Welcome to Counterpoint with Cargill. Each week, we’ll take a look at a popular topic making its way around the movie blogosphere and explore some different viewpoints. Let’s get started!
“That’s just the tip of the iceberg.” Man, what a great expression that is. So descriptive, so apt for so many situations…and so overused that people forget what it really means. In this day and age it has come to mean “Oh, that’s just the beginning.” Here, check out this picture to the left. Take a good long look at that. Now, I want you to think about the internet. See that little bit of white sticking out of the water? Those are the opinions of the people that post in the comment sections on the internet. See everything else below the surface? That’s the rest of you. Last week thousands of people read my column on “The Titanic Effect” – and yet there were a mere 13 comments. 13.
This is an important point to keep in mind when reading Elisabeth Rappe’s excellent look at where she believes that fandom is going. Now I strongly disagree with her, because while I definitely feel where she is coming from (the same place and time as Devin Faraci from last week’s column) I think she is spending too much time looking at the size of the tip of the iceberg and forgetting about the mass of content fandom lurking beneath the visible surface. To listen to the geek hardcores over in the talkbacks of my various Ain’t it Cool News columns (especially my Top 10) you’d think that there was a real schism between perceptions on this year’s Star Trek movie. But a quick Glance at IMDB shows us that after over 100,000 votes, it scored an 8.2 out of 10. Keep in mind films don’t get higher than a 9 on IMDB. A look at Rotten Tomatoes shows us that 94% of critics liked it too. And while My Top 10 list is getting torn apart by the vocal minority, what did the rest of fandom do this Christmas? They bought Star Trek on Blu-ray and DVD. Amazon has them listed as #5 and #13 bestsellers respectively in the Movies & Television section.
No Virginia, there is no turn in fandom. There’s a turn in America. We’ve just come out of one of the roughest decades of the last century, and we discovered that there was a great new tool for taking out our aggression on our neighbors without suffering repercussions. You think this vocal screaming is limited to fandom? Hell no. Go to CNN.com and read their comment section sometime. It will make you lovingly pine for the vicious rabid badger pit of AICN Talkback. I’m not saying that everyone who posts on the internet is stupid, evil, lonely or wrong – but neither are they representative of the rest of us. And they are especially not representative of fandom.
The internet is an incredible tool that has allowed minority opinions – especially EXTREME minority opinions – to discover that they are not alone. Opinions, beliefs and fetishes once was thought to be aberrations of a single, deranged mind have now been found to belong to actual groups and subgroups of the culture we exist in. If you think something is weird, odds are there’s a fan group for it. And that is hardly restricted to the nerdy/geeky/dorky groups of folks that we refer to as FANDOM. Did you know there was a Ford Pinto Fan club? http://www.fordpinto.com/ Yup. And when I landed there on Google, it told me that there were 18 other people on the page with me at that very moment. And if Ford decided to re-release the Pinto – re-imagined and redesigned of course – how many angry internet comments do you think they might receive? It would be representative of the minority of a minority.
So is fandom souring? Are they becoming ugly in their entitlement as fans? No. Not really. I certainly think a few fans are. But the majority of fans? They’re still fans, still chugging along buying anything they can with the name brand of their favorite series or band or toy and all is well in fandom. I know a lot of fans. Very few of them are angry. Most of them are quite happy. But they’re below the surface, hard to see. You have to look for them beneath the roiling waves. Beneath the tip of the iceberg. But they’re there. And they’re bigger than you think.
Check out last week’s Counterpoint with Cargill
