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Yes, this 'cult/proper' distinction doesn't make much sense to me either, Persephone...
So obviously if you take something like Trek or even Blake's 7 (hey, did I tell you all that Chris Boucher, the script editor, is going to be at the big B7 con this year? I am incredibly excited at the thought of being in the same room as him, even though it will ruin my whole fantasy that he and Robert Holmes secretly "gayed" the show deliberately...), fan groups have evolved with their own game rules regarding ways of relating to/thinking about the texts: rules which are non-monolithic and in flux, obviously. F'rex, some B7 fans believe that Chris Boucher's assurance that, although Blake definitely dies in the last episode, all the rest may or may not have died depending on which of the actors agreed to have their contracts renewed, is the definitive statement governing the bounds of acceptable speculation on "what happened next". Most of us, on the other hand, don't. (As for Gene Roddenbury - there is, as I understand, a very strong streak of auteur-worship in Trek fandom, cf huge veneration for Joss Whedon).
Non-controversial statement: different groups of people relate to texts & their creators, and construct the author-text relationship, in different ways, depending partly on what they are using a text for - Haus, your Goth Neverwhere extras who tremble when Gaiman approacheth are probably all perfectly capable of writing impeccably death-of-the-author lit-crit appreciations of the show should they need to.
My own idea, at the moment, of what makes a text "cult" is that it is generally understood to have merit according to the standards of the literary (non-fannish) establishment, as well as being a text which prompts a high level of very specific personal investment from a reader ("I thought only I felt that way! Those references are tailor-made to me! No-one outside understands how good this movie is except me!"). Some people/groups will then defend their investment in the text on the basis of "proper", institutionally sanctioned, reasoning (I spent half an hour explaining the Shakespeare references in The Lair of the White Worm to someone recently); some will understand and talk about their investment on the basis of "improper", personal/ personalized, thinking. Now there are far fewer academic or high-culture discourses able to deal with specific, individual, personal, pleasurable, highly invested ("this book saved my life!") readings of texts (Barthes, of course, bless his lovely femme heart - now Barthes would have understood me like nobody else could, and of course if he'd only known me, his life would have been so much better... so tragic... Ahem), so this kind of thinking is easily sucked into a sort of generalized relation to "celebrity".
Another theory: as someone who is primarily attracted to fictional characters and texts in general, I can more easily see, perhaps, the way that personal relationships are way overvalued in this crazy world in which we live in. So the intense emotional-erotic relation to a text that reading can produce seems as if it should be a relationship to a person (otherwise we're just being "escapist" and not "living in the real world"). Hence, stalking. |
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