was a really big hoot -- this was going to be one of these films which is so bad that it is good.

Trash Film Aesthetics: From Niche to Mainstream

Think about that for a moment. The celebration of trash cinema used to be itself a niche audience taste. But over the past decade or two, this niche consumption practice has become progressively more widespread. Cable programs like Mystery Science Theater 3000 helped to introduce the pleasure of razzing a really bad movie to the masses. And so, we can now anticipate that a high percentage of the youth market and beyond will turn up just to throw rotten tomatoes at the screen and laugh about the whole premise.

Fan-Made Media

More than that, the film's fans (if you can call them that) started producing their own movie trailers and music videos; they've created all kinds of bad art -- like this or this or this. Check out this site, Snakes on a Blog, which documents the wild world of fan appropriations surrounding this film. This also reflects the growing ability of media consumers to archive, appropriate, and recirculate media content. These fans are using a wide variety of tools and distribution channels -- including both Flickr and YouTube. What's striking about the present moment is how easily such materials can attach themselves to a major -- or in this case, minor -- media property and get widespread attention. In fact, the fan response keeps generating news coverage for the film -- Entertainment Weekly in particular seems to have a Snakes on a Plane story every few issue.

Hollywood Listens to Its Consumers

But that's not all. In this case, you had a production company which was monitoring the fan response and like a real leader, figured out where the crowd was going and ran out in front, shouting follow me. You could imagine a film getting this kind of public drubbing and having the producer decide that the safest option was to pull it from theatrical distribution and send it direct to video.

In fact, though, the producers listened closely enough to hear the affection underneath the raspberries and realized that the audience was actually looking forward to going out to the theatres and see this turkey. It's hard to tell now whether the film was going to be marketed as camp all along -- somehow I doubt it -- but everyone's busy mythologizing the choice. Samuel L. Jackson is reputed to have insisted that the film keep its over-the-top title: "What are you doing here? It's not Gone with the Wind. It's not On the Waterfront. It's Snakes on a Plane!". The producers reportedly went back and reshot some scenes to include really bad dialogue proposed by fans. The new previews really play up the absurdity and improbability of the core premise -- and when I saw the preview at a theatre in Boston the other week, the audiences cheered and clapped like there was no tomorrow. And I have never seen a official site which so aggressively played up fan response to a film which is still sight unseen by its potential audience.

So, if the film really strikes it big at the box office, we can see this as a powerful illustration of what happens when fans take charge of the promotion of a major Hollywood release.

Networked Publics Group Tackles Participatory Culture

The Networked Public group at USC's Annenberg Center recently posted a fascinating new essay on participatory culture, written by Adrienne Russell, Mimi Ito, Todd Richmond, and Marc Tuters. The group has been conducting conversations with leading thinkers about contemporary media and is now putting its collective heads together to jointly author a new book for the MIT Press. I was lucky enough to be included in the process, having an animated two hour conversation with them after they had read an advanced copy of Convergence Culture.

I was pleased to see that they had taken some of my insights to heart, expanding and enlarging on some of my book's arguments about participatory culture and linking it in productive ways with ideas from Yochai Benkler's The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom.

Convergence and Media Change

Here's what they have to say in the essay's conclusion:

"Convergence culture is not only a matter of industry and technology but also more importantly a matter of norms, common culture, and the artistry of everyday life. Professional commercial media brought us a slick common culture that has become a fact of life, the language of current events, shared cultural reference, and visual recognitions that lubricate our everyday interactions with one another. Commercial media, for better and for worse provide much of the source material for our modern language of communication. The current moment is perhaps less about overthrow of this established modality of common culture, but more a plea for recognition of a new layer of communication and cultural sharing. At best, this is about folk, amateur, niche and non-market communities of cultural production mobilizing, critiquing, remixing commercial media and functioning as a test bed for radically new cultural forms. At worst, this is about the fragmenting of common culture or the decay of shared standards of quality, professionalism, and accountability. The history of networked public culture has opened with a narrative of convergence and participatory culture; we lie at the crossroads of multiple unfolding trajectories."

