CHASING SEMIOTIC RABBITS: THE PROLIFERATION OF

SECONDARY MEANING IN DOCTOR WHO FANVIDS

E. CHARLOTTE STEVENS

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1+1 Canada Chasing Semiotic Rabbits: The Proliferation of Meaning in Doctor Who Fanvids

By E. Charlotte Stevens a thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies of York University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

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Abstract

The practice of vidding, making a music video that uses existing media as source material, is relevant to a contemporary study of television and audience studies. Media fandom has a long history of embracing advances in consumer technology to interact with the objects of their fandom, but vids and vidding have enjoyed only limited

scholarly attention. This thesis uses a case-study of three vids made from episodes of

Doctor Who, supported by textual and visual analysis, and an examination of the nature

of fandom and fan production, to explore the critical narratives constructed in the selected vids and to demonstrate one of the subcultural results of media piracy. Through an analysis of the making and re-making of meaning in fanvids, I extend Barthes's

explanation of the semiotic function of captioning to describe the analysis performed by the interaction of lyrics to video clips. V

Acknowledgements

This thesis could not have been written without the assistance and support of many wonderful people and without much loud music.

I dedicate this work to my comma-wrangling friends, to my ever-patient family, and to the endlessly-inspiring world offandom. None of this was possible without you.

I also must thank Dr. Jennifer Brayton, my supervisor, cheerleader and - now -friend.

Caution

Although what you are about to see is a work of academic prose, it should never the less be read at maximum volume. vi

Table of Contents

Abstract iv Acknowledgements v Table of Contents vi

Introduction 1

Chapter 1: Methodology and Practices 9 1.1 Research Questions 9 1.2 Selection o/DoctorWho Case Study Videos 14 1.3 Textual and Visual Content Analysis 18 1.4 Scope of Project 22

Chapter 2: Literature Review 24 2.1 The Location and Positioning of Fans and Fan Practices 24 2.2 Active Audiences and Fan Agency under Capitalism 30 2.3 The Roles of Technologies for Fandoms 44 2.4 Fan Videos and the Practices of Vidding Cultures 57 2.5 Communicating Meaning through Images 69

Chapter 3: Narrative Transformations of Three Doctor Who Videos 86 3.1 Introduction 86 3.2 Background: Selections from the Semiotic Universe o/Doctor Who 89 3.3 Case Study I: The Master as Enthusiast 94 3.4 Case Study 2: The Master as Rapper 100 3.5 Case Study 3: The Master as Predator 106 3.6 Common Emerging Themes 109

Conclusion 122

Appendix A 127 Song Lyrics 127

Bibliography 130 1

Introduction

Since the 1980s, television audiences have found that developments in audio­ visual technology - from the VCR's first appearance on the commercial market through

to today's powerful personal computers - have affected their relationship with the media products they consume. Traditional television theory understands flow as a linear journey, where a predetermined sequence of content captures and propels audiences

(Gripsrud 1997). The digitization and subsequent commodification of previously

ephemeral cultural products, and the way audiences have the ability to select, collect and manipulate only those components of the flow that attract them (and indeed can

circumvent the flow entirely to obtain television), suggests that a more apt metaphor for the present state of television consumption is a dynamic archive. No longer tied to

corporately-defined flood of images, this method of watching television places individual

episodes in a larger archive of cultural artifacts to be received, reflected upon, and

reconstructed beyond traditional understandings of television flow.

This alteration in conventional methods of media distribution and consumption

allows superficial control on behalf of the viewer, engendering a greater sense of

ownership over the product. A process that began in the 1980s with the advent of cable

television, and the rapid proliferation of technologies and delivery systems such as

satellite, videocassette, laserdiscs and fibre-optics (Barnouw 1990: 505), continues as the

digital technologies of high-speed internet, powerful personal computers, and digital video recorders provide the television viewer with an abundance of choice. Web-based distribution, both with and without license, makes nearly any television show, movie, or 2 song available to a global audience (Leaver 2008). While television networks and cable companies slowly negotiate the business and politics of digital viewership, while simultaneously attempting to pin down the internet as either a marketing tool or a distribution arm (Leaver 2008: 146), television audiences have created their own broadcast networks via personal computers.

From this raw material, media audiences can create collections of favourite content to keep or to share, and can make whole new works such as fanvids or mashups.

These forms - music videos, short films or remixes which take existing media as their source material - are created outside of institutions and beyond an academic, professional or avant-garde context. The society of spectacle that Guy Debord (1977) famously condemned has in fact spawned new forms of art-making. I propose to use visual analysis and close readings of these new-media texts in conjunction with a review of the literature surrounding internet and fandom culture, found footage films, and key texts in communications studies, to attempt an understanding of fan-made products and their larger context.

This research project is based in the relatively young multidisciplinary field of fandom studies and will incorporate perspectives from political economy, cultural studies and visual cultural studies to provide a theoretical context for responses to television properties and for the production of collage-type video art. At the centre of this project aiefans: a subset of the media audience, "distinguishable from the general audience in their emotional connection to their specialized interest" (Brayton 2006: 138). The project's focus will not be the fans themselves, but rather the practices and artifacts of 3 fandom (the world of fans).1 Within fandom, the practices Henry Jenkins famously characterized as "textual poaching" (Jenkins 1992) exist in concurrence with more explicit forms of out-and-out piracy, where the texts are themselves materially poached, rather than having characters and settings culled for use in fan fiction or fan art. Fanvids

(or "vids") are fan-made music videos, non-institutional audio/visual creations that are built from (overwhelmingly) pirated audio and video sources and that have a well- established history in the media fandom subculture (Bacon-Smith 1992, Jenkins 1992,

Coppa 2008, Walker 2008). Publications directly addressing specific vid texts have a tendency to celebrate the sensational aspects of vids as radical texts articulating feminist

or queer identities,2 and rarely address what Francesca Coppa (2008) argues is the origin

and purpose of vids as critical and analytical works. Nowhere is there a discussion of the

issue of the source material for these vids; currently, this includes downloaded or format-

shifted digital media. Nor has there been a substantial body of work looking at those vids

which re-tell the narrative of the source material and do not present a radically altered

narrative, or framing of characters' identities. It is necessary to distinguish between at

least two forms of fannish appropriation: I will argue that there is a difference between

the abstract re-use of recognizable characters, settings and plots to extend the semiotic universe of the original source material and the material re-use of the original source material itself (or a copy thereof) to create those secondary discourses.

1 This will be addressed in detail in Chapter 2. 2 This echoes the predominance in academic writing on fandom of slash fiction or stories where textually- straight characters are queered. 4

In order to adequately discuss vids and vidding as an independent form, I believe that the alternate model for media production and distribution that fandom provides should be considered in relation to the alternate (and dubiously legal) distribution practice of downloading. The top two reasons for downloading music collected by Kinnally et al.

(2008) in a survey of university students were fun and "convenience/economic utility"

(902). As Tama Leaver (2008) has shown, the convenience/utility explanation for downloading television had heightened significance for Australian fans of Battlestar

Galactica (2003), who deemed it a necessary activity. Thanks to what Leaver calls "the tyranny of digital distance"3, these fans are faced with a dilemma unique to the twenty- first century (Leaver 2008: 146): participation in the global fan culture required a measure of creativity to obtain episodes while they were still current. By using programs such as a BitTorrent client, Australian fans could access episodes directly after they first aired in the US and participate in online fandom via conversations, message boards, discourse around specific fan works, and being able to search for information about the show from mainstream media outlets without fear of spoilers. File-sharing enables fans outside a series' primary market to follow a show with their peers and to not be isolated from the broader fanbase.

Contrary to the received understanding of downloading as an act of piracy to avoid paying for eventual DVD releases or cable subscriptions, downloading television episodes is a way for fans at that digital distance to participate in an international

3 After a term coined in the 1960s by Australian historian Geoffrey Blainey (Leaver 2008: 145). 5 community. The corporate argument, that of dutifully waiting to pay for a DVD release or consuming television in a way that makes economic sense to the copyright holders, is trumped by the desire to participate in a community.

Questions around the interaction between television and its audience were complex prior to the advent of the internet (Fiske 1987) and the addition of "new media" to the equation understandably complicates matters. As technologies, the television screen and computer screen have become linked, if not wholly interchangeable (Seiter

2002). Indeed, John Pavlik identifies no fewer than twelve sites of transformation as media integrates digital technology; one of these is the status of the media audience as both user and producer, rather than merely a consumer of media (2008: 56). Ellen Seiter argues for the maturity of the internet as a broadcast medium comparable to television or print media, with television and the internet existing together without the need for an intermediary device (Seiter 2002: 117-118). Television producers use the internet as a marketing tool and audiences use their internet-connected computers as a form of television receiver (but only in the most archaic understanding of the word) through the phenomenon of downloading movies and television episodes. As an object of study, however, the internet provides a challenge of ephemerality, as its content cannot be fixed as easily as print media, and yet - significant to this project - is more concrete than performance media (Schneider and Foot 2004: 115).

I will engage in a case-study, aided by both visual and textual analysis. I will examine the discourses surrounding fan activity and fan agency, explore the critical narratives as constructed in a specific form of selected fan-created music videos (fanvids) 6 to demonstrate one of the subcultural results of media piracy and to discover what the arguments made in fanvids can indicate about how television shows (and other aspects of visual media) are read by their audiences. Unlike Camille Bacon-Smith (1992) or

Jenkins (1992), I have not attempted to interview vidders or offer a new perspective on the culture of vidding, but rather to suggest that vids themselves can provide a rich site of analysis. While, for example, a vidder's own positions on gender politics in relation to their work (Ng 2008) can certainly be relevant to the decoding of a vid, the structures and processes of distributing vids means that the work itself can be consumed in the absence of any accompanying artist's statement.

To that end, I would therefore like to explore the use and re-use not only of digital files, but also of the narratives created therein. I will take three fan-created videos from the Doctor Who fandom and compare how narratives are created and re-made as critical texts (similar to a manifesto or essay) which deconstruct a single narrative within the larger Doctor Who canon and provide critical commentary through this form of fan work.

The three vids I have selected address and reframe the character of the Master/Harold

Saxon (in a role shared by Derek Jacobi and John Simm) as he appears in the three episodes "Utopia", "The Sound of Drums" and "Last of the Time Lords" that ended the third season of the BBC Wales reboot of Doctor Who (2005 - present). The intertextual dialogue that occurs between the selected clips and the song chosen as soundtrack provides, in each vid, a different fan reading of the character's arc. Through an analysis of the making and re-making of meaning in vids, influenced by Roland Barthes's 7

"Rhetoric of the Image", I will seek to demonstrate that vids are, primarily, tools for analysis.

Neither Bacon-Smith (1992) nor Jenkins (1992) provide a detailed explanation for why they chose to examine the vids that were discussed in their work and their descriptions of what vids are and how they function are general and wide-ranging. Eve

Ng (2008) treats vids as texts on a par with fan fiction and does not consider vids as separate technological artifacts. Coppa (2008) views vids as analytic tools that are "part of a distinctive and important tradition of female art" (5.2). I wish to use this case study with Doctor Who to place vids at the centre of a method to understand audience interaction with media, by way of examining these re-mediated texts. It will therefore be useful to separate vids from other fan works as their form allows for a dramatically different entry point to understanding audience perception of a show as vids are a televisual response to a televisual medium.

I begin with detailing my research questions and methodology, proceed to my literature review, and then conclude with a case study of narrative transformations and the making of meaning in vids. I have chosen to employ a combination of case study and visual analysis methodologies, as the scope and scale of this research does not include participation, interviews, or any quantitative methodologies. In the future, I hope to return to some of the questions posed here and incorporate some of these other methodologies, as I acknowledge that by necessity I have a relatively narrow scope.

The first section of the literature review gives attention to debates within fandom studies regarding the very nature of what it is to be a fan, what constitutes fan activity and 8 practice, and the problems and challenges of adequately theorizing fandom. One issue I do not focus on is the theoretical soul-searching that characterizes the enumeration of the relationship between academic and fan. The second section of the literature review focuses on the role of communications technologies in the experience and the expression of fandom. The third section of the literature review surveys the limited research

available on vidding, and highlights the limitation of this literature insofar as questions of piracy are concerned. The fourth section of the literature review addresses the particular question of media production from within a political economy framework, and highlights the question of distribution as an under-theorized aspect of contemporary media. Finally,

the literature review concludes with an elaboration of my proposed theoretical perspective on vidding, within a context of semiotic perspectives on the role of images in

meaning-making.

With the three vids in this case study, I hope to demonstrate how three different

fan re-presentations of the end of the third series of the BBC Wales version of Doctor

Who can be used to locate three separate but complementary interpretations of a single

character, in this case, that of the Master. With each vid, a different song from a different musical style is used in a work that makes the Master the main character, making the

episodes' antagonist into a temporary (anti-)hero. The condensation of narrative in the

vids highlights the source episodes' themes concerning the representations of power,

technology, gender, race, sexuality and age. 9

Chapter 1: Methodology and Practices

1.1 Research Questions

Participants in media fandom only represent a subset of a television show's audience, but that subset is both dedicated and prolific. An analysis of fannish output itself- as both an artifact and phenomenon - can contribute much to the understanding of how media audiences, both fans and the casual participant in popular culture, interact with the contemporary mediascape. In fandom studies, vids are under-represented, warranting mention only in comparison to ethnographies written about science fiction conventions (Bacon-Smith 1992, Jenkins 1992, Penley 1997, Bacon-Smith 2000) or discourse and textual analyses of fan fiction (LaShev 2005, Mullens 2005) or of email lists and message board posts (Bacon-Smith 1992, Siapera 2004).

Ng (2008) reads vids in relation to queer representation both within fandom (the

"slash" tradition of queering straight characters) and in the context of mainstream media's unsatisfactory representations of queer couples; Coppa (2008) elaborates on Bacon-

Smith's historico-feminist reading of fandom, convincingly placing the sociocultural context of the fanvid production within a history of women working with media technology. Both Coppa and Ng investigate vids because of their capacity for cultural expression. However, what these approaches lack is a cohesive, dedicated theoretical examination of vids as technical (or technological) artifacts which embody the creation of a transformed meaning. 10

As vids are produced outside of an institutional context (commercial, academic or artistic), they represent a counter-cultural framing of television, North American society's dominant media form (Smythe 1994, 109). They stand counter to official short-form video montages, such as commercial music video clips, movie trailers, and an episode's

"previouslies"4, through their capacity to re-present and renarrativize pre-existing content. Vidding has remained an underground form, comfortable in the fandom subculture, where the academic or artistic avant-garde filmmaking has ceased to be subversive or fringe work and instead rests comfortably in institutions such as schools and galleries (Bolter and Grusin 2000, Keen 2007, Wees 2009). In this project, I wish to explore how meanings are made and remade as audiences both react to and interact with the objects of their fandom.

Using the fanvid, I want to articulate how the values and associations attached to scraps of television and music can be read as both fixed and detachable and both the original and refigured meanings can be present in a work of fan production. To do so, I ask what relationship is held by fan works to their creators and the source texts which become their primary source material? What function does the creation of a fanvid serve? Finally, do vids offer a different form of audience interaction from other fan work? Established film theory recognizes the linguistic capacity of film to contain, locate and explicate a readable argument. Like language, there are conventions and rules (a grammar). The reading of a film's argument is reliant entirely on the interpretation of an

4 The segment before the start of an episode that begins with the voice-over or title, "Previously, on..." 11 audience member. Bruce Conner's found footage film A Movie, for example, is prone to many different individual readings, but its choice of images and soundtrack leads to a definite ironic take on Cold War-era American culture (Wees 1992).

My central question, therefore, is this: how do vids operate as discursive tools?

The audio/visual fusion of a music video form could be approached as a form of paralinguistic discourse, insofar as a vid-as-analysis is making its point solely through images and sounds. The forms and objects produced by fandom create a compelling area of study because they provide artifacts that can be examined to provide a slightly different picture of audience consumption and recognition than those which can be obtained through Nielsen ratings, focus groups and test screenings. The study of fan output and of vids, in particular, offers confirmation of an engaged audience, as it represents a strong measure of attention paid to technology and with a media text beyond its manifest narrative. Vidding was only possible when commercial media technologies had developed to a point where participants in fandom could become video producers

(Bacon-Smith 1992, Coppa 2008). While Bacon-Smith and Coppa place this fact within

a larger story of women and technology, I wish to focus instead on the technological

aspect as a question of audience interaction.

This project will provide further enquiry into the output of fandom, recognizing the sophisticated readings of television shows and the norms of televisual representation, performing a kind of archaeology via visual analysis of individual vids. Using these videos as representative of fan interpretation and understanding is similar to studies which examine activity on message boards relating to a television series (for example, 12

Once & Again: Mennon 2007) or ethnographic interviews of participants at Star Trek conventions (Bacon-Smith 1992, Jenkins 1992, Penley 1992 and 1997) or a literature studies approach to perform analyses of major themes in fan fiction (as seen in the Spring

2005 special issue of Spectator).

I do not wish to approach these artifacts as art forms that can be slotted neatly into a high (intellectual) art and low (commercial) art dichotomy. Rather, as fan-produced texts they perform active functions within fandom that go beyond the entertainments they resemble. I argue that the act of dismantling a pop culture text and remaking it automatically and necessarily creates a state whereby the viewer is forced into a position of decoding and interpretation, even as the object is being consumed as entertainment.

The enjoyment value of such objects tends to be, again, by virtue of their form, the recognition of the difference between the known and understood original text, and the estranged alternate reading of that original in vid form.

I hope to demonstrate the necessity of including this form of fan response to the immediate discourse in fandom studies, and to promote a broader conversation outside of this field which addresses the manner in which audiences watch and understand popular and cult television series. What the combination of downloading and vidding provides is a site, countering the data gathered through Nielsen ratings and focus groups, where the reactions of television audiences can be located. I want to address the explicit poaching of not just intellectual property (the idea of a character) but to address the appropriation and reuse of copies of the actual images and sounds that are part of the so-called 'canon' of a show. To use semiotic terminology, I wish to study the manipulation of signifiers, 13 the recombination of which complements the array of concepts which are being signified.

I also will examine vids as objects that articulate a specific argument and which therefore represent a complex analysis of a particular media text. As Anders Hansen et al. complain, there is a lack of researchers who question "actual... media images and signs" as most researchers "have surprisingly little to say about actual images or the methods used to interrogate them" (Hansen et al. 1998: 191).

Current academic engagement with vids often position these specific fan works as sites of queer and feminist re-textualization, without engagement with the paradoxical virtual materiality of the works as texts with their own structure and language, mimicking the form of film/music videos (and to some degree, found footage films) but performing a different function and serving a different purpose. While Hansen et al. (1998) assert

"there is no doubting the visuality of certain media and the special role that visuals play in imparting information and inviting affective and aesthetic forms of engagement" (191-

192), this project is important because fandom studies contains an innovative approach to understanding contemporary media (television, film, music, internet) as a subcultural force which is international and active. Within fandom studies, the critical engagement with fan works is weighted towards fan fiction and fan art, which is understandable because these forms are static objects that have been submitted to rigid textual analysis and anthropological study. Vids, on the other hand, when mentioned, are read unproblematically, without first questioning how and why these texts are operating.

What vids represent, as with fan fiction, is a form of expression and communication with its own codes and norms that exists at a locus of many disciplinary and theoretical 14 tangents. These include (but are not limited to) the fine arts, video art, feminist discourse, new media theory, the internet as a place of engagement and creation, the internet as a place of sub-legal activity, and fan culture as a cultural production machine which runs parallel to mainstream corporate production and feeds off corporate output.

1.2 Selection o/Doctor Who Case Study Videos

The method of analysis I propose to use in this project is a case study, using a visual analysis of three related vids to explore the intertextuality of meaning-making in televisual media and how these meanings are taken up and altered by participants in media fandom. My approach to this project is strongly influenced by film theory, with the primary assumption that film - and, indeed, images - can be "read" using the same principles as language.

In starting to compose the literature review for this project, I performed extensive searches of online scholarly databases Ebsco Host, JSTOR, and Scholars Portal using the following keywords, alone and in combination with appropriate Boolean operators:

internet, audience, fan/fan studies, fandom, discourse, textual, technology/science, representation, television, and fanvid/vid.

The first step of interacting with my three selected texts for this case study was to re-watch the source episodes that these three vids draw from, making extensive notes on what appear to be the main narrative moments. Following that, repeat viewings of the individual vids were required, noting the sequence of images and their source in chart form (following Ng's approach). I anticipated a minimum of three viewings for each vid 15

and two for the source episodes themselves in order to ensure a keen familiarity with all texts and their narrative components. My coding technique follows the approach undertaken by Ng in her examination of vids which are sourced from All My Children.

This approach is more immediately applicable than Coppa's approach to examining Star

Trek slash vids, because the three texts which form the basis of my case study are not

constructing new relationships and interactions for the characters described therein: Ng's work on All My Children focuses on vids describing an interaction that is part of the

established narrative of the show, as is Saxon's rise to fame in my examples.

Coppa and Ng's methods agree (and hold with Jenkins and Bacon-Smith's

ethnographic accounts of vidding) in borrowing conventions used in film studies to

include a detailed account of key shots and transitions and their role in constructing the

filmic narrative and overarching thematic connections. For each vid, I describe the

general thesis of the vid as I read it and then use close textual analysis of a selection of

sequences within the vid to provide illustrative examples of the making and remaking of

meaning within the vid itself. Where I believe this project will become most interesting

is in recording shots that appear in all three vids. From there, I will be able to discuss

how each common shot or sequence is presented and the effects these have on the reading

of these artifacts as dramatically different approaches to re-telling the same story.

This project did not require many specialized research tools. As there were no

surveys, questionnaires or interviews with human participants, I did not need to create or

maintain a database of raw figures. Further, as I would not be looking at broader trends

in internet fandom or the development of fan discourse surrounding individual vids or 16 vidders, I did not need to mobilize data mining or similarly in-depth research tools designed for content analysis. I employed broader literature searches of scholarly

databases (as mentioned earlier) to gain a more grounded understanding on the current

debates surrounding the internet as a medium, but I believe these studies will be a

sufficient base from which to build my analysis of vids as artifacts whose existence has been enabled by a series of technological developments, of which the internet itself is the

latest. On a basic level, I required access to a computer with an internet connection in

order to carry out the literature search and adequate media software (such as VLC media player) to view the vids after they were downloaded.

