In what seemed to be a well-timed analysis of fan culture, Matt Hills analyzes the behaviors of the fans towards making the worldwide release of television series produce popular that was visible in the commercial and ‘fun cult’ success seen after the 2002 releases of Spider-man, The Star Trek Nemesis, The Two Towers, and Star Wars (Episode II). Before that, there was The Lord of the Rings released in 2001.
Here, the fans will either say that they are happy with what has been produced or become indifferent that the product is not to their expected standards. The nature of fan’s enthusiasm when waiting for the next episode or series is what baffles many scholars; that what makes fans stick to such a ‘religiously’ wait? Hills successfully explains this behavior and relate it to cult media in his work, Fun Culture, that he relates to Adorno’s Culture Industry.
In his work Fun Culture, Mart hills explore that direct fan involvement with the culture industry products is one thing that is creating the fan cult, a trend worsened by the academic world. Hills visibly embarks on an effort to re-engineer Adorno’s work of culture of fandom, by indicating Adorno’s place in the present or contemporary cultural setting (Williamson, 2003, p. 3). Hills (2002) examines the “moral dualism” to understand and explore the study of fandom to bring bare the unjustified differences between the “rational” and “immersed”.
The imagined notion of the difference is justifying the blanket classification of “bad” and “good” (p.21). He, therefore, says that the imagined “bad” consumer is the work of both fans and the people of academia who strive to draw a thick line between the so-called themselves. Hills (2002) however goes ahead to inform us that the fans are “always ready consumers” and even advises that it is necessary to analyze in include fan culture in a wider study of “consumer culture” (p. 27-28).
This is why he advocates for the “resurrection” of Adorno’s ideas of commercial aspects of cultural products. He categorically separates himself as a scholar-fan from the past scholars whom he said had completely ignored the “fan culture as subject”, consequently sidelining the “multi-dimensionality” of fandom (Hills, 2002, p. xiv). His approach is also different from those other scholars like Henry Jenkins who classified the fun behavior as either “bad or good”, hence making his analysis more rational (Hills, 2002, p. Xiii) and reasonable to the readers of the texts and the watchers of the television series, leaving it to them to analyze the reason why they love the products of the media exaggeration.
Hills (2002) analyzes the fan culture by looking at the “fantasy and reality” (p. 90), and “consumerism and resistance” (p. 27). He compares and contrasts the theories the academics have used to study and analyze the fan behavior, points out the problems that the current works have, and even go as far as offering alternatives which the coming generation of Scholar-fan could use to do much of their studies and investigate the fan behavior further (p. 66).
He goes further in part two of this book where he analyzes how fans become not just readers of the produced stuff but performers themselves, hence they become “incorporated” in all processes of production and distribution, consequently going into new territory of cult geography, fan tourism, fan impersonation, and the internet (p. 105). This kind of attachment is what Hills (2002) would describe as “emotional love”, hence the fan psychology study (p. 20).
Hills (2002) quote of Jenkins’ work, “Adorno….takes the toymaker’s perspective when he describes how priced cultural texts are ‘disintegrated’ through over-consumption as they are transformed from sacred artifacts into ‘cultural goods’, lose their fascination and coherence, when they are played too often or in inappropriate contexts, while popular texts are made simply to disintegrate upon first use and therefore have little intrinsic worth. What Adorno’s account of repeated consumption misses is the degree to which songs to other texts, assume increased significance as they are fragmented and reworked to accommodate the particular interests of the individual listener.” (p. 32).
In this statement, Hills is trying to reinforce Jenkins’ work with that of Adorno by bringing out a concept that by re-doing the popular works, the producers are striving to integrate the productions into a particular group of people’s culture in order to continue selling and create the feeling of identity among the listeners, hence the people can claim ownership of the production. He also says, “It might seem odd to suggest that Jenkin’s work on fandom participates in a moral dualism of ‘good’ fandom versus ‘bad’ consumption, especially since Jenkins has addressed television fan culture through what he concedes is a ‘counter- institutive’ lens, beginning from the position that media fans are consumers who also produce…” (p. 30).
By this, I think Hills is saying that fans are the target markets for the programs that are produced. The fans’ interests in these programs make them vulnerable to the media producers who buy and sell them and consequently distribute them as fans, a concept that goes hand in hand with Adorno’s theory expressed in his works on the Culture industry. This distinctively classifies the audience as fans that are a potential niche for-profit motive of the producer.
He also says that the works once re-done, creates an engraved notion among the fans/ consumers that had some of their past heroes like Shakespeare, Fleming, and Conan Doyle lived long enough, they could have made some of their works more ‘interesting’, he, therefore, concludes that “the unreality of games gives notice that reality is not yet real. Unconsciously they rehearse the right life.” (p. 32). Geraghty (2003) clearly highlights Hills notion that fans are simply co-opted or involved in the production in order to rake profits that comes due to their participation and that this motive is overlooked by the people in academia (p. 1).
