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, , and the Internet 1

Running Head: STAR TREK, , 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 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—, 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 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 of fan- produced film. Fan film is an offshoot of fan , a form of most closely associated with texts such as and Star Trek, but which extends to many other cult media texts (Brooker, 2002; Jenkins, 1992). 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 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/ 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 exists largely on an underground basis. For example, Brooker (2002) notes that while has explicitly or implicitly endorsed the creation of fan fiction and fan film, the company has explicitly condemned slash as both a violation of 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 , 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. 9-10). Thus, when examining a fan culture as a vernacular culture, it is important to be situated as a member of that culture.

Grossberg (1997) offers three categories of investment that describe audience’s relationships to popular culture: fans, ideologues, and fanatics. Fans, he says, “make an affective investment into the objects of their taste and they construct, from those tastes, a consistent but necessarily temporary affective identity” (p. 247). The general everyday enjoyment of media texts constitutes culture for the fan, who can derive strategies for survival from fan practices. In contrast to the fan, the ideologue’s investment is affective, but is based on the application of external criteria to the text. Ideologue judgments of texts may be based on content or form, but

“the ideologue’s taste is always measured by standards defined outside of and adhered to independently of the pleasures of everyday life” (p. 248). Finally, fanaticism involves a totalizing, yet empty affective investment in an ideological site. The fanatic cannot step outside the object of investment, because it is lived as the totality of existence.

One final understanding of fans that will be important to this analysis is Jenkins’ (1992) idea of textual poachers. Jenkins draws upon de Certeau’s poaching model, but modifies it to explain the science fiction fans he studies. Textual poaching is a processual model of fandom; it emphasizes meaning making and interpretation. Textual poachers choose media texts which express their previously held commitments and interests; there is a sense of recognition and identification. In Jenkins’ approach, poaching involves both reading and writing as a social process, in contrast to de Certeau’s isolated readers who discard meanings when they are no Star Trek, Fan Film, and the Internet 8 longer useful. Jenkins says that for the fan, “these previously ‘poached’ meanings provide a foundation for future encounters with the fiction, shaping how it will be perceived, defining how it will be used” (p. 45).

Starship Exeter: of the Past

Starship Exeter: The Savage Empire (http://homepage.mac.com/starshipexeter/) is an entirely fan produced and financed episode derived from the original Star Trek series. As described on the show’s website, the program was created out of the long-term vision of two brothers, Jimm and Josh Johnson, and intended to serve as a pilot episode for a new Star Trek series set in the same time period as the original show. The Johnsons created a new ship, the

Exeter, and a new cast of characters to populate their story. However, it is obvious from the promotional material and from the production that every effort was made to fit Exeter into the

Star Trek canon. The episode, which is split into four segments for downloading, mimics exactly the structure of classic Trek episodes. It begins with a teaser, which transitions into opening credits that employ the same music and font type as the original series, although the captain’s voice over had been slightly modified. The plot for the episode finds the Exeter on a mission to the Andorrian system, to secure medicine urgently-needed to cure an outbreak on another

Federation ship. As was the case for classic Trek episodes, the captain of the Exeter, John

Garrovik, beams down to the planet as part of the away team. When they find themselves under attack by a nine-foot, man-eating lizard, Garrovik and his crew hike, climb, and run until they find the entrance to the Andorrian’s underground dwelling, only to be ambushed by a rogue

Andorrian sect in league with the . They eventually escape, force the Klingons to retreat, and secure the medicine. The episode ends with a summarizing voice over and tag, and the closing credits again employ the style and music of the original series. Star Trek, Fan Film, and the Internet 9