The internet is a medium brimming with text, visual images, sounds and video,

and the generalized location where a nearly infinite number of human (and

human/machine) interactions take place, means that nearly any methodological approach

can be used to study this area (Schneider and Foot: 2004). As a case study of the making

and remaking of televisual meaning as demonstrated though the fannish practice of

vidding, my core data will consist of the three vids which I have chosen as examples that

are illustrative of the broader vidding practice. While there have been a vast, unknown

number of vids produced, covering an impressive range of popular media texts both in the mainstream and in cult spheres, the specific choice of texts to analyze is limited to

those which are freely available online, and which meet a set of criteria which will allow

for a coherent study. The most important criteria was to choose vids based on shows that

I was already familiar with, in order to expedite my decoding of their messages. 17

I selected my examples after searching for Doctor Who vids through several search engines (including Google), the search function on the LiveJournal blogging site, video websites (including YouTube, Google Video and imeem) and archives of fan recommendations and award sites. I used combinations of the following keywords:

Doctor Who, DW, vid, fanvid, fan video, and rec (for "recommendation"). After finding several vids that took up the three-episode narrative arc of the character Saxon, I modified the search with the following additional terms: Saxon (character name), Harold

Saxon (character name), Master/The Master (character name), The Sound of Drums

(episode title), Last of the Time Lords (episode title), and lotl (abbreviation of episode

title "Last of the Time Lords").

My specific sources for this investigation, therefore, are three vids entitled, "Don't

Stop Saxon", "Mother Flippin'" and "Wasted". "Don't Stop Saxon" is a straightforward

overview of the Master/Saxon narrative arc: the vid begins comedic, expressing both the

character's textual enjoyment with world domination and his desire to continue without

impediment. It turns ironic as the second half of the vid contains clips summarizing his

downfall, but the song (Queen's "Don't Stop Me Now") remains upbeat and enthusiastic

even as the subject of the vid is shown at his death. "Mother Flippin'" takes a uniformly

light touch, capitalizing on the interplay between Saxon's flamboyant physicality and the mock-rap lyrics from its song, "Hiphopopotamus Vs. Rhymenoceros" by New Zealand

comedians Flight of the Conchords. "Wasted", which takes its title from the And One

song it uses as a audio source, is a darker and more serious look at the character that

explores the realities of the Master's totalitarian police state. These three vids employ the 18 same three episodes as their source material but, due to each vid's sequencing of images to create meaningful juxtapositions with the song lyrics, each clip can demonstrate different aspects of the characters, their relationships and the themes of the episodes.

I chose these three vids for several reasons. First, it is important to me to use subjectively intelligible and engaging texts to maintain researcher interest using familiar characters and narrative. Second, these three vids take up the same limited plot arc and restrict their source material primarily to the appearance and dispatch of a single villain character, rather than attempting broader comments about recurring characters' relationships, motivations or development arcs. This limitation of the source material greatly reduces the number of hours that I, as a researcher, would need to spend becoming familiar with the source text. Finally, these examples are compelling because they renarrativize and comment on the same contained plot in three different ways: a sample of one is unsatisfactory because it is harder to claim that a single piece is representative of a larger production format; a sample of two provides a single point of comparison which may suggest one represents a standard and the other a deviation; a

sample of three suggests a measure of diversity without being overwhelming. In order to

address vids as discursive texts, it will make for a more cohesive project if I can look at three different works which each present unique analyses of the same source material.

1.3 Textual and Visual Content Analysis

This project's primary theoretical approach will follow Barthes, in particular his essay

"The Rhetoric of the Image" (1977b), to provide a foundational explanation of the 19 making of meaning through images. Barthes uses primarily advertising and press photography to demonstrate his ideas, but it is possible to extend, as Stuart Hall (1973) does, Barthes's reading of still photography to televisual images. Central to this is an assumption that images and sounds can be read as a pseudo-linguistic form, borrowing theoretical language from the analysis of written text. Barthes wrote of the function that captioning plays in fixing meaning to an image: this is essential to my project because I wish to consider the interplay of the recontextualized moving image with an unaltered audio source which provides a subordinate captioning function. Cornel Sandvoss's

(2005) nuance of Barthes's view of texts extends the reading of Barthes into post- structuralism, arguing that texts cannot have inherent meanings; this makes the question of meaning-making all the more interesting as the source text is itself meaningless until meaning is created by its beholder. I rely on Hall's definition of encoding and decoding to explain how meaning is understood - and that meaning can be understood on several layers, simultaneously.

Steve Bailey (2005) suggests that "textual analysis... is particularly critical in providing a strong sense of the semiotic contours of the fan's symbolic world" (51); otherwise the political or social structures of production without looking at the products

(or artifacts) themselves. Accordingly, Bailey does not refer to "fan works" or "fan production", but instead to "secondary discourses produced within the respective fan cultures - fanzines, websites, works of fiction and visual art, critical discussions and other objects - as these offer particular access to the interpretive work central to the fan experience" (50). Therefore, I seek to understand three related phenomena. First, using 20

Barthes's insights from "Rhetoric of the Image", I will explore how the descriptors which are attached to an art work - the captioning which forms part of its frame - informs and affects the interpretation of that visual image. The second phenomenon I wish to understand is how, through the application of an audio caption to a video clip, sounds and images together can be mobilized to state a theoretical or critical position with much the same effect as a manifesto, a theoretical essay or any other written analysis. Finally, I will explore how vidding can be used to suggest and fix a limited range of interpretation in a thesis text, rather than allowing the deconstruction and reconstruction of the order of the visual images to strip those images of meaning completely.

To accomplish this, I will draw on essays by Barthes that collectively address the role of captions in understanding visual images and will use Hall's "Encoding/Decoding"

(1973) in order to nuance Barthes's theoretical understanding of audience reception. I

seek to understand the structural and mechanical processes at work in a vid's creation which allow for a predictable decoding of this particular form of video art. Using that knowledge, I will demonstrate that the fanvid, as a technological cultural artifact, is worthy of as much critical academic attention as other forms of fan creativity, such as fan

fiction or fan essays ("meta"), message board posts, or other forms of textual expression.5

From this project, I hope to gain a detailed understanding of how discourse is constructed in the vid: as a dialogue between the images as edited, the song chosen as illustration, and expectations for narrative or heteronormative relationships, a Foucaultian reading of the

3 Fanart, another form of fannish visual expression, is similarly under-represented in academic literature. 21 power relationships as constructed by the original source material and by the vid, and so forth. I am also interested in exploring how identification functions if the vid is being read on several layers simultaneously, as a complete object, with emphasis on the lyrics, but based in recognition of the context of the source clips.

A vital theoretical basis to understanding vids as technical artifacts is the fine arts practice of collage. Collage, "the most revolutionary formal development in 20th century art" (Wees 1992: 39), finds filmic expression in found footage films, where video and audio clips are re-presented outside the original context of creation. While the found footage genre is widely read as a genre of fragmentation (Rony 2002: 128), with fanvids the "fragmentation" of the source text occurs to facilitate the new layers of meaning placed over the text in the video. In fact, like found footage films, fanvids appear to delight in being a "self-reflexive expose of how meaning is read" (Desjardins 1995: 26).

As fan-creators arguably place themselves in a privileged position in the matrix of cultural creation and reception (Bacon-Smith 2000: 3, Stein 2005: 19), the reflexivity of these transformative works demonstrates "an analytical and critical attitude toward its images and their institutional sources" (Wees 1992: 53). Vids can be a kind of visual music that illustrates an argument (Coppa 2008), however, the transformative aspect of the video source is essential to this process. In the same way that the Soviet montage school looked on editing as the instrument of the creation of meaning in film - one shot, when placed next to another shot, created a third meaning - the act of appropriating and re-editing a film is more than simply adopting these elements, it is transforming them. 22

While I would like to explore this connection in greater detail, given the restrictions of this project I will remain with Barthes and not explore the found footage angle.

1.4 Scope of Project

By maintaining the project's theoretical and case-study approach, I believe that significant outcomes can be achieved in the absence of human participation. I do allow for the place of ethnography in a project such as this, but I believe the scope of this project will become too broad and the focus I wish to maintain will be lost were I to expand to include that source of data. The theoretical/interpretive focus, I believe, adds to the feasibility of the project as it will be accomplished largely through independent research and will not require the development of questionnaires and survey questions, the determination of an appropriate sample size within the relevant stakeholder groups, or the collection and interpretation of that information. The challenge will be finding a strategy to represent an audio-visual time-based art work. I believe that with my background in

film theory, I will be able to present an orderly overview of the key themes and issues as raised in the work, a sensible reporting of the narratives which are being addressed in each work, and a close reading of relevant shots and sequences.

One of the areas this project will not address is the complex legal relationship underlying fan activity. While intellectual copyright laws protect the use of characters and scenarios from plagiarism, American fans have found that their activities are protected as "fair use" insofar as they are producing a so-called transformative work or a piece that is substantially different from the original, copyright-protected work (Tushnet 23

2007). With slash fiction it is easier to prove a transformation, because the fan has altered the presentation of character's established sexual orientation (Penley 1997, Coppa

2008). Works that substantially re-cut an episode of Star Trek or Doctor Who are recognizable as being derived from those sources, but could not be mistaken as exact replicas of their original forms. Where fandom finds itself in the most immediately- dubious legal territory is in the complexities of file-sharing, as this is an international activity which redistributes copyrighted works without the consent of any who may have legal claim to the control of these works.

While legal action has been taken, for example, in response to fan-made websites

for the Harry Potter books and films, the outcome has been an uneasy truce wherein the

cost for copyright-holding corporations of alienating fans and appearing a tyrannical gatekeeper of beloved characters was determined to be greater than the benefit of maintaining exclusive control of a trademark (Murray 2004). The unavoidable fact, however, is that most cultural objects created under industrial capitalism are owned by

corporations based in countries where intellectual property of such objects is recognized

and legally protected. That being said, the nuances of a detailed comparative legal

analysis surrounding contemporary (and historical) intellectual property laws are far beyond the scope of this project. For that reason, I will not pursue an analysis of the legal protections for intellectual property, respectfully submit that a culture of media piracy will (at some point) require a careful examination of the viability of mass media business models, and bracket off the legal dimension from a project otherwise interested in the life

of media products after they have been consumed. 24

Chapter 2: Literature Review

2.1 The Location and Positioning of Fans and Fan Practices

Early academic work on media fandom looked at fan practices, in particular the writing of Kirk/Spock slash fiction, thereby resulting in an over-determination of fandom as an act of resistance to hegemonic capitalist culture. In their enthusiasm to continue rehabilitating the status of the media consumer, Constance Penley (1991), Bacon-Smith

(1992), Jenkins (1992) and John Fiske (1992) look to what Fiske termed fans' "textual productivity" (1992: 39) in order to locate examples of this active engagement in the way fans subversively reconstructed dominant media texts. Jenkins's famous characterization of fan practice as "textual poaching" (1992) is a clear statement of where legitimacy lies in popular culture: fans have no right to the semiotic rabbits (as it were) caught on the

(media) baron's land.6 As Matt Hills (2002) and Sandvoss (2005) have argued, this theory of textual productivity is based on the assumption that fan productivity elevates those fans from the lesser status of mere consumer. Are fans identifiable solely through their behaviour in a series of productive practices, or is fandom a personal response to popular culture that does not necessarily result in material production? If this is true, and fandom is defined by productivity, then "being a fan" under capitalism must always be related back to the language of political economy in order to define that productivity and contrast it with models of non-productive consumption from outside fandom.

6 And presumably, the weight of the law is behind that baron in prosecuting the poacher. 25

The purpose of my literature review is twofold. First, I examine the key themes, debates and conclusions found in the past two decades' study of media fan cultures.

Second, I shall detail the few references to vidding in the available literature. In the relative wealth of literature on other forms of fan creativity there only appears to be four sustained discussions of vidding. Within the larger field of fandom studies, there is an interesting problem around what could be categorized as the ontology of fandom. I use the word fandom to refer to the group of individuals who use that term for themselves.

Fandom's present use is sometimes synonymous with "fan culture" in referring to the totality of "being a fan". It sometimes (and simultaneously with the first meaning) can indicate a specific property and fan works created in response to that property. "'Star

Trek fandom", "Star Wars fandom" and "Harry Potter fandom" refer to all primary

(official) works that comprise each respective franchise as well as fandom's particular interaction with, uses of, and responses to, those primary works. The original works themselves should be considered as part of the definition of fandom, because without that component, fan work exists as an empty referent. Within this matrix of interaction, there is the very important distinction between canon and fanon. Canon refers to elements of a primary work which constitute the official presentation of the semiotic universe, whereas fanon is concerned with invention and speculation on behalf of fans. Fanon formulation can serve to fill in character backstory, which adds - for fans who are familiar with the secondary production - motivation and depth to canon events.

One can be "in fandom" generally - a member of the subculture - but self- identification as a fan of one media text does not necessarily indicate automatic 26 membership in another specific fandom. Not all fans are in fandom. A fan "in fandom" is a particular kind of fan, one who is familiar with the norms of the fannish approach to popular culture. This usage is, I believe, particular to the media fandom that grew out of the organization of certain fans of Star Trek and The Man From U.N.C.L.E., whose affection for these series was expressed in a variety of ways, including critical and creative responses. Sandvoss (2005) argues that sports fans' affinity for their favourite clubs is wholly commensurate to media fandom; however, this project is based in academic literature on media fandom and unless otherwise specified "fandom" can be assumed to have the "media" qualifier.

Fan practices represent a diverse array of engagement with primary media texts, including the consumption of a media commodity. These creative practices, or

"secondary discourses" (Bailey 2005: 50), include critical and artistic work across all media, and occur both off- and online. Fans can write fan fiction (also known as fanfic, or fie), often prose, and of many different lengths and styles. Fan work in the visual arts and in handicrafts (including forms such as knitting, quilting, jewellery making, stained glass, and woodworking) can be grouped as fanart. Fanvids (vids), as already defined, are one of several forms of fan-made video, including works that re-edit existing material or those that use new footage produced and shot by fans. These aforementioned creative practices are conscious of fandom's main genres: gen, het and slash. Gen refers to a general work, one that does not create a romantic relationship for any characters. A het story involves a /ze/erosexual pairing of characters, in a relationship either taken from the canon or created in the work. Slash involves the queering of canon characters, creating a 27

narrative space where a "perceived homoerotic subtext" (Busse and Hellekson 2006:10)

in the primary work can be elaborated7. Femmeslash (or femslash) is a variant on slash

focusing on female characters. Fans may also attend a fan convention, or help in its

organization; this is a usual place to find fans who are engaged in cosplay, that is,

attending in a (usually) fan-made costume replicating the appearance of a character.

Another common fan practice is the critical analysis of the object of their fandom,

through platforms such as mailing lists (on paper and online), online message boards, and

blogging communities.

According to a taxonomy of online fan activity described by Victor Costello and

Barbara Moore (2007), fans "see themselves as markedly different from the average

viewer or casual fan" (131), and can be ranked on a scale of relative activity from online

"information seekers" (133) who use the internet as a substitute for television-related journalism, to those who have participated in a "save-the-series" campaign (138). In

between these two extremes on Costello and Moore's "activity continuum" (2007: 139)

are fans who connect with other fans to talk about their favourite shows (134) in "literally

a true interpretive community" (135), those who produce and consume fan fiction (136)

but no other form of secondary work, those who create fan websites (136-137), and those

who use the internet to connect with actors or other members of a production (137). The

problem with this list is that it details several static categories that do nothing to account

for the dynamic nature of fandom, nor for individuals who are fans in multiple fandoms.

7 The increase in canon queer characters is forcing a re-definition of "slash": is it just synonymous with "queer", or should the term be reserved for works which propose queer identities not found in canon? 28

An interesting complication for fandom studies is that where, in the past, fan

interaction had to occur within a network of friends and associates, computer-mediated

communication created the fan category of "lurker", who is the fan of both the original

text and the secondary material other fans have produced in relation to that original product. Lurkers are fans who, in Fiskeian terms, consume unofficial production.

Lurkers generally do not post comments in discussion forums, create or share fan fiction

or vids, or interact with fan creators. Recognition of the lurker destabilizes the notion of

the fan as a producing consumer because while the lurker's fan practice is a form of

secondary consumption, their production is largely intangible, immaterial and limited to

digital traces such as a statistic on a page-load utility. Sandvoss (2005) argues that by

studying only textually productive fans, the experiences of fans who actively participate without leaving textual traces cannot be adequately theorized, resulting in the very least

in a "need to develop a taxonomy of fans which accounts for the varying degrees of productivity and social organization in fandom" (30). By limiting studies to those who

are textually productive, he charges that academic accounts of fandom can make it seem

as if it is only those explicitly productive fans who "derive a distinct sense of self and

social identity from their fan consumption" (Sandvoss 2005: 30) but who do not leave behind the same kind of obvious traces.

Bailey (2005) and Sandvoss (2005) argue that identification as a fan and the negotiation of the fan identity is part of negotiating one's own identity in a mediated

world. Andrea MacDonald (1998) gives perhaps the simplest definition: "fans attend to a

text more closely than other types of audience members" (136) and this attention can lead 29 fans to seek out others who are similarly attentive. This is how fan communities are formed: a collection of individuals who use objects of their fandom as "a focal point" come together in a variety of contexts for a variety of purposes (MacDonald 1998: 136).

After all, Penley (1991) dates the emergence of explicit Kirk/Spock slash fiction writing to "at least 1976", and credits that it did not start with one individual, "but seems to have arisen spontaneously in various places beginning in the mid-seventies" (137) and soon thereafter spread to encompass reactions to other fandoms (Walker 2008). Of course, the unspoken caveat here is that this community-building is limited to those members who have access to technology sufficient to enable their participation. Bailey (2005) does not treat media fandom as separate or distinct from other forms of audience experience, as did Jenkins (1992), who called fandom "a subculture that exists in the 'borderlands' between mass culture and everyday life" (3). For Bailey, fandom is a component of (but maybe not a manifestation of) the individual interpretation, meaning-making or hermeneutic production that characterizes an individual's experience of media within their social world.

It should not be radical to state that fans rely on popular culture for their existence. After all, a fan has to be a fan of something, although in this case the term

"fan" simply describes some kind of relationship between an individual and something, usually a cultural object, which is external to that individual. Less theoretically certain is the nature of the relationship between fans and popular culture, beyond the simple assertion that one (popular culture) begets the other (being a fan). The problem is that neither "popular culture" nor "fans" truly signify a homogenous entity or state of being. 30

The object of one's fandom, Star Trek is a frequently-used early example, is both a cultural artifact and a cultural production created under the aegis of consumer capitalism.

The state of these cultural artifacts which are also products for consumption is the basis that I propose for the main theoretical tension in fandom studies. The fundamental questions of who fans are, what the nature of their relationship to these objects is, and what lessons can be learned from the study of fans, all have different answers depending on how the objects themselves are conceptually framed.

2.2 Active Audiences and Fan Agency under Capitalism

Historically, fandom studies tends to focus on the productive output of fans who are actively engaged in the subversion of canon power relationships in mass media properties created by media owners and producers. This subversion can be enacted through any of the secondary discourses of fandom, and is best known for the feminist and queer re-readings of the semiotic universe of these mass media texts. In the context of political economy, media fandom raises questions about the role of the audience in industrial (and post-industrial) mass culture. Since its inception, organized media fandom has been extraordinarily productive: beyond just creating meaning on a conceptual level, this subset of the mass media audience produces its' own texts that, by the very fact of their existence, challenge capitalism's control over the texts of commercial media.

Vincent Mosco (1996) offers the following definition of political economy: it is

"the study of the social relations, particularly the power relations, that mutually constitute 31 the production, distribution, and consumption of resources" (25). While these categories are useful in theory, he cautions that the seemingly-separate roles used to connote three phases in the life of a resource - producer, distributor, and consumer - are not independent, unrelated variables. He gives the example of a film producer who relies on a distributor's buy-in to allow a film project to get underway; when financing comes from a distributor, is the distributor now also a producer? In the same way, the audience is not merely a consumer of a cultural commodity, but is engaged in the production of value on behalf of various agents within the culture industry.

Mosco points out that even as capital constructs audiences (in much the same way as it constructs labour), both audiences and labour have a measure of agency: "both audiences and labor construct themselves by deciding, within a social field whose terms of engagement are primarily set by capital, how to activate their audience and labor power. For the audience, this means attending or watching as capital would like, interpreting programming in oppositional or alternative ways, or simply not watching at all" (149). While this kind of audience power may not have a significant or direct impact on the production of official capital commodities, the unofficial labour for the production of unofficial commodities has not been previously discussed in the context of political economy. Mosco's explanation appears to be a good place to start thinking about this unofficial immaterial labour force.

As a question of power, audiences (as consumers) have little real control over the objects of their fandom while those objects are in production. It can also be convincingly argued that the production of those objects themselves are under no individual's 32 exclusive control while in production and are designated a corporate "author" for legal purposes. Once they are distributed to be consumed, though, these objects exist in a tangible and conceptual form, wherein it is the audience that produces "the symbolic value (or meaning) of media products (or texts) as they consume them" (Mosco 1996:

26). This view of the audience takes into account the interaction that an individual or group may have with the content of the mass media product in question.

A central stance in early writing on fandom culture was to look at a particular subset of a media audience and to position the radical re-presentation of popular texts as cohesive resistance to commercial media production. This position uses a combination of

Bourdieu's theory of cultural capital (Fiske 1992) and concepts cherry-picked from

Michel de Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life such as tactics (Penley 1991) and textual poaching (Jenkins 1992), to configure popular culture as the output of industrial cultural production. Accordingly, fandom is therefore often configured as an amateur resistance to "the truth", as was (in)famously claimed, of popular culture's status as

"legitimize[d]... trash" (Horkheimer and Adorno 1944/2006: 42), finding fan productivity to be somehow a redemptive act.

Penley (1991) argues that, unlike the temporary "moments of resistance or pleasure" offered by de Certeau's bricolage or intellectual synthesis, fen works are "real products (albeit ones taking off from already-existing heterogeneous elements)" which offer "pleasures found lacking in the original products" (139). Indeed, she characterizes

Star Trek fandom as a vertically-integrated industry with a productive capacity that meets and exceeds the source franchise (Penley 1991: 140). Fans have accomplished this, she 33 argues, by "enthusiastically mimicking the technologies of mass-market cultural production" (Penley 1991: 140). While this thesis does not focus on the relevance of gender in a subculture that has a predominantly female population (Bacon-Smith 1992,

Busse and Hellekson 2006), it is interesting that ever since the early 1970s, women in fandom tend to transfer technical skills learned in the workplace to their fandom activities and use workplace resources to operate this parallel culture industry (Penley 1991,

MacDonald 1998, Seiter 1999).

