domogrue

Jason Lee

5/3/07

MC90 – TV on the Internet

Fan Production Paper

The Great Divide: How Authorship is Withheld from Audience, and How the Gap may be Bridged

In this paper I am going to focus on the theory of Authorship in the context of the relationship between fan communities and mass media, and discuss how the death of the author is occurring within the fan culture of anime. In Jenkins’s case study of the Star Wars fan culture, television and movie studios set up their fan cultures in a way to keep the ideas of “author” and “audience” separate. In opposition to these examples I am presenting the fan community surrounding the anime Naruto in America as a community in which the “Author is dead”, and the viewer is encouraged to rewrite and play with the Naruto text.[1] Through this case study, I hope to present a model of television occurring now in which the producer and audience are synonymous, and that the notion of authorship no longer belongs to the originator of the text but its receiver.

To begin, I want to define “authorship” in this context using Jenkins’s case study of Star Wars fandom from his “Quentin Tarantino’s Star Wars?” article. While Jenkins describes how audience participation and fan productions are instances of “popular culture” repurposing and reacting to mass media texts, the response back from mass media is not quite sympathetic. Mass media, such as Lucasfilms, has responded to the explosion of “popular culture” with efforts to limit the narrative of the text into the confines of the original Star Wars through corporate control of fan communities. While Lucasfilms tolerated fan productions, the company did not completely embrace them; as Jenkins puts it, “Lucas has opened up a space for fans to create and share what they create with others but only on his terms” by “desiring some zone of tolerance within which fans can operate while asserting some control over what happens to his story” (Jenkins 149). An example of this is Jenkins’s study of the launch of www.starwars.com, a fan site run by Lucasfilms. The problem the site had with fans was that any material posted on the site became legal property of Lucasfilms, and could be taken down or published without any warning or compensation to the fan who originally created the content (Jenkins 153). Hence, through this effort Lucasfilms tried to maintain authorship of the Star Wars text by removing what it deemed not fitting for their text and legally acquiring and editing what does. Besides this there is also Lucasfilms designation of the Atomfilms.com to be the “official” Star Wars fan films host. The specific guidelines given for entries are that “films must parody the existing Star Wars universe, or be a documentary of the Star Wars fan experience. No ‘fan fiction’—which attempts to expand on the Star Wars universe—will be accepted. Films must not make use of copyrighted Star Wars music or video…” (Jenkins 154). These guidelines act as constraints to protect against copyright lawsuits but also preserve authorship from falling into the hands of the fan. By limiting fan productions to either satire or documentary, Lucasfilms has the ability to keep the Star Wars narrative from being expanded by another entity (the fan), for both satire and documentary work at best as commentary, failing to advance story that can be accepted as actual Star Wars narrative. These two examples can be taken as two examples of what Jenkins describes as “interactivity” versus “participation” with the authorship of Star Wars, in which interactivity is “prestructured by the designer” while participation is “less under the control of media producers and more under the control of media consumers” (Jenkins 133). The websites of Lucasfilms allow fans to “interact” with Star Wars narrative, either by commenting through satire/documentary or by surrendering their interpretations to the mass media corporation, but there is no “participation” allowed, that is any control of the way the universe works or any stories that occur within it.