The group describes our present moment as one where both grassroots and commercial interests are adjusting to some profound shifts in the relationship between media production and consumption brought about by the rise of networked media. The new media landscape, they argue drawing on Benkler, is characterized by a proliferation of different groups (some grassroots and amateur, some civic or public funded or educational, some commercial) which are producing and distributing content and by new kinds of social communities which are emerging to produce, evaluate, and discuss new forms of culture and new forms of knowledge. The era when commercial media dominated the marketplace of ideas is ending -- even if the mass media continues to exert a disproportionate claim on our collective attention. The commercial industry is reacting with great anxiety and often limited foresight, trying to shut down many of the opportunities which are emerging as the public exerts a greater control over the circulation and production of media. Yet, they are being forced to give ground again and again as fan communities are beginning to operate as collective bargaining units. Those interests which can not adjust to the changes become increasingly imperiled.

Transforming the Music Industry

At the heart, the essay outlines a series of compelling case studies of the interface between commercial and public culture -- including discussions of how amateur music is being reshaped by new technologies of production and distribution, how anime fans are partnering with Asian media interests to get their desired content into the market, how Madison Avenue is learning -- mostly by making mistakes -- ways to tap viral marketing, and how the journalistic establishment is struggling to adjust to the competition and critique offered by the blogosphere.

For my money, the discussion of amateur music production was perhaps the most interesting, if only because it is the area that I know the least about going in. The authors argue that "music has always been a domain of robust amateur production, making it particularly amenable to more bottom-up forms of production and distribution in the digital ecology, and ripe for the disintermediation of labels and licensors....As late as 2001 the prevailing wisdom described local/amateur music being considered by fans, scholars, and musicians alike as 'something to get beyond.' In other words, the end game for the artist was still 'getting signed' and following the traditional industry model, with the time-honored decision-making chain. However as the lines further blur, remix becomes embedded into the culture (even beyond music), and technological changes continue to occur, it would appear that perhaps "getting beyond" might no longer be the goal."

The Saga of the Legendary K.O.

Reading this passage, I was reminded of recent news about how the hip hop community in Houston was using web distribution of music to respond to the aftermath of Katrina. The Legendary K.O., a little known Houston based group, used their music to express what they were hearing from the refuges that were pouring into their city. Randle lives near the Astrodome and Nickerson works at the Houston Convention center. Both found themselves listening to refuges tell their stories: "Not till you see these people face to face and talk to them can you appreciate the level of hopelessness. The one common feeling was that they felt abandoned, on their own little island." They found their refrain while watching Kanye West accuse Bush of being indifferent to black Americans during a Red Cross Telethon being broadcast live on NBC. The juxtaposition of West's anger and comedian Mike Myer's shock encapsulated the very different ways Americans understood what happened.

The Legendary K.O. sampled West's hit song, "Golddigger," to provide the soundtrack for their passionate account of what it was like to be a black man trying to make do in the deserted streets of New Orleans. They distributed the song, "George Bush Doesn't Care About Black People" as a free download and it spread like wildfire. The song has been perhaps the most powerful demonstration to date of Chuck D's prediction that free downloads could turn hip hop into "the black man's CNN," offering an alternative perspective to mainstream news coverage and thus enabling communication between geographically dispersed corners of the Black America. Within a few weeks time, the song had in effect gone platinum, achieving more than a million downloads, largely on the back of promotion by bloggers. And soon, people around the world were appropriating and recontextualizing news footage to create their own music videos. The song may have started in Houston, framed around both local knowledge and national media representations, but where it was going to end up was anybody's guess. They have since used their reputations to produce more songs which speak to topical concerns, especially those facing the black communities of Houston and New Orleans.

The Legend of Grizzly Bear

I was also reminded of the story of Grizzly Bear, one of the young artists which my student, Vanessa Bertozzi interviewed for a project we were doing together. Grizzly Bear created music in his own bedroom, making imaginative use of found objects, and deploying low-cost but highly effective digital tools to record and manipulate the sound. He tapped local networks to get his music out into the world via mp3 files and into the hands of a record company executive. He ended up getting a contract without ever having performed in public and then faced the challenge of putting together a band to go on the road and perform in public.