The fans' non-commercial, "underground" (Walker 2008) use of recognizable characters and settings in their own works led this behaviour to be characterized as anti- commercial and inherently oppositional. Certain works are quite striking in their difference from what would have been aired, but this textual disjuncture was extended to describe an entire subculture. Fan works, such as slash fiction, were used as material evidence of fan resistance to corporate control of media; the predominantly-female population of early science fiction fandom was celebrated as recalling the actions of relatively powerless consumers who nonetheless "seize every opportunity to turn to their own ends the forces that systematically exclude or marginalize them" (Penley 1991: 139).

The aspects of appropriation, theft and poaching tend to be emphasized in this manner of academic writing about fandom, thereby affirming the legitimacy of "official" cultural production (in Fiske's terms) and emphasizing a view of media fandom as subversive, radical and anti-consumerist.

According to Penley, slash fandom "more than illustrates de Certeau's claim that consumption itself is a form of production" (139); however, if consumption is itself a 34 form of production, the utility in emphasizing the difference is obscured. I will return to this concept shortly, but for the moment will remain with the first few influential theorizations of media fandom.8 Penley adds that the use of the technologies of production - for example, an office photocopier used to reproduce fanzines - points to a continual negotiation of the fans' "relation, as women, to those technologies, through both the way they make decisions about how to use the technological resources available to them and the way they rewrite bodies and technologies in their Utopian romances"

(Penley 1991: 140). In this sense, the act of production is a part of a larger social process; Penley is one of the few of these early writers on fandom who does not fully subscribe to the idea of fandom as resistance.

Penley's own use of de Certeau is moderately more constructive than what was proposed by Jenkins: she employs de Certeau's theories of resistance to explain the intricate and vertically integrated parallel media industry in fandom, which do not propose an alternative to established structures of media production and distribution, but instead adopts those structures and systems for unsanctioned entertainment (Penley 1997:

105-106).

Jenkins collects accounts that have constructed the discourse of "the fan", creating

"a stereotypical conception of the fan as emotionally unstable, socially maladjusted, and dangerously out of sync with reality" (Jenkins 1992: 13). A word which appeared first in the 19th century to refer to any devotee of entertainment, the character of the fan quickly

8 It is only recently that a historical account of fandom was attempted (thanks to Francesca Coppa); most other accounts are only interested in theorizing/explaining its present state. 35 became a stock character in horror and comedy fiction, which then emphasize the antisocial and obsessive nature of a fan's all-consuming passion for a fetishized object

(Jenkins 1992: 12). In comedy and horror, the fans are presented as male, "although frequently as de-gendered, asexual or impotent" whereas "the feminine side of fandom is manifested in the images of screaming teenage girls who try to tear the clothes off the

Beatles or who faint at the touch of one of Elvis's sweat-drenched scarfs, or the groupie servicing the stars backstage after the concert in rockamentaries [sic] and porn videos"

(Jenkins 1992: 15). Jenkins seeks to rehabilitate the image of a fan from an individual who is dangerously disconnected from daily life through an explanation of the idea of taste taken from Bourdieu. Jenkins's argument is that fandom treats "popular texts as if they merited the same degree of attention and appreciation as canonical texts. Reading practices (close scrutiny, elaborate exegesis, repeated and prolonged rereading, etc.) acceptable in confronting a work of'serious merit' seem perversely misapplied to the more 'disposable' texts of mass culture" (Jenkins 1992: 17).

Jenkins's account focuses on the experience of fans of Star Trek and of Beauty and the Beast, where he positions "fans as active producers and manipulators of meanings," borrowing de Certeau's idea of poaching in popular readings. However, while poaching for de Certeau is the process of taking away from a text only that which is pleasurable, "as an ongoing struggle for possession of the text and for control over its meanings" (Jenkins 1992: 24), fan works serve as sites where fans "try to articulate for themselves and others unrealized possibilities within the original works" (Jenkins 1992:

23). Jenkins further argues that the social construction of a fan identity involves 36

"borrowing and inflecting mass culture images, articulating concerns which often go unvoiced within the dominant media" (Jenkins 1992: 23). This notion of enunciating a missing aspect of an artifact of mass culture through poaching those same artifacts is not positioned as working with mass culture, but rather against it. In this view, the production of culture under capitalism is inherently flawed. In mass culture, possibilities are not realized and concerns have no voice. As a fan response "typically involves not

simply fascination or adoration but also frustration and antagonism" it is a fan's negotiation of the two contrary responses that "motivates their active engagement with the media" (Jenkins 1992: 23).

The term "poaching" to denote fan appropriation is problematic because it

suggests that fandom as a collective group operates beyond the bounds of legality. This

is an apt description as fan works are, essentially, the appropriation and dissemination of copyrighted intellectual property: fans of this sort are participants in a "mass kleptocracy"

(Keen 2007: 142). The term poaching itself is heavily weighted with destructive

connotations and significantly undercuts the prodigious rate of production within fandom, and its distinct creative aspects. For example, fandom can be useful as a forum for fans to hone creative skills and to have access to an audience willing to provide ready

feedback, albeit with characters that are not one's own creation (Bacon-Smith 2000).

Within the logic of fans-as-producers, fans first consume popular media texts, and then produce works of their own which in some fashion improve upon those source texts by demonstrating in a slash story, for example, a subject position that is not rigidly heterosexual. They thereby reveal the inadequacy of "official cultural production" (Fiske 37

1992: 39), as fans recognize that such presentations would not normally be possible on­ screen in that official production. Under this logic, the resulting fan works contain a more equitable range of representation than those official texts, because fans allow characters a range of subjective expression beyond what mainstream media permits and continues a tradition of cultural production from the margins (Derecho 2006).

The main limitation of this approach is that it both reduces the possible expressions of fandom to some aspect of "productivity", and as Hills (2002) argues, simultaneously stretches the idea of productivity too far, meaning that "short of not watching a programme at all, there appears to be no way of not being 'productive' in relation to it" (30). For Fiske, after all, fans are semiotically, enunciatively or textually productive (1992: 36-39) but only the third option involves material production. The other two terms can be translated into "making meaning" and "making conversation".

While I do not wish to suggest that interpretation of cultural information on a personal or social level is not in some way productive - such a statement may in fact be contrary to everything I hope to argue - the emphasis in Fiske is in categorizing all forms of interpretation, of meaning-making as a form of capitalist production. Given that Fiske's titled this particular essay "The Cultural Economy of Fandom" (my emphasis) I do not believe I have misconstrued his purpose. Nowhere is there a sense of the individual who is engaged in these productive acts. Forcing individuals to take on one of two binary roles (producer or consumer) does not seem to allow for the full range and subtlety of human interaction. 38

For Fiske (1992), the production and consumption of what he calls subordinate cultural capital within fandom serves to "reproduce equivalents of the formal institutions of official culture" and constitutes "a sort of'moonlighting' in the cultural rather than the economic sphere" (33). Here, a parallel cultural economy supplies a demand left unfilled by "legitimate" culture. Fiske argues that legitimate (or official) culture leaves gaps which can be filled by unofficial cultural capital, often providing a source of social prestige for those productive consumers. These unofficial equivalents of official culture, both the products themselves and the structures used to produce them, are for Fiske the totality of fandom's purpose.

Fiske's view of the utility of fandom is dramatically narrower than what Penley allows; he suggests that peer recognition and self-esteem are the sole benefits of fan cultural capital, as this shadow cultural economy seldom produces economic benefits.

Fiske cites three examples where self-definition and self-recognition of female fans (of various ages and of various pop culture artifacts: Cagney &Lacey, Madonna and romance novels) enhanced the fans' self-esteem "which in turn enabled them to perform more powerfully in their social world" (35). This semiotic productivity occurs even while fans acknowledge the official devaluation of their objects of fandom. This awareness also leads many fans to compare popular culture to legitimate culture using the criteria of legitimate culture and unsurprisingly finding the popular items to be just as

"complex" or "subtle" as their official cousins (Fiske 1992: 36).

This semiotic productivity, "the making of meanings of social identity and of social experience from the semiotic resources of the cultural commodity" (Fiske 1992: 39

37) is an internal process which may be shared with others in person ("enunciated").

While Fiske suggests that semiotic productivity affects one's formulation of self as an individual and as a member of a social group (38), in his view the meanings made (as mentioned earlier) are translated into cultural-economic terms: the phenomenon

"approximates much more closely the artistic productions validated by the official culture... with production values as high as any in the official culture" (Fiske 1992: 39).

Fiske cites the "typical" examples of fan fiction and vids9 as forms of textual productivity that are created by fans interested in "filling in the syntagmatic gaps in the original narrative" and circulating these works "through an extensive network" created and maintained by fans, for fans (1992: 39).

Sandvoss (2005) argues that fandom cannot be characterized (much less celebrated) as anarchistic or resistant. Fandom is evidence of self-reflection and self- construction (similar to Bailey 2005) but it is not inherently counter-hegemonic.10

Sandvoss previously published on sports fans; he defines fandom "as a form of cultural institution and interpretive community" (11) and does not rationalize fandom within an economic context. He takes particular issue with Fiske's position on popular culture and fandom, as Fiske "formulated an overall paradigm of power and resistance in the analysis of fandom that has continued to shape much of the field" (Sandvoss 2005: 11). Central to this paradigm, charges Sandvoss, are the assumptions that popular culture is comprised of polysemic texts which are open to interpretation and that fandom engages this polysemy

9 Though calling them "novels" and "music videos" (39) 10 Depending on the jurisdiction, downloading/format-shifting could be not only subversive but illegal. 40 through performing readings of these popular culture texts which run counter to a dominant reading or "normal" audience (Sandvoss 2005: 12).

The problem that Sandvoss (2005) sees in this construction is that it positions fandom as an essentially oppositional force. By reviewing several decades' worth of research on fans and fandom, Sandvoss determines that fandom reproduces dominant discourses of race, class and gender, and never presents a uniform resistance to any system or institution, let alone its primary target of industrial capitalism. This echoes

(and expands upon) MacDonald (1998), whose observation of Quantum Leap fan practice refuted the anti-hierarchical rhetoric by scholars of fandom and of fandom itself, citing

Jenkins and Bacon-Smith specifically (MacDonald: 1998: 136). MacDonald found that hierarchies within her sample were constituted along multiple dimensions: those of knowledge of the text, quality of participation, access to actors or producers, leadership

("A natural dynamic of these smaller groups"), and of venue ownership, be it metaphorical or actual, physical or virtual (MacDonald 1998: 137-8). Sandvoss suggests that Fiske's belief in popular culture, as a "means of capital accumulation to the media industry," that nonetheless "are appropriated by fans as meaningful resources in their everyday lives" (Sandvoss 2005: 13) is based in the theory that fandom and its pleasures are "subversive by design" because, following de Certeau, "everyday life in industrial capitalism [is] a site of struggle in which those disempowered do not create their own products and symbols" and are left to "'make do' with mass-produced culture through their own distinct and oppositional readings" (Sandvoss 2005: 13). 41

Sandvoss charges that Fiske's "understanding of the origins of hegemonic power seems too singular to account for complex power relations" (14), leading "to the need to explore under which circumstances, and against whom, fandom constitutes a form of resistance" (Sandvoss 2005: 15). After all, there is no single authoritative, hegemonic producer of culture with a uniform purpose and intent - and arguably never has been one

- that defines a dominant reading. Sandvoss gives several examples of conflict within frames of bourgeois cultural determination, such as between recording artist and record label, between athlete and pro team, and most interestingly between fan readings of a text that may be both in line with the intended reading of the text/genre but counter to a dominant ideology of the fan's cultural context. Sandvoss finds Fiske's formulation of a bourgeois power block is unaccountably simplified, arguing that studies of particular groups of fans - here, Sandvoss cites McKinley (1997) on 90210 fans - fail to account for "the interplay of fans' readings and fan texts, which, through textual productivity, can ultimately be removed from media producers' control" (Sandvoss 2005: 21).

Sandvoss notes that Fiske's taxonomy of semiotic, enunciative, and textual productivity is problematic: "while all fans are semiotically, and most fans are enunciatively productive, only a minority of fans participate in textual production"

(Sandvoss 2005: 29). All fans must engage with the object of their fandom in order to fit it into their symbolic universe and most fans will speak or write about the object of their fandom, but only a small minority will persist in creating secondary works related to those primary texts. It is only textual productivity that allows a fan to approach the potential for subversion as they "reformulate the fan text in ways that necessarily move it 42 out of its industrial framing and thus invite emancipation from, and resistance to, such frames" (Sandvoss 2005: 29). Semiotic and enunciative production constitutes the bulk of fan engagement, Sandvoss argues, and therefore not all fan engagement can be considered subversive or emancipatory in relation to dominant cultural production under capitalism.

Sandvoss also argues that by studying only texrually productive fans, the experiences of fans who actively participate without leaving textual traces cannot be adequately theorized, resulting in the very least a "need to develop a taxonomy of fans which accounts for the varying degrees of productivity and social organization in fandom" (Sandvoss 2005: 30). Costello and Moore (2007) attempt to do this, but are heavily indebted to the Fiske/Jenkins belief in the inherent resistance of productive fans.

By limiting studies to those who are texrually productive, academic accounts of fandom

can make it seem as if it is only those productive fans who "derive a distinct sense of self

and social identity from their fan consumption" (Sandvoss 2005: 30), leaving out those who do not leave behind the same kind of tangible trace.

Hills revisits the work of Adorno to highlight the potential for developing a

coherent theory of fandom that picks up on what Hills argues is Adorno's underlying

ambivalence toward mass culture. The concept of value appears again as Hills revisits

Jenkins's (1992) use of The Velveteen Rabbit to attack what Hills suggests is a "simplistic version" (31) of Adorno's perspective on (mass) culture under capitalism. In Jenkins's

account, argues Hills, "The heartless 'toymaker' Adorno is hence positioned as the villain

of the piece" (32), as Adorno's seemingly-unforgiving views on valueless mass culture 43

are tied to the views of a fictional toymaker who sees only the flaws in a product and not the accumulated meaning and value that the same product has for its childish owner.

When Hills compares this morally-inflected reading of Adorno with another of Adorno's writings (titled "Toy shop" [sic]) he finds a much more nuanced view of the possible meaning cultural objects can hold for their audiences.

Hills argues that Adorno uses the Marxist concepts of use-value and exchange- value to describe a child's play as a kind of rehearsal of a possible life outside of the

capitalist world and that, "This resistance, this imagination of a better life, and this

temporary deviation from the 'expected' or 'anticipated' use of a cultural object" predate

Jenkins's preferred theorist, de Certeau (Hills 2002: 33). Through a close reading of

Adorno's dialectical approach to the study of culture, Hills proposes a '"dialectic of value'

in place of this 'dialectic of enlightenment'" (Hills 2002: 34), which embraces Adorno's view that "material 'reality' is essentially contradictory and remains outside the mastery

of traditional logic" (Hills 2002: 33). For fandom studies, this provides a theoretical

perspective that enables the fan's contradictory operation both in and out of consumer-

capitalist logics of use-value and exchange-value. In other words, theorizing fan

activities using this framework addresses the ambivalent and contradictory way that fans

operate both in opposition to commodity capitalism and as curator-consumers. For

example, the market for memorabilia defies "conventional logic of use and exchange-

value" (Hills 2002: 35) because the valuation of such goods are localized within fan

cultures and does not relate to standard economic models. 44

2.3 The Roles ofTechnologies for Fandoms

In the early days of media fandom, all fan production was material production: fan fiction was printed in zines that were typed, photocopied and distributed in person and through the mail (Penley 1991, Bacon-Smith 1992, Jenkins 1992), fan art appeared in those same zines and as prints, and songtapes were created and distributed on videocassette. In the age of the internet, fan production represents a kind of labour that is

"intellectual, immaterial and communicative labour power" (Hardt and Negri 2000:29) but that can only function as a result of the television episode's separation from the flow.

Although this has immediate relevance to a contemporary understanding of mass labour, a subculture's production that is parallel to the dominant entertainment industry can be analyzed through a similar lens because even lacking immediate economic benefit for any fandom practitioner, the labour performed will contribute to the circulation of power and resources within a (sub)cultural economy (Fiske 1992). Contemporary digital vidding is immaterial but nonetheless tangible.

According to Penley, the spontaneous appearance of Kirk/Spock slash happened after "fans recognized, through seeing the episodes countless times in syndication and on their own taped copies, that there was an erotic homosexual [sic] subtext there, or at least one that could easily be made to be there" (1991: 137). This points to the central role of technology in fandom: the kind of audience experience that is particular to fandom is based on the ability to revisit media texts, either in syndication or on user-recorded media. As Penley (1991) argues, the VCR: 45

".. .is the lifeblood of the fandom. The ubiquitous VCR allows fans to copy

episodes for swapping or for closer examination of their slash possibilities, and

provides the basic technology for producing songtapes. Fans are deeply invested

in VCR technology because it is cheap, widely available, easy to use, and

provides both escape and a chance to criticize the sexual status quo." (146).

The same can be said, two decades later, for the ubiquity of the personal computer. Like the VCR, it provides the basic technology for the production of vids, even discounting its use as a communications device. This is stated with the obvious caveat that access to this technology is only possible within a specific socio-economic context. Communication technologies are also vital to the maintenance of a dispersed community and the technological literacy of a predominantly female subculture should not be understated,11 but the importance of the television episode as a defined unit must be part of the understanding of the fannish perspective. Penley notes two vital aspects of syndicated

and taped viewership: that returning to any given episode that constitutes a symbolic universe allows the fan to perform a deeper reading of the episode than would be possible upon first viewing and that this kind of reading allows the conceptual space for creations

which highlight (or impose) a subtext on the work itself. Moreover, access to videotaped

copies of episodes meant that with songtape production, subtext could indeed be made to

exist on screen through the manipulation of that videotape source.

11 Seiter (1999) showed that male members of households tend to monopolize computer technology, leaving the female family members to explore the new toy after the males lose interest. 46

Rather than dismissing these engaged viewers and interpretive communities as secondary to understanding how television is consumed, the decision to study fandom can highlight complexities in the way these engaged audiences interact with the objects of their fandom. For example, a closer study of the discourses and practices involved in the semiotic interpretation of televisual content can follow from Mosco's acknowledgement that distinguishing between producer and consumer becomes complicated within the contemporary study of the political economy of communication

(1996: 26). However, if the once-potent categories of producer and consumer are no longer entirely valid, the third category - the distributor - must be equally uncertain.

This confusion then begs the question: what is this commodity that defies the traditional definition of political economy?

For Bacon-Smith (1992), the introduction to videotaped episodes represented a deeper "initiation" into fandom. In the mid-to-late 1980s, fans who traded videotapes and who held screening parties became part of an inner circle. Like the later downloading, time-shifting, or DVR'ing, videotaped episodes allowed for the extensive redistribution of television products which could then be viewed on the fan's own timetable, sometimes years after the original broadcast date. Bacon-Smith argues that watching pre-taped episodes changes the viewer's "attitudes and perceptions of the very nature of mass-produced entertainment" (1992: 123), as fans would duplicate and share copies around the world (1992: 126). This privileged interaction with other fans and with media products circumvented broadcast schedules, facilitated international fan connections and trained these audiences in the deep reading of television products. 47

This intervention in broadcasting flow meant that in the experience of the audience, "the ephemeral, throw-away nature of television changes, as programming becomes frozen in time at the will of the viewer" (Bacon-Smith 1992: 123), although degradation of audio and video quality occurred through each 'generation' of duplication.

This is a style of watching together that is not solely for entertainment, but rather is an exercise in viewership as a perpetuating act of collective interpretation, or in other words, self-training in a form of close reading. The VCR allowed a viewer to stop, rewind, and re-view segments of a videotaped episode, allowing a significant degree of control over the manner of the episode's viewing, thus enabling this manner of close reading. Bacon-

Smith defines this as a macro-reading of television, that involves fans developing ways to read a show in relation to the "macroflow", a term she coined based on Raymond

Williams's flow metaphor (Bacon-Smith 1992: 131). This manner of watching shaped the basis of the fannish perspective and the deep textual reading and broad understanding of the nuances of a canon are only possible when the texts themselves are available for study. The present ubiquity of DVD boxed-set releases and the easy availability of sanctioned and unsanctioned digital downloads provide the possibility of a similar viewing experience without the problem of degrading quality as each copy is made.

Fan works, in the forms mentioned earlier, do not only re-write the immediate narratives of popular commercial artifacts, they also use the media technologies designed to facilitate mass culture's distribution and consumption in order to produce, distribute, and consume their own alternate readings. It is necessary to look at the production and re-production of televisual media within the context of media fandom in order to see what 48 can be learned about fandom's interaction with these semi-tangible commodities and what can be surmised about the role that the television episode as commodity plays within a fragmented television distribution context.

Rather than dismissing downloading12, there is a need for the serious study of

digital downloading as an alternate distribution method that is both similar to the videotape distribution circuits of 1980s television fandom (following Bacon-Smith 1992)

and fundamental to the internationalization of audience communities both in and beyond

fandom. This phenomenon of international sharing allows individuals in global television markets to consume televisual products which are not available for broadcast in

their area. This could include American audiences watching British shows The

Professionals or Blake's 7, thanks to transatlantic videocassette sharing (Bacon-Smith

1992), Doctor Who fans circulating tapes of decades-old episodes copied from production masters (Robb 2009: 199), or the aforementioned Australian audiences who keep current

with Battlestar Galactica, despite their home networks airing episodes months after their

original airdate (Leaver 2008). In both cases, developments in recording technology

allow for potential audiences beyond the initial market to access media texts and to

participate in the fandom subculture (Shefrin 2004, Siapera 2004). The bulk of

accessible content is made available without the permission of copyright holders,

subverting both a legal distribution of media products and the legal use of these artifacts.

12 "Downloading" is intended as shorthand for many activities: P2P network use (BitTorrent and others), direct upload communities (such as Livejournal.com's cdntvonthedl and tvshare) and direct mailings with burned DVDs containing video files that are shared directly between individuals. The filesshare d originate from digital recorders or rips of DVDs. 49

While media piracy is another interesting avenue of investigation, many jurisdictions' protection for intellectual property do have provision for these so-called "transformative works" (Tushnet 2007).