Although Exeter adheres strictly to Star Trek canon and format, it can also be seen as a parody of that same style. There are numerous instances throughout the show of fan references, jokes that poke fun at the overused conventions of the original series. Within the first act of the program, for example, we witness the death of a redshirt (the nameless ensigns who served as sacrifices for the plot on classic Trek), and a fight with a “ferocious” monster (portrayed ironically by a very bad purple clay dinosaur). The opening of the second act finds a shirtless captain being thrown into the brig after a torture session. After Garrovik and his remaining crew escape, he must engage in hand-to-hand combat with the captain who, brandishing a knife, rips Garrovik’s shirt with his first blow. In fact, the only Star Trek device missing from

Exeter is a liaison between the captain and an exotic alien woman. The ability to create a new text which is at the same time a copy of and a comment on an artifact of mass culture allows fans to situate themselves as fans but also as observers of the media process. By reproducing worn- out gags they challenge the homogeneity of the mass culture industry. Additionally, the high production values of Exeter, made possible by relatively inexpensive digital technology, allow the fans to create a text virtually indistinguishable in quality from the original. That this text is disseminated globally through the Internet helps to undermine the death-grip of large media conglomerates on the production of popular culture. While Paramount, the company that owns the copyright to Star Trek, could sue the Johnson brothers, to do so would only serve to alienate the very fan base that keeps the franchise in business (a fact noted by the Johnsons on their website). Thus Internet fan film can be seen as a symbol of the power that fans hold over media producers, a power that they are aware of and work to exploit.

At the same time that fan film allows for a space of ironic comment and serves as a symbol of power over and resistance to media conglomerates, the emphasis in fan film on the Star Trek, Fan Film, and the Internet 10 auteur and the canon constrains the ways in which the text can offer more serious challenges to the dominant culture. Gene Rodenberry, the creator of Star Trek, is the focus of much fan attention. Fan productions seeking to be authentic must in the first place adhere to Rodenberry’s vision, both as articulated by him and as interpreted by fans based on the canonical texts.

Unfortunately, much of Rodenberry’s vision for a liberal, diverse utopian society was itself constrained by the demands of 1960s television (Tulloch & Jenkins, 1995). Although the producers of Exeter, as self-financed fans, are not constrained by current or past televisual norms, they nonetheless fail to challenge those aspects of Star Trek that have been criticized for not conforming to a modern, diverse society. For example, the one major female in

Exeter, Jo Harris, appears to be the first-officer: she is seated in the captains chair while he is on the away mission, she is the only one to speak with him during his absence, and it is she to whom others report about the status of the ship when they are attacked by the Klingons. Thus it would appear that the producers are attempting to write a wrong from the original series, where Chapel, the nurse, was originally supposed to be the first officer, an idea squashed by the production company as not believable. However, whatever ground is gained by making Harris the first officer is undermined by never explicitly naming her as such in the episode, thereby denying her the full force of such a title. In addition, she is referred to by the captain only by her last name, further obscuring her identity as a woman. Minorities fair only slightly better in the world of

Exeter, with the Chief Engineer portrayed by an African-American actor and another main character whose identity can be possibly read as Hispanic. On the whole, however, Exeter reproduces the white, male homogeneity of the classic series. Some allowances must be made in this regard, since, as a fan production, the actors worked for free, and the producers may have been limited in the talent they could find. However, it is still clear that the allegiance to the Star Trek, Fan Film, and the Internet 11 canon, to making this an accurate portrayal of the Star Trek world, has kept the producers from making a statement about the lack of diversity in mainstream television.

Hidden Frontier: Possibilities for the Future

Star Trek: Hidden Frontier (HF) is also an entirely fan-produced and funded Internet- based fan film (http://www.hiddenfrontier.org/). Unlike Exeter, which was planned and created as a pilot episode for a TV series, HF is a series, and seems to have been planned that way from the start. According to the HF website, a group of Los Angeles-based Star Trek fans first came together over the idea of producing a fan film2, and from that experience decided to create an entire series. The first episode of HF “aired” in August 2000, and the finale to the third season aired on March 23, 2003. Those first three seasons include a total of 18 episodes varying in length from approximately 12 minutes early in the first season to the standard one-half hour by the end of season three. The series itself is produced by shooting the actors against a green screen background with the set for each seen being added in digitally. This does limit the production in the variety of shot-types and the amount interaction the actors can have with props and the setting, but over the course of the three seasons, HF’s production values have become more sophisticated. However, unlike Exeter, it is visually no match to a commercially-produced .

