The Secular Religion of Fandom

Pop Culture Pilgrim

Jennifer Otter Bickerdike, Author

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781473907799
• eBook ISBN: 9781473912670
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Media pilgrimage has become a booming business in the 21st century. Fans of television shows, rock groups and books flock to places associated with their favorite series, artist or writer, trying to embody and perhaps understand what inspired the beloved piece of work, and, more importantly, to cobble together their own personal identity, seeking meaning in an ever-more divergent and fast-paced world.

At the same time, participation in organized group activities are dropping. One of the largest down turns in the US and the UK can be seen in the steep decline of attendance at traditional religious venues. This trend dovetails with the radical uptick in on-line sites dedicated to pop culture and celebrities, as well as an array of niche-focused real-time tours allowing fans to experience the spaces, places and scenery featured in their favorite entertainment medium.

 

The Secular Religion of Fandom: Pop Culture Pilgrim examines the function of fandom, specifically the visiting of spaces which have been recently deemed worthy of sanctification and a newly elevated status of importance. It examines how such pilgrimages are used as a means for forming and maintaining a common language of culture, creating a replacement apparatus based on more traditional frameworks of religious worship and salvation, while becoming an ever more dominant mechanism for constructing individuality and finding belonging in a commodified culture.

Looking at television shows such as The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones, bands like The Stone Roses and Joy Division, and authors like J.K. Rowling and the Brontë sisters, The Secular Religion of Fandom: Pop Culture Pilgrim delves into these issues by examining spaces, fan communities and rituals, providing a unique and provocative investigation into how technology, media and humanistic need for guidance are forming novel ways of expressing value, forging self and finding significance in an uncertain world.

1 Symbolic Pilgrimage

Using the word ‘action’ to describe sitting down to veg out in front of a TV seems like an oxymoron. The act of watching TV is most often associated with tuning out the ‘real world’ and becoming one with the sofa – hence the popular ‘couch potato’ tag long used for individuals who lay slug-like in front of the boob tube for hours on end. The parasocial relationships that are formed, however, between the viewer and the characters populating a television series can be very profound. These are individuals who are coming into the home on a regular basis – daily, in the case of soap operas like Coronation Street – or weekly, with The Walking Dead. This is not to mention the ability via streaming services to literally have a favorite show with one at all times, as on-demand services allow for whenever, wherever watching. With such exposure available, an individual may have more interaction with a fictional protagonist from the small screen – coming into the house/handheld personal space on a regular, often weekly basis – than with a loved one.

Perhaps putting on a favorite show can be a form of pilgrimage, of escaping the daily grind to a different reality. Professor Will Brooker argues that maybe this seemingly passive, often dismissed form of entertainment holds far greater meaning in our spiritual life than previously thought. He realizes that ‘the idea that watching television constitutes a “symbolic pilgrimage” may still prompt a skeptical response’ (2007: 149), yet still asks if ‘instead of treating symbolic pilgrimage as a separate category, we should ask whether all geographical pilgrimage in fact involves a degree of conceptual, inner, symbolic travel’ (150). While this may sound initially like a bit of a stretch, Brooker points out that such metaphorical, metaphysical journeys have long-reaching roots, as ‘this notion of passage as a spiritual and symbolic state rather than a literary movement can be identified in Christianity, as well as African tribal culture’ (151–2). Like the practices of other recognized religions, Brooker notes ‘how some form of preparation ritual is not uncommon among media fans … this often seems to approach an act of communion, a symbolic activity that removes the participant from the everyday and brings him or her closer to the fiction’ (155). In his previous work on fans, Brooker found that respondents found viewing of a favorite television show ‘a transition to a world “between the real and unreal”’ (1999: 165), ‘a sacred place where “real” time and space are excluded’ (164). Brooker’s analysis also showed that ‘the community is also symbolic, and can take place even if the individual is sitting alone, as “despite watching the show by themselves, they feel attached to the community of non-present viewers”’ (168). This surely is even further buttressed by real-time interactions offered on such platforms as Facebook and Twitter, where commentary evolves before, during, and after the television show has been aired. When Brooker published his findings in 1999, he noted that, ‘This congregation, an invisible network uniting fellow fans independent in part on traditional schedule-based broadcasting, so the viewer can imagine millions of others doing the same thing at the same time – unites individual viewers … in a kind of intellectual elite’ (Brooker, 2007: 158). Here Brooker references the assumed perimeters and language of religious groups, a ‘congregation’; yet the church in this instance is the television, the pews the individuals’ sofa from where they watch the show. Such phenomenon has surely only grown with the explosion of apps, websites, and the instant availability of information and opinion in the coinciding years.