Benjamin could not have foreseen the possibilities of the internet, and of the evolution of digital reproduction as the next stage in industrialization's mechanical reproduction of culture. What is used to make vids are copies of the work, not the work itself: mechanically reproduced cultural forms lack the "unique existence in a particular place" (Benjamin 2008: 21), to the resulting effect that all mass media products are by nature diffuse. This modern convergence of technologies determines how media

audiences (both fans and the casual participant in popular culture) interact with the

contemporary media landscape.

On television, the segments between advertising blocks maintain the audience's

interest long enough to justify the next block of ads. Traditionally, audiences had no means of subverting that corporately-defined flow. Williams, upon watching American television, blamed his disorientation on the lack "of 'interval' between the scheduled

[programming] and the inserted commercials" (Gripsrud 1997: 18) and clearly preferred

the BBC's format, which was to not interrupt with commercial messages. As soon as technologically possible, audiences of commercial television were more than willing to use their VCRs to skip these interruptions, demonstrating both a disdain for the

advertising, and the understanding that the television episode was itself a unified entity.

As mentioned above, early critical attention to media fandom focused on the idea of lack,

suggesting that semiotic gaps in official production were identified and filled by fandom 50 production (Fiske 1987, 1992). In order to identify those semiotic gaps in official production, it stands to reason that audience members would have to spend a considerable amount of time not only thinking about the television series and discussing it with other engaged fans, but also re-watching the episodes just as any researcher would re-visit the object of inquiry. Networks and audiences agree that episodes are commodities, but there is a dearth of scholarly writing that frames an episode as a semitangible commodity produced by professional labour and, in media fandom, altered by fanvid creators in their

"leisure" time.

Further, it would be through a closer examination of the way an engaged viewer engages with a symbolic universe that Meehan's final approach to television, the "self- programmer," can lead to deeper questions about the utility of the television set itself.

When she writes that, as self-programmers, "we can view home-made or home- duplicated materials, time-shift television programs, and use prerecorded materials to create our own schedules" (2007: 167), she ignores that, even before 2007, the computer was a viable tool through which to access televisual content.13

In all of Meehan's descriptions of the various approaches to television, there is an implicit assumption that the act of watching television is done with the aid of a television set. She does not entertain the possibility that while televisual content may be approached in ten different ways, there is a tension between television's content and the use of that content. While media corporations allow themselves to cede control of the

13 Like other Firefly fans, I downloaded that 2002 series around the time of its airing. 51 timing of audience consumption, the reality is that distribution of televisual content falls outside of their direct control. With the appearance of online streaming and downloading, as well as both sanctioned and unsanctioned VHS and DVD distribution, audiences can choose to obtain their content through a variety of technological avenues.

Implicit in this last approach of Meehan's is that the self-programmer will time-shift or tape an episode because they desire to pay close attention to it. What Meehan does not account for in her enumeration of approaches is that the self-programming is a substitute for broadcast distribution. Her entire range of approaches is equally applicable when content is self-programmed, rather than programmed on behalf of the audience. Self- programming, through whatever means, is by definition necessary for a viewer to become engaged. Indeed, to become "absorbed with a television series... [consistently watching and rewatching episodes," (Meehan 2007: 167) that viewer must have access to the technologies of self-programming, or be blessed with abundant reruns and a well- thumbed TV Guide.

The most glaring missed opportunity in Meehan's all-too-brief description of self- programming is how the move away from watching content as it is shifts the status of a television episode from something immaterial to a product which can be possessed by its consumer. Central to the idea of self-programming, then, is a fundamental change in the role and status of the television episode and its figuration as a discrete commodity. This becomes relevant to the practices of media fandom because these units (episodes) that are being self-programmed are suddenly in the control of the (engaged) audience. 52

Meehan provides an overview of the concept of the commodity audience as it has been taken up by political economy scholarship. The question of how people watch television, she argues, has led to "a variety of experiences with television and hence of ways that we can be audiences" (Meehan 2007: 165). As a ubiquitous technology, the onto logical variety of audiences means that any given individual can exist in many different ways as a kind of audience member; these "ways of approaching television"

(Meehan 2007: 165) can shift rapidly and fluidly depending on the exact moment in question. Each of these ways of approaching television includes different reactions to both the narrative content of a television program and to commercial breaks within televisual flow. She argues the "casual viewer" is the one most sought by advertisers, and her description of the "engaged viewer" who then joins an "interpretive community"

(Meehan 2007: 167) is just another name for fans in media fandom.

It is important to emphasize the role of technology when forming theories of a productive audience, because it is through media technologies that Meehan's engaged viewers are able to connect - as she puts it - with "similarly committed viewers"

(Meehan 2007: 167). Despite this casual phrasing, committed viewers (or listeners, or readers) have been connecting and building interpretive communities for quite some time.

Theberge (2005) suggests the history of celebrity culture (and therefore, implicitly, of fan culture) dates as far back as Paganini and Liszt, and depended on "the rise of publicity and the newspaper as a mass medium" (488). Fans of Sherlock Holmes, "probably the oldest established fandom" (Pearson 2007: 105) in the contemporary sense, formed a formal fan club in 1934. The academic study of fans usually binds itself to activities 53 from the early twentieth century, following scholarship on audience dating back to the early days of radio, such as Meehan's earlier work on the development of the ratings system and the commodity audience (Meehan 1990).

In her language, those who produce fanvids - what she calls "semi-professional videos" (Meehan 2007: 167) - are engaged in extending the universe of the original property. Fiske's use of official versus unofficial production (1992) is perhaps a better way to characterize fanvid production, as it speaks to the corporate origins of the source material and not the educational background or training of the fan doing the re-editing.

Because Meehan frames her account of fandom activity in terms of corporate awareness of and reactions to the engaged viewer, she ignores the interpretive and creative aspects of media fandom in favour of enumerating various strategies used by corporations to maintain the conceptual distance between official producer and audience, as "the companies are mainly focused on shaping how these people spend their disposable income, not how they interpret episodes" (Meehan 2007: 167). What is lacking in this account is an explicit acknowledgement of the work done by these engaged viewers - fans - in constructing secondary media products.

Beyond these fundamental issues, the role of communications technologies within fandom underwent a significant change in the 1990s with the rise of the internet.

MacDonald (1998) suggests that technology is "intrinsically linked" to science fiction

(139) and therefore it is natural to see science fiction fans in particular using the most current communication technologies in the practice of their fandom. She cites Jenkins's argument (echoed by Penley and Bacon-Smith, as described above) that technology is 54 essential for the close reading of television texts that fandom demands (MacDonald 1998:

139) and acknowledges fan anxiety around professional-looking works that Penley

encountered as a way of exploring the dependent but sometimes ambivalent perception of technology within fandom (MacDonald 1998: 140). The complications posed by the

introduction of computer technology into the fandom subculture imposed a divisive hierarchy - that of competence with this new technology - and questions about the changing nature of fandom as it moves from face-to-face interaction to "cybered practices" (141). While some fans embraced the new platform, others were alienated by the subculture's move online.

Cumberland (2000) discusses what she calls "the paradox of cyberspace" (n.p.): that the "public" forum of the internet - personal websites, webring connections, message boards - can be used by individuals who hide their personal identities. She finds that, for

female authors of erotic fan fiction, "the protection and freedom of cyberspace is

enabling these writers to defy many of the social taboos that have inhibited self

exploration and self expression in the past" (n.p.) as online pseudonyms grant a liberating

anonymity. Since the stories in question can be distributed anonymously, there is less personal danger to the author: no fear of being "outed" as the author of sexually explicit

fiction, of having one's sexual fantasies made public, or of being acknowledged as a

transgressor of norms. The internet is positioned as a permissive shield; it is used "by

women to express desire in ways that have been socially prohibited in the past, and which

continue to be publicly and generally taboo for women in our society" (n.p.).

Cumberland cites Jenkins (1992) to describe the changes in media fandom practices after 55 the physical spaces of fan conventions were augmented by the possibilities of cyberspace.

Where once the only place to obtain this kind of fan fiction was in a paper zine purchased directly from the author or distributed through the mail on the fan fiction circuit, the internet is assumed to provide a safe and anonymous space where one's private predilections can be indulged without fear of discovery.14

With Convergence Culture (2006a), Jenkins provides another view of how audiences interact with contemporary media, and suggests they participate in the production of culture because there are more opportunities for a more active engagement with media content and media technologies. The idea of "participatory culture" (Jenkins

2006a) is flawed because it presumes every individual who has access to production technologies will produce their own content to populate this digital realm. While the concept of "participatory culture" seems to presume too much about in the level to which an individual is willing to become a producer, the concept is useful in considering the recognition of the changing role of the commodity audience, especially as producers of official culture create media experiences which capitalize on this willingness to engage.

For Jenkins, online fandom brings the possibility of a Utopian remodelling of

"existing structures of knowledge and power" (2006b: 136). The web-enabled

"knowledge community" (Jenkins 2006b: 139) creates an "information space" to replace

"the old commodity space" with its "disconnect between media producers and consumers" (Jenkins 2006b: 140). Jenkins argues that "Online fan communities might

She seems to infer that all fan fiction readers are also fan fiction authors. 56 well be some of the most fully realized versions of [Pierre] Levy's cosmopedia, [as they are] expansive self-organizing groups focused around the collective production, debate, and circulation of meanings, interpretations and fantasies in response to various artifacts of contemporary popular culture" (137). It is Jenkins's contention that science fiction fans existed in that open, Utopian space - with a "reciprocity among readers, writers, and editors" (138) - long before the internet and fandom's move online (137). Therefore, the fact that the internet manifests all of the most Utopian qualities is unsurprising, since

"practises employed on the early [digital] bulletin boards were often directly modelled on science fiction fandom" (Jenkins 2006b: 138).

Despite this, fandom's move from person-to-person interactions (meeting at conventions, distribution of fan fiction through the mail, holding screening parties in a private home) to a digital world without traditional gatekeepers means that - despite a potential knowledge community's self-developed ethical standards and goals - "fandoms often have difficulty arriving at such a consensus" (Jenkins 2006b: 142). Just as Bacon-

Smith has described elsewhere (2000: 79-80), Jenkins (2006b) notes that the increase in subscription to a discussion forum forces that existing community to revisit its "taken- for-granted interpretive and evaluative norms" (142). While he states that in some cases these conflicts are successfully mediated, "more often, the groups splinter" and end up

"pushing some participants from public debates into smaller and more private lists"; this echoes MacDonald's (1998) analysis of Quantum Leap email lists, but Jenkins does not do his readers the courtesy of citing what he claims is a frequent outcome. 57

Jenkins (2006b) details the ways in which the internet has also "made visible various forms of fan participation and production" (147), which lead "many media producers, who still operate within the old logic of the commodity culture" (146) to define their relationship to fans as a legally antagonistic and adversarial one (146-149).

Fan poaching and blogging, he contends, "see unrealized potentials in popular culture and want to broaden audience participation" (Jenkins 2006b: 150) whereas culture jamming is a factor of "the old rhetoric of opposition and cooperation" (ibid) that "assumed a world where consumers had little direct power to shape media content and where there were enormous barriers to entry into the marketplace, whereas the new digital environment expands their power to archive, annotate, appropriate, and recirculate media products"

(Jenkins 2006b: 151). As with much of Jenkins, this is another statement that could benefit from the judicious application of words like possible, potential, ox perhaps to descriptions of fan's apparently new-found "power." Despite celebrating a new era of participation (Jenkins 2006a), this new era is still defined in terms of overcoming a previously adversarial relationship between producers and consumers. Jenkins mentions the internet's utility as "a powerful distribution channel" (2006b: 144) for fan works, and acknowledges the ability of fans to archive and recirculate (2006b: 151) but does not expand upon this dual role of the internet as an archive and distribution medium.

2.4 Fan Videos and the Practices of Vidding Cultures

Over the twenty-year history of academic responses to fan culture, there have been very few chapters or articles that have attempted a substantive discussion of 58 vidding. Jenkins (1992), Bacon-Smith (1992), Coppa (2008), and Ng (2008) appear to be the only scholarly works that mention vidding in any meaningful way, let alone approach the topic with any sustained analysis of the form. Jesse Walker's interview with Coppa for Reason Online (2008) treads much the same ground as Coppa's own article on the history of vidding (2008), albeit in a more casual format. This means the sixteen-year gap between the chapters by Jenkins and Bacon-Smith and the articles by Coppa and Ng, and the fact that the focus of "most [academic] discussions of fan-produced texts... on the written texts of fan fiction, as well as viewer commentary and criticism" (Ng 2008: 103, author's emphasis), has left vids without critical attention in the academic world. For the purpose of this discussion, vidding refers to that part of the media fandom subculture which is the practice of re-editing existing video and audio sources into what is known as a vid, was once known as making songtapes, and has its origins in the 1970s Star Trek slideshows of Kandy Fong. Forms of video remixing beyond the strict vid definition, such as the long tradition of found footage films and culture jamming, and the more recent phenomenon of faux-trailers, Machinima, and other examples of non-commercial manipulation of popular culture, are undeniably fascinating examples of audience re-use of media texts, but are beyond the scope of this project.

This gap in academic analyses is especially problematic when considering the radical change in fan activities brought about by the internet and the popular rhetoric around DIY media. Particularly baffling is vidding's absence from Karen Hellekson and

Kristina Busse'sFan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet (2006), which would have been a natural home for such a discussion. In fact, none of the pages 59

referenced under the "vids" entry in the index refer back to sections with any sustained

discussion of the form. The tendency is to list vidding as one of several forms of fan

work, but the overwhelming bias of the collection is toward print-based fan production.

When vidding is mentioned it is as if the authors know vids exist, recognize that the form

has a place and history within media fandom, but are still unwilling or unable to engage

with any examples of the form. The volume's introductory chapter acknowledges that

vidders have abandoned VCRs in favour of "more sophisticated" vids, where "complex

authoring software" is used "to manipulate electronic files" (Busse and Hellekson 2006:

12). Nowhere in that chapter nor elsewhere in the collection does anyone ask where

those electronic files originate, just what it is that lends these vids their augmented

sophistication, or what the authors mean when they write that vids use the "selection and juxtaposition to highlight particular moments in the source text to tell a story that is or is

not present in the text or to analyze a particular character, often playing with visual

aesthetics" (Busse and Hellekson 2006: 12). From that description, vids sound quite

compelling, but unfortunately none of a vid's intriguing elements that are listed here, such

as telling a story, analyzing a character, or playing with aesthetics are explored further.

It is therefore left to Coppa and Ng to briefly comment upon the history of the vid

form and how it currently stands before moving on to the subject of their papers. For

Coppa, this is to expand upon the history of vidding prior to 1990 in order to demonstrate

the evolution of the form as a tool for critical engagement with a text. For Ng, this is to

use vids of a canonically lesbian couple to open up a larger discussion of queeraess on

television and in the media. Penley's brief comment on the VCR's role in vidding (1991), 60

and the more detailed descriptions of pre-digital vidding in Jenkins and Bacon-Smith

(1992) remain the most extensive descriptions of the structure, purpose and aesthetics of the form. Ng acknowledges the difference between pre-internet fandom and present-day

practices, namely that "Digitization technology and the Internet now mean that fans can

create their videos using readily available computer software, publicize these at online

message boards, and share them via YouTube or various other Web sites" (Ng 2008:

104). In today's context of downloadable content and personal computers with video

production software as a standard feature, vidding has found a comfortable home in

digital production: today's vids are produced on computers and distributed online.

Despite this change, Ng ultimately concludes that between "significant challenges

to traditional models of media political economy" and "limits on fan resistance through

new media" a more relevant and significant use of her chosen vid examples is not to

understand technological change but to examine how fans negotiate representations of

canonical queerness in mainstream media (Ng 2008: 104). Ng does not therefore explore

the unofficial (and sometimes piratical) distribution networks which can give the vidder

the digital files from which vids are constructed, though she does acknowledge this

digital state as "one dimension of difference"15 (Ng 2008: 103) between early vids and

her examples. Ng's preference is for "the broader political stakes of queer representation"

(Ng 2008: 104) and not the broader political stakes of distribution of both source files and

vids themselves on what might be considered a digital black market.

15 Ng refers to "the splicing together of videotape" (106): Ng is not interested in vidding's technical side. 61

Prior to the internet, participation in this aspect of fandom was significantly less than there was for fan writing. This was due to "the greater difficulty of access to video equipment, than to desktop publishing and photocopying technologies, which are often available in the fan's own workplace and can be used even while on the job" (Penley

1991: 145). As a more difficult, time-consuming and technically daunting form of fan work, vidding requires a greater commitment of time (to learn to use the technology and to create the work itself), and money (to purchase the technology). From the form's representation in Bacon-Smith (1992), the barriers are less onerous than what Penley describes; Bacon-Smith does allow that few fans "are able or willing to devote the financial resources necessary" (Bacon-Smith 1992: 176), but concludes that the technology required for creating songtapes was commercially available, requiring only a few extra pieces of equipment and the willingness to learn simple editing techniques.

Vidding on VCRs dates from at least 1980, possibly with Kendra Hunter and

Diana Barbour, who were working with Starsky and Hutch episodes. Unfortunately there is no record of who the first fans were to migrate Kandy Fong's idea from stills to moving images (Coppa 2008: 4.1). Coppa argues that the technology was expensive and imprecise, so much so that a decade later, in 1990, a trio of vidders created a meta-vid comically detailing their troubles ("Pressure", from a Billy Joel song, nominally about

Quantum Leap; 4.4).16 Underlying this section of Coppa's history (4.1-4.15) is a much different picture of fandom-as-resistance, one that does not use an analysis of the vids'

16 This vid is doubly interesting because it suggests there was then an audience for vidding that was then sufficiently familiar with the form to appreciate the parody/homage. 62

content to tie these works to an artificial genre. This is quite unlike the unconvincing bid

to consider fan fiction as "archontic literature" from Abigail Derecho (2006). This kind

of collage has a closer material relationship to the source product than fan fiction does,

since the original work itself is present; the commodity being fetishized is made to

perform a demonstration of that fetish. Significantly, too, Coppa refrains from presenting vidding in a way that sets it up as a practice that takes place in opposition to any existing hegemony; rather, she cites Virginia Woolfs protagonists in A Room of One's Own on

one hand and the history of women as film editors in Hollywood on the other to suggest

vidding as "making art within the domestic sphere" (4.9) that is critical, analytical, and

collaborative.

As Bacon-Smith describes it, songtape artists in the early 1980s started to make their own music videos, using videotaped episodes as the video source and whatever

music was desired as the audio source: "in a songtape the artist deconstructs the texts of both source products - audio and video - and reconstructs not only their forms but in

many cases their messages as well to create a new narrative" (1992: 176). As

commodities, songtapes were widely copied and traded both through the mail and in

person; as media objects were read in a manner unique to the form. Bacon-Smith argues that reading a vid requires the near-reflexive identification and interpretation of a rapid

sequence of clips. This community knowledge was adapted into a convention-based

trivia game, and Bacon-Smith observed fans calling out identifying details for each clip

as the vid was screened (1992: 179). Bacon-Smith defines fannish interpretation as: "a

function of what actually appears on the screen - a combination of craft, employed with 63 the intention of communicating a message, and unintentional messages based on tacit assumptions the creators of the source products make about the real world and unconsciously incorporate into their art - and the cultural assumptions or worldview of the viewer" (1992: 180). This is a useful and near-mathematical equation that allows for all mentioned elements to be present in a range of strengths, producing a singular effect.

Where Bacon-Smith sees vidding as a progression and textual expression of the particular kind of watching taught by fandom, Jenkins (1992) explains vids as the literal manifestation of fandom's core foundation: textual poaching and material appropriation.

Relying (as does Penley) on de Certeau's discussion of "the tactical nature of consumption and the nomadic character of the consumer's culture", he uses the case of what he calls "fan music videos" to build upon his earlier argument surrounding slash fiction, that: "fan-generated texts cannot simply be interpreted as the material traces of interpretive acts but need to be understood within their own terms as cultural artifacts"

(Jenkins 1992: 223). Fan video for Jenkins forms the basis for theorizing the aesthetic basis of poached culture, where "borrowing and recombination" are just as important as

"original creation and artistic innovation" (1992: 224).

Jenkins describes vids as, "a unique form, ideally suited to demands of fan culture, depending for its significance upon the careful welding of words and images to comment on the series narrative" (1992: 225). Unlike the conceptual appropriation of fan fiction, the basis of fan videos is materially appropriated by vidders: "the creator's primary contribution... comes in the imaginative juxtaposition of someone else's words and images" (Jenkins 1992: 225). Jenkins describes a Starsky and Hutch slash vid, where 64

Jimmy Buffet's "Leaving the Straight Life Behind" is transformed into "a celebration of

'coming out'" (225) through its contact with a sequence of evocative clips from the series.

Jenkins concludes that "the pleasure of the form centers on the fascination in watching familiar images wrenched free from their previous contexts and assigned alternative meanings. The pleasure comes in putting words in the character's [sic] mouths and making the series represent subtexts it normally represses" (227-8).

Jenkins enumerates several tropes and tendencies of vidding which still ring true post-digital, such as using a romantic pop song in a slash vid to suggest an attraction

"masked by codes of conventional male conduct" (228). Jenkins likens the formal appearance of vids to MTV-style editing, a "postmodern art of pastiche" (234), but making it clear that is where the similarity ends, stating, "if what fascinates critics about

MTV is its refusal of narrative and its seeming rejection of referentiality, fan video is first and foremost a narrative art" (233). This may be likened to the film genre of the musical, where songs operate as elements that open up a narrative space for a character's internal reflection and emotional expression: vids create the context where a fan's extrapolation of a character's emotional reality can be articulated.

Coppa (2008) uses Fong's slideshow "Both Sides Now" (ca. 1980, taped 1986) as an example of the use of Spock as a significant point of identification (3.7) that can be described through a sophisticated, live-edited slideshow (3.3). Through a complex set of intertexts - for example, using Leonard Nimoy's own cover of the Joni Mitchell song

(3.4) to describe Spock's inner emotional life (3.7) - this proto-vid "excavated the complexities of Spock's character, highlighting some of the key traits that have made him 65 a popular figure of identification and desire" (Coppa 2008: 3.12). The resulting juxtapositions force the work's audience to reconsider their original interpretation of the source, being "explicitly asked to consider whether Spock is attracted to both men and women, to read Spock's inner landscape as well as his outer appearance" (Coppa 2008:

3.9). While the choice of song is not accidental it is also not the subject of the slide show. This work, which inspired the vid form, was therefore "a visual essay in which music is used as an analytical tool and not a soundtrack" (Coppa 2008: 3.12).