As a fan film production, HF shows its commitment to preserving the canon and fitting into the Star Trek universe. The HF producers accept scripts from any willing contributor, and the website contains an extensive writers bible with guidelines on the timeline, crew, technical jargon, missions, and the vision for the show. Rather than being an to classic Trek as

2 The film, The Price of Duty, is only referenced in passing in the description of the character of Captain Knapp, and while its plot seems to have some connection to events in HF, it is not integrated into the series and does not appear on the website. Star Trek, Fan Film, and the Internet 12

Exeter is, HF slots into the current Star Trek timeline. The pilot episode is set at the end of the

Dominion War, and thus overlaps with events in the last season of Star Trek: Deep Space 9, the fifth season of Star Trek: Voyager, and the ninth feature film, Insurrection. The producers of HF make use of events from the canon to locate their program in both time and space, as it is set in the Briar Patch, a region introduced in Insurrection, and incorporates the use of both star ships and a space station, DS12. Because the only currently active official TV series, Star Trek:

Enterprise, is set in a historical period prior to events in the original series, HF has the distinction of being the only “current” Star Trek production. Season three of HF coincides in the timeline with the tenth feature film Nemesis, released in late 2002, and thus their upcoming fourth season will in fact be extending the Star Trek timeline outside of the official universe.

In addition to the careful attention paid to the timeline, HF also attempts to reflect the current understanding of the Star Trek ideology. Their website states that:

We are not doing stories that cast our people and our vessel in the role of "galaxy police".

Nor is our mission that of spreading 21'ST century Euro-American cultural values

through the galaxy. Stay true to the prime directive. We are not "space meddlers".

This admonition to potential writers reflects the criticisms about the official series that have come from fans themselves. Jenkins (Tulloch & Jenkins, 1995) notes that the historical moment in which a popular culture text is situated will affect the way fans read the text. Additionally, as fans encounter the text at different times, this re-reading will also prompt a change in reactions.

Fans who encountered the original series as children in the 1960s had to reexamine their own interpretations when watching the show in reruns in the 1970s. Fans whose first Star Trek experience was watching the Next Generation series in the late 1980s had similarly different interpretations of it and classic Trek than did fans who followed the programs from the start. Star Trek, Fan Film, and the Internet 13

Jenkins charts the changes in both the official ideology, as reflected in the canonical texts, and the fan community’s interpretation of this ideology. Fans actively work to explain contradictions between the future-utopian ideals and the sometimes overtly 20th century capitalistic ideology that is evident in many Star Trek texts. Jenkins argues that these sometimes divergent readings are not resistant, however, because the fans’ allegiance to Rodenberry as auteur causes them to see themselves as being in line with his artistic vision, and to displace contradictory elements of the shows as the product of the corporate media environment.

The allegiance to the canon and the auteur seen in Exeter does not completely inhibit fans’ attempts to extend the universe in new ways. Indeed, HF shows the potential that fan film can have as a challenge to existing media tropes. While the plots of the HF episodes tend to reflect generic Star Trek subject matter, i.e. encounters with new aliens, rescuing important ships or people, exploring anomalies, battling new enemies, the writers bible, and to an extent the episodes, attempt to achieve a deeper level of character development and are more embracing of exploring relationships and back story. This is in line with much of general fan fiction (Brooker,

2002; Jenkins, 1992), which was motivated by a desire to fill in gaps and extend characters and relationships that were sacrificed to the narrative-heavy structure of commercial TV and film.