The virtual communities of television predated online networks, yet within the current economy, the latter helps to create new bonds and evoke deeper meaning for the former. By ‘experiencing’ the same thing with others around the world, a new definition and form of participation is forged, where boundaries of spatial consequence are broken down, or perhaps even non-issues. Here fans from across the world can share a pilgrimage to the same place at the same time which may have the same profound meaning to their lives as a visit to the actual place. Brooker believes that “symbolic pilgrimage” is more than just a subcategory of or poor cousin to “real” geographical journeys, offering a fainter taste of the same sensations and a shallower sense of connection. In fact, symbolic immersion and psychological leaps of faith are integral to many, perhaps the majority, of geographical media pilgrimages (Brooker, 2007: 163).

The fan must, therefore, first journey symbolically, e.g. without physically going to a specific place to understand its meaning, and have the ability to decode the significance of certain sites and spots associated with the focal text. The symbolic pilgrimage allows for the richest understanding and experience with the site of a text and a space of secular worth as mediated by the television show community’s beliefs and values.

Sylvia Plath scholar Gail Crowther further underscores this point, the importance of knowledge acquired through symbolic pilgrimage. In her own travels to retrace the steps of the famous poet, Crowther relates how she has already ‘been’ to many of the places tied to or associated with Plath’s short life. Crowther writes,

I have never been to America, my neighboring country across the Atlantic from here in England, yet I really have walked the streets of Boston. For Boston exists in a virtual space, its buildings and roads there to be walked and strolled with one click of a button on Google Street View. (2010: 1)

As she encounters various landscapes Plath wrote about through her internet connection, Crowther notes, ‘I am simultaneously responding to the traces someone left fifty two years ago right there, yet mediated through the screen of my computer’ (2010: 2).

As we become more digitally and technology indebted, it is becoming harder and harder to differentiate between such ‘real’ and ‘ethereal’ space. Crowther uses theory from Mark Nunes to further support this dual importance of both the seemingly ‘actual’ (the physical) and the ‘virtual’ (online) place. ‘Nunes argues that virtual space is not really non-corporeal or simply a mental space because in order for it to be produced, it requires the presence of laptops, computer terminals and the cramped fingers of the corporeal body working the keyboard’ (Crowther, 2010: 3–4; Nunes, 2001). This makes the ‘virtual’ perhaps on par with the ‘real’, if not at least a springboard for increasing interest in visiting the actual and informing the feelings, beliefs, and practices at specific sites.

When approaching the three television case studies examined here – The Walking Dead, Game of Thrones, and Doc Martin – it begs to question what these divergent places and series have in common. The trait they all share is the way that secular pilgrimage has dramatically changed the communities to where such travels occur. In all three case studies, the uptick in newly founded importance to each place associated with the television shows has contributed to the economic benefit and survival of the spaces. This makes the native stakeholders just as beholden to upholding and perhaps perpetuating the value of each of these areas, providing another layer of investment and meaning.

While the locals in these disparate examples all appear to have had their fortunes changed by such en masse tourism, the reasons for the trips themselves and the ideals motivating each pilgrimage differ greatly. The Walking Dead offers an imagined landscape of post-apocalyptic diaspora, a reinvention of the human condition. Game of Thrones has a similar fantastical appeal, being set in world resembling but not completely our own. However, pilgrims to the setting of this show are looking to convene not with a seemingly alternative version of reality offered by The Walking Dead; instead, they want to be immersed in a fictional world much different to the one they know in all but the most perfunctory of ways. The landscape of Game of Thrones is the closest opportunity to interact with the show in a three-dimensional, palpable manner. The Walking Dead is also a created universe, a nightmare vision of modern humanity. Yet the difference between pilgrims to The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones locations is the former are attempting to recapture or perhaps further make sense of the bleakest future of humanity, while the latter are looking to pin the fantastical to the real; thus the need to shore up the ‘virtual’ and ‘real’ with the imagined and physical is blurred in both visits. While the needs of the pilgrim to somehow get closer and further bestow the text of the shows with meaning are similar, the deeper motivations and values offered by the two spaces are opposite. The Walking Dead is a fantasy of worse-case scenario, while Game of Thrones is a parallel universe entirely.

In contrast, Doc Martin fans visiting Port Isaac are seeking to experience the seemingly gentler, simpler life as portrayed on offer in the light-hearted British show. Doc Martin seems real – the characters populating the scenes of each episode could be actual people. Indeed, some of the cast of the show are made up of natives and locals, blurring the lines between material and scripted. While The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones visitors are looking to ground the fictional in the corporeal, Doc Martin’s small Cornish village looks and feels as if you could truly step into the show. Trips to Port Isaac further this allusion, as the sites, smells, and people are almost identical to the ones viewed on television, thus making the visitor feel as if they have already been to the town.