The purpose of Coppa's article is to provide a contextualizing response to a then- recent article circulated by Associated Press that grossly mis-characterizes vidding's history, purpose and audience. Coppa argues that the author, Jake Coyle, misread his vid example because of his "underlying - and unquestioned - assumption that the fans who make 'fan-made music video' are fans of the audio source, that these fans edit footage to music because they like the bands" (2008: 1.2). Coppa counters that in vidding, the audio source is less important to the overall project than the source footage, and that the primary purpose of vidding is not to share a favourite song, but to construct an argument about the video source (2008: 1.1). Coppa does not explore how posting vids on

YouTube makes them available to wider audiences, as it has been many years since fandom operated in a members-only environment. This recalls, though less contemptuously, Jenkins's lament about inadequately socialized internet fans who have gained unrestricted access to fandom and cross established boundaries (2006b: 142). It is also worthy to read Coppa's correction of the journalist's misreading in light of

Sandvoss's analysis of the different critical takes on 1950s Batman comics, where the 66

"open-ness" of a text (its polysemic nature) allows for an incalculable range of interpretations (Sandvoss 2005: 124-126). Sandvoss's conclusion that "the determined researcher... will always be able to find evidence contrary to the assumption of a single interpretation" (125), and any given text - in this case, a vid - can be subjected to wildly divergent interpretations.

Fandom's video art, the songtape (in pre-internet terminology) or fanvid (post- internet), is a kind of culture jamming or found footage filmmaking that was developed by media fans in the 1970s playing around with then-novel consumer electronics, and who subsequently passed their knowledge on to other fans, thereby making possible an ever-expanding pool of potential creative artists in this parallel culture industry. With respect to Costello and Moore (2007), it makes little sense that the purpose of this kind of fan work is to exert "power over television content" by way of "manufacturing their own versions of the fantasies" they are unable to see play out on screen, and who are kept from directly influencing programming "because of their [the fans'] economic status"

(136). Prior to the internet, the rituals surrounding the distribution of videocassettes and of the production of songtapes required the fan to have individual contact with other fans in order to participate in the subculture. Songtape production was a process that required technical sophistication and interested fans would have to attend workshops at conventions or join a videotape collective in order to learn about this form of amateur video production (Penley 1991, Bacon-Smith 1992, Jenkins 1992). Fandom's move online which began as early as 1992 (Coppa 2006: 53), enabled a transformation of this body of knowledge. No longer a closed circuit of insider fans recruiting other fans, the 67 specialized technical knowledge required for fans interested in creating their own amateur video works started to be found online.

Today, there are innumerable currently-updated and archived but still historically interesting websites, communities, and discussion forums dedicated to sharing detailed information about digital video editing and the kinds of sophisticated meanings that can be constructed in the savvy reconstruction of corporate media products. This is not

Jenkins's "participatory culture" (2006a), with its implication of reliance on the individual participant's buy-in to what seems to be a post-millennial Utopia of digital democracy. It is nothing so lofty: certain members of the audience decided long ago to become a consciously productive force and create a parallel economy. These individuals are involved in the (parallel) production of culture.

As mentioned earlier, technology is central to fan culture, and mastery over technologies of media production has long been central to the productive fan's experience. While post-war fan clubs, for example, may not have engaged in a large- scale textual production of the kind demonstrated by contemporary media fandom, sharing 45 s and fan magazines between friends describes an engagement with mass- produced content beyond simple consumption of a commodity. In the late 1960s, fans of

Star Trek (1966-1969) and The Man From U.N.C.L.E (1964-1968), began to communicate with each other (Fiske 1987, Bacon-Smith 1992, Jenkins 1992, MacDonald

1998) and produced "creative responses to their favourite show" (Coppa 2006: 45).

These responses include works of creative fiction, visual art, songs and video art, among many other possible forms of cultural production. Penley (1991) characterizes early Star 68

Trek fandom as a vertically-integrated industry with a productive capacity that meets and exceeds the source franchise. Fans have accomplished this, she argues, by

"enthusiastically mimicking the technologies of mass-market cultural production"

(Penley 1991, 140). In her discussion of appropriate and appropriated technologies,

Penley highlights the fandom discourse on the appearance of professionalism in zines and in songtapes.

Participation on the creative/productive side of this aspect of fandom is significantly less than with fan writing; one reason is that as a more difficult, time- consuming and technically daunting form of fan work, vidding requires a greater commitment of time (to learn to use the technology and to create the work itself) and money (to purchase said technology). Significantly, these fans were using the technical skills gained as knowledge workers in the growing information economy to produce and distribute fanzines based on characters and scenarios from the mass media. Within the context of vidding, the experience of the fanzine subset of fandom was similar to the way songtape producers engineered the VCR's extension of functionality beyond its marketed purpose. Fandom production represents a form of production whose users have had a unique relationship to technology and media: a decades-long, organized parallel industry where the kind of material and immaterial production performed by fandom participants is linked to these participants' knowledge as both skilled technicians of the information age and as audience members.

Fiske (1987, 1992) and MacDonald (1998) relate fandom's textual productivity to

Bourdieu's metaphor of cultural capital, where fandom culture represents a "popular 69 cultural capital" (Fiske 1987: 314) that exists in opposition to bourgeois official (or legitimate) culture, and that compellingly transcends a metaphorical state to constitute both a "shadow cultural economy" of fandom (Fiske 1992: 30) and the circulation of commodities such as print zines and videotapes. Media fandom therefore represents a site where the evolving state of labour in the knowledge economy is inextricably linked with fandom's parallel culture industry, as media fandom relies entirely on communications technologies for its existence. The assertion that media fandom exists only because of communication technologies is not an entirely facetious statement. The study of media fandom provides a case study not just for a non-commercial challenge to corporate control of industrial culture, but as a necessary addition to the study of communication. Media fandom represents an unusually productive approach to the consumption of popular culture.

2.5 Communicating Meaning through Images

Writing nearly twenty years ago, Jenkins differentiates vids from the then-novel

MTV music video, characterized by a postmodern and ahistorical "hodge-podge of borrowed images and reworked devices," that he argues "celebrates a refusal to make sense of the cultural environment" (1992: 233). This form of commercial music video is the complete inverse of vids. Where commercial music videos are non-narrative and are organized around the performer in order to sell that performer's products, fan-produced vids are a narrative form that demonstrates "an art of quotation that anchors its images to a referent, either drawn from the fans' meta-textual understanding of the series characters 70 and their universe...or assigned them within the construction of a new narrative" (Jenkins

1992: 234). It is this anchoring of image to referent - or of signifier to signified - that creates the semiotic complexity of vids, and allows a new narrative to be presented in the vid. Alone, each frame and each word can be read as having any number of meanings by a viewer, and together the collision of signifiers creates a dense - but navigable - semiotic haze.17 Bacon-Smith (1992) agrees that the (re)creation of narrative is a primary characteristic of vids: "the artist deconstructs the texts of both source products - audio and video - and reconstructs not only their forms but in many cases their messages as well to create a new narrative" (176). While Bacon-Smith's assertion that the audio source is deconstructed is normally only true on the level of signification, the material metaphor - deconstructing and reconstructing - allows for vidding to be understood as a rearrangement of signifying clips, where the moments from a television series (its building blocks, in a sense) are used to construct a new, condensed version of that semiotic edifice.

If cultural symbols function merely to "resolve and explain contractions"

(Womack 2005: 2) within that culture, then fandom's long history of creative responses could be seen as a method of understanding and engaging with popular culture's productions as a collection of symbols that can be easily rearranged. Robert Sklar (1972) argues that a predominantly Caucasian, sexually conservative, and heteronormative

17 The interesting question that vidding poses in terms of their reconstructed narratives rests in where meaning is located and where/how meaning-making occurs. Defining the location of meaning is important in order to describe what happens when referents are rearranged. 71 conceptual order was developed in early cinema, where the influence of "moral authorities" restricted the range of possible representation in motion pictures, and subsequently, in television. One way of looking at media fandom is as a response to restrictive, reductive mythologies in popular culture; these responses are expressed by, as mentioned earlier, "filling in the syntagmatic gaps in the original narrative" (Fiske 1992:

39). Fan works (such as vids) create a discursive space where these imbalances are acknowledged (Coppa 2008: 2.20, Ng 2008); significantly, this alternate reading of the source text is directed to the fan's own community and not to the creators of the original work. To put it another way, if myths are the stories a culture tells itself in order to explain itself, then vids are the stories fandom tells itself about how it perceives the characters, though not necessarily to mount a direct counter-hegemonic attack against dominant modes of representation. At issue, then, is the manner in which symbols found in popular culture are rendered sensible by media fandom's take on popular culture.

With vidding, the symbols in question are the mediated images of actors and actresses in their character roles, primarily connoting both specific information about the story itself, (both directly pertaining to the image's immediate original context and to the context of the meta-level macroflow), and also indicating a broader analysis of mediated representations. For example, the slash genre of vidding queers the mediated image of a male body as its central symbol and, through the re-editing of the official presentation of the characters, demonstrates a reconfiguration of heteronormative desire, and highlights the normative conceptual orders communicated by the primary source material. 72

Since the vid reduces one of the source texts to images without any of the linguistic signifiers found on the original audio track, it relies on the audio source to perform that particular function. The juxtaposition of these two textual moments creates a third meaning - sometimes known as the Kuleshov effect - specific to the vid's argument. Indeed, it is because the images are presented out of context that the full meaning of a vid's interactions between the lyrics of the song and the visual elements are often comprehensible only to other fans (Bacon-Smith 1992: 179). Coppa (2008) characterizes vids as "a form of collaborative critical thinking" (5.1) that builds on a close reading of what Bacon-Smith (1992) calls "gestural codes" (188). The practice of vidding is intimately related to the particular manner in which fans of a television show watch and make sense of the fictional mythologies which reflect and mediate the

mythologies of contemporary (North) American life. If television is, fundamentally, "a

cultural agent, particularly as a provoker and circulator of meanings" (Fiske 1987: 1) it is the fan-audience's understanding - or decoding (Hall 1973) - of those cultural and

narrative meanings, indicated by the reflexive/analytical form of fan works, which is of

interest here.

When Barthes writes that the Western world constitutes a civilization of writing,

he argues that our perception and understanding of symbols are organized along linguistic

lines. This position is similar to that of structural anthropologist Levi-Strauss, who believed human beings to be naturally symbol-making creatures who make sense of the world through a network of symbolic binary oppositions. Where Levi-Strauss believed he could find commonalities across all mythological narratives, Barthes - not being an 73

anthropologist - turned this line of inquiry on his own society. Drawing on observations of daily life in France, his analyses of constructed visual images and prosaic activities led to a scheme through which to read images as language, using, as did Levi-Strauss,

Saussure's theories of structural linguistics as a starting point to discuss how symbolic meanings are made (Barthes 1977a).

Building on the methodology of Levi-Strauss, though not his conclusions, Will

Wright (1975) argues that the study of popular culture can be useful in understanding how the oppositions in the myths of popular culture can "communicate a conceptual

order" to an audience (17). In this sense, a myth is not simply synonymous with "story", but indicates a series of narratives, which when combined lead to an understanding of a broader cultural context. Levi-Strauss argues that a myth's narrative "contains only

superficial, or apparent, content; the real, conceptual meaning of myth is established and

communicated solely by the structure of oppositions" (Wright, 1975:24). While the metatextual, paradigmatic dimension allows for an overall structure of oppositions to be

listed, Wright argues that narrative (the syntagmatic dimension) is vital for the comprehension of a myth's social meaning (1975:24). This framework has unexpected congruence with the form of vids: they are composed of clips which have been lifted from their narrative housing to participate in a new fiction. What must be emphasized here is that the comprehensibility and analytic power of a vid rests in the addition of a subsequent narrative and layer of textual meaning, and not the replacement of the original meanings. When vids are viewed, the conceptual understanding of whole episodes, as well as plot points and character moments within those episodes, are present in the minds 74

of those viewing, even as they read the re-formed texts (Bacon-Smith 1992: 131). With

vids, it is impossible to reduce the interplay of the conceptual and the narrative to two

simple planes, as they contain, for example, multiple simultaneous performative

constructions within a single actor's body, a critical questioning of dominant modes of representation, and a mode of audio-visual narrative storytelling that is both linear and non-linear.

Wright's structural study of the Western genre in film demonstrated the way popular mythologies "communicate a conceptual order to members of that society"

(Wright 1975: 17). Popular media products are not as interested in replicating the diverse

complexities of off-screen social interaction and cultural practice, relying instead on broader generalizations and conservative simplicity. If the purpose of myth and ritual practice is to make the unspoken visible - to render the unknowable sensible- vids

perform that same function. What sets vids apart is their creative power; the creation of

additional meanings which spawn a re-presentation of visual elements (signifiers) in

which the official presentation of the cultural artifacts continues, untouched. A vid can

only be created after the appropriated episodes have been transmitted, in their entirety,

and then adopted for use by the fan audience.

Barthes argues that the role of contemporary myth-making is to create ideological

meanings which appear naturalized. The mechanism by which this process occurs is

linguistic, as the myth to Barthes is a part of speech. The process of myth, as a second-

order semiological system has, in Barthes's case, replaced a factual history of French

imperialism with a version of events, encoded through visual signifiers, such as 75 photographs, that supports the dominant hegemony of the French bourgeois class and the natural state of France as an imperial power. Norman Fairclough, when writing on the question of ideology's locating in social structures, asserts he does find some value in structuralist readings but finds that placing too much value in structure simplifies the relationship between events (defined as "actual discoursal practice") and broader social

structures (Fairclough 1995). Ideology could, then, also be located in those events, which has the advantage of allowing ideology to be described as something not static or dependent on myriad social structures but rather as inherently dynamic and transformative. Fairclough cautions against discounting social structures completely in discussions of ideology because discourse ultimately must be interpreted, and

interpretations are read through the effects of diverse social forces. Fairclough suggests the entities at play in structuring discourse are clearly defined, vary in scale and exist in any number of relationships with each other.

Fairclough prefers to use the term discourse over Saussure's/>aro/e because

Fairclough understands language as layered in social processes, not an isolated or asocial phenomenon. Text is only one element of discourse, the others being social practice and the linked triad of the production, distribution and consumption of text that Fairclough terms discoursal practices. Ideology is vested in the production of text (even in a decision to use italics or scare quotes) and interpretation rests on where, the interpreter finds the presence of ideology, that is, in layers of meaning. Social processes in turn affect linguistic forms in a cultural artifact, forming a dialectic whereby society both shapes and is shaped by discourse. When this method of analysis is applied to a narrative 76 structure, the discursive imprecision threatens the pursuit of a stable ideological meaning, but opens up the possibility for the existence of secondary discourses (fan works). It is this disjuncture which allows the work to act as a statement or analysis about the assumptions made when telling a story.

The efficacy of symbols depends on broader social consensus. In Levi-Strauss's example of the doubting shaman who is still able to perform a ritual healing that effects a cure, this consensus is built between the shaman, the patient, and the audience. In the example of popular media, this is less immediately consensual (Hall 1973) but rather defined by a series of corporate practices (also, implicitly, authorized and intentional) which are near-codified and which are then decoded by audiences - this decoding by fan- audiences is then demonstrated through vidding. Fan audiences watching for the gestural codes in a television series have a similarly agreed-upon reading of those moments

(Bacon-Smith 1992: 188-189), a reading which can counter the corporately-scripted, officially transmitted meanings and messages of that story. In fandom, when the moments which represent examples of the gestural code are taken from a television episode and placed into a vid, those moments gain a new place in a symbolic system created for the length of that vid.

In semiotics, three basic elements - the signifier, the signified and the sign - work together to create meaning. The combination of "a signifier (the word or the image) with a signified (the cultural concept)" produces the sign (Allen 2003: 42). The sign is the amorphous connection between object and meaning that is itself "very ambiguous" and

"occupies a place, albeit imprecise" in the scope of understanding (Barthes 1977a: 35). 77

Importantly, the signifier (the image, object, word) is for Barthes an empty entity, which is only filled with meaning and transformed into a sign when associated with the signified, or concept (Barthes 1972). The key to semiotics is signification, which is the process that "binds the signifier and the signified, an act whose product is the sign"

(Barthes 1977a: 48). Barthes attaches signs to context, and makes signs functional so that their meaning is functional. Meaning, that is, becomes a function of the structure in the context of its use.

For Barthes, the reading of an image is neither arbitrary nor anarchic: "it depends on the different kinds of knowledge - practical, national, cultural, aesthetic - invested in the image" (Barthes 1977b: 46). Using advertising images as his example, Barthes writes of how captions and text can be applied to an image in order to fix a "floating chain of signifieds in such a way as to counter the terror of uncertain signs" (Barthes 1977b: 39), limiting the variety of possible interpretations and rendering the image sensible in a specific manner and to a particular end. Barthes's analysis of the pasta sauce advertisement in "Rhetoric of the Image" talks about the colours and arrangement of objects used to invoke a national or regional connotation of "Italianicity". This quality is not particularly definable, beyond asserting that a set of signifiers (the colours red, white and green) is intended to recall a mythological Italy where anyone may find good food composed of fresh ingredients that are skilfully prepared. This myth of Italy reduces the actual Italy to nothingness; for the purposes of selling a pasta sauce, the parts of Italy that contain bad chefs and pre-packaged food cease to exist. The complex and layered set of associations is wedded to these objects on a symbolic level. 78

Barthes argues the importance of marrying words to images is the process of creating a universal concept (signified) that can be used to communicate a complex concept in a tidy visual shorthand: "in fact, it is simply the presence of the linguistic message that counts, for neither its position nor its length seem to be pertinent (a long text may only comprise a single global signified, thanks to connotation, and it is this signified which is put in relation with the image)" (Barthes 1977b: 38) The invocation of

"Italianicity" by an advertiser on behalf of a client when selling tinned pasta sauce relies on a shared understanding of a set of possible meanings for those particular vegetables in that particular arrangement, and fixed by that particular linguistic signifier. All aspects of a visual image - and in particular, an image mobilized to a specific end - can be deconstructed to divine its meaning. While he writes primarily about captions in advertising, this line of inquiry is easily adapted to talk about the interaction between narrative (words) and images in moving pictures. Captioning helps the beholder "to choose the correct level of perception [and] to focus not simply my gaze but also my understanding. When it comes to the 'symbolic message', the linguistic message no longer guides identification but interpretation, constituting a kind of vice which holds connoted meanings from proliferating..." (Barthes: 1977b, 39). In vidding, the role of the linguistic message as the role of the caption is taken by the pop music soundtrack, which functions as "an interpretive lens" (Coppa, 2008:1.1) to render explicit a vid's core argument.

John Berger (1972) provides a useful example that illustrates this phenomenon.

Berger argues that Van Gogh's painting Wheat Field with Crows on its own contains a 79

certain set of meanings about the artist, the style, the subject matter, and there can be a

complete and contained narration of the painting's meaning and relevance. If, however the same work is presented along with a caption explaining that this is the final work of

Van Gogh before his suicide, Berger argues a further layer of meaning is applied to a

viewer's understanding and interpretation of the work. In this case, the caption fixes the painting in a linear narrative of Van Gogh's life (and death) - in Barthes's language,

fixing various floating signifieds (concepts) to the signifier of the painting. Captioning,

as one form of framing, directs the decoding or interpretation of both the work and its

frame. The layers of meaning created in vids rely on the interaction of the song lyrics to

recontextualized clips in order to make some kind of argument about the source that the

vidder is only able to do through this aural captioning.

A criticism of the now long-outdated sender-receiver model of communication,

Hall's essay "Encoding/Decoding" (1973) introduces his suggestion that not every message sent by the producers of mass media is understood in a predicted and uniform

manner. Rather, he argues those who produce media content consciously and

unconsciously encode certain information into the message (whatever form it may take)

and the audience can (broadly speaking) accept, question, or refuse the message as it is presented. Instrumental to this idea of signification, as Hall (1973) rightly points out, is

the role of interpretation and negotiation. While Barthes tends to avoid speaking directly

about who places the caption to fix a chain of signifiers, instead blaming bourgeois

interests (Barthes 1972), Hall introduces the idea of an agent of meaning-making, or

"encoder" to the understanding of how images are used to communicate both simple and 80 complex meanings. For Hall, however, the agency of communication appears to reside with the listener, reader, watcher - the "decoder" - as the messages as presented may have a number of possible interpretations, each of which is specific to the individual decoder or to a community of decoders. Storytelling, which is less immediately charged with political significance, can provide an interesting opportunity to examine how linguistic meanings can be made and then interrupted. Stories, like advertisements, are told through complex codes of meaning and signification. The power of a narrative rests not just in the words themselves, but in what those words can evoke: if narrative discourse is the words spoken in the telling of a story, then "the story is an imaginary construction that the spectator or reader creates while reading the narrative discourse of the actual text" (Gunning 2004).

Hall finds little value in Barthes's distinction between denotation as literal meaning and "the more associative meanings for the sign which it is possible to generate

(connotation)" (Hall 1973: 133). Rather than applying tidy schematics to the production of meaning, Hall argues that the literal/associative binary is more useful than the terminology of denotative and connotative. However, he does allow that retaining that distinction does allow for easier analysis "at the level of their 'associative' meanings (that is, at the connotative level) - for here 'meanings' are not apparently fixed in natural perception (that is they are not fully naturalized) in their fluidity of meaning and association can be more fully exploited and transformed" (Hall 1973: 133). Writing of

Barthes, Graham Allen asserts that the purpose of Barthes's investigations into second- order semiotics, mythologies, was to destabilize a tool for communication which enjoyed 81 an unquestioning position as an indicator of truth: "if one of theory's fundamental purposes is to remind us of the arbitrary, culturally-specific nature of all language use, then theory must attack languages which present themselves as stable, universally valid and timeless" (Allen 2003: 4).

In contrast to the anthropological and phenomenological tendencies of much of fandom studies, Hall's model of encoding and decoding is more relevant to both a political economy and cultural studies perspective on the social life of cultural commodities. Most significantly, Hall argues for the double life of a media product: the economic circulation of the commodity occurs alongside its discursive circulation. Both material and social relations are at play, but it is perhaps the decoding of such a commodity that is more critically relevant than its material distribution: "If no 'meaning' is taken, there can be no 'consumption'" (Hall 1973: 128). The discursive consumption - the decoding of meaning - is therefore highly relevant to the study of media because the intangible nature of mass media means proof of material consumption is impossible to prove. Within the context of media fandom, the work done by individual members of a fandom audience does function to feed monolithic capitalism as well as to reproduce and negotiate social meaning.