This is seen when Hills (2002) says, “open any contemporary textbook and you are likely to be confronted with a statement on the Frankfurt School’s arrogance and of ‘passive’ mass audience”(p. 31). He further elaborates that fan commodification changes and shapes the fans’ minds into believing in the consumption act. Hills, therefore, warns that “the fan-consumer niche market becomes almost entirely insulated from any wider market. It is therefore cut off from the ‘mass’ cultural circulation which generated the existence of such a fandom in the first place.” (p. 65).
The fan culture is what Hills concludes is the source of the term “love” and “cult”. Hills (2002) draws the concept of the source of cult worship by fans when he says, “As a starting point to my use of Adorno’s work, I will briefly consider how Henry Jenkins links Adorno to the ‘toymakers’ in Margery Williams Bianco’s fable The Velveteen Rabbit. Jenkins uses the tale of The Velveteen Rabbit as an example of how fans’ love for a text can make that text significant in their lives: seen from the perspective of the toymaker, who has an interest in preserving the stuffed animal as it was made, the Velveteen Rabbit’s loose joints and missing eyes represent vandalism…yet for the boy, they are traces of fondly remembered experience, evidence of his having held the toy too close and pet it too often, in short, marks of its loving use.” (P.31-32)
Hills does not stop there, in the internet analysis and the nature of its impact, he says that it’s “internet news group” who have intensified the “cult media” in the community. For example, he quotes Henry Jenkins, “the problem working with the net becomes not how to attract sufficient response to allow for adequate analysis but how to select and process materials from the endless flow of information and commentary.
What’s so exciting is that the net discussion tends to center on those issues that are of most interest to media researchers;….attempts to develop aesthetic criteria for the evaluation of the television and other popular texts; speculations about media authorship; critiques of ideology; and self-analysis of the matters’ own involvement with broadcast materials …the computer net groups allow us to observe a self-defined and ongoing interpretative community… [Whose] discussions occur without direct control or intervention…” (p.174).
By this, Hills means that the cult media is not as a result of lack of insufficient information but as a result of an overflow of information, too many opinions, and over-expression by the fans and “debate” which is not “subjected to any controlling or synthesizing gaze.” (p.174). He says that the use of the wild wide web has made the fans more than just audience fans but participating fans hence become producers.
He says, “the influence of the world wide web on the conduct of social life within the internet is an indication of the effect ‘lurking’ can have upon the construction of social life… The claimed advantages of the world wide web, particularly the visual orientation of its interface, allowed people to treat the internet as a type of slow-moving television set, or, alternatively, as a series of pages to be ‘turned’” (p.175) and that all the fun associated with this approach is engraved in the psychological mind, making it a mass concept. The people, therefore, are able to interact and exchange information with no barrier, which is eventually used by the internet media producers to reorganize the already existing information among the fans and solicit more participation.
According to my discovery, the actual reason for “falling in love” with products such as Buffy the Vampire, Lost, Prison Break, and much other television series I cannot understand. While waiting with bated breath the outcome of each successive episode, I would simply sum it up as “amazing” when asked why those television series tick to me. Perhaps I would say that a program like Buffy the Vampire’s sexual orientation, Lost’s witty girl as one of the major casts, tossing and even kill any man who crosses her way or provokes her, combined with the ability to trick a man to get what she wants, even offering to make a visible unreal “love” with any man to get access to what she wants from a man.
Even though these characters are unreal and may be exaggerated, I would imagine and believe that such characters do exist and I “simply love” them and wants to be like them, at least in my world of fantasy. This is what Hills examines and says to be a cult- media creation, where the media is involved in incorporating the fans in what is yet to be produced or what follows the present episode, painting some personalities as supernaturally witty, flawless, and smart in almost all their moves, a scenario that media publicity and exaggeration, creating a cult-like culture among consumer-fans.
I mean if, for instance, media houses like CNN or BBC have done their analysis and rated the program as “good or above average”, why would I question the motives? This is also seen in internet products. Facebook, Youtube, Tagged, etc are all involving the fans in their products, calling for maximum participation hence creating a cult-like following toward accessing their websites. This is what Hills connects with Adorno’s Culture industry with his own work, Fan Culture; a clear-cut analysis of the fun behaviors, suggestions on how people should question what is what for them by the creators of the products and advises the academia lot on what should be studied in the future to unravel the mystery that surrounds the fun culture behavior.
Reference
Geraghty, L. 2003. Fan Cultures: A book review, University of Nottingham, UK. Web.
Hills, M. (2002). Fan cultures, Routledge, ISBN 0415240247, 9780415240246.
Williamson, M. 2003. Fan Culture: A book Review, Journal of Consumer Culture.2003; 3: 121-123. Web.