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Star Trek, Fan Film, and the Internet 1 Running Head: STAR TREK, FAN FILM, AND THE INTERNET Star Trek, Fan Film, and the Internet: Possibilities and Constraints of Fan-Based Vernacular Cultures Kris M. Markman, Ph.D. [email protected] Paper presented to the Popular Communication Division at the Annual Convention of the International Communication Association, May 30, 2005, New York, NY. Star Trek, Fan Film, and the Internet 2 Abstract This paper explores the distinctions between mass and vernacular popular culture as manifested in the fan productions of Star Trek fans. Fan-produced video represents an opportunity for ordinary people to take the means of cultural production into their own hands. However, because of its roots in an already-existing, culture industry-produced world, there may exist limits to the amount of resistance this form of vernacular culture can provide. To explore these tensions, I compare two fan film productions based on the popular Star Trek television and movie franchise. These two productions, both of which are distributed through the Internet, illustrate the different levels of attachment to and freedom from the main text that characterize much of fan film. Star Trek, Fan Film, and the Internet 3 Star Trek, Fan Film, and the Internet: Possibilities and Constraints of Fan-Based Vernacular Cultures One distinction made early in the history of cultural studies was that of mass versus elite culture. For example, Adorno and Horkheimer, (1993), writing at the end of WWII, were pessimistic about mass culture and wary of the power of the culture industry. They saw the mass audience as cultural dupes to a system that claimed to be responding to the needs and wishes of a public but was really engaged in the process of creating and reinforcing its own ideas of what the public needed to be. They critiqued the products of the culture industry—films, jazz and radio programs, for example—as leaving no room for imagination, reflection, or independent thought. Mass culture was low culture, juxtaposed against the high culture of the elites—classical music, literature, high art. Although much of their harshest views towards mass culture can be explained by the historical conditions in which Adorno and Horkheimer wrote, the mass=bad/elite=good distinction persisted in cultural studies until the 1960s (During, 1993). At that time, the rise of social movements provided cultural studies scholars with a new line of questioning, and one result was a focus on audience and a celebration of mass culture texts (e.g. Fiske, 1986; Hall, 1993). However, some current work (e.g. Edensor, 2002; Ono & Sloop, 1995; Triece, 2001) in cultural studies suggests that scholars should also focus on the distinction between mass culture, produced by the culture industry for popular consumption, and vernacular cultures, those arising from and produced for the people themselves. The implication is that vernacular cultures provider alternate understandings of cultural history, and that they may offer opportunities for change and liberation that mass culture does not provide. However, Ono and Sloop (1995) stress that vernacular cultures should not be assumed to always be emancipating per se, because they Star Trek, Fan Film, and the Internet 4 may in fact reproduce some of the same oppressive features of the dominant culture. In their view, vernacular cultures are mixed in their opportunities for resistance and change. A similar theme is found in the work of Grossberg (1997), where he has shown how conservative political organizations effectively use popular culture techniques to disseminate their messages. This paper will explore the possibilities that one type of vernacular culture, fan culture, holds for challenging existing social relations. Fan cultures can be seen to occupy a middle ground on a continuum of mass to vernacular culture. Pulling in one direction is the fact that fan cultures are derived from mass culture artifacts. Fans coalesce around texts and artists that are created by and propagated through mass culture. However, the result of fandom is often the creation of new texts which have a variable relationship to the original inspiring artifact. Additionally, these new texts are produced almost always for the consumption of other fans; they are not meant to be sent into wider distribution. As such, fan texts allow members of the community to share with each other their own interpretations of the object of fandom, interpretations that sometimes veer sharply from the meanings of the original (Jenkins, 1992). To study fan culture as vernacular I have therefore chosen to focus on the texts created by the fans themselves. Specifically, this paper will examine two examples of the genre of fan- produced film. Fan film is an offshoot of fan fiction, a form of creative writing most closely associated with science fiction texts such as Star Wars and Star Trek, but which extends to many