In contrast, the relationship between the fan community surrounding Naruto and the Japanese Anime Studio that owns it operates on a level of participation with the text. Like “popular culture” in the pre-internet age, anime screenings were local events and anime communities were restricted by region and means of communication (Jenkins 158). However, with the rise of the Internet, home video-editing software, and Bittorrent amateur translators could easily create high quality digital half-hour episodes that were fully translated and easily distributable within the day the show is aired in Japan. Such amateur translation methods, or “fansubbing”, had advantages over corporate translation methods because companies interested in marketing anime overseas to America usually cater to “westernizing” certain ideas unfamiliar to western audiences and adding English dubs to the shows; this delays the release of the material, and furthermore may also make the show more undesirable to those who have a familiar grasp on Japanese culture and prefer hearing the Japanese voice acting over the usually inferior English voice acting. Likewise, Japanese companies rarely have their own work translated for overseas distribution, leaving the job to American companies and fans. As a result, fansubs end up becoming the only viable means of distribution for most fans, as American corporations are too slow and insensitive to the fan’s needs. Hence, for an anime like Naruto in which the fans are over 150 episodes further than the American release, neither the Japanese nor American companies are keeping tabs on fan efforts. The very meanings of the shows are in the hands of fans, for fansubbers control to what degree ideas get “Americanized” and through translating episodes fans also insert their own interpretation to the text they are translating. This can be seen in how some fansubs will include lengthy notes during opening sequences or commercial breaks (or even inserted in the middle of the anime) explaining certain cultural jokes or ideas that are unfamiliar to a western watcher instead of “Americanizing” the idea. So while Jenkins discusses how certain elements of Star Wars fandom ends up having to “go farther underground” to avoid attention from corporations (Jenkins 158), fansubs as an only viable option makes the fan culture immediately visible and apparent to anyone who watches the show. The show distributor, audience, and fan are all collapsed into one; the ones providing the show to the audience have no need to restrict participation for they are participating in choosing how to translate the work. Hence it is not surprising to find remixed music videos like “Hinata Naruto – Truly Madly Deeply”, in which a bulk of fan art is mixed with short clips to create an otherwise absent narrative in the series, or fanfictions like “Changes”, which expands on a subtextual romance between two characters whom fans are waiting to get together. Likewise, fans will often rewrite the intense relationship of the two leads, renarrating it as in video “One Mission” or reinterpreting it through slash fiction. These works, unlike those for Lucasfilms, take the narrative of Naruto and insert absent ideas and events, whether it be recontextualizing and summarizing the storyline or inserting homoerotic themes. In one sense, there is a strong divide between audience and text in that the producers of the Naruto show are halfway across the world, speaking in another language, and turning a blind eye to the piracy of fansubs. But this divide allows for the merge of distributor and fan, which in turn allows the fan to be author of his reinterpretations and reactions. In order to be a viewer it is hard to also not to be an author, or at least undergoing the authorship of some fan’s narrative.

I stated in the beginning of this essay that the Naruto fan culture is one of a dead author. In the case of LucasFilms the author is very much struggling to survive by trying to suppress the rewriting of the Star Wars text by fans. For Naruto in American fan communities that author is lost the moment fansubbers choose the distribute the work, and the invisibility of the Japanese Mass Media Machine gives fans the freedom Star Wars fans are denied. However, also lacking is the ability for two-way communication, and while Jenkins stresses how fan productions get recognized and reacquired by corporate interests, such reacquisition is impossible in the Naruto model. This shows that there is still a split of viewer and producer, for the fansubbers is only a partial producer of the Naruto text. Yet in the age where fandom is being harbored, where communication between fan and mass media is becoming more open in shows like Heroes and Lost, where reinterpretation is creeping slowly but surely into mainstream TV, the death of authorship will be occurring in American media sooner than we think.

Additional Works Referred to:

“Fansub”. Accessed 5/2/07. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fansubbing

“Hinata Naruto – Truly Madly Deeply” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voUPduf2S6g

“Changes” http://forums.narutofan.com/showthread.php?t=196282

musstardd

Today's presentation dealt with Sconce's article "What If?" She outlined Sconce's arguments about TV's evolution from anthology, to episodic, to serial, to a hybrid of serial progression and episodic accessibility. This fourth stage of television creates a reality for viewers an characters to occupy together and rewards those who appreciate the premise of the show. Television plays with a few basic premises that have been found to catch audiences. It also recycles plots in ways that can engage all viewers. For example, Livia observed that every show has a reluctant romance, even if it's created by the viewers themselves like in X-Files an Battlestar Galactica.

Narrowcasting has created an opportunity for specialized realities/shows that wouldn't succeed in a 3-network mass media system such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer. But this evolution also allows  viewers to fill in the gaps in the textual universe, thus building a stronger bond with the audience. We drew some parallels here to Eileen Meehan's critique of ratings and notions of different qualities/instensities of viewership that ratings can't account for. Ratings are less important because even cancelled series can survive online. Julie noted the constant tension of stabilizing reality and leaving it open ended, and the balance between an indeterminate but "official" world on the production side and the potential for fan narratives/fan production to be included in the "cannon."

We considered how Sconce's assertion that "TV is no longer constrained by realism" and briefly discussed how this pertains to reality TV. The question of what kind of reality viewers are being engaged in drew concern as it pertains to "survival of the fittest" reality shows especially from Parks' perspective. Julie observed the slight differences in narrative structures between cult TV and Lost/Heroes-style TV. The former leaves pieces of the show's reality open for fans to fill however they so desire. The latter gives us puzzles and secrets that beg fan speculation with the underlying sense that the pieces will be filled in later as fact by the producer. Is this an attempt by producers to maintain that elusive concept of "control" over audience production?