Brooker, Press & Livingstone, and Ang outline a range of approaches to studying media audiences. Which of these issues and possibilities strike you as particularly useful for understanding consumption of popular culture? What troubles do you see arising from these methods? How might these ideas help explain or explore the consumption practices fictionally represented in Purple Rose of Cairo?
Theories of Popular Culture
Class blog for AMST0355, Spring 09, Middlebury College
I thought that Booker’s chapter on Speculation was very interesting because it shows a different way of fan consumption of popular culture than we have discussed. Speculation seems almost like a pseudo-para text (if that’s even a word), a way that fans can almost create a text so that they can then spend time analyzing it. I found it very interesting that some fans were so well connected within the Star Wars world that they were able to gain enough actual knowledge about a project to speculate about what might actually be happening. The amount of time spent gaining information and then piecing that information together to yeild even the smallest bit of legitimate information was amazing. The obvious problem that arises from fan speculation is that there is often little or no merit to what is being said and fans can spend hours talking about and analyzing somehting that is not actually going to happen.
As a die hard LOST fan (is there any other kind?), the chapters on Canon and Speculation from Brooker really struck a chord. I’ve always been fascinated by the extent to which fans will go to predict, decipher, and organize a movie/show that is, ultimately, a clever money-making device by a privately owned production studio. They could care less whether fans are getting the details right, as long as they tune in during sweeps week or pay 8.00 to see the movie at midnight. To me, this obsessive manner of consuming pop culture speaks to many different facets of what we’ve discussed in class. I feel it can be viewed from several different perspectives: some might say it’s unhealthy and leads to the further domination of the elite over the masses, while others might see it from a more hegemonic point of view, as fans taking control over their beloved show/movie, and spawning its success out of their obsession.
Personally, I prefer to think the latter, but (as an obsessed fan) fear the former. Ultimately, the show LOST is nothing more than a clever mystery spread out across 6 seasons, and Star Wars, in terms of accepted canon, spans even less actual screen time. What worries me is that we, as fans, have put far more time and energy into understanding and deciphering these productions than the producers, directors, and possibly even the writers. Somehow, I can’t decide whether that argues more for the dangerous perspective or the hegemonic perspective. In the meantime, I’ll cross my fingers that no harm will come to me.
Brooker’s chapters on canon and speculation explain us the process through which Star Wars fans determine some Star Wars productions to be primary and others secondary. One of the striking aspects of about Brooker’s argument is that while some cynical fans dismiss speculative statements and restrict the scope of ‘canon’ Star Wars productions in a sensible manner, other fans do the opposite act which is in fact not that nonsensical. It is easy to tie Brooker’s respectful approach towards Star Wars fans with this week’s movie Purple Rose of Cairo. In the movie, audience involvement and participation in the discussion of cultural products is valued to such an extent that we see the characters of the black & white Purple Rose of Cairo interact with the audience in the theatre, or even leave the screen as Tom Baxter does!
I acknowledge that this discussion I provided was not the main point of Brooker’s chapters on canon and speculation, but thinking about audiences’ role in media fascinates me and I wanted to share it with you.
As an avid Star Wars fan with an embarassingly complete collection of Extended Universe novels from Timothy Zahn’s “Heir to the Empire” trilogy up through the 2000s New Jedi Order series, I found the discussion of canon interesting. For me, a character fleshed out over dozens of novels and years of his or her life is much more interesting than the archetypal figures of the original films. Minor characters from the original trilogy like Chewbacca and Wedge Antilles are given detailed back stories and play huge roles in the post-ROTJ galaxy. I never found much of a reason for endless debates on canon vs non-canon vs quasi-canon, because minor discrepancies never violated my sense of cohesiveness. These EU authors take great care to work within the bounds of LFL’s vision and all preceding works.
Although I never devoted a significant amount of time to semi-formal speculation with Star Wars, I certainly did with the Matrix sequels. I won’t link to them because they are painful to read six years later but lengthy discussions over the plots of Revolutions and Reloaded can be found on the internet with my Internet pseudonyms featured prominently.
Tom Baxter’s leaving the screen fulfills the fantasies of countless fanfic and slash writers. Fan fiction is a creative outlet for those who wish to see their favorite characters in another setting, or to see what happened between scenes, after the film, just off frame. The Purple Rose of Cairo captures that desire in the most literal way possible
PS The Matrix came out ten years ago last week. I feel old.