other cult media texts (Brooker, 2002; Jenkins, 1992). Fan fiction stories began as mimeographs circulated among fans at conventions or distributed by fan produced magazines, but now extend to more high-tech periodical publications and Internet distribution. Fan fiction stories explore a wide range of topics, often motivated by a desire to work out tensions in the original texts or elaborate on characters and relationships, and as such are often liberating for their creators Star Trek, Fan Film, and the Internet 5 (Jenkins). One extreme example is slash fiction. Slash fiction is a version of fan fiction, usually written by women, that explores homosocial and homosexual relationships. The term originates from the first slash stories, which centered on Kirk/Spock fantasies drawn from classic Star Trek. Unlike most fan fiction, which is generally ignored by the media producers, slash explores such taboo ground that even within the fan culture it exists largely on an underground basis. For example, Brooker (2002) notes that while Lucasfilm has explicitly or implicitly endorsed the creation of fan fiction and fan film, the company has explicitly condemned slash as both a violation of copyright and Star Wars’ family morality. Unlike most fan fiction, which tends to be written by women (Jenkins, 1992), fan film is a very male-gendered phenomenon. Fan films are the visual equivalents of fan fiction, and have exploded as a phenomenon with the availability of cheap analog and digital video cameras and computer animation and editing software. Fan-produced film is often tied very heavily to a reverence for the auteur, the creator of the text who serves as a “point of coherence and continuity” (Hills, 2002, p. 132) for fan narrative. Along with the emphasis on the auteur as textual authority, adherence to the canon, the official universe of artifacts that constitute the world of the text (Brooker, 2002), constrains the parameters of fan film production. As visual representations, fan film is limited in narrative scope to what can be easily conveyed on screen, and thus tends to differ from a text whose limits are those of the imagination of the author. At the same time, the technology available to modern fans enables them to bypass the traditional media conglomerate hierarchy and produce high-quality shows which they can then distribute directly to other fans through the Internet, video stores, and conventional outlets such as conventions. It therefore can be seen to have a higher profile, because of its status as a visual medium, than does fan fiction. Star Trek, Fan Film, and the Internet 6 The ability to produce and distribute new works serves to empower fans to shape and add to the textual universe in which they situate themselves. To describe how these tensions play out I will first discuss some ways that fans and fandom have been conceptualized in the literature, and then I will critique two recent fan film productions, a thirty-minute movie/TV pilot, Starship Exeter: The Savage Empire, and a three-season long fan film series, Star Trek: Hidden Frontier1. Conceptualizations of Fans and Fandom There are many different manifestations of vernacular culture, but one of the most prominent and widely studied is fan culture. The study of fan culture is complex, however, since fans have always had a tenuous relationship with scholars and with the popular press. For example, Star Trek fans have been lampooned on television shows like Saturday Night Live, reinforcing the popular stereotype of many fans (and especially science fiction fans) as that of the overweight geek who needs to ‘get a life’ (Jenkins, 1992). Among the problems in scholarly work, Hills (2002) argues that in academia fandom has generally been conceptualized as a thing, while ignoring that fandom and fan identities are also always inherently performative. He says that fandom is never a neutral ‘expression’ or a singular ‘referent’; its status and its performance shift across cultural sites. …Viewing fandom as a ‘thing’ or ‘object of study’ has led previous studies of fandom to treat the ways in which fan identities are legitimated as authentic ‘expressions’ of a group commitment. (p. xii) Hills critiques Jenkins’ approach to studying fandom, arguing that by separating ‘good’ fans from ‘bad’ non-fans, Jenkins is creating a unnecessary moral dualism. Rather, Hills argues that 1 The data for this study was collected in late spring, 2003. Since then, the producers of Starship Exeter have completed two additional episodes with plans for more, and Star Trek: Hidden Frontier has completed its fourth season and begun a fifth. Star Trek, Fan Film, and the Internet 7 “fandom…deserves to be represented more on its own terms…the task which confronts cultural studies at this moment in time…is to theorise the media cult and its fandom through a primary allegiance to the role of ‘fan’ and a secondary allegiance to ‘academia’” (pp.
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