Indeed, the cast and crew of HF are significantly more diverse than the cast of Exeter, featuring several Hispanic characters in the first season, including the first officer, and several strong female characters. In the fifth episode of season one we are introduced to Lt. Commander

Elizabeth Shelby, who takes over as first officer and later, when Captain Ian Quincy Knapp is promoted to Commander of DS12, is herself promoted to Captain of the Starship Excelsior, the primary ship in the HF series. The ship’s chief engineer, counselor, and chief science officer are also all women, and in the latter half of the second season a female admiral becomes a recurring Star Trek, Fan Film, and the Internet 14 character. Although the portrayals of these women are not stereotype free (for example they character of Shelby starts out as an aggressive career woman), they generally avoid the overly- feminized or othered quality of female characters in previous Star Trek series (Korzeniowska,

1996). Minorities fare somewhat less-well, as most of the Hispanic characters introduced at the beginning of the series have disappeared by the end of the third season, although season three does feature and African-American character at the ops position on the Excelsior. However, it may be that, as a fan production staffed by volunteer actors, the racial diversity on the set may be more a reflection of who is available to participate than any purposeful decision on the part of the producers. In fact, historically within Star Trek racial tensions have been played out in conflicts between species more than between human races, and this is especially vivid in the portrayals of hybrid characters (Hurd, 1997). The one hybrid character on HF, Ensign Jenna

McFarland, is half-Trill, half-Human, and other than the typical Trill spots there are no visible physical manifestations of her hybridity, nor does her character exhibit any inner conflict as a result of her mixed genetic heritage.

The main enemy faced by HF characters is a new species called the Grey, who are mysterious, genetically engineered, highly advanced race who appear to require the life-force of humanoid creatures as an energy source. They are featureless black entities hidden under grey cloaks, whose communication with the HF characters has been extremely limited. Whereas the alien enemies on Star Trek, and especially in the classic series, could often be read as characterizations/stereotypes of human racial or ethnic groups (Russians, Chinese, African-

Americans), the Grey as an enemy on HF appear to be more a manifestation of current fears about technology and its hold over humans than about struggles with racial others. Star Trek, Fan Film, and the Internet 15

In addition to these limited attempts to move beyond the gender and racial stereotypes present in many canonical texts, HF moves the Star Trek universe in a direction previously untouched in the official universe. Towards the end of the third season the series introduces two characters, Ensigns Corey Aster and Ro Laren, who are beginning to explore their romantic feelings for each other. This relationship, which is projected by the writer’s bible to extend into and mature during the fourth season, would mark the first time in Star Trek history that a homosexual relationship has been featured as part of the recurring storyline. While heterosexual relationships and encounters abound in Star Trek history, there have been only two fleeting attempts to deal with same-sex partnerships, and both times the story was resolved by dissolving the relationship. The budding romance between Aster and Ro, however, is treated as natural and normal by the other HF characters, and in this respect demonstrates the revolutionary possibilities for fan film. Although gay characters do have increased visibility on mainstream commercial television, their characterizations are still problematic, and are often marked by tokenism or heteronormative framing (Battles & Hilton-Morrow, 2002; Dow, 2001). And the producers of Star Trek, in both the productions and the extra-textual discourse, have never been able to successfully explain to fans why there were not openly gay characters on the show.

Jenkins’ (Tulloch & Jenkins, 1995) assessment of the situation is worth quoting at length here:

The producers, in a curious bit of circular logic, were insisting that the absence of gays

and lesbians in the Star Trek universe was evidence of their acceptance within the

Federation, while their visibility could only be read as signs of conflict, a renewed

eruption of homophobia...The signs of homosexuality, if there are any to be seen at all,

automatically become too ‘obvious’ in a homophobic society while the marks of Star Trek, Fan Film, and the Internet 16

heterosexuality are naturalized, rendered invisible, because they are too pervasive to even

be noticed. (p. 248)

Thus it took fans, acting as both critics of the original texts and yet also adherents to the utopian ideology, to create a version of Star Trek in which two same-sex characters could pursue a relationship without being labeled or singled out, and which was as naturalized as heterosexual relationships have always had the privilege to be.

