The Adoring Audience

Fan Culture and Popular Media

Lisa A. Lewis, Lisa A. Lewis

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134899180
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Art
• Categoría: Popular Culture in Art

With stories of hysterical teenagers and obsessive fans killing for their heroes, fans and fandom get a bad press. The Adoring Audience looks deeper into fan culture, particularly as it relates to identity, sexuality and textual production.

I Defining Fandom

1 Fandom as Pathology: The Consequences of Characterization

JOLI JENSON

DOI: 10.4324/9780203181539-2

The literature on fandom is haunted by images of deviance. The fan is consistently characterized (referencing the term's origins) as a potential fanatic. This means that fandom is seen as excessive, bordering on deranged, behavior. This essay explores how and why the concept of fan involves images of social and psychological pathology.

In the following pages I describe two fan types — the obsessed individual and the hysterical crowd. I show how these types appear in popular as well as scholarly accounts of fans and fandom. I consider why these two particular characterizations predominate — what explains this tendency to define fans as, at least potentially, obsessed and/or hysterical fanatics?

I suggest here that these two images of fans are based in an implicit critique of modern life. Fandom is seen as a psychological symptom of a presumed social dysfunction; the two fan types are based in an unacknowledged critique of modernity. Once fans are characterized as deviant, they can be treated as disreputable, even dangerous ‘others.’

Fans, when insistently characterized as ‘them,’ can be distinguished from ‘people like us’ (students, professors and social critics) as well as from (the more reputable) patrons or aficionados or collectors. But these respectable social types could also be defined as ‘fans,’ in that they display interest, affection and attachment, especially for figures in, or aspects of, their chosen field.

But the habits and practices of, say, scholars and critics are not deemed fandom, and are not considered to be potentially deviant or dangerous. Why? My conclusion claims that the characterization of fandom as pathology is based in, supports, and justifies elitist and disrespectful beliefs about our common life.

Characterizing the Fan

The literature on fandom as a social and cultural phenomenon is relatively sparse. What has been written is usually in relationship to discussions of celebrity or fame. The fan is understood to be, at least implicitly, a result of celebrity — the fan is defined as a response to the star system. This means that passivity is ascribed to the fan — he or she is seen as being brought into (enthralled) existence by the modern celebrity system, via the mass media.

This linking of fandom, celebrity and the mass media is an unexamined constant in commentary on fandom. In a People Weekly article on the killing of TV actress Rebecca Schaeffer by an obsessive fan, a psychologist is quoted as saying:

The cult of celebrity provides archetypes and icons with which alienated souls can identify. On top of that, this country has been embarking for a long time on a field experiment in the use of violence on T V. It is common-place to watch people getting blown away. We've given the losers in life or sex a rare chance to express their dominance.₁

In one brief statement, cults, alienation, violence, TV, losers and domination (themes that consistently recur in the fandom literature) are invoked. A security guard, also quoted in the article, blames media influence for fan obsessions: ‘It's because of the emphasis on the personal lives of media figures, especially on television. And this has blurred the line between appropriate and inappropriate behavior.’₂

In newspaper accounts, mental health experts offer descriptions of psychic dysfunctions like ‘erotomania’ and ‘Othello's Syndrome,’ and suggest that the increase in fan attacks on celebrities may be due to ‘an increasingly narcissistic society or maybe the fantasy life we see on television.’₃

This same blending of fandom, celebrity and presumed media influence in relation to pathological behavior can be found in more scholarly accounts. Caughey describes how, in a media addicted age, celebrities function as role models for fans who engage in ‘artificial social relations’ with them. He discusses fans who pattern their lives after fantasy celebrity figures, and describes at some length an adolescent girl, ‘A,’ who in 1947 shot Chicago Cubs first baseman Eddie Waitkus. He argues that her behavior cannot simply be dismissed as pathological, because up to a point her fan activity resembled that of other passionate fans. The model of fandom Caughey develops is one in which pathological fandom is simply a more intense, developed version of more common, less dangerous, fan passion.₄

This is also Schickel's explicit claim. He ends his book on the culture of celebrity by comparing deranged fans and serial killers to ‘us.’ He concludes that we ‘dare not turn too quickly away’ from ‘these creatures’ who lead ‘mad existences’ because ‘the forces that move them also move within ourselves in some much milder measure.’₅ These academically-oriented accounts develop an image of the pathological fan who is a deranged version of ‘us.’