The comprehension of visual messages (decoding, to use Hall's terminology, Hall

1973) is a process (not a static fact) which is external to the visual message, and is unrelated to any presumptions of inherent meaning embedded in that visual object.

Indeed, Barthes argues that images are polysemous, with no inherent meaning, and instead merely imply a series of possible interpretations, or decodings. With each 82

image's aforementioned "floating chain of signifieds" in which "the reader [is] able to

choose some and ignore others" (Barthes 1977b: 39), meaning is only created through the

active interpretation of that sign. It is the interpretation, the decoding, of a meaning which has "no necessary correspondence" to its encoding (Hall 1973: 136).

Despite being the theoretical concept that forms the basis to most approaches to

studying fandom, polysemy "has... received relatively little critical attention since the

first wave of fan studies" which is the result of it having "near-universal acceptance"

within the field (Sandvoss 2005: 124). To illustrate "the fundamental assumption that

(popular) texts are open" (124), Sandvoss uses the example of the apparent textual heterosexualization of Batman through the introduction of the Batwoman and Batgirl

characters to the comics, which was judged by one critic to have successfully limited the possible interpretations of Batman and Robin (and Alfred)'s relationship. This reading was challenged by another as incomplete, as it missed possible subversive clues within

the text itself. To Sandvoss, this indicates "that all texts are polysemic" and, what is

more, that "the determined researcher... will always be able to find evidence contrary to

the assumption of a single interpretation" (2005: 125). What is left to account for is the

layers of polysemy, which Sandvoss terms the qualitative dimension ("a multiplicity of possible interpretations which are consciously realized by the reader" 2005: 125) and

quantitative dimension ("allows for different readings by different readers" 2005: 126).

Sandvoss addresses this overwhelming multiplicity with the challenge that polysemy so emphatically denies the text a "single, definitive meaning" that "they

become neutrosemic - in other words, carry no inherent meaning" (2005: 126). Rather 83 than being meaningless, meaning is constituted by each individual's self-reflection back onto the object of their fandom, leaving a near-limitless "possibility and actuality" (128) of readings. While there is the possibility of a text "which ultimately is beyond interpretation and negotiation" (Sandvoss 2005: 128), Sandvoss argues that objects of fandom, "do not constitute a single text.. .but a wide array of different signs and symbols" without a finite "textual coherence" (2005: 130). Rather, since fans tend to consider themselves fans of a sports team and not a single game, or of a television series and not a single episode, the collective 'author' of these various texts is largely constituted by individual participation. He concludes that "given the role of the reader in the constructing and shaping of meaning, questions of polysemy and neutrosemy are dependent on the reception context rather than the text itself (Sandvoss 2005: 130).

While Sandvoss is largely silent on the topic of vids, his insights into idiosyncratic and contextual readings of media texts do help illuminate the role a vid can play in communicating that idiosyncratic reading to others and the role vids play in the complex array of complex fan discourse. The aforementioned "reception context"

(Sandvoss 2005: 130) of a text means that every object of fandom is a "textual hybrid... composed of many textual episodes whose boundaries are defined by the fan him- or herself..." and "cuts his or her own text out of all available signs and information like a figure out of a seemingly endless sheet of paper" (Sandvoss 2005: 132). While Sandvoss is speaking metaphorically, this description resembles the material reconstruction of primary texts that occurs when a vid is made. Within a given series, then, this overt polysemy can support the cherry-picking of clips used to construct the vid. In this way, 84 individual clips are used as parts of speech that contain the same "combinantorial freedom" (McCracken 1990: 66) as language.

Bacon-Smith (1992) adopts Williams's "flow" metaphor of broadcasting to describe the two simultaneous ways that fans watch television, identifying (in Wright's terms) both the conceptual oppositions and the narrative functions which are at play. In watching, a fan constructs a map from the macroflow (the overall series, its complete plot and character arcs), which is itself constructed of microflow (individual moments of significance). Taken together, the macro-and micro-flow compose the conceptual understanding of episodes and individual plot points and character moments within those episodes as they relate to the rest of the series. Within the microflow, select moments

(usually of character interactions) are identified as being particularly significant to the macroflow. These moments provide the clips which are then re-edited into vids, as they have been already singled out by the collective fan-audience as symbolic moments that deepen the understanding of the overall series: Ng (2008) states that one of the functions of vidding is to recirculate popular moments from a previously-broadcast episode, though

Coppa (2008) would argue that this is not the form's primary function. The short clips and segments used in a vid are there to not only represent the specific narrative moment from which they had been lifted (as a segment of a scene, part of a larger arc), but to signify the conceptual place that moment holds within the macroflow, or the myth at large. What is important to note at this moment is that these elements of microflow, these paralinguistic signs, are visual: moving images containing pictures of people. The 85 representations of the characters' bodies - their physical on-screen presence, either alone or with other characters - become the base symbolic unit in a vid.

Bacon-Smith writes of the way these base units, composed of "glances, gestures, and postures that signal a focus on an equally engaged second figure" (Bacon-Smith,

1992:184), are made to "become symbolic when they are directed at only one or a few characters, designating relational discrimination. .. The significance is not necessarily in the generalized social meaning of the particular gesture, but in the degree of divergence from normal behavior the gesture represents in the character" (Bacon-Smith 1992:189).

Watching on the level of macro flow - relating each moment from an episode within the context of the larger arcs - means looking for narrative patterns (for meaning) as found within these smaller moments. The behaviours and actions of the actors on screen become a pattern: "out of the patterns of relations discovered in the macroflow, viewers develop a gestural code that may be read as tacit knowledge" and are then repeated in the aesthetic conventions of vidding (Bacon-Smith 1992:184). Within this schema, there are three ways in which televisual content is meaningful: through codes which are generally used in similar cultural representations (intrinsically meaningful), through codes which have been constructed for that series (patterned and subsequently meaningful, as macroflow), and through codes with meanings that speak beyond their context

(simultaneously patterned and meaningful). 86

Chapter 3: Narrative Transformations of Three Doctor Who Videos

3.1 Introduction

The following vids are different than the ones described by Jenkins, Bacon-Smith,

Coppa and Ng. Unlike their examples, these three Doctor Who vids draw on a limited number of appearances of the character of the Master from only three episodes, and

comment on the character's rise to power and ultimate defeat at the hands of the Doctor.

As I am mindful of the postmodern rejection of the possibility of a text containing a

single absolute meaning, I acknowledge that my interpretation of the meanings made by

these vids, and of the original episodes themselves, is by no means definitive, may differ

dramatically from another viewer's interpretation, and is influenced by my background

and training. It is also necessary to provide context for the three vids that form the basis

of my case study, as some familiarity with the motivations and histories of the characters,

as well as the laws governing this fictional universe, is required for a coherent description

of the translation of this narrative into vid form.

The episodes in question form the final narrative arc of the third season of the re­

launched Doctor Who television series. First aired in 1963, this British television series

(and extended universe, including novels and radio plays) follows the Doctor, an alien

who travels through space and time in his TARDIS (an inter dimensional craft), and is

usually accompanied by at least one human companion. The Doctor is from a slightly-

telepathic race known as the Time Lords, whose unique relationship with temporality

lead them to take on a custodial role in the universe's affairs. For Time Lords death is not 87 usually fatal, as they have to ability to "regenerate" into a new appearance. As John Paul

Green (2010) notes, the Doctor can be read as an example of "[Stuart] Hall's postmodern identity": the Doctor's "ability to regenerate in effect allows him to recreate himself (3) demonstrating no "fixed, essential or permanent identity [and is instead] historically, not biologically defined" (Hall 1992: 277, quoted in Green 2010). This is useful for continuing a character through many decades: the series presently has its eleventh actor

(Matt Smith) in the role. This also presents a unique challenge for describing the character of the Doctor, as his behaviour and motivations change with every actor and writing team as they join the franchise.

As can be expected with a science fiction/fantasy series spanning multiple decades, there are several recurring villains and villainous races: Cybermen and Daleks are two iconic examples. A third recurring villain is another Time Lord who calls himself the Master, a campily sociopathic megalomaniac who is obsessed with taking over the universe and torturing the Doctor. While Doctor usually prevails in their encounters, in "Logopolis" (1981) the Master (Anthony Ainley) managed to kill the

Doctor, who then regenerated (passing the role from Tom Baker to Peter Davison).

Despite being enemies, in the history of the series "the fellow renegades frequently find themselves in temporary alliance against a monster of the month and work together better than the Doctor's multiple incarnations in the various team-up stories"18 (Newman 2005:

76). The Master (Ainley, again) also appeared in the defence of the Doctor (now played

As a time-traveller, the Doctor frequently runs into himself. 88

by Colin Baker) during the fourteen-part "Trial of a Time Lord" (1986) series. While the usual narrative role of the Master is to act "as a front man for the various alien species

attempting to invade the Earth" (Chapman 2006: 80), the long history between the

characters makes the Master "the Professor Moriarty figure to the Doctor's Sherlock

Holmes: the two antagonists respect each other's intelligence and each professes a

grudging admiration for the other" (Chapman 2006: 81).

After a hiatus of sixteen years, the series returned in 2005 with a more American-

style format. The new series consists of self-contained episodes of forty-five minutes

rather than multi-part stories split into twenty-five minute segments. During the hiatus,

an off-screen Time War pitted the Daleks against the Time Lords, wiping out both

civilizations and leaving the Doctor as the only survivor (Newman 2005: 115). Aside

from providing an excuse for the series creators to distance their version of the show

from its previous run, this narrative element had the added benefit of giving the character

of the Doctor a slightly different motivation than his previous incarnations. Rather than

being an outcast member of an all-powerful race, the Doctor was now guilty of genocide

and became a true exile.

Despite teasing the implications of a dramatic Time War that supposedly left only

one survivor, Doctor Who's narrative tropes allow for the return of iconic villains; after

only five episodes, a Dalek returned, and the Master came back at the end of the third

season to once again menace the Earth. To make the Master's return fit within the

semiotic universe of Doctor Who, and to resurrect a character that was supposed to be

dead, an earlier story in the third season was used to set up the circumstances by which 89 the Master could remain hidden from the Doctor until the most dramatically advantageous moment, thus providing both the means for the Master's return and a credible reason for the Doctor not being aware of the other Time Lord's existence.

3.2 Background: Selections from the Semiotic Universe o/Doctor Who

The two-part episode "Human Nature'V'The Family of Blood" (UK airdates May

26, 2007 and June 2, 2007) required the Doctor to become biologically human in order to hide from profoundly evil pursuers. To do so, he encases his Time Lord nature in a pocket watch in order to keep it physically separate from himself. Although his physical appearance remains the same, the essence of his identity, personality, and memory are replaced by the guise of John Smith, an absent-minded schoolteacher living in 1913. In order for this process to be reversed at the end of the episode, the watch is opened and the

Doctor's Time Lord self is restored.

This plot device is used again at the very end of the later episode "Utopia" (UK airdate June 16, 2007) to explain how the Master could have been hiding for the length of a human lifetime without the Doctor being able to sense him, and to return to the Master his memories and Time Lord powers. "Utopia" takes place on a barren planet 100 trillion years in the future, where an elderly, absent-minded scientist named Professor Yana

(Derek Jacobi) is aiding the last humans in the universe to escape the dying world. The

Doctor (David Tennant), his human companion Martha Jones (Freema Agyeman), and their stowaway, past companion and accidental immortal Capt. Jack Harkness (John

Barrowman), help the kindly if scattered Professor Yana launch a rickety personnel 90 transport spaceship while fighting off the feral "Futurekind" that have taken over the planet. The episode's main plot is concerned with the Doctor and his companions

assisting in the repair of the spaceship's faulty launch technology, while the encroaching hordes of cannibalistic Futurekind attempt to gain access to the human compound. For most of the episode, Yana is troubled by lapses in concentration that appear to be the

effects of stress and age.

In the episode's final scenes, Martha discovers that Yana's pocket watch is

identical to the one that hid the Doctor's true nature in "Human Nature'V'The Family of

Blood"; therefore, another Time Lord may have survived the Time War, albeit with no memory of his past. Understanding that this explains Yana's increasingly erratic

behaviour, as it echoes that of the Doctor's temporarily-human John Smith persona,

Martha takes news of her discovery to the Doctor. After she leaves, Yana opens the watch and becomes the Master, who wastes no time in electrocuting his assistant and

disabling the base's defences to allow the Futurekind to attack. Before the assistant dies,

she shoots the Master and causes a wound of sufficient severity to enable his

regeneration. Martha and the Doctor arrive back at Yana's laboratory in time to witness

the Master's regeneration into a younger form (John Simm). Having been healed of his

injuries by the regeneration, the Master promptly steals the Doctor's TARDIS and strands

the heroes in an outpost now overrun by Futurekind.

"The Sound of Drums" (UK airdate June 23, 2007) and "Last of the Time Lords"

(UK airdate June 30, 2007), the two episodes that immediately follow "Utopia", form the

season finale wherein the Master creates the alias of a British politician in order to use 91

Earth as his base of operations in (yet another) bid for intergalactic supremacy. In "The

Sound of Drums", the Doctor, Martha and Capt. Jack travel back in time to twenty-first century Earth, where they discover that the Master has been active for some time in the guise of Harold Saxon, a businessman who has recently been elected Prime Minister of

Britain.19 The Doctor is most shocked to discover that the Master, living in the public eye as Saxon, now has a wife. Lucy Saxon (Alexandra Moen) has been aware of her husband's identity and ambition from the start of their relationship. Soon after taking office, the Master assassinates his cabinet. Still maintaining his charming Saxon persona, he holds a press conference to announce Earth's contact with friendly aliens: the

Toclafane, hovering spheres slightly larger than beach balls. Saxon also declares the

Doctor, Martha and Jack to be enemies of the state, in a narrative move entirely in line with the series' long-standing distrust for figures of authority (Chapman 2006: 81-82).

Martha's family is detained by government forces, and afterward the Master calls

Martha's cell phone to gloat about his evil plan. While in hiding the Doctor tells his companions about his history with the Master and wonders if the Time Lord practice of taking their children to stare into the Time Vortex is what caused the Master's insanity

(the usual outcome being inspiration to help rule the universe).

As the world waits for alien contact's appointed hour, the American President takes control of the event, which is taking place aboard the flying aircraft carrier

19 To clarify: Yana, the Master and Saxon are all iterations of the same character, in a role shared by two actors. In "Utopia", Jacobi plays both Yana and the Master, and Simm takes over the role at the very end of the episode. In the two following episodes, the Master operates in the public eye as Saxon, answers to "the Master" after taking over the world. The choice about which name to use at any given point in what follows will depend on which iteration is textually dominant, or which actor's performance is being noted. 92

Valiant.20 Once the Toclafane arrive asking for "the Master", Saxon accepts their fealty, orders the death of the American President and declares himself Earth's new leader. Prior to the assassination, the Doctor, Martha and Jack had snuck aboard Valiant in hopes of stopping the Master; however, the Master uses his laser screwdriver (a cousin to the

Doctor's own sonic screwdriver) to physically age the Doctor by a century. With the

Doctor incapacitated, Jack (temporarily) dead and Martha cowed by the threat of violence to her family, six billion Toclafane emerge through a rift opened by the stolen TARDIS, which has been converted into a Paradox Machine. Lucy looks on in adoration as the

Master turns on loud rock music,21 dances, and orders a decimation of the Earth's population. As the episode ends, Martha is given a secret mission by the Doctor and escapes back to the planet's surface.

In the third episode, "Last of the Time Lords", a year has passed since the

Master's takeover of Earth and the incarceration of the Doctor. Valiant has become the

Master's flying fortress and base of operations. The surviving population of Earth lives in fear of the Master and of the Toclafane, who seem to enjoy killing with as much as their leader. Martha rouses a global resistance, buoyed by the rumour she is collecting pieces of a weapon that will stop Time Lord regeneration and defeat the Master. Martha is caught and brought before the Master, who destroys the weapon but decides to keep

Martha alive in order to stage her death in front of the Doctor.

As in the old series (Chapman 2006: 82), the new Who takes place a few unspecified years in the future 21 "Voodoo Child" by The Rogue Traders, including the lyrics "Here it comes/ The sound of drums" 93

Once aboard the Valiant, Martha learns the Master has been keeping the artificially-elderly Doctor as a pet, Jack in chains, and her family as servants. In order to keep the Doctor docile and to humiliate his old rival, the Master further ages the Doctor to a shrunken, wizened creature: what the Doctor would look like if his physical form reflected his chronological age of (approximately) nine hundred years. The result is a weak, diminutive creature the Master keeps in a birdcage. In the background of many of these scenes, it is clear Lucy has become another of the Master's victims, as her body language and the bruises visible on her face suggest she has changed from the confident ally of a dictator to a victim of his abuse. As Martha is about to be killed by the Master, she reveals her true goal for the last year: not to gather pieces of the weapon but to convince the people of Earth to participate in mass "belief in order to restore the Doctor as a force equal to defeating the Master. The Doctor's youth and vitality are returned in a sequence that is part messianic and part Peter Pan, as the collected "psychic energy" of

Martha's contacts undo the physical damage done by the Master.22 Restored to his full power, the Doctor fights the Master in a sequence that includes a quick teleport down to the planet's surface, a standoff and the Master's surrender, and a teleport back up to the ship above. They return to Valiant just as the now-freed Jack breaks the Paradox

Machine, undoing the events of the past year. The Toclafane are immediately pulled back through the rift that had facilitated their arrival.

The Messianic overtones are at odds with the series' anti-authoritarian bent. Hills (2010) suggests this is one of the rebooted series' "textual connotations of mass popularity" (216), that diegetically reflect Doctor Who's recent transition from cult to mainstream hit, and hint at acceptable modes of fandom. 94

The material traces of the Master's rule - among them, industrial works and massive statues of the Master - vanish from the planet and the only people able to

remember what occurred are the ones who were on Valiant when the Paradox Machine was destroyed. As the survivors regroup from the Shockwaves of travelling back in time,

Lucy's year of abuse takes its toll and she shoots her husband; this echoes the end of

"Utopia" when the Master is shot by his assistant after he attacked her. The Master refuses to regenerate and dies. The Doctor mourns the passing of the only other being of his kind.23 The closing scenes of the episode include the shot of a woman's hand

removing the Master's ring from the ashes of his pyre.

S3 Case Study 1: The Master as Enthusiast

The first vid of my case study pairs the Master's story in these episodes with the

Queen song "Don't Stop Me", in a work called "Don't Stop Saxon" by the vidder

Charmax. The celebratory tone of the song helps this work respond to the Master's

enthusiasm for global annihilation. Of the three vids, this has the most coherent

narrative, in particular making sophisticated use of irony in the latter half of the vid. The

vid's overall effect is to comment on the Master's dedication to his plan for world

domination: the lyrics and the tone of the song remain upbeat and optimistic, but the

video clips generally follow the order they originally appeared in during the episodes.

This results in the link, near the end of the vid, of images of a defeated and cowed Master

23 John Simm returned as the Master in the two-part special "The End of Time" (UK airdates December 25, 2009 and January 1, 2010), but the events therein are beyond the scope of this project. 95 shown just as the lyrics finish the final repetition of the words, "I don't wanna stop at all".

While this is arguably true from the Master's perspective - defeat not being a desired outcome for an evil dictator - for the survival of Earth and of the universe, stopping the

Master is preferable. As the song winds to a close, its tone remains celebratory even as the vid moves from clips of the Master's death scene to a clip of an earlier flashback to a scene from the Master's childhood, intercut with the flames from his cremation. Edited to a different song, this sequence could be made to suggest the Master feels some measure of remorse for his actions and that he was experiencing regret or seeking forgiveness. As presented in "Don't Stop Saxon", however, the lyrics' jubilant tone persists and the resulting juxtaposition could suggest an absence of regret, remorse, or anything but the naive defiance of a sociopathic madman. The suggestion of the character's inner life justifies the vid's narrative focus on the Master even after the

Doctor has regained his heroic supremacy.

The most striking aspect of this vid is how the Doctor, the title character of the series, appears in only a few short segments. The companions, Jack and Martha, have even less screen time: the narrative of the vid belongs to Lucy and the Master. As previously mentioned, the vid tells the story of these three episodes from the Master's point of view, commencing just before Yana opens his pocket watch and releases the gold mist that turns him back into the Master and ending with his death. The efforts of the Doctor and his companions to thwart the Master are not a part of this vid and the characters only appear in moments where the Master has the upper hand. For example, through the final chorus the Doctor's return to youth and power (fed by the psychic 96

energy of believing humans) happens off-screen and we see only the Master's reaction to

this event. As the Master's companion andwife, Lucy has a stronger presence in this vid than she does in the episodes, and the absence of other characters creates a focus on the relationship between the couple. Her presence also provides context for the more overtly

lascivious lyrics.

The song's first-person narration is matched early on with close-up clips of Yana,

signaling the vidder's clear intention to craft a work reflecting the experience of this

character. The lyrics "I feel alive/ the world, it's turning inside out" speak perhaps of a

revelatory experience, of coming into one's true nature after a lifetime of feeling out of

place, and are matched to clips of Jacobi's character changing from the temporary,

camouflage identity of Yana to that of the powerful alien Master. While the vid's

audience would presumably already be familiar with what is about to happen, the line

"the world, it's turning inside out" becomes the Master's own insane declaration of purpose: to set in motion a long-term plan to strike a final blow at the Doctor as he sets

out to steal the Doctor's TARDIS. In the episodes, as in the vid, this moment signals the villain's ascent into power. The Master now controls the Doctor's home, transportation,

and seat of power, tidily "turning inside out" the Doctor's usual role in the diegesis as near-omniscient being and protector of Earth and removing an iconic extra-diegetic

signifier of the series from the Doctor's power.

This narrative dominance is continually reinforced throughout the vid, and emphatically so as the first image of the now-youthful, regenerated Master is paired with the lyrics "I'm a shooting star". In this segment, a short sequence of clips showing the 97 back of the regenerated Master (still dressed in Yana's clothing) gives way to a shot of his face just as the word "star" is sung, indicating the Master's intention to capitalize on celebrity culture in his plan as well as the character's cartoonish flamboyance. The association with the Master's youthful vitality is clear, especially in contrast to the

Doctor's greatly-aged form later in the narrative. Within the same verse, the Master completes his theft of the TARDIS and dematerializes after giving the Doctor a childish,

finger-waggling wave (under the lyrics "I'm gonna go go go/ There's no stopping me").

