infobong.com

I'm in the end-of-semester crunch, so it has taken me a few days to blog this CNet News feature about fan films. The article describes how digital editing and Internet distribution have spurred fan films in recent years. I have no reason to doubt the overall gist of the piece, but I had to take issue with one passage, "Indeed, this community of fan creators is increasingly the subject of study by academics--not to mention marketing departments--seeking clues to tomorrow's trends," which links to this Henry Jenkins piece. Perhaps it's simply glib reporter phrasing, but studying fan culture is hardly a new trend - Jenkins published Textual Poachers over a decade ago - and I don't get the sense that fan studies are exploding in the academy. Maybe there's an uptick in the amount of research done on fan films and fan fiction, but I don't get the sense that it's exploding in the way that blog studies has exploded since I began grad school in 2002. I do think this is a case of an overly-enthusiastic reporter who doesn't know his material.

The piece also quotes Patricia Zimmerman, which piqued my interest since we read selections from her Reel Families in (you guessed it) "Media/History/Collective Memory" a few weeks back. While I certainly think home movies and consumer media technology, I thought she ignored substantial technological theory like Brian Winston's notion of the "suppression of radical potential" that would have helped her argument that social work took place that limited consumer media-making to topics of the domestic sphere, rather than political discourse. In the selections we read, she also did little to acknowledge alternative media outside of art contexts, which I found frustrating.

The CNet piece paraphrases her, saying "But unlike the products of some underground film communities, fan films (barring plots based on gender and sexual-role switching) are rarely socially or even commercially subversive, she noted." It seems that excluding fan fiction that contests the heteronormativity of media ignores a particularly broad swath of fan art. The profile of Slash Fiction both in the academy and online would suggest that fan fiction often contests social norms represented in the media. In addition, movie studios often regard fan art as a threat to their copyrights and perhaps their control over authorship. In the past, studios have threatened fan Web sites with cease-and-desist orders. Most recently, the MPAA harrassed fan fiction Web sites over their use of MPAA ratings symbols like, "G", "PG", and "R". In light of these actions, I would contend that Hollywood regards fan art as "commercially subversive."