One model of the pathological fan is that of the obsessed loner, who (under the influence of the media) has entered into an intense fantasy relationship with a celebrity figure. These individuals achieve public notoriety by stalking or threatening or killing the celebrity. Former ‘crazed’ acts are referenced in current news stories of ‘obsessive’ fans: Mark David Chapman's killing of ex-Beatle John Lennon, and John Hinckley's attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan (to gain and keep the attention of actress Jodie Foster) are frequently brought up as iconic examples of the obsessed loner type.

This loner characterization can be contrasted with another version of fan pathology: the image of a frenzied or hysterical member of a crowd. This is the screaming, weeping teen at the airport glimpsing a rock star, or the roaring, maniacal sports fan rioting at a soccer game. This image of the frenzied fan predominates in discussions of music fans and sports fans.

Since the 1950s, images of teens, rock ’n’ roll and out-of-control crowds have been intertwined. In press coverage, the dangers of violence, drink, drugs, sexual and racial mingling are connected to music popular with young people. Of particular concern are the influences of the music's supposedly licentious lyrics and barbaric rhythms. Crowds of teen music fans have been depicted as animalistic and depraved, under the spell of their chosen musical form. Heavy Metal is the most recent genre of youth music to evoke this frightening description of seductive power: Metal fans are characterized, especially by concerned parents, as vulnerable youngsters who have become ‘twisted’ in response to the brutal and Satanic influence of the music.₆

The press coverage of rock concerts almost automatically engages these images of a crazed and frantic mob, of surging crowds that stampede out of control in an animalistic frenzy. When 11 teenagers were crushed to death in Cincinnati's Riverfront Coliseum (before a 1979 concert by The Who) press coverage was instantly condemnatory of the ruthless behaviour of the frenzied mob. In his Chicago-based syndicated column, Mike Royko vilified the participants as ‘barbarians’ who ‘stomped 11 persons to death [after] having numbed their brains on weeds, chemicals and Southern Comfort.’₇

Yet, after investigation, the cause of the tragic incident was ascribed not to a panic or a stampede of selfish, drug-crazed fans, but instead to structural inadequacies of the site, in combination with inadequate communication between police, building workers and ticket-takers. Apparently, most crowd members were unsuccessfully (but often heroically) trying to help each other escape from the crush, a crush caused by too few doors into the arena being opened to accommodate a surge of people pressing forward, unaware of the fatal consequences at the front of the crowd.

In other words, the immediately circulated image of mass fan pathology (a crazed and depraved crowd climbing over dead bodies to get close to their idols) was absolutely untrue. As Johnson concludes, ‘the evidence … is more than sufficient to discount popular interpretations of “The Who Concert Stampede” which focus on the hedonistic attributes of young people and the hypnotic effects of rock music.’₈ Nonetheless, the ‘hedonistic and hypnotic’ interpretation was widely made, an interpretation consistent with the iconic fans-in-a-frenzy image historically developed in connection with musical performances.

Concern over fan violence in crowds also appears in relation to sports. There is an academic literature, for example, on football hooliganism.₉ This literature explores the reasons for violence at (mostly) soccer games, where ‘hard-core hooligans’ engage in violent and destructive acts, often against the opposing teams' fans. These incidents have become cause for social concern, and have been researched in some depth, especially in Britain. Even though, obviously, not all soccer fans engage in spectator violence, the association between fandom and violent, irrational mob behaviour is assumed. In this literature, fans are characterized as easily roused into violent and destructive behavior, once assembled into a crowd and attending competitive sports events.₁₀

To summarize, there is very little literature that explores fandom as a normal, everyday cultural or social phenomenon. Instead, the fan is characterized as (at least potentially) an obsessed loner, suffering from a disease of isolation, or a frenzied crowd member, suffering from a disease of contagion. In either case, the fan is seen as being irrational, out of control, and prey to a number of external forces. The influence of the media, a narcissistic society, hypnotic rock music, and crowd contagion are invoked to explain how fans become victims of their fandom, and so act in deviant and destructive ways.

Fans as Socially Symptomatic

What explains these two iconic images? One possibility is that they genuinely embody two different aspects of the fan/celebrity interaction — individual obsessions, privately elaborated, and public hysteria, mobilized by crowd contagion. But do these models accurately or adequately describe the ways in which fandom is manifested in contemporary life? Are they appropriate representations of fandom? Do fans really risk becoming obsessed assassins or hysterical mobs? Do they (we) too easily ‘cross the line’ into pathological behavior, as Schickel suggests, because ‘we suffer to some degree from the same confusion of realms that brings them, finally, to tragedy?’₁₁

I suspect not, and the crux of my argument here is that these particular pathological portrayals exist in relation to different, unacknowledged issues and concerns. I believe that these two images tell us more about what we want to believe about modern society, and our connection to it, than they do about actual fan—celebrity relations.₁₂

What is assumed to be true of fans — that they are potentially deviant, as loners or as members of a mob — can be connected with deeper, and more diffuse, assumptions about modern life. Each fan type mobilizes related assumptions about modern individuals: the obsessed loner invokes the image of the alienated, atomized ‘mass man’; the frenzied crowd member invokes the image of the vulnerable, irrational victim of mass persuasion. These assumptions — about alienation, atomization, vulnerability and irrationality — are central aspects of twentieth-century beliefs about modernity.

