Meandering Musings

I've seen that movie. Anyone who's spent any time in fandom will be torn between nodding furiously, laughing until they wet themselves, and cringing. Very high recognition factor.

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londonkds.livejournal.com

Are any of these people seemingly involved in wider media fandom? Or is there a subculture of Shining fans completely detached from everyone else?

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Well, The Shining doesn't have a fandom as such, I guess, since it's the kind of movie that qualifies as Culture. :/ And Kubrick fans... sorry, experts tend to be pretty obsessive. But yeah, apparently there's quite a lot of bloggers, cinephiles and conspiracy theorists who dedicate themselves to finding the True Meaning^TM of The Shining. Some are actually pretty interesting (this one, for instance), others are just completely nuts (there's one guy in Room 237 who is absolutely convinced that Kubrick was the one who faked the moon landing, and that The Shining is ENTIRELY about this).

The central idea seems to be: We know that Kubrick was very clever, and an absolutely fanatical perfectionist. Therefore, any detail that shows up anywhere in any of his movies has been deliberately chosen to represent something. Therefore, the fact that Jack Nicholson uses a German typewriter proves that The Shining is about the holocaust. There's a logic in there somewhere, I guess...

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And how is this not a fandom again...? Because that description reminds me of fandom. ;-)

I mean nothing against fans...but yes, we and they do exactly that. Fan short for "fanatic". Or do you mean they don't interact with each other?
Is that the definition - the interaction?

You can't say being just a fan or just obsessed with The Shining doesn't make it fandom, because that would mean 50% of Buffy fans are not in a fandom. Nor can you say if you don't write fanfic, because again excluding half of the Buffy fans.

So is it the interaction? Because I'm not sure you can say that - it appears they are "interacting" with each other so..how is it not a fandom?

Edited Date: 2012-12-06 01:56 am (UTC)

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Evidently I need a sarcasm font. :) It seems to me that the word "fandom" is reserved for people obsessed with things like sci-fi shows and books about teenage wizards, whereas people who spend their every waking hour poring over real (there's that font again) films and books consider themselves "experts." There's a difference there, for some reason.

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Which, ironically, is also standard fannish behavior. :)

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LOL!!!

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whereas people who spend their every waking hour poring over real (there's that font again) films and books consider themselves "experts."

Hee.

We are talking about The Shining right? Granted the film is by Kubrick, but it is still based on a pulp genre horror novel by Stephen King.

Hardly a real film or a real book. Yes, the film is by Kubrick and a classic, but it is still a horror flick about a guy driven insane by evil ghosts and based on a Stephen King novel. (both of which I've seen and read, the film is actually better...but I know King doesn't agree with me.)

I want to go to these people and say...what I said to a friend who snarked at me for loving Buffy...yeah, right, you love Stephen King. Failing to see the difference here.

Edited Date: 2012-12-06 11:42 pm (UTC)

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The linked analysis is interesting.

The problem I think is when folks take an interpretation of an interesting aspect and then try to push it as THE thing the story is about.

Also a problem is in ignoring some practicality of story mechanics. Sometimes (such as the reappearing ax) it may be foreshadowing more than a cultural symbol.

That said, I thought the linked analysis had a really good point about the downplaying of history in The Shining -- the history of the hotel, Jack's history of addiction and abuse, etc. All the characters minimize what has gone before and this sets the stage for what's coming. Cleaning up, prettying up, and generally living in denial of what's gone on in the past is usually a really bad idea. So there is a germ of a really solid idea in there.

(That said, I was also amused -- and nodding -- at the commentor saying that most media artists aren't really investing in obscuring and hiding what point they're trying to make.)

Edited Date: 2012-12-06 04:03 pm (UTC)

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The problem I think is when folks take an interpretation of an interesting aspect and then try to push it as THE thing the story is about.

Yeah. Filmmakers like Kubrick (Whedon too) tend to do something like this: they tell a fairly straightforward story, but then they add tons of little (more or less well-thought-through) details full of symbolism, to underline and support the story they tell, designed to hook into various stories that the viewer already knows and draw the viewer in. They don't need to be very detailed, or even all that relevant, they just need to be loaded. (The second you show a girl in a red hood next to a tree, the viewer will think "WOLF!", etc.)

The Shining is a horror movie about a little kid trapped in a hotel with a father who he knows is going to try to kill him, because he's an abusive alcoholic. To really drag the audience into this, Kubrick adds lots of little details to freak the viewers out and support the general theme of realising that the authority you rely on is going to turn on you - underlined by the whole Smallpox Blankets thing, the impossible architecture, the Theseus/Minotaur labyrinth, and a lot of other things that are just hinted at but play into something the audience already knows. Then people watch it, and some decide that the subtext IS the text, that there is a One True Hidden Meaning to be derived from the story, because everyone wants to be the one to know The Truth, and that it just happens to depend entirely on that one little bit of hinted subtext that happens to be the topic the viewer in question is obsessed by... Almost every single "expert" in Room 237 start off their rant by saying something along the lines of "I'd been studying the Native American genocide/holocaust/Greek mythology/Moon landing hoaxes for years, then I saw The Shining and realised it was ENTIRELY about the very subject I knew everything about!" Yeah, no. The movie is Really About a little kid trapped with an alcoholic father.

I may be slightly drunk and rambling. Room 237 really is a lot of fun when you see it as a documentary on how we see stories rather than a documentary about the True Meaning of one particular story.

Edited Date: 2012-12-06 10:23 pm (UTC)

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This is fascinating. What you described above regarding the Shining, reminds me a great deal of how I used to analyze Buffy on the ATPO board along with other fans.

I'm not sure anyone else did this? But we actually went so far as to analyze the credits to determine the theme and plot structure and found patterns with higher meanings. We also went crazy over the costumes each character wore. Small details. And I remember being absolutely certain that the story was about some ancient greek myth.

And Star Wars is similar...

Films that rely a great deal on visual metaphors often result in obsessive fandoms...because people can find more in the film and widely interpret it, than if the film lacked those metaphors. For example - what would interest you more? A story about a boy afraid of his abusive alcoholic father in a remote hotel or a ghost story about a boy who is afraid of his crazy father and crazy ghosts?
It's all in "how" we tell it, I think, not in "what" the story is about.

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This was why the review intrigued me. I've seen this phenomenon in fandom and it has entertainment value. :)

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shapinglight

Heh! I'm pretty sure I could written something similar about Bladerunner back in the day.

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There's a guy on DailyKos who each week writes a screed about how "The Walking Dead" is REALLY about re-asserting the Southern Male In Power.

Like many of these media analysis narratives, it has a germ of an interesting idea with some support...and then they extrapolate it into such a narrow narrative of "This what it's ALLLLL about" that you wind shaking your head and wondering when they find the time to build this castle on a cloud.

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It wasn't just on BAPS, there were several similar posts on Whedonesque, ATPO and Buffy Cross and Stake.

Sigh.

Fans often bring more to a piece of artwork than is actually there. And get horribly disappointed when and if they realize it. Those who never do, stay fans forever. Those who do...drift away.

But yep...when I read that synopsis, I thought, damn...a very good description of the Whedon fandom.

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If only Whedon were half as organized and detail-oriented as his most staunch believers claim. We'd all be better served by that.

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Quite true.

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txvoodoo.livejournal.com

HAHAHAH oh yes, that BAPS post!!

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