They arguably have – through countless evenings engaging on ‘symbolic’ pilgrimages mediated at home. Stijn Reijnders examined the motivation of media pilgrims, using Dracula tourism as his primary subject group. After substantial field work, Reijnders found that the desire to visit actual places where fictional works were set fell primarily into

a dynamic between two partially contradictory modes. First, Dracula tourists are driven by a desire to make a concrete comparison between the landscape they are visiting and their mental image. On the other hand, this rational approach to trace reality is contrasted with a more intuitive, emotional desire for a temporary symbiosis of both worlds. (2011: 231)

Similar to the research outcomes of Brooker, fans differentiate between fact and fiction, yet are driven to somehow shore up the two in real time. Reijnders notes this contradiction:

Dracula tourists use rational terms to describe their desire to make concrete comparisons between imagination and reality, they are also driven by an emotional longing for those two worlds to converge. What these two modes have in common is their distinctly physical foundation: they are both based on a sensory experience of the local environment. (2011: 233)

Though they intellectually know that events in Bram Stoker’s masterpiece are imaginary, there is a longing to find a higher, deeper connection beyond the written word on the page. Brooker argues that there is a yearning to connect not with the actor or even the communities found on social networking platforms, chat rooms, fan forums, and even real-time visits to spaces, but with the text itself in a transcendent, more profound fashion. His respondents repeatedly described their experiences of actually going to spaces where favorite shows and movies were shot as fantastical, ‘If a movie is like a dream, then standing in an actual location is like stepping into the dream … the feeling of connection is not with other fans, but with the fiction’ (Brooker, 2005: 25). It is with the characters that inhabit these invented worlds that the fan related to, as the pilgrim was not bonding with other travelers, but was trying to deepen their connection with the mediated figure – ‘with Luke Skywalker … Mulder and Scully … [fictional protagonist of the Star Wars movie series and leading characters of the X-Files TV show]’ (Brooker, 1999: 160). This theory can be carried over to any mythologized figure, whether once living (Ian Curtis, Marc Bolan) or only ever fully realized through a camera lens or an author’s pen.

Zombies R Us

In 2013, Nicolas Barber wrote, ‘It’s now more than a decade since zombies began their relentless shuffle into the mainstream of popular culture’. He identified the start of the horror creatures’ newly invigorated emergence into media as Danny Boyle’s terrifying post-apocalyptic film 28 Days Later. He argues that this new popularity for the matinee fear favorite ‘can’t be a coincidence … [as] … zombies are in vogue during a period when banks are failing, when climate change is playing havoc with weather patterns, and when both terrorist bombers and global corporations seem to be beyond the reach of any country’s jurisdiction’ (ibid.).

However, I would also suggest that the longevity of this flesh-eating monster trend also rides on how western society has become zombified itself, often lacking the time and head room to process the tsunami of information that is constantly bombarding us via e-mails, cell phones, and virtual lives. Barber contends that the appeal of zombies offers us a source of escapism from our often overwhelming problems of the modern world, many of which are out of our control. He quotes writer Max Brooks, author of World War Z (which would later go on to be a cinematic Brad Pitt zombie vehicle), explaining the continued investment by fans with the flesh-eating ghouls, ‘zombie stories give people the opportunity to witness the end of the world they’ve been secretly wondering about while, at the same time, allowing themselves to sleep at night because the catalyst of that end is fictional’ (ibid.). Barber believes, however, that the real reason we flock to the fiends is because they are possibly a view of our worst possible selves, as ‘they’re frightening because of how dismal it would be to become one yourself’ (ibid.).

I would argue, however, that the fascination with the zombie is twofold. Objectively, we have been often forced to become zombies ourselves, doggedly following along to the newest trend as set by #Twitter, trying to not drown in a world of instant accessibility and data overload. It is becoming harder and further obscured to differentiate between important and non-consequential, as tabloid, celebrity-driven news battles more detrimental humanitarian issues for space and the attention of punters. At the time of this writing, Zayn Malik, leaving his reality television formed band, One Direction, is sparring off for top billing on newspapers and websites alike with the tragedy of a suicidal co-pilot Andreas Lubitz, who killed himself and all 150 people on board the Germanwings Flight 9525 he was flying. This lack of clarity between fame-inflated sensationalism and true, horrifying tragedy is even further intensified as ‘1D’ fans take to Instagram and Twitter to display their self-harming photos, in a bid to outdo each other at their grief for the singer’s departure. Are we zombies? I would say yes, as it is the easiest way to survive the current climate. Zombies are inherently devoid by definition of planning, thinking, rationalizing – all traits which are held high as unique to humanity. Yet these very same characteristics are being sucked continuously away from us in the current climate. In order to keep up and fit in, the path of least resistance appears to be the simplest, to just be swept along with the pack (aka any scene from choose-your-favorite-zombie movie), in the herds of the seemingly brainless moving en masse. While this may sound far-fetched and perhaps a bit harsh as a critique of modernity, it does succinctly describe the so...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Publisher Note
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• About the Author
• Illustration List
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Mecca for Muggles
• 1 Symbolic Pilgrimage
• 2 Mr. Mojo Risin’
• 3 For the Love of Blood Suckers
• Conclusion: The Mighty Hordes
• References
• Index