After viewing The Purple Rose of Cairo I couldn’t help but connect Woody Allen’s obsession with fantasy and imagination to Freud’s theories on the unconscious. I then started thinking about what his intentions as director could have been regarding how his audience would speculate on his film. How deeply do producers consider how their consumers will construe their messages? Does it depend on the size and culture of the audience how meaning is extrapolated? Allen has been long revered by a small, yet loyal audience for his independent films and frequent succession of work. Given the familiarity and an increasingly close relationship between consumer and producer, how do close rapports affect the nature of an audience’s speculation?
I’d like to continue our conversation on religion tomorrow. Perhaps in addition to drawing parallels between religious texts and fandom we can discuss the level that adherents to a particular religion speculate on the various possible meanings that may be propagated within its main tenets.
WARNING: The comment you are about to read contains a reference that includes a spoiler for the sixth Harry Potter book.
Brooker’s chapter on speculation captured my interest the most. I was mostly shocked by how smart and effective – brilliant, even – a community of fans can be at decrypting and extracting every possible detail from the materials they have. Predicting entire scripts for films and several images before it comes out is an incredible feat. It is essentially the same as the community of people dedicated to spoiling Survivor, figuring out who the contestants are and the order in which people have been voted off before the show even airs.
Although amazed at the power of these communities, I am also scared that one of these kinds of fan communities will somehow ruin my experience of whatever they have spoiled. How bad must it feel to have something you have been waiting for for a long time ruined?
There is one example I have been haunted by for some time now. The night of the release of the 6th Harry Potter book, some guy drove around shouting “Snape kills Dumbledore!” A google search for “Snape kills Dumbledore” finds a video he recorded of himself spoiling. I can’t help but see something like this and feel really, really bad for the kids waiting for the book – and I blame the fans.
This advanced, collective knowledge is like the force: it can be a helpful collection of information accessible to anyone (the good side), or it can be forced upon others to ruin their experiences (the dark side).
In terms of studying media consumption, I would say that there is always the danger of changing and affecting the people you are studying. This can limit the range of objectivity. For example, Ang, in including the phrase “I like watching the TV serial Dallas but often get odd reactions to it”, she is making an assumption about Dallas viewers that then influences the way her subjects may respond. I think Brooker, in asking “why the films were important” to his respondents, does not assume anything about his subjects except the significance of the text to them and inquires directly about the nature of that significance. He can avoid confounding variables like his wording of the question.
However, sometimes the influence of the observer on the observed is not as easily avoided or minimized. Brooker acknowledges that the group of fans he sat down with to watch a Star Wars film were probably influenced by his presence and therefore performed unnaturally in some ways. This is a problem with ethnography in general. For The Purple Rose of Cairo, I think it would be best to analyze moviegoers and their consumption practices on their own terms but also with the context of the culture that surrounds them. I thought Purple Rose presented moviegoers as unable to deal with a text, such as Tom Baxter or the other characters, that challenged their assumptions or norms. Both the public and the establishment struggled to reaffirm the social order and put Tom Baxter back in his place, literally. This reminds me of the situation where feminists pass off women who read romance novels as being duped by patriarchal ideology and losing themselves in escapist fantasy.
Consumption in Speculation was interesting because I find it amazing how people/fans spend so much time and effort creating story possibilities, graphically and analytically, in order to predict how their universe pans out. The issues that may come out from this are spoilers that ruin it early, killing the surprise fan experience, or disappointment by fans after learning what they tried to create wasn’t exactly what they hoped.
The consumption found in Slash and Other Stories chapter reminded me a lot about the Gender and Sexuality chapter in Reader. There appears to be degrees of escapism that Brooker talks about, where fans create relationships between characters that might not have had relationships or they expand on current ones, in order to depart from everyday life, as seen with the Reading Romance section about giving up domestic duties for something different. One fan mentions that Star Wars has a “whole galaxy of people and things “where they wish they live and not in their “boring life” (143).
The mention of a fan/genfic writer who creates romantic scenes with Han Solo partially because she identifies with Princess Leia because she, like others, secretly “like to believe [they] are her” (145), is reminiscent of the consumption taking place in The Purple Rose of Cairo in the way that Cecilia wants to escape the Depression and her deadbeat marriage, finding love with the character Tom.