(Fan)Boys Will Be Boys?

Last month marked the sec­ond anniver­sary of the release of the then-much antic­i­pated geek manifesto–and par­tial inspi­ra­tion for this web­site–Fan­boys. I remem­ber in the long years lead­ing up to this movie’s release there was much dis­tur­bance in the Force uncer­tainty. We knew the plot was about a guy with can­cer whose friends take him to break into Sky­walker Ranch to see Episode I before it was released, but then we heard they took out the can­cer plot line to make it a buddy-romp. And then fans protested so it got put (clum­sily) back in? Then it was fin­ished but then Lucas liked it so much he gave rights to sound effects and other Star Wars trade­marks, so they re-shot a lot to add those in? I didn’t fol­low the order of all that very closely, but I knew it was com­ing and the sec­ond it dropped, my fel­low Star Wars fan friends and I raced to see it.

We were maybe a few of twenty peo­ple in a large the­ater but it was glorious–it had been so long since a movie just seemed to get me. When Linus and Eric, after not speak­ing to each other for years, get into a scream­ing match osten­si­bly about whether Luke knew Leia was his sis­ter when they kissed, I just knew this movie under­stood that the nature of the fight was about some­thing else; that these awk­ward boys were using this shared lan­guage or cul­tural touch­stone to express them­selves. That, after all, is a lot of what fan­dom means to me: hav­ing com­mon affini­ties for cer­tain kinds of nar­ra­tives and choos­ing to inter­act with the world through the lens of those stories.

I prob­a­bly annoyed every­one in the room off by leap­ing up when “Harry Knowles” asked Bot­tler what planet Chew­bacca came from, and shout­ing “KASHYYYK!” I prob­a­bly annoyed every­one more when I did it again when they asked the same trivia ques­tion later in the movie after the gang had been caught by the guard at Sky­walker ranch. (Really, Fan­boys, you couldn’t think of any other trivia about Star Wars to ask?) And then, yes, I cried at the end when Linus is gone. This movie didn’t have to try hard to pull me in, as a mas­sive Star Wars fan, but it really did a good job of work­ing for it anyway.

But.

There were still a hand­ful of scenes that I had to cringe through in that the­atre and that I invari­ably have to fast-forward through now that I own this film on DVD to make it the tran­scen­den­tal expe­ri­ence I’ve just described above. Because the thing about main­stream Star Wars fandom–and the thing about Star Wars fan­dom in the 1990s as the antic­i­pa­tion for the pre­quels was growing–is that it had (and to some extent still has) some pretty hard­core misog­yny, homo­pho­bia, and yes, racism, at its root. Fan­boys, for bet­ter or worse, is a movie painfully faith­ful to that tradition.

As a fem­i­nist, queer woman who still iden­ti­fies pretty strongly with the fan per­spec­tive this movie offers up, I’ve tried to read some inten­tion­al­ity into its depic­tion of these offen­sive ten­den­cies. How­ever, it’s clear to me that its dis­dain for gay­ness and its really prob­lem­atic con­cep­tion of the place of women in fan­dom is offered up as the audience’s innate per­spec­tive with­out much cri­tique. Look, it’s no coin­ci­dence that some of the key adver­tis­ing of this movie par­o­died the adver­tis­ing for the 40-Year-Old Vir­gin, the first in a series of wildly pop­u­lar Judd Apa­tow and copy-cat flicks by, for, and of some straight, white, dudes.

So, Fan­boys: I say this from a place of love–from a place where I wanted this movie to be about ME, to get ME, or at bare min­i­mum, to not dis­miss peo­ple who are not straight, white, men as a poten­tial mem­ber of your audi­ence wholesale–here’s a few places where you went hor­ri­bly, hor­ri­bly wrong:

• (Fan)Boys Will Be Boys
• That’s so gay!
• ‘Macho’ men
• Spoil­ers > Sex­ual Abuse of a Child?
• Hos Before Bros
• More sex­ual harass­ment for fun! and! profit!
• There is good in him still.

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