Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Rochester. Department of English, 2019.
Projecting Fandom: Authorship, Fandom, and Media Convergence in Contemporary Hollywood argues that contemporary auteurs have revitalized Hollywood's efforts to recapture cinephiles from the competing media available through repertory theaters, specialty cable, DVDs, and online streaming by recharacterizing themselves as fans who would rather watch other directors' films than make their own. When studio executives appropriate elements from the Hollywood classics playing on Turner Classic Movies, the European masterpieces issued on the Criterion Collection's DVDs, the low-budget exploitation films mocked on Mystery Science Theater 3000, and the parody trailers uploaded to YouTube, cinephiles often accuse the resulting pastiches of being anonymous, commoditized, and inauthentic ripoffs. By contrast, filmmakers like J.J. Abrams, Tim Burton, Steven Soderbergh, and Christopher Nolan, among others, appeal to cinephiles by fashioning their potentially inauthentic, disreputable pastiches as fan letters to more authoritative, original, and talented visionaries. In the process, these filmmakers replace the humanist values of agency, authority, and authenticity that traditionally adhere to authorship with neoliberal counterparts--passivity, powerlessness, and posturing--that legitimate Hollywood studios' and other corporations' consolidation of the power and resources needed to produce and distribute media. Ultimately, then, this book aims to understand how authorship's changing forms and functions recover Hollywood's economic and cultural dominance from an oversaturated mediascape. Projecting Fandom will reshape existing theories about how authorship and fandom affect spectatorship's affective, political, and industrial dimensions. Emotionally, these filmmakers temper cinephiles' diminished expectations about contemporary Hollywood cinema by strategically praising and deferring authority to their cinematic idols: as viewers first and artists second, they can acknowledge and even alleviate audiences' disappointment, disillusionment, and disdain about Hollywood's failure to uphold its heroes' legacies. Politically, these filmmakers link or perhaps attribute Hollywood cinema's diminished quality to the diminished acceptability of its white masculinist ideologies: by admiring what their idols could accomplish when unfettered by contemporary sensitivities about race, class, and sexuality, these filmmakers alleviate audiences' ambivalence about supporting more white male directors than women and people of color. Industrially, these filmmakers encourage cinephiles to embrace their passivity and powerlessness about Hollywood cinema: their melancholia, self-deprecation, and self-flagellation show consumers how to enjoy watching, discussing, and promoting even the most disappointing films and television shows. The book's first four chapters illustrate how filmmakers like J.J. Abrams, Christopher Nolan, Tim Burton, James Franco, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Gus Van Sant, and Kevin Smith, among others, use auteurism to authenticate a range of popular and lesser-known films, including: high-concept blockbusters like Interstellar (2014) and The Force Awakens (2015), biopics like Ed Wood (1994) and The Disaster Artist (2017), historical dramas like The Revenant (2015), romantic comedies like Zack and Miri Make a Porno (2008), and remakes like Psycho (1998). To explore how other media industries have adapted these strategies, the book's final chapter analyzes how showrunners like David Chase, David Milch, and Noah Hawley redirect cinephiles from Hollywood films to "quality" television programs like The Sopranos (1999- 2007), Deadwood (2004-2006), and Fargo (2015-present).