Scholars as well as everyday people characterize modern life as fundamentally different from pre-modern life. Basically, the present is seen as being materially advanced but spiritually threatened. Modernity has brought technological progress but social, cultural and moral decay. The modernity critique is both nostalgic and romantic, because it locates lost virtues in the past, and believes in the possibility of their return.

In the early twentieth century, mass society terms (like alienation and atomization) took on added resonance in the urbanizing and industrializing United States, where the inevitable beneficence of progress (celebrated by technocrats and industrialists) was being increasingly questioned by intellectuals and social critics. Two aspects were of particular concern to American critics — the decline of community, and the increasing power of the mass media.

These concerns are related. Communities are envisioned as supportive and protective, they are believed to offer identity and connection in relation to traditional bonds, including race, religion and ethnicity. As these communal bonds are loosened, or discarded, the individual is perceived as vulnerable — he or she is ‘unstuck from the cake of custom’ and has no solid, reliable orientation in the world.

The absence of stable identity and connection is seen as leaving the individual open to irrational appeals. With the refinement of advertising and public relations campaigns in the early twentieth century, along with the success of wartime propaganda, and the dramatic rise in the popularity of film and radio, fears of the immense and inescapable powers of propaganda techniques grew. It seemed that ‘mass man’ could all too easily become a victim of ‘mass persuasion.’ And under the spell of propaganda, emotions could be whipped into frenzies, publics could become crowds and crowds could become mobs.

This conceptual heritage, which defines modernity as a fragmented, disjointed mass society, is mobilized in the two images of the pathological fan. The obsessed loner is the image of the isolated, alienated ‘mass man.’ He or she is cut off from family, friends and community. His or her life becomes increasingly dominated by an irrational fixation on a celebrity figure, a perverse attachment that dominates his or her otherwise unrewarding existence. The vulnerable, lonely modern man or woman, seduced by the mass media into fantasy communion with celebrities, eventually crosses the line into pathology, and threatens, maims or kills the object of his or her desire.

The frenzied fan in a crowd is also perceived to be vulnerable, but this time to irrational loyalties sparked by sports teams or celebrity figures. As a member of a crowd, the fan becomes irrational, and thus easily influenced. If she is female, the image includes sobbing and screaming and fainting, and assumes that an uncontrollable erotic energy is sparked by the chance to see or touch a male idol. If he is male, the image is of drunken destructiveness, a rampage of uncontrollable masculine passion that is unleashed in response to a sports victory or defeat.

Dark assumptions underlie the two images of fan pathology, and they haunt the literature on fans and fandom. They are referenced but not acknowledged in the relentless retelling of particular examples of violent or deranged fan behavior. Fans are seen as displaying symptoms of a wider social dysfunction — modernity — that threatens all of ‘us.’

Fandom as Psychological Compensation

The modernity critique, with its associated imagery of the atomized individual and the faceless crowd, is mostly social theory — it does not directly develop assumptions about individual psychology. Nonetheless, it implies a connection between social and psychological conditions — a fragmented and incomplete modern society yields a fragmented and incomplete modern self. What we find, in the literature of fan—celebrity relationships, is a psychologized version of the mass society critique. Fandom, especially ‘excessive’ fandom, is defined as a form of psychological compensation, an attempt to make up for all that modern life lacks.

In 1956, Horton and Wohl characterized the media—audience relationship as a form of ‘para-social interaction.’₁₃ They see fandom as a surrogate relationship, one that inadequately imitates normal relationships. They characterize the media mode of address as a ‘simulacrum of conversation’ and demonstrate how it tries to replicate the virtues of face-to-face interaction.

They also examine the structure and strategies of celebrity public relations, noting how they function to create what they call the celebrity ‘persona.’ They suggest that ‘given the prolonged intimacy of para-social relations … it is not surprising that many members of the audience become dissatisfied and attempt to establish actual contact …. One would suppose that contact with, and recognition by, the persona transfers some of his prestige and influence to the active ...