This physical expressiveness is quite usual for the Master, as he is seen singing and

dancing, barely containing a great deal of nervous energy in many parts of this vid. The

song's guitar solo is matched, in part, with several instances where the Master gleefully

wheels an aged Doctor around Valiant's main deck. This maniacal good humour strongly

suggests the Master is enjoying his role as supreme ruler of Earth and, in this context, the repetition of the phrase "don't stop me" throughout this vid begins to sound like a child begging for an extra half-hour before bedtime. As the overall tone of the vid is humourous, the vidder makes the Master agree with the vid's analytical assessment of his

excesses: the Master is seen giving an exaggerated double-nod under the lyric "I'm out of

control".

Vids take the "open-ness" of a series of moving images and suggest a way in which aspects of that visual text could be slightly closed: in Barthes's terms, captioning is used to direct the interpretation of the images. With vids, however, the images themselves are not stripped of meaning before they are reused in a vid. It is the open­ ness of Doctor Who that enables it to be linked to an additional series of associations 98 from the lyrics of "Don't Stop Me", which then collapse slightly into a comprehensible argument laid out by the vidder. The repetition of "Don't stop me now / I'm having such a good time" in the song means that in the vid those particular words are made to caption several moments in the narration, with each repetition of the lyrics adding another layer of meaning to each subsequent juxtaposition. This semiotic density is revealed in the challenge posed by describing the boundaries of any given vid. In each instance, the

Master is made to demand that his opponents permit him to continue, but as there is no repetition in the clips used with each chorus, each demand is made in reference to a different moment in the narrative.

The Master becomes harder to stop with each step, and the song lyrics help him celebrate this fact. The first appearance of "So, don't stop me now / Don't stop me" is matched with the finale of "Utopia", in the moments between the restoration of the

Master's identity and his regeneration. On "don't", the Doctor and Jack are shown rushing to the locked lab door. On "stop me now", we see the Master shot by his assistant, and reacting in pain. When the phrase is repeated, the sequence includes a close up of Jack smashing the door's lock, then of the Doctor and Jack rushing to where the Master has entered the TARDIS. These are a few of several clips used to emphasize each failed attempt to stop the escaping Master. The next appearance of the lines, at the first chorus, establishes the Master's textual power in his Saxon persona. While the lyrics again crow "Don't stop me!" we see his use of his authority as Prime Minister to plant a pipe bomb in Martha's apartment (one that the Doctor and his companions narrowly escape), and to aggressively detain Martha's family. The Doctor and his companions 99 could not stop this abuse of power or the threat to their lives. Next, the line is chanted during the song's bridge and this is illustrated with the invasion of the Toclafane, providing the visual proof of the extent of the Master's martial power. During the last chorus, the clips from the end of "Last of the Time Lords" showing the Master's defeat are intercut with clips from earlier in the narrative, including three separate shots of the

Master laughing that have been edited together. In the end, the Master's flight from

Valiant's boardroom is finally thwarted by Jack stopping him at the door.

The Queen song used in this vid is indiscriminately hyper-sexualized; the lyrics suggest celebratory sexual adventures with both men and women and the desire to continue this activity as long as possible. While through most of the song the lyrics could be interpreted as describing the singer's enthusiastic anticipation of any number of hypothetical tasks, the section that directly follows the first chorus ("I am a sex machine ready to reload/ Like an atom bomb about to/ Oh oh oh oh oh explode") strongly indicates that reading the song as carnally-focused is appropriate. When paired with the vid, however, the association with clips from a show marketed as family entertainment in a somewhat literal manner defuses the sexual overtones to the lyrical content. The lines

"gonna go go go/There's no stopping me" are made to caption the Master's physical movement and not to connote a sexual conquest. The Master's association with Lucy aside, much of the vid relies on the ironic juxtaposition of amusing metaphors for seeking a sexual partner (based mostly in metaphors for space travel) with images of the Master's totalitarian police state. One of the repetitions of "Don't stop me now (Yes I'm having a good time)" is paired with the Master and Lucy giggling together after trapping and 100 murdering an investigative reporter. Rather than indicating arousal, this example of captioning suggests instead that the pair are reacting more like naughty children who are playing.

3.4 Case Study 2: The Master as Rapper

The second vid of this study is a work called "Mother Flippin'", edited by Fahrbot

Drusilla, which uses the song "Hiphopopotamus Vs. Rhymenoceros" from the comedy duo Flight of the Conchords. This vid may not be the most sophisticated example of the form, but it does present a re-casting and connotative layering of the Master's character that raises interesting questions and enables an analysis of the original text based on what is highlighted in the vid. The song is a parody of the rap style, complete with stage personas and misogynist lyrics. The rapid pace of the lyrics means that the job of editing the vid to match specific lines leaves a lot of rapid cuts, not all of which lead to logical connections between clips (other than the ruling logic provided by the song). Unlike the previous vid, this one includes a greater proportion of clips of characters other than the

Master. While still clearly from his point of view, the perspective is not quite as tightly restricted. Flight of the Conchords are a pair of white New Zealanders who are "rapping" in a vid that draws from a show with a mostly-white cast. While the cutesy faux profanity of "mother flippin'" and child's picture book-style rap names help to emphasize the song's distance from urban culture, the conscious parody of such a well-known subculture does bring to the fore an implicit question about race. Martha and her sister 101

Tish are the two lone characters of colour in the vid, and their inclusion helps to underscore the otherwise uniformly-white casting choice of the episodes.24

My purpose here is not to characterize the song as a racially-charged parody, but merely to point out that the awareness of race within this context leads to looking for how race is represented in the rest of the vid and in the source episodes. The question of racial representation in the vid and the location of power within this semiotic universe are particularly interesting when considering the previous presentations of the Master. John

Paul Green notes that, "The Master is coded as foreign on several levels - firstly like the

Doctor, his alien-ness can be seen as viewed as the foreign other, but secondly, actor

Roger Delgado (who was born to a Spanish father and French mother [and first actor to play this character]) had had a reputation for portraying non-British villains on British television shows" (Green 2010: n21). Subsequent actors to take on the role continued this "pantomime villain" (Chapman 2006: 144) coding of the character and throughout the 1970s and 80s "the bearded, Nehru-jacketed Master. ..relishe[d] teaming up with various alien or Earthly invaders" (Newman 2005: 76). The Master's historical presentation as a foreign other is greatly diminished in the episodes as the Master is here played by a clean-shaven, fair-haired actor, who has put aside his typical costume in favour of the inconspicuous and professional suit and tie in order to look the part of a human politician. Within the vids, the markers of alien-ness (meaning both "not British" as well as "not human") are entirely missing from this Master. As a white heterosexual

The characters' parents and brother appear in the episodes, but not in this particular vid. male with a blonde wife who typifies an idealized version of feminine beauty, this

version of the Master is the precise representation of normative white patriarchal power

and privilege. The textual joke of "being too white to rap" from the song finds a sound

reflection in the Master's upper-middle class appearance. The semiotic markers of the

dangerous foreigner are replaced by a threat of dominant heteronormativity.

The song allows the vid to parody the rap genre's sexist conventions. The

following lyrics are matched with shots of the Master flirting with female characters:

My rhymes are so potent that in this small segment

I made all of the ladies in the area pregnant

Yes, sometimes my lyrics are sexist

But you lovely bitches and hos should know I'm trying to correct this.

This section is also the first close-up of Martha in the vid, at just over halfway through

the piece. The first section, "My rhymes... pregnant" contains mostly confused reaction

shots of female characters. Where their expressions of horror and disgust are originally

in reaction to watching the Master's plan unfold, within the context of the vid their

disturbed faces become a reaction to the thought of being impregnated by this obnoxious jerk. With the second section of this stanza, "Yes, sometimes... correct this", the focus

of the vid slips to Lucy. While the Master is still the primary subject of the vid, in this

shot the focus is on Lucy, whose lighting and position within the frame makes it very

easy to see her black eye, presumably from the Master's abuse. The vid's collection of

"bitches and hos" is limited to Martha's sister Tish in close-up intercut with a moment

from "Last of the Time Lords" with Lucy struggling to help her husband into his jacket. Here, the lyrics do not quite fit within the meter of the line, and the vocalist's struggle to complete the sentence within the measure captions Lucy's struggle to complete her appointed task in an unobtrusive manner. Where in "The Sound of Drums" Lucy was the

Master's knowing accomplice and spouse, in this clip her manner suggests she is performing the duty of a maid.

The Master is made to take on the identities of both Rhymenoceros and

Hiphopopotamus over the course of the song. Jenkins (1992) argues that, "fan criticism assigns motives and psychological explanations for this on-screen conduct; fan videos can take this one step further, linking surface images with music that speaks from an emotional depth, putting into words what characters feel and cannot say" (236). In this case, the Master's hidden emotional depth is made to play out in a rap battle with the

Doctor. In the song, the Hiphopopotamus refutes misinformation about himself that he guesses was spread by someone named Steve ("Did Steve tell you that, perchance?

[pause] STEVE"). The clips paired with the first part of this line are taken from the scene where the Doctor tells Martha and Jack the story of his childhood with the Master.

The second mention of the name Steve is matched with close-up shots of the Doctor looking serious and grim and other clips used in this sequence include a shot of the

Master's exaggerated frown and another of him making "blah blah blah" hands to augment the dismissive tone of the vocal line. While looking for emotional depth in the

Steve joke could be stretching the analysis beyond what is present in the work, this sequence could be read as an alternate version of a conversation that the Master could have with Martha and Jack to refute the Doctor's version of events. This vid also plays with the idea of a rap persona as it relates to the Master's use of the Saxon fa9ade through the comically literal juxtaposition of lyrics such as in the following verse:

My rhymes and records they don't get played

Because my records and rhymes they don't get made

And if you rap like me you don't get paid

And if you roll like me you don't get laid.

The double meaning to the lyrics refer on one level to the self-aggrandizing claims found in boastful raps, but the final line supports a level of meaning where the lack of recordings is not attributable to contents too explicit, inflammatory, or radical to please a record executive. Instead, what had started as a statement of danger becomes the admission of failure because one would presume that the element of danger associated with being an edgy rapper would translate to greater interpersonal success.

Just as with "Don't Stop Saxon", by using a song with the line "And if you roll like me you don't get laid", the vid draws a connection between world domination and sexual prowess. Significantly, there is the foiling of both aims in the vid "Mother

Flippin'" as the un-doing of the Master's works is paired with the enumeration of the

failures of an unsuccessful artist, and of the failure of boastful masculinity, which then leads into a clip of Lucy firing her gun and the aftermath. While "...don't get made" and

"...don't get played" are heard, the vid shows clips of the disappearances of the immense statue and factory works that had been constructed during his reign. The end of Lucy's relationship to the Master/Saxon, as wife to the man and companion to the Time Lord, is 105 both the denial of a continuing sexual relationship ("you don't get laid") and the final act of the Master's erasure from the continuing narrative.

As it is applied in the vid, the term "mother flippin'" appears to be mostly synonymous with any empty phrase indicating the emphasis of exceptional social status and prestige. Unlike the previous vid, which ends in congruence with the episodes, this work includes shots of the Master's death, but ends with a sequence of clips showing the

Master at the height of his powers. Rap/hip hop is a form associated with youth and with expressive stylized dancing/movement. The Master's proclivity to dance to diegetic rock and pop provides several clips to support this editing. His exaggerated physicality recalls previous characterizations of the Master as a stylized and "glower ingly evil" (Newman

2005:77) pantomime villain, which offers sufficiently broad source material to match an equally-arch, stylized parody. Similarly parodic is the section of the vid that begins with the lyrics, "They call me the Hiphopopotamus/ My lyrics are bottomless." Immediately following this, there is an extended section with no lyrics (part of the joke of the parody), but in the vid this lyric-less section is paired with a collection of Saxon's election posters that had been peppered throughout the season, and from the spin-off series Torchwood.

The lyrical silence is made to reference the Master's method of gaining power via subliminal mind control. Before mounting his election campaign, Saxon's business interests involved developing a communications satellite network that allowed him to put in place the technology necessary for him to direct the opinions of the voting public.

This sequence perhaps also represents a replication of the episodes' more general comment on the empty interchangeability of contemporary political messaging. 3.5 Case Study 3: The Master as Predator

This final vid, also by Fahrbot Drusilla, uses the song "Wasted" from the industrial/metal band And One to take a more serious look at the episodes' darker themes.

Where "Don't Stop Saxon" described the Master's delight in his role as dictator and

"Mother Flippin'" made the Master into a rap artist, this example represents a looser subjectivity that allows for the vidder's analysis of the uniformly-negative impact the

Master has on other characters. The darker sound to the song, and the far less playful lyrics, react to the source episodes' apocalypse/invasion narrative more than the other two examples, which only have time for the Master's perspective. While the vid is still about the Master, it is the Master as seen through other characters' eyes. Unlike the other two vids, this example uses only a part of the song, a two-minute truncation taken from the middle of the full song.

The beginning of "Wasted" focuses on Lucy, where the lines "She wants a change in her human life / And she puts herself under the cutting knife" are matched with images of Lucy from "The Sound of Drums" and quick intercut flashes of the Toclafane invasion. The literal lyrical reference is possibly to plastic surgery and physical transformation,25 but the association made here is the metaphorical change in life as the line is paired with clips of Lucy just after becoming First Lady. The intercut sections of the Toclafane and the lyrical match to lines indicating agency ("she wants" is repeated and "she puts herself implies a willing choice) suggests that Lucy's association with the

The plastic surgery link has resonance in the physical transformations of the Master and the Doctor. 107

Master is consensual. The link is made between the election of Saxon as Prime Minister, and the Master's creation of the Paradox Machine that enables the alien invasion. "[T]he cutting knife" of the lyrics refers to both the danger posed by the Master's plan for world domination and the personal danger posed by the man himself. Accordingly, the next lines, "She wants the look and feel of an angel / Even if it means a deal with the devil" are matched with shots of Lucy with her husband; the former paired with their kiss during the broadcast of the election results whereas the latter line is paired with the couples' reaction shots during the murder of the investigative reporter.

Immediately after this opening, the lyrics shift from a third person voice to a first person narration, returning the focus of the lyrics from Lucy to the Master. The vid then continues to tell the story from his perspective. As in the previous vids (even though two characters are heard in "Mother Flippin'"), the "I" of the song is the Master. The effect in this case is that Lucy's opening stanza is not told by her, but is rather told on her behalf. The first chorus resembles the thematic elements of "Don't Stop Saxon", with the lyrics "Get out of my way... get out, get out" reflecting the Master's single-minded drive to see his plan successfully carried out. This section's clips include the Master's assassination of Saxon's cabinet members and two other instances of the Master removing a threat to his power, namely the deaths of the reporter and of the President. In both cases the narrator of each song admits to having lost control - contrast "I'm totally wasted" to the direct "I'm out of control" from "Don't Stop Me". With this first chorus, both appearances of the word "wasted" are accompanied by the Master appearing to agree with the lyrics' estimation. On the first mention he gives a thumbs-up to the camera and, on the second, he slides in to frame with his arms raised, a clip taken from when the Master says "Tah daaaah!" in the episode. This reinforces the Master's

ownership of the first-person perspective heard in the lyrics. It also reframes specific

shots used in the other two vids, but in this case in a more serious context. Where in

"Mother Flippin"' and "Don't Stop Saxon" they are framed as silly/playful behaviour, in this one the gestures are made to indicate the kind of behaviour expected of a

dangerously unbalanced madman and to connote the expectation of Saxon as a character

who finds joy in the suffering of others.

One of the many shots this vid shares with the others is of Martha and Saxon

facing forward and tipping their heads to the side in unison. Martha is in the foreground,

and is in focus, while the Master is behind and to her left, and is slightly out of focus. In

"Mother Flippin'" this shot is timed for comedy and highlights his mockery of her

through mimicry. In "Wasted", more of the original shot is used in order to make it

easier to notice that Martha is crying. In its original context that shot is also a reaction

shot; "Wasted" shows us what the pair is looking at (Martha's family held hostage) whereas "Mother Flippin'" does not.

Another element that differentiates this vid from the other two is that it is not a piece with overall narrative coherence, instead relying on a one-to-one correlative connotation where image and word are linked to create a temporary meaning. This is the

expression of Barthes's captioning as a connotative vice; with each section, a new character is shown and the paired lyrics become most meaningful to the character at that moment within the source narrative. For example, the line "I hear screams of thousand 109 virgins" is paired with clips of the Toclafane, suggesting their relative innocence (the ship of humans from "Utopia" was mutated by the Master into the Toclafane). Likewise, the line "I see the dreams of mighty surgeons" is paired first with the Doctor (an obvious match playing on the character's name), and the line's repetition is matched to Martha, who had left her training as a medical doctor to travel with the Doctor. These lines are of more significance to the momentary and specific association under which they are presented; it is only the Toclafane who are virginal and innocent, and only the Doctor and

Martha who are allowed to be mighty. It is worth noting that in both cases the Master maintains his omniscience: he can hear the Toclafane, and he can see Martha and the

Doctor's "dreams", which here mean plans of rebellion and resistance.

3.6 Common Emerging Themes

Four strong, interconnected themes present in the vids circulate around the representations of power, technology, gender and age. A fifth aspect, the representation of race, appears more on the level of subtext, as the main narrative of the episodes do not address this issue as strongly as the others. As the vids themselves are a reiteration of the episodes, albeit from the Master's point of view, the episodes' main themes are all present in the vids and, therefore, form a prominent part of the vids' analysis. The relative complexity of the source narrative, and its reliance on physical form as a marker of identity, makes it an excellent example when discussing the idea of re-narrativization in vidding. The viewer's familiarity of conventions and codes at play in the source universe are vital to decoding the sequence of potentially incomprehensible images presented in 110 each vid. In the case of these Doctor Who vids, their reinforcement of the canon narrative and characterization consequently reinforces the power dynamics at play in the source episodes.

Barthes suggests the only way to resist a hegemonic myth, a set of naturalized assumptions, is to create a new myth to replace the first, harmful myth. Vidding provides an interesting answer to that challenge, where the signs and symbols which constitute that myth are reshuffled in such a way as to help question the myth's original presentation. I must emphasize that vidding is not simply the re-editing of clips; the song used to provide the aural captioning is essential for any vid's comprehensibility. Ng (2008) argued that vidding a textually-lesbian couple from All My Children was a way to create a more satisfying narrative conclusion to an unfulfilling mainstream representation of queer couples, but does not appear to put much stock in the use and value of the songs used by the vidders in their study to guide her interpretation. Coppa (2008) found proto- vidding in Star Trek fandom to be an articulation of another kind of textual insufficiency, that of the absence of a strong female character (Number One) who was written out of the series for its second pilot episode. As discursive tools that rely on the active interrelation of images, lyrics, and the viewer's own hermeneutic engagement, vids can operate as an analytic statement which reacts to a dominant narrative's treatment of the range of possible subject positions (indicated by class, race, gender, and all possible iterations of that matrix) and that narrative's basis in a straight, white, middle-class subjectivity. In order to perform that reaction, to fill in a semiotic gap, the vids must use the elements Ill

(clips) that compose the source; vids must carry the connotations of the source into their secondary presentation.

By repeating the narrative, and by creating a secondary discourse that contains a significant degree of fidelity to the source material (versus a fundamental alteration to the character), vids allow for a re-examination of that primary source narrative as it was originally presented, providing rich analytical ground without asking for a dramatic reconsideration of the material itself. What vids can do is transmit some of these multiple readings and interpretations back to the source text and add interpretive complexity to the original narrative. As a discursive tool, a vid can remain in conversation with the source text as there is a constant feedback loop of the viewer's recognition of each clip's place and meaning within the macroflow, or overall series canon. The most striking example of this phenomenon in this case is that the use of the Master's point of view in the vids highlights the textual oddity of giving over so much of the narrative to its antagonist.

Power

In these vids, the Doctor is reunited with a long-standing nemesis who is also the only other one of his kind in existence. In their previous encounters, the Doctor prevails against the Master's machinations and meets the expectations of a titular character's role

in the narrative. One of the significant differences in the reboot of the series after its own regeneration is a stronger identification of the Doctor as a recognizable hero figure

(Green 2010, Hills 2010). Episodes such as these, echoing the classic Who story

"Castrovalva", are ones where the normal balance of power is inverted and the Master (as 112 villain) has ultimate power over the Doctor (as hero). In both cases, the Doctor is not able to rescue himself and instead must rely on his human companion's power of persuasion to secure the means of his escape.

The three vids highlight the episodes' inversion of normal power relations. The narrative upset of the Master's temporary supremacy and world-domination is reinforced not just by the Doctor's incarceration, but by the fact that the Master is far more charismatic, dynamic and energetic than the Doctor. It is not simply that the Master is dominant; it is that he asserts his dominance with great expressive style. Early in "Last of the Time Lords", for example, the Master pushes the feeble, aged Doctor around the bridge/boardroom of Valiant in a wheeled office chair, all the while serenading him with

"I Can't Decide" by Scissor Sisters, singing along with "I can't decide / Whether you should live or die". (It should be noted that subtlety is not one of the Master's strong points.) This celebration of his supremacy keeps the plot point present, and also provides dynamic, kinetic, visually exciting physicality that is the opposite of the Doctor's forced inactivity. In the narrative, the Doctor loses social power and control, as demonstrated in all three vids by the inclusion of several clips of the aged, frail Doctor at the mercy of the

Master. This inclusion is to be expected, considering the Doctor is the show's titular character; however, in the push to maintain congruence with the source narrative, the way each of the vids tells the story from the Master's point of view further marginalizes the

Doctor.

Of the three vids, both "Don't Stop Saxon" and "Mother Flippin'" end with a shot of the Master, though in neither case is this a shot of the Master in his full power. In fact, 113

the vid with the tightest focus on the Master's personal narrative is the one that ends with

a moderate restoration of the normal power balance, with the Master no longer dominant.

In "Don't Stop Saxon", the final shot of the vid is of an extreme close-up of the Master as

a child: as the Doctor tells it in "The Sound of Drums", this is the moment in the Master's

young life where he went insane. This sequence is intercut with dissolve/superimposition

of the Master's cremation, meaning that while the final image of the vid is of the Master,

the sequence is composed of moments when the character was far from being in control.

