They are what we move beyond.
I’ve been what is now commonly called a “fan” all my life. (Earlier: “nerd,” “geek,” “loser,” and a lot of other things.) For good or ill, my status as a fan defines me socially. I’m the desk at the office that people stop by to discuss the new Star-Wars-anything. I’m the person you text after the premiere of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. I’ve been a fan in the era when none of this was popular; and I’m still a fan now that we’re in the era when all of it is not only popular, but omnipotent.
And, as I’m sure is the case with many people my age who grew up during the Dark Times — i.e., the era when telling someone in your classroom that you liked Star Trek or Star Wars could literally get you beaten up — it’s amazing to look around, to see fans and fandom become the dominant voice in popular culture… and to see that those same fans and fandoms are arguably more insecure, more miserable, and more self-destructively paranoid than they’ve likely ever been.
These days, it’s difficult to extract my feelings about fandom and being a fan from a few vectors that meet in fandom’s middle and have, for all intents and purposes, rendered the very idea of fandom abhorrent — possibly permanently so.
The first was the revelation (to me, a privileged person) in the Gamergate era that many spaces I’d long considered inclusive were anything but, and were in many cases girded against inclusion in all its forms. Gamergate was my “aha” moment, although there have been literally hundreds of such instances since, and likely far more prior. I feel like a fool and an asshole for missing it for as long as I did. The evidence was there to see and it was my own blindness that held me unwilling to see it; perhaps I grew up with the nerd’s romantic idea that no one who had been aggressively marginalized could possibly marginalize others. Naive and ridiculous, I know, and showing a real lack of insight into human nature, and even my own stupid ego; but, there it is.
Moving beyond anti-inclusive fandom, though — and it is a big thing to move beyond, and perhaps we shouldn’t even try — there are certain unavoidable elements to (a lot of) fandom now that I find detestable, none more so than the cadre of fanbases everywhere who have rejected new, inventive storytelling entirely, in favour of ego-stroking regurgitation. It’s the pre-masticated content thing: not wanting the story to go anywhere new, interesting, or different, in favour of droplets of wet, familiar food that are spit into fans’ mouths by the mommy bird. (Insert your mommy bird of choice: mine is Disney+.)
It would be wrong to say that those forces came to a head with The Last Jedi — if anything, I think the clapping-monkeys reaction to CGI Luke Skywalker in The Mandalorian is a much more telling bellwether of where fandom is today than any element of the fantrum that met Episode VIII — but with Rian Johnson proclaiming this past week that he’s even more proud of his film now than he was in 2017 (rightly so), it was hard not to think about it. At this point, one’s stance on The Last Jedi has the bearing of a clean dividing line, a philosophical aesthetic marker. I know it isn’t, but it’s a lot easier and neater to think that every thinking Star Wars fan who believes that the franchise still has room for the kind of imaginative, mythic derring-do that made the original films so lasting, thinks The Last Jedi is a masterpiece. And it’s equally easy and neat to think that — even if you filter out all the misogynists and racists who didn’t like The Last Jedi for their reasons, which again, is a pretty big, and unnecessary, “if” — the clapping monkeys who didn’t, don’t.
No one really knows why a thing catches fire and becomes a treasured part of the popular imagination. There is (I think) a natural enough tendency to assume that the reason everybody likes something is, at least in part, due to the same general reasons that you yourself do; that there are “first principles” at play. (To whit: Star Trek is about the value of infinite diversity in infinite combinations; so, no Star Trek fan could possibly have a problem with persons of colour or queer characters, could they? Wait, could they??)
Similarly, I grew up on enough of the barrage of “Star Wars is Joseph Campbell in space,” and took the time to learn what that meant, that I kind of assumed that everyone else understood the instructive spark intrinsic to the mythology and storytelling, too. And then I started running into the guys for whom “story” means “two hour video where cool shit happens,” and not “the evolution and testing of a hero through learning and sacrifice.”
On one level, this means that in my DNA, I don’t understand how anyone who loves Star Wars can’t think The Last Jedi is a masterpiece, just like (I’m sure) the guys who think story means “two hour video where cool shit happens” definitely have no fucking idea what I’m talking about, either. (“He makes a Yo Momma joke right at the beginning! What the fuck, bro!”) The difference between me and them, from personal experience, is that I’d prefer to say “I’m sorry you didn’t enjoy the film!” and change the subject for the sake of everyone around me; whereas those guys really need to convince you that they’re right, and don’t care if it takes all night.
(Oooh — while on the subject of the dangers of the “video where cool shit happens” crowd, Matt Zoller Seitz’s discussion of Star Wars images that shatter the philosophical framework of Star Wars is, as always, a founding document.)
Anyway. This isn’t about Star Wars. I was thinking about the thing from the weekend of Comic Con, where William Shatner said that the new Star Trek series couldn’t hold a candle to the original shows created by Gene Roddenberry, and how so many people got so upset. Good people! Star Trek people! IDIC people! People who should know better!
Here’s something: it’s called an opinion, and Shatner’s is a valid one; and it can come from William Shatner, or the Great Bird of the Galaxy, or the space-demon beyond the Great Barrier himself, and it should not impact your feelings about any given Star Trek television series at all. That, in turn, is called “the courage of your convictions.” And I see very little of it anymore.
There’s something festering within all these fan cultures: the need for persistent validation. I think this actually leads to the problem of the pre-masticated content — the Leonardo-Dicaprio-meme content — where you, as a fan, get to feel chuffed because you can identify the thing that’s in front of you on screen because you’ve seen it before. What is fan nerdery, if not an opportunity to show that you definitely know the thing, way better than anybody else?
Which, in turn, leads to some version of the gatekeeping problem: who better than you, a knowledgeable fan, to set the rules of engagement for the fandom itself, in terms of who gets to be one, and who doesn’t?
Neat. Clean. Abhorrent.
One last thing worth discussing: this paralyzing status-quo, where to love a thing is to hold it without any possible flaw and above all criticism. Donald Trump loves this idea, if you’re under any apprehension about where to fall on it; this is the “journalists shouldn’t report bad stuff” of fan culture. It’s the MAGA concept of “patriotism,” i.e. unflinching loyalty, applied to shows about comic book characters. I try to wear any of my own ambivalence about any given new show or movie like a badge of honour, because liking something and simultaneously believing it missed some critical dimensions means, to me, that you’re actually still engaged with the work and care about what it can be. So yeah, I think Dune is only half-successful as a film. I hold back a half-star from The Last Jedi, because the 5-act structure makes the pacing clunky regardless of how strong the storytelling is. I love Thor: Love and Thunder to pieces, but acknowledge that it’s sloppy as hell. There’s nothing wrong with any of this.
It doesn’t mean I don’t love Marvel. It doesn’t mean I don’t love Star Wars. It means I love them enough to believe that they have intrinsic value, and can be great; and that I care to call them out when they aren’t.
But leaving the act and nature of criticism aside: it also means I believe in myself. It means I don’t need universal praise of a thing to bolster my own hard-earned feelings about that thing. If I did, would I even be a fan? Would I even love the thing itself? I don’t think so. My love is not fragile.