Conclusion

Through the examination of two fan film productions, Starship Exeter: The Savage

Empire and Star Trek: Hidden Frontier, I have tried to show how fan cultures have a mixed ability to challenge existing social relations. The paradox of fan texts such as fan fiction and fan film is the tension between faithfulness to the source (the canon and the auteur) and the desire to extend and elaborate the textual universe. Fan texts are productive; fans are motivated to create new texts in order to add to the canonical universe and thereby increase the number of sources for entertainment. They are also motivated by a desire to fill in gaps and explain contradictions in the original texts, and in this way have the potential to be critical. At the same time, however, the location of these texts within fandom sets limits on how critical and how resistant they can be. Fan productions are meant to be a part of the universe, and are not designed to unseat it. This is why the most radical form of fan fiction, slash, remains a largely underground , and is rejected not only by the media producers, but also by the bulk of fans in the mainstream fan community (Brooker, 2002). Because slash breaks with many of the established facts of the canon, it can never be fully integrated into the fan culture.

In addition to demonstrating the possibilities and limitations of fan film, this examination can also reveal something about the fans themselves. The people who create fan film are not Star Trek, Fan Film, and the Internet 17 easily slotted into Grossberg’s (1997) three categories of investment (fan, ideologue and fanatic).

Clearly, the attachment described by the fan category does not go far enough to explain the amount of time and money that fans pour into these productions. Their devotion to the texts should not, however, be read as a sign of fanaticism. The fanatic could not possibly produce fan film or fiction, because in their totalizing and slavish devotion to the object of fandom, fanatics see the canon as already perfect and see nothing to be gained by adding to it; and the notion of changing or reinterpreting canon is blasphemous. The ability to produce fan texts reflects a sophisticated understanding of the relationship of the textual universe to the industry, and the ability to step outside of the universe in order to determine how to add to it. Fan film and fan fiction reflect a certain ownership and mastery over the object of fandom that tempers the passion of fans and keeps them from sliding into fanaticism. But if the fan and fanatic categories do not adequately express the investment of fan producers, neither does the ideologue. One problem with the ideologue concept is that, while it can be seen to represent fan positions within music and film, for example, it does not seem to have a good fit with television texts. One reason may be that television has always been held as a more lowbrow form of popular entertainment; witness the myriad of TV stars who, upon gaining success in that medium, immediately desert it for the more glamorous and more profitable medium of film. But more importantly, the fan- producers of TV programs such as Star Trek do not seem to be attracted to the program because it fits into a set of objective criteria for what makes a ‘good’ show. Rather, the attraction is one of personal identification; fans are attracted because the producers seem to have “read their minds” (See Tulloch & Jenkins, 1995 for examples of this identification). The investment in these texts is one of matching pre-existing ideologies; the criteria is subjective, because the texts feel like they were made specifically for the fans. In this way, the producers of fan film and fan Star Trek, Fan Film, and the Internet 18 fiction more closely resemble Jenkins’ (1992) concept of textual poachers than any of

Grossberg’s categories; textual poachers mediate between fanatics, ideologues, and sometimes even fans.

There are a range of fan productions in current circulation, and it is likely that they vary widely in how they address the relationship of fans to the auteur, the canon, and the culture industry. What we have seen in this analysis is that, similar to Ono and Sloop’s (1995) findings from their analysis of the Pacific Citizen, vernacular cultures do not always serve as a space for challenging the dominant culture. Fan cultures, because of their strong ties to texts created by the culture industry, serve as imperfect vehicles for challenging existing social relations. Fan film, as a primarily male phenomenon that emphasizes narrative, the auteur, and the canon, does not always allow for room to completely explore the opportunities for challenging the ideologies inherent in mass commercial culture. What remains to be explored is whether these constraints will remain, or if increased access to technology will allow different groups of fans the opportunity to produced their own texts, and perhaps open fan film up to more diverse, and more socially progressive points of view. Star Trek, Fan Film, and the Internet 19

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