Similarly, "Mother Flipplin'" ends on an ambiguous note, with a shot of the Master seen

from behind, arms raised triumphantly over his head. There are many shots that could have been used showing the Master making a similarly jubilant gesture, but the choice to

use this shot is perhaps more interesting. In the narrative of the vid, where the Master's

long-standing feud with the Doctor is characterized as a rap battle, this final shot is used

to mimic a back-stage shot, as if the Master is acknowledging a crowd of fans. While the

Master's only fan is himself (which is also consistent with the lyrics of the song), the vid

allows this elaboration of the rap schtick so that the Master can end this narrative at a

high point, despite previously showing the Master's death.

The end of "Wasted", on the other hand, ends on a two-shot of the Doctor and

Lucy. The three-shot of the Master and Lucy supporting an aged and distraught Doctor

between themselves as they look down upon the Earth zooms and reframes to exclude the

Master from the shot, which would usually indicate that power lies with the pair still in

the shot. Instead, the captioning from the lyrics, "I'm everything for you" maintains the

Master's position of power; the first person narration from the song can be (as mentioned) 114 taken as the Master's subject position, therefore in this clip the Master is still asserting his dominance (as spouse, nemesis, jailor, etc.) over the pair still in frame.

Technology

Equally prominent in the episodes is the presence of sophisticated technology.

The narrative considers the extreme level of power enabled by controlling advanced technology and this is seen through the vids. The iconic alien technology of Doctor Who, the blue police-box TARDIS and the sonic screwdriver, is largely absent from these vids.

With both examples, the Master subverts these usual signifiers of the Doctor's technological supremacy. The dirty, material, mechanical corruption of the TARDIS into the Paradox Machine is briefly shown in "Mother Flippin'". The Doctor's super alien multitool, his sonic screwdriver, is trumped by the Master's laser screwdriver, which was modified to facilitate the rapid ageing of the Doctor. The source episodes' narrative removes these devices from the Doctor's control and their exclusion from the vids further reduces their textual presence.

Also not represented in the vids are the moments in the episodes where Martha's low-tech method of insurrection, instructing the people of earth to direct their "psychic energy" to the Doctor, becomes the only way to restore the Doctor, allowing him to defeat the Master. Instead, the vids present a semiotic universe rich in advanced technology, and in particular, advanced communication technology. In "Don't Stop

Saxon", for example, one of the repetitions of the lyric "Don't stop me now/ 'Cause I'm having a good time" takes the lyrical cue from "Give me a call" and uses a series of quick 115 cuts to establish that the Master is using communications technology to track the heroes.

The way in which the Master uses Britain's extensive CCTV network to track the Doctor and his companions is a comment on contemporary UK surveillance culture and, in the vids, reminds the viewer of the extent of the Master's power and control as a dominant force in both business and in politics. All three vids also include the image of Saxon's face in close-up on a television screen immediately after being made Prime Minister.

This mediated communication establishes Saxon as a larger-than-life political figure and connects to the Master's use of global television broadcasts to announce his rise to power.

This social power is wholly dependant on the Master's material control of mechanical devices: he can target the Doctor's position through cell phone location data and the CCTV network; he incapacitates the Doctor and kills Jack using his laser screwdriver; and he uses the cyborg Toclafane as lethal soldier-drones who answer only to him. This distance means that although the Master is a murderer many times over, he does not, as such, get his hands dirty. All three vids include clips from the scene in "The

Sound of Drums" where the investigative reporter brings her concerns about Saxon to

Lucy, hoping to save Lucy from her husband. While the reporter assumes that Lucy knows nothing of Saxon's shaky cover story, Lucy reveals that she "knows everything" and waits with her husband in the next room as the Toclafane obey his command to murder the reporter. The Master orders the reporter's death, but does not lay a hand on her. The Toclafane echo discourses of paranoia surrounding cyborg technology, as they are "mutated human faces inside machine-like, spherical cases" (Hills 2010: 129) who 116

are perhaps even more insane than the Master and share his delight in killing. "Don't

Stop Saxon" defuses some of this anxiety by a pun about the Toclafane's spherical shape,

matching the line "I'm having a ball" to a clip where the creatures appear out of thin air,

hovering over the Master's shoulder. At this narrative moment the Master is indeed

enjoying his rise to power; he possesses more than one spheroid minion as well as the

personal audacity and drive to carry out his plan.

As Saxon, the Master developed and promoted the Archangel network of

telecommunications satellites and integrated mobile technology, which allowed him to

institute a form of mind control affecting Earth's population (in particular, to convince

Britain's voting public to elect him) and to hide his presence from the Doctor, who would

otherwise have been able to detect him. The side-effect of Archangel's control is that it

causes those affected to unconsciously tap out a particular drum beat - a kind of psychic

earworm26 - that plagues the Master. All three vids match the clip of the Master tapping out this beat after he assassinates his cabinet members.

Gender, race and sexuality

Another theme these vids highlight is Doctor Who's presumption that power is held by white, heterosexual men. The restricted subjectivity of "Don't Stop Saxon", with very few shots of characters other than the Master, serves to reinforce and naturalize a semiotic universe that allows power to be obtained by someone of the Master's

According to the episode's commentary track, this is the same beat fromth e show's original theme tune. 117 demographic. Even though the balance of power is weighted towards the villain rather than the hero, when considering the gender, race and sexuality of these two characters, the difference between the Master and the Doctor is slight. Both characters are even costumed in business suits, a further signifier of power and privilege. "Don't Stop

Saxon" offers only brief glimpses of other characters, though these other clips are paired with the chorus. Thus, when seen, the other characters are commanded to "Don't stop" the Master, limiting their agency within the vid's narrative. In "Mother Flippin'" the

Doctor is not only shown aged, but is feminized when clips of the Master wheeling around his nemesis are paired to the verse about drinking tea with one's grandmother.

Not only is this a benign, atypical activity for a standard rap persona, it removes the usual signifiers of power and privilege associated with the (male, mature adult) Doctor and instead connotes maternal docility. This connotation is aided by the diegetic appearance of a cup of tea served to the Master that he rejects. In "Mother Flippin'" this specific clip is paired with the line "drinking a cup of tea", additionally hinting that becoming enraged about a bad cup of tea is a "street" thing to do.

While "Don't Stop Saxon" contains few characters other than the Master, Martha and Lucy are given a more prominent role in "Mother Flippin'" and "Wasted". Another detail shared between the Master and the Doctor is that they have women as companions;

Green (2010) notes that in the classic series "the companions were explicitly placed as inferior to the Doctor, both on an intellectual and physical level, thus rendering both male and female companions as foils to the Doctor's hero" (7). In the vids, Lucy and Martha are shown as equally subservient to their Time Lords. While "Last of the Time Lords" 118 devotes a considerable amount of its plot to following Martha on her global quest to save the Doctor, the vids maintain their focus on the Master and include Martha only when the

Master or the Doctor is in frame. Her agency as it relates to her textual position as the one who brought down the Master's dictatorship is ignored in favour of clips where the

Master is exercising his power over her - such as through a pipe bomb in her apartment, seen in "Don't Stop Saxon", or his arrest of her family, seen in "Mother Flippin'" and

"Wasted" - or when she is carrying out the Doctor's orders. Despite her significance to the source narrative, she does not play the same kind of role in the vids.

Jack, the Doctor's other companion in these episodes, is both queer and an accidental immortal. Despite being both white and male, as well as being the main character of his own spin-off series Torchwood (BBC Wales, 2006 - present), he is relegated to the status of companion in this narrative. All three vids include the clip of

Jack's temporary death (courtesy the Master's laser screwdriver) in "The Sound of

Drums", but nothing else that is not immediately related to events taking place from the

Master's limited subjectivity.

In the vids, Lucy's transition from trophy wife and accomplice to abuse victim is represented in different ways, with each vidder setting aside a stanza of their song to address their main character's spouse. "Don't Stop Saxon", specifically the verse ending

"I'll make a supersonic woman of you", contains many clips of the Master and Lucy together. They embrace, dance, appear in public together as Mr. and Mrs. Saxon, and represent a stereotype of a successful (male) public figure and his beautiful, biddable and silent wife. Lyrically, the woman who is to be made supersonic is confronted with 119

someone who also claims to be "moving at the speed of light"; the rapid editing of this

section emphasizes Lucy's inability to escape from the Master as her partnership in their

dance is less than fully willing. The Master maintains control of their encounters in the

clips which make up this section and her subjectivity is not explored. Instead, the focus

is on the Master's exuberance and excitement as he celebrates the ongoing success of his

plan. "Mother Flippin'" takes a more directly serious line by matching the song's

discussion of sexist language to the close-up shot of Lucy's bruised face from "Last of

the Time Lords", thereby acknowledging through the audio captioning a narrative detail

that is not explicitly acknowledged in the episode itself.

With "Wasted", as mentioned, the focus on the Master moves briefly to Lucy,

using many clips of her, and suggests that her attraction to the Master is a response to

wanting, as the paired lyrics say, "a change in her human life... even if it means a deal

with the devil". This verse, as paired with many clips of Lucy in her diegetic role as First

Lady, argues that her association with the Master was her own choice. In "The Sound of

Drums", she states that she knows his true identity is not Harold Saxon and this

knowledge, paired with the lyrics claiming agency ("she wants", repeating), implies that her subsequent domestic abuse could be her responsibility. That said, given the Master's

own diegetic admission of the (technologically-enabled) capacity for mind control, her

ability to give consent to be the Master's companion and partner is dubious. All three

vids include clips of Lucy shooting the Master. This is both necessary to maintain a

narrative coherence within the vid itself and in the context of the source episodes. It also

carries forth into the vid the episodes' perpetuation of the woman-as-victim trope. 120

Lucy's moment of empowerment comes as she attacks her attacker, moving from her own victimization to retaliate against the Master's abuse. As seen at the end of "Don't

Stop Saxon", though, the Doctor's feelings on the matter are given more weight than exploring Lucy's (or Martha's, for that matter) year of trauma.

Martha and her family are the only black characters in the episodes. Even though

Martha is the more active character in the narrative of these episodes, Lucy has a stronger presence in the vids. The vid that most directly addresses the racial subtext, "Mother

Flippin'", does not make that subtext immediately explicit and certainly not in the way the slash vids described by Jenkins (1992) and Bacon-Smith (1992) perform an overtly queer reading of the text. The primary purpose of this particular vid follows the purpose of the song that it employs; it is a humour piece that playfully - and knowingly - adopts codes and conventions from the rap style in a manner that emphasizes the rappers' distance from the vast majority of major-label rap artists, both historically active and presently recording. The focus is on the presence of whiteness rather than the absence of blackness, as the subtext of the song itself fills in the missing caveats and explanations.

When applied to the Master and when dealing with a text that has a black character, the absence of diverse subjectivity becomes more striking.

Age

With regards to the presentation of age in the episodes, the appearance of regeneration, transformation and death (as aspects of a Time Lord's unusually lengthy and linearly chronological lifetime) do also play an important role in the episodes and the 121 vids. This is significant to the textual location of power within the episodes and is articulated with greater clarity and concision in the vids themselves, as the vids do not spend time with characters and subplots that are ancillary to the central point. Old age is plainly aligned with inactivity, as the physical vitality of the childlike Master dominates the aged Doctor. Old age is the prison and the punishment forced upon the Doctor, and this form of incarceration is reinforced by the vids: where other characters imprisoned on

Valiant are under armed guard, it is the punishment of age that is repeated by the vids.

The Master's greatest power comes after he regenerates into a younger form; were he not severely wounded, the character could have continued in Yana's form without regenerating (or recasting). What the vids help to highlight is that the world of Doctor

Who equates youthfulness and vitality with power and influence. Even though both the

Master and the Doctor are of a considerable age (being several centuries old), the actors playing these characters are in their thirties. The Master, as we see him, ages backwards, regenerating into a much younger body after naturally growing to old age as the human

Professor Yana. The Doctor is made to confront the chronological actuality of his existence and forced to experience at a greatly accelerated pace a physical transformation that regeneration helps him avoid. Even though the Doctor has his age advanced twice in the episodes, the more elderly version is not shown in the vids, as they prefer to show the more human-looking version of the aged Doctor. 122

Conclusion

Fan audiences are not directly creative: they work in re-creations, not the generation of primary source material. The large-scale media production and distribution offered by the few major corporations that dominate popular North American media have the means to create and have traditionally expected their audiences to be content to remain passive consumers. Unfortunately for these media corporations, audiences in fandom are trained within their subculture to become hyper-aware of the uses of media in their social world. One fan reaction is to lobby a production house to include stories within the show's canon which demonstrate a more nuanced system of representation.

Another reaction results in fan works such as fan fiction and fanvids; if mainstream television does not reflect a range of lived experiences which fall outside the strict definitions of white, middle-class heteronormativity, then fans feel free to re-create a subsidiary (subcultural) representational norm where such lived experiences can be embodied in the lives and narratives of familiar characters, as with the slash genre.

Another possible response is an overtly critical form of fan creation, such as the examples in the preceding case study, which condense and thereby highlight canon representations without substantially changing them.

While the discourse of fandom as essentially oppositional has been convincingly challenged, it still remains that fans operate in relationship to commercial media products and this fact invites a discussion of fandom in the context of political economy. This becomes particularly interesting when considering vidding, as due to their very nature, vids may have the closest relationship with official production than any of the other 123 secondary discourses of fandom. Vids are materially composed of those official products

- re-edited from re-purposed clips - and do not merely adopt more abstract themes for the fans' own end. One aspect of media fandom that has interested scholars is the fans' enthusiastic adoption of media technologies (including the photocopier, the VCR, and the personal computer) as an aid to creating a parallel culture industry. A characteristic of media fandom both before and after the advent of the internet has been fandom's willingness to enable technical proficiency in interested members. In fandom's history, this has sometimes taken the form of encouraging clandestine use of technology present in an office, of organizing workshops to teach video editing, and of forming video art collectives focused on the songtape or fanvid form of fan production.

What a vid can accomplish, as a text that addresses the frame of the original work, is the active acknowledgement of all the individual immobilized instants which are represented in the work. In Bacon-Smith's terminology, this is reading within the macro flow. What is possible with vidding is to use language as a form of captioning, where lyrics function as both an aspect of a newly-created narrative and as a meta- narrative commentary that acts as a guide to the reinterpretation of the visual source material. Viddign can accomplish this because it can show as it tells. When a vidder reduces the video source to a "silent" series of moving images, she relies on her audio

source to create both context and meaning (Mullens 2005, Ng 2008), much as Barthean captions direct the interpretation of a single static image. The use of music and lyrics is made to suggest a possible way to read the primary work and fixes its signifieds to a

dominant chain of created connotations. Vidding can therefore be used to suggest and fix 124 a limited range of interpretation in a thesis text, rather than allowing the deconstruction and reconstruction of the order of the visual images to strip those images of meaning completely.

Instead of a vid's clips being rendered meaningless as they are ripped from their

context, meaning is constituted by each individual's self-reflection back onto the object of their fandom, leaving a near-limitless "possibility and actuality" (Sandvoss 2005: 128) of available readings. A vid's source material does not necessarily lose its original meaning after its re-use; rather, what occurs is an aggregation of meaning through the active

intertextual discourse between the viewer's memory and understanding of the original

context/meaning and its presentation in the context of a vid. By locking down the possible meanings, the lyrics, as the vid's temporally-unfolding audio caption, provide the conceptual space to interpret a simultaneous presentation of visuals and music. As with vidding, the application of an audio caption to a video clip, sounds and images together can, as Coppa (2008) argues, be mobilized to state a theoretical or critical position with much the same effect as a manifesto, a theoretical essay or any other written

analysis. This improvisational approach to meaning-making functions within an internal

logic demonstrated through the elaboration of Bacon-Smith's gestural code. The two

clips of the characters as edited in that particular order is not found in the original

symbol-system and the song is explicitly related to neither element. By isolating clips

containing these gestural moments, by juxtaposing them in a manner which creates an

eyeline match across the cut and by adding the audio captioning of that particular lyric, a

new meaning is created through the recombinant possibility of this symbol-system. For the vidder to effectively reuse (or poach) a commodity and re-present particular elements,

for the object's transition from one symbolic system to the next, both the original and new meanings must exist as congruent and comprehensible systems. The logic of editing vids is not dramatically different from the ways in which editing is used to create meaning in the original material.

Vids stand as a deliberate interference with the intended meaning of a cultural

corpus. By explicitly addressing that intended meaning, which, as already stated, is

enacted in the process of decoding, the re-editing of a work helps to highlight discourses

which surround the primary text and (less frequently) the audio source. In a

predominantly visual society, one option for critical response to that culture is to speak in

that same language of visuality. A vidder's complex reflection on pop cultural media texts do not necessarily have to be translated to text in order to carry coherent meanings

that can be decoded by a viewer.

A potentially rich theoretical vein can be found in the practices of media fandom, because these fandom practitioners use methods and means that mimic the production of

official corporate culture. The close relationship of secondary fan discourses to official

production means that it is possible to place less of an emphasis on the potential of the technology to revolutionize a population's relationship to corporate production, and

instead to pose questions about the relationship that does presently exist.

Vids do not limit the reading of a text, but they do strongly hint at a particular

reading of that text. This reading can diverge significantly from a conservative textual

reading, but it is not necessarily subversive. With fandom, and with the acknowledgement of the "fan reading" concept, Barthes's description of a single hegemonic connotative vice suddenly appears to have the most immediate (and credible) utility in describing an interpretive mechanism. Vids provide a rich example of captioning used as Barthes' connotative vice: as each juxtaposition is presented, the viewer cannot help but consider the argument made in the association between lyric and video clip. Even though the outcome of that consideration could be to discard the alternate reading, it is the presence of that tentative possibility of an alternate subjectivity that works to re-evaluate the dominant (source) narrative, be it to reaffirm an initial interpretation, or to challenge an assumption.

Therefore, vids and vidding provide a compelling site for analysis because they are the textual re-workings of popular media products, thereby representing a direct form of interaction with mass culture. The fan who vids has a unique ability to take this metaphorical recontextualization and to create a work which does indeed function as a self-reflective meta-narrative. The polysemic nature of images, be they still or moving, means that video clips from the episodes can be mobilized for any manner of rearticulation a fan would wish to express. What makes vids and vidding a compelling object of study is that this reinterpretation can take so many forms. Appendix A

Song Lyrics

Queen "Don't Stop Me Now" From Jazz (1978)

Tonight I'm gonna have myself a real good time I'm burning through the skies Yeah! I feel alive and the world it's turning inside out Two hundred degrees Yeah! I'm floating around in ecstasy That's why they call me Mister Fahrenheit So don't stop me now don't stop me I'm trav'ling at the speed of light 'Cause I'm having a good time having a good time I wanna make a supersonic woman out of you

I'm a shooting star leaping through the skies Don't stop me don't stop me don't stop me Like a tiger defying the laws of gravity Hey hey hey! I'm a racing car passing by like Lady Godiva Don't stop me don't stop me I'm gonna go go go Ooh ooh ooh (I like it) There's no stopping me Don't stop me have a good time good time Don't stop me don't stop me I'm burning through the skies Yeah! Ooh ooh Alright Two hundred degrees That's why they call me Mister Fahrenheit I'm burning through the skies Yeah! I'm trav'ling at the speed of light Two hundred degrees I wanna make a supersonic man of you That's why they call me Mister Fahrenheit I'm trav'ling at the speed of light Don't stop me now I'm having such a good time I wanna make a supersonic woman of you I'm having a ball don't stop me now If you wanna have a good time just give me a call Don't stop me now I'm having such a good time Don't stop me now ('cause I'm having a good time) I'm having a ball don't stop me now Don't stop me now (Yes I'm having a good time) If you wanna have a good time I don't want to stop at all Just give me a call Don't stop me now ('cause I'm having a good time) I'm a rocket ship on my way to Mars Don't stop me now (Yes I'm having a good time) On a collision course I am a satellite I'm out of control I don't wanna stop at all I am a sex machine ready to reload La la la la laaaa Like an atom bomb about to La la la la Oh oh oh oh oh explode La la laa laa laa laaa La la laa la la la la la laaa hey!!.... Flight Of The Conchords "Hiphopopotamus Vs. Rhymenoceros" From s/t (2008)

I'm the mother flippin' Rhymenoceros My rhymes are so potent that in this small segment My beats are fly and the birds are on my back I made all of the ladies in the area pregnant And I'm horny Yes, sometimes my lyrics are sexist I'm horny But you lovely bitches and hos should know I'm trying to correct mis. If you choose to proceed you will indeed concede Cos I hit you with my flow Other rappers diss me The Wild Rhino Stampede. Say my rhymes are sissy. I'm not just wild, I'm trained, Why? Why? Why? Domesticated What? Why exactly? I was raised by a rapper and rhino mat dated What? Why? And subsequently procreated Be more constructive with your feedback, please. That's how it goes Why? Here's the Hiphopopotamus Why? The hip hop hippo Why, because I rap about reality? They call me die Hiphopopotamus Like me and my grandma drinking a cup of tea? My lyrics are bottomless There ain't no party like my nanna's tea party. Hey! Ho! They call me the Hiphopopotamus Flows that glow like phosphorous I'm the motherflippin' Poppin' off the top of this esophagus I'm the motherflippin' Rockin' this metropolis I'm the motherflippin' Who's me motherflippin? I'm not a large water-dwelling mammal I'm the motherflippin' Where did you get that preposterous hypothesis? I'm the motherflippin' Did Steve tell you that, perchance? I'm the motherflippin' Steve. Motherflippin'

My rhymes and records they don't get played Because my records and rhymes they don't get made And if you rap like me you don't get paid And if you roll like me you don't get laid. And One "Wasted" From Virgin Superstar (2000)

Get out of my way 'cause you know That I'm totally wasted

She wants a change in her human life And she puts herself under the cutting knife She wants the look and feel of an angel Even if it means a deal with the devil

Get out of my way 'cause you know That I'm totally wasted Get out get out 'cause I'm everything you ever hated

I hear screams of diousand virgins I see the dreams of mighty surgeons

Get out of my way 'cause you know That I'm totally wasted Get out get out 'cause I'm everything you ever hated

So when I get my feet on the ground Take notice of a distant sound Sleepless soul wretched and torn Just waiting to be reborn

Get out of my way 'cause you know That I'm totally wasted Get out get out 'cause I'm everything you ever hated

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Vids

"Don't Stop Saxon": www.mediafire.com/7qzb5zdtlx91

"Mother Flippin'": www.mediafire.com/7dtyg4zmljrw

"Wasted": www.mediafire.com/7oczq4mmvz9x