I suspect we will be hearing many more stories about groups like The Legendary K.O. and performers like Grizzly Bear in the years to come -- more groups coming from nowhere and exerting some influence on our culture. As these two examples suggest, sometimes these artists are going to be making and distributing music -- and building up a loyal fan base -- almost entirely outside the commercial sphere and beyond the control of record labels. In other cases, they are going to find labels to be effective allies in getting their sounds before a larger public. It is the hybrid nature of this new communications landscape which is central to Convergence Culture and to the Networked Public group's essay.

Ode to Robot Chicken

I recently had a chance to catch up with the first season DVD of The Cartoon Network's Robot Chicken series and found it an interesting illustration of some of the trends I discuss in Convergence Culture. For those of you not in the know, Robot Chicken is a fifteen minute long, fast-paced and tightly-edited, stop motion animation series, produced by Seth Green (formerly of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Austin Powers) and Matthew Senreich: think of it as a sketch comedy series where all of the parts of played by action figures. The show spoofs popular culture - vintage and contemporary - mixing and matching characters with the same reckless abandon as a kid playing on the floor with his favorite collectibles.

For example, the first episode I ever saw included a Real World: Metropolis segment where Superman, Aquaman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Cat Woman, the Hulk, and other superheroes share an apartment and deal with real life issues, such as struggles for access to the bathroom or conflicts about who is going to do household chores. The same episode also included an outrageous parody of Kill Bill, in which Jesus does battle with the Easter Bunny, Santa Claus, and George Burns (as God). And a spoof of American Idol where the contestants are zombies of dead rock stars and the judges are breakfast cereal icons - Frankenberry (as Randy), Booberry (as Paula) and Count Chocula (as Simon).

The humor is sometimes sophomoric (in the best and worst senses of the word) - lots of jokes about masturbation, farting, vomiting, and random violence - an entire "nutcracker suite" sequence consists of nothing but various characters getting hit or kicked in the groin. Yet, at its best, it manages to force us to look at the familiar icons of popular culture from a fresh perspective: one of my favorite segments features a series of breakfast cereal icons (Tony the Tiger, Toucan Sam, Captain Crunch, The Trix Rabbit, and the Lucky Charms Leprechaun) as forming an international drug cartel smuggling "sugar" into the country. Many of the sketches depend on the juxtaposition of toys remembered fondly from childhood with adult realities (such as a segment which restages the violent murders of S7even within the Smurf kingdom): it has all of the transgressive appeal of cross-dressing a G.I. doll or staging a ritual hanging of Barney the Dinosaur, speaking to a generation which has only partially outgrown its childhood obsessions.

Action Figure Cinema as Fan Practice

In Convergence Culture, I described the ways that the ancillary products surrounding Star Wars were being redeployed by amateur filmmakers who wanted to pay tribute or spoof the original film franchise:

"The amateur filmmakers often make use of commercially available costumes and props, sample music from the soundtrack album and sounds of Star Wars videos or computer games, and draw advice on special effects techniques from television documentaries and mass market magazines... The availability of these various ancillary products has encouraged these filmmakers, since childhood, to construct their own fantasies within the Star Wars universe....The action figures provided this generation with some of their earliest avatars, encouraging them to assume the role of a Jedi Knight or an intergalactic bounty hunter, enabling them to physically manipulate the characters in order to construct their own stories. Not surprisingly, a significant number of filmmakers in their late teens and early twenties have turned toward those action figures as resources for their first production efforts." For many of us, these action figures introduce us to the idea of participatory culture, creating a space where we can rewrite the narratives of popular television and where we can immerse ourselves in vast fictional universe. For some kids, the goal is to lovingly recreate the worlds of their favorite fictions with as much accuracy and plausibility as possible. For others, the goal is to subvert -- do rude things with characters from television, turning Skeletor into a good guy, criss-crossing program boundaries at will.

