Fans have been making their own video re-interpretations of
the original Star Wars texts since their release. (An early example can be seen
here). Ever since
recording technology has been affordable enough to get into the hands of fans,
this has been a type of media.
The appeal of re-enacting an existing media artifact seems
to function as a fulfillment of the “ago-old desire to live out a fantasy
aroused by a fictional world…intensified by a participatory, immersive medium
that promises to satisfy it more completely than has ever before been
possible.” (Murray[1]) Though it seems in many cases these fans are
acting out the double fantasies of the fictional world portrayed in the
original text and the additional fiction of participating in the creation of
that original text. In the case of Star
Wars, fan remakes allow fans to enjoy both the fantasy of Long ago in a galaxy
far, far away, AND the fantasy of George Lucas directing a cast of actors in
the creation of an artifact that the fan is deeply invested in.
So long as the technology used to create these fan texts
remained relatively cumbersome, most shared fan-made recreations of the text
were straightforward and not intentionally self-reflexive. However, as
technology has made the creation and distribution of these fan texts easier,
and as an actual audience for fan art has formed online, the nature of fan-art
“the thing itself” has matured to encompass a range of postmodern and
poststructuralist possibilities. Jenkins[2]
might point out that video fan art as a medium has existed for almost 50 years,
and that only technologies through which that medium is captured and
distributed have changed. It would be
difficult, though, to argue against a very real evolution in what fan art is as
it has changed from being something created for the “artists” own enjoyment to
being something created for a broad and engaged audience. The conversation has, in many cases become
wittier and more intertextual, though as Jenkins points out, “When people take
media into their own hands, the results can be wonderfully creative; they can
also be bad news for all involved.” The
concept of an audience seems to bring out the best and the worst across a
strata of creators.
Star Wars Uncut comes along as an interesting vehicle for
fan art, both because of it’s collaborative nature, and because of its ability
to show a broad scope of the realm of fan-films in a relatively condensed
way.
The idea of a feature-length collaborative creative endeavor
organized entirely online through a fan forum is a strong illustration of
Convergence as described by Jenkins.
“Convergence doesn’t just involve commercially produced materials and
services traveling along well-regulated and predictable circuits. It doesn’t just involve the mobile companies
getting together with the film companies to decide when and where we watch a
newly released film. It also occurs when
people take media in their own hands.
Entertainment content isn’t the only thing that flows across multiple
media platforms.”
Convergence of content flow inherently empowers audience
voice, and (again according to Jenkins) “Audience work becomes more vocal and
public.” (Audience work referring,
presumably, to the idea introduced by Dallas Smythe[3].)
According to Jenkins, as technology changes the nature of spectatorship,
“Convergence requires media companies to rethink old assumptions about what it
means to consume media, assumptions that shape both programming and marketing
decisions. If old consumers were assumed
to be passive, the new consumers are active.
If old consumers were predictable and stayed where you told them to
stay, then new consumers are migratory, showing a declining loyalty to networks
or media. If old consumers were isolated
individuals, the new consumers are more socially connected. If the work of media consumers was once
silent and invisible, the new consumers are now noisy and public.”
Star Wars Uncut seems to actually illustrate a spectrum of
old-consumer relationships with the original text and new-consumer engagement
with it. Old-consumer style could refer
to the “straight” segments, striving for maximum verisimilitude with the
original text and it’s diegetic world. A
new-consumer end of the spectrum would be those segments that totally
reinterpreted the text to create something new, either by reinterpreting the
written dialogue (such as CP3O’s offer to assist Master Luke) or by
reinterpreting the setting (usually involving heavy intertextuality, such as
the Yellow Submarine sequence) , or by abandoning verisimilitude altogether to
create something intensely self-reflexive.
Across the 500+ 15-second-segments that made up Star Wars
Uncut’s version of Star Wars, A New Hope, there was illustrated a breadth of
engagement with the original text that created an audio-visual aid illustrating
the broad possibilities for a single viewer’s experience encountering the
primary text. This reinforces Radway’s[4] insistence
that a critic’s singular view of a text’s meaning is problematic. “The behavioral explanations and sociological
theories [critics] advance to account for [a] genre’s popularity have been
produced, then, by a process that is hermetically sealed off from the very people
they aim to understand.” Radway
proceeded to engage with a group of consumers who engaged with their texts in
manners very similar to one another, how much more true is her emphasis on the
role of reader/viewers in creating meaning when considering a group with
disparate ways of engaging with a text?
The appeal of the Star Wars Uncut project for its
participants seems likely to have been diverse, however the appeal of such a
participatory medium is well articulated by Murray in that “the enchantment of
the computer (by which this film project was initiated, distributed, and in
many instances produced) creates for us a public space that also feels very
private and intimate. Computers are liminal objects, located on the threshold
between external reality and our own minds.”
While not all participants interpreted participation in the same way,
the 15 second limit functioned as a “mechanism of participation” that limited
the ability of any particular clip to stray too far from the original text to
render the narrative unfollowable. This
functioned in some ways like the “explicit mechanism of participation” (In
LARP/Live Action Role Play) that serve to “sustain the illusion of a fictional
world.”
The downside of this mechanism, is that 15 second intervals
are painfully frequent for a viewer of the finished text. The continual alienation of the audience,
having to re-orient themselves within the frame of the narrative as settings,
actors, costumes, styles and tones constantly change, makes me think that this
is only a stop along the road of increased audience participation in media
convergence. I expect that platforms
allowing audiences and fans to participate in the creation of more fluid and
sophisticated fan fictions are in the near future.
[1] Murray, Janet Horowitz. "Immersion." Hamlet
on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. New York: Free,
1997. 97-125. Print.
[2] Jenkins, Henry. "Introduction: "Worship
at the Altar of Convergence"; A New Paradigm for Understanding Media
Change." Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide.
New York: New York UP, 2006. 1-24. Print.
[3] Smythe, Dallas Walker. "On the Audience
Commodity and Its Work." Dependency Road: Communications,
Capitalism, Consciousness, and Canada. Norwood, NJ: Ablex Pub., 1981.
22-51. Print.
[4] Radway, Janice A. "Introduction."
Introduction. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular
Literature. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1984. 1-18. Print.
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