So...um... basically fandom, right?

[shipperx]

Reading EW's list of "10 Best Movies of 2012" they mention a documentary "Room 237"  (I haven't seen the movie so this isn't really commentary on it.)  The description of the movie was intriguing enough for me to look up a review. 

The review said this:

It's an essay in interpretive heresy and critical dissent. The subject is Stanley Kubrick's 1980 film The Shining, based on the 1977 novel by Stephen King. Ascher declines to approach it in terms of the conventional consensus established by reviewers and pundits. Instead, he talks to fanatical Shining obsessives who have developed outlandish theories and found sensational clues in the tiny, subliminally glimpsed details, in the strange perspectives, continuity errors and Escher-like physical inconsistencies in the layout of the Overlook Hotel. Kubrick was himself a detail obsessive, and that fact makes these theories very seductive. The ideas about The Shining as a meditation on historical guilt and the return of the repressed are powerful.  The movie's flaw is that it is sometimes unclear if it really is about The Shining – or about delusional interpreters.

Still remember the bizarre post on BAPS that was made just prior to Chosen claiming that the existential nature of the entire Buffyverse was beautifully coming together and that the meaning of life or whatever would be revealed...

Comments

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

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?

[beer-good-foamy.livejournal.com]

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.

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

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

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

LOL!!!

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

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.