Becoming “The Right People”: Fan-Generated Knowledge Building (pre-print version) Kris M. Markman, Ph.D John Overholt Citation for version of record: Markman, K. M. & Overholt, J. (2011). Becoming “the right people”: Fan-generated knowledge building. In R. G. Weiner & S. E. Barba (Eds.), In the Peanut Gallery with Mystery Science Theater 3000: Essays on Film, Fandom, Technology and the Culture of Riffing (pp. 66-75). Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co. Please address correspondence to the first author: [email protected] Becoming “The Right People”: Fan-Generated Knowledge Building In a 1992 mini-documentary produced by Comedy Central, This is MST3K, show co- creator Joel Hodgson said, “We never say ‘Who’s gonna get this?’ We always say ‘The right people will get this’” (Price and Eicher 1992). This oft-repeated quote has served as a rallying cry of sorts for MST3K fans. It is an acknowledgement direct from the horse’s mouth that they are part of a special group—they are the people who “get it.” What they get, in this case, are the hundreds of often obscure jokes and references that make up the basis of the show. In carrying out the central premise of the show, making fun of bad movies, the writers call upon a wide range of cultural resources to build a highly intertextual text (Ott and Walter 2000). The references in any given MST3K episode reach well beyond popular culture, extending to literature, history, anthropology, and occasionally the writers’ own personal lives. The writers of the show acknowledge that obscurity, rather than familiarity, is in fact the goal; in the same documentary, Kevin Murphy says, “I think we’ve done our job if one viewer somewhere gets the most obscure joke that we put into the show…the obscure jokes are so much fun because there’s a very small percentage of people who get those, but the ones who do say, ‘My God they’re inside my head. They know me. They know too much about me.’” Indeed, several fans interviewed in the documentary echo Murphy’s sentiments, and note that the obscurity of many of the references is part of the appeal of the show. The obscurity of the references, however, also serves as a potential barrier for viewers wishing to cultivate their identities as fans of MST3K. Research on fandom has found that fans’ identities as fans are often closely bound up with their interactions with the texts and that, as illustrated by the Kevin Murphy quote above, fans often see themselves in the texts. In a show like MST3K, however, fans must do extra work to understand the references in order to fully realize their identities as fans and become “the right people.” Because of the breadth of the allusions in the show, this work has to be done in concert with other fans. This paper examines the collaborative knowledge building activities of MST3K fans as they relate to the decoding of jokes and references in the show. We first briefly discuss the previous research on MST3K, and then we present our framework for examining fan identities and intertextuality. We then describe the different types of references that make up the show and explore the various internet-based resources that have been constructed by fans in their attempts to decode show’s references, and discuss how these sites work as a form of collective intelligence (Jenkins 2006). Scholarship on MST3K There has been relatively little academic research on the text of MST3K. Royer (2000) employed a feminist reading of two MST3K episodes, The Amazing Colossal Man (Mallon 1991, Episode 309) and The She-Creature (Mallon 1997, Episode 808) as a means of examining how American perceptions of women and gender roles had changed over time. Royer (2000) concludes her close reading by noting that detailed watching of the show does pay off in terms of more political depth and added humor. However, she argues that the show still perpetuates common societal conventions regarding women and doesn’t stray far from the norm in criticizing the 1950s conventions portrayed in the movies it skewers. Royer notes that “the humor of the observers’ comments is at times productive and empowering, but is still used to bond the male critics and exclude women” (131). Finally, Royer argues that the mixed fan reactions to the character of Pearl Forrester illustrate society’s unresolved feelings toward feminism and feminists. However, she acknowledges that MST3K has a lot to say with regard to gender roles, even if it is not all empowering or positive. Other scholars have identified MST3K as an example of postmodern storytelling (King 2007; Reeves, Rodgers and Epstein 1996; Stevenson 1994). Reeves, Rodgers and Epstein use MST3K as a contrasting example to what they argue is the staunch anti-postmodernism of the show The X-Files. They position MST3K and the similarly formatted Beavis & Butthead as clear examples of ironic postmodern detachment, in which the shows “commodify oppositional reading and cash in on viewer resistance to commercial culture” (34). King (2007) focuses his analysis on the Joel Hodgson-era episodes, reading the show as an allegory for postmodernism, with its heavy use of references reflecting the saturation of popular culture into our everyday lives. King notes the heavy use of references and the range of knowledge needed to understand the jokes, including the fact that the show itself sometimes becomes the source of references. King argues that while the heavy use of references made the show incomprehensible and boring to the mainstream viewer, its self-conscious construction of MST3K as television served to give dedicated viewers an avenue for criticizing the media experience. King also explicitly argues against Royer’s (2000) critique of the politics of MST3K, noting that in the episode Jungle Goddess (Mallon 1990, Episode 203), the show “while mired in the degraded landscape of B movies, went far out of its way to critique the politics of the films it watched, so much so that some viewers regarded the show as ‘preachy’” (47). King argues that ironically, MST3K’s power as a mediated critique of the televised form began to weaken as the show gained popularity and began to exert its own pressure on popular culture. Identities and Texts: The Work of Becoming a Fan Fans and fandom have been discussed by scholars in a number of different ways and contexts. 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” (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” (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. By contrast, Jenkins’ (1992) conceptualizes fans as textual poachers. Jenkins draws upon de Certeau’s poaching model, but modifies it to explain the science fiction fans he studied. 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 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” (45). Hills (2002), critiquing previous scholarship on fandom, argues that in academia fandom has generally been conceptualized as a thing, while ignoring that fandom and fan identities are also always inherently performative. One way to understand the difference between a fan and an enthusiast is that fans often “incorporate the cultural texts as part of their self-identity, often going on to build social networks on the basis of shared fandoms” (Pearson, 2007: 102). Similarly, Harrington and Bielby (2007) argue that it is in their investment in media texts, in behavioral, psychological, and emotional terms, that fans distinguish themselves from consumers. Fans, according to Sandvoss (2005), are self-reflexive about their media consumption, and construct the object of their fandom as an aspect of their concepts of self. One common thread in these various treatments of fans and fandom is the importance of identification. This identification with the object of fandom can be enhanced by the textual strategies employed in the text. As Ott and Walter (2000) note, exercising the cultural knowledge necessary to decode intertextual references “fosters feelings of superiority and belonging…[S]uccessful identification of parodic references allows readers to mark themselves as…part of a selective community…Indeed, the pleasure of recognition is often directly proportional to the difficulty of identifying the allusion” (436). Thus for fans of MST3K, the intertextual nature of the show, with its the rapid-fire delivery of often obscure jokes and references, is tightly coupled with their enjoyment of the text and their identities as fans. Ott and Walter (2000) note that the term intertextuality as used in media scholarship has its roots in two different traditions.