I go on to discuss the works of amateur filmmaker Evan Mather: "Mather's films, such as Godzilla Versus Disco Lando, Kung Fu Kenobi's Big Adventure, and Quentin Tarantino's Star Wars, represent a no-holds-barred romp through contemporary popular culture. The rock-'em sock-'em action of Kung Fu Kenobi's Big Adventure takes place against the backdrop of settings sampled from the film, drawn by hand, or built from LEGO blocks, with the eclectic and evocative soundtrack borrowed from Neil Diamond, Mission Impossible, Pee-wee's Big Adventure, and A Charlie Brown Christmas...Apart from their anarchic humor and rapid-fire pace, Mather's films stand out because of their visual sophistication. Mather's own frenetic style has become increasingly distinguished across the body of his works, constantly experimenting with different forms of animation, flashing or masked images, and dynamic camera movements."

Action figure cinema is an emblematic example of the capacity of grassroots media makers to archive, annotate, appropriate, and recirculate media content. Fan filmmakers essentially take toys that were sold to them as commodities and transforming them into resources for their own creative output. Action figure cinema makes a virtue of the technical limits of amateur filmmaking. The movies are intentionally crudely done -- everyone is supposed to recognize that the sets are built from Lego blocks and the roles are performed by molded plastic figurines.

Mass Media Absorbs and Amplifies Grassroots Creative Practices

Action figure cinema was quickly absorbed by commercial media-makers. We see a similar blend of low tech production and pop culture references in MTV's Celebrity Death Match and Nickelodeon's Action League Now!!! series, both of which used stop motion animation and in the case of Nickelodeon, actual action figures, to parody icons of contemporary popular culture. If amateur filmmakers parody and remix popular culture, commercial media engages in "cool hunting," monitoring their local innovations and pulls back into the mainstream those that they think may have a broader market appeal. And then the process begins all over again. Innovation is most likely to occur on the fan fringes where the stakes are low; the power of mass media comes through its capacity for amplification.

We can trace this process at play within the history of Robot Chicken. As the show's head writers Douglas Goldstein and Tom Root explain, the series originated as part of a regular feature in Toy Fare, a niche magazine which targets action figure collectors and model builders. Seth Green, a fan of the publication, asked Goldstein and Root to help him put together a special animated segment for Green's forthcoming appearance on Conan O'Brien's show, which, in turn, led to an invitation to produce a series of web toons for Sony's short-lived but highly influential Screenblast, which, in turn, led to an invitation to produce a television series as part of the Cartoon Network's Adult Swim lineup. We can thus trace step by step how this concept moves from the fan subculture across a range of sites noted for cult media content.

As the aesthetics of action figure cinema moves more mainstream, the media producers never-the-less want to maintain some of the grassroots authenticity which gave the approach its initial edge. Many of the earliest web cartoons (see the shows at Mondo for example), specifically spoofed the content of television and cinema - trying to establish themselves as closer to the viewer than the mass media (even when, or especially when, the content was actually produced by companies like Sony which were themselves part of the so-called "mainstream media.") In fact, almost every journalistic account I've read of the series stresses Seth Green's own status as a fan boy and toy collector and often describes the challenges faced by the program's "toy wrangler" who often has to go onto eBay or move into retro shops in search of the specific toys needed to cast a particular segment, again blurring the line between amateur and commercial media making practices.

Fan-Friendly Television

When this approach is done well - and Robot Chicken really does this about as well as any show I've seen, the program enjoys enormous credibility within the fan community. For all of the crude comedy and broad parody, the show consistently respects the nuances and details of popular culture. As a parent, I would sometimes step on some artifact of my son's action figure collection trying to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night. Extracting a sharp chard of molded plastic from my barefoot, I would grumble about "god damn Teela" only to be told by my still three-quarters asleep son, "No, Daddy, that's from Evil-Lyn." My son would respect a show like Robot Chicken because it would know the difference between Teela and Evil-Lyn, even as it breaks down the borders between different fictional universes and brings the characters screaming and kicking into the world of adult realities.