At four years old, I am Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz...
1. So far, people who read this LJ think Kara Thrace is hotter than Sam Winchester. Or at least those who want to hear my thoughts on BSG: Razor, so I suppose it's not an entirely unbiased sample.
2. The following is the first draft of an "autobiographical" essay I'm turning in for my Gender & Autobiography class next week. It's uh, basically a "Fannish Origin Narrative" kinda, I guess.
Textual Intimacy: A Love Story
I have always been intimate with texts, with fiction.
At four years old, I am Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz in my free time. Which is all of it-I haven’t started school yet though I am teaching myself how to read out of the McGuffey readers I inherited from my grandmother, with their leather-bound covers and archaic “See Spot Run” language. Years later when I fall in love with the Anne of Green Gables novels I will be delighted to discover that these are the same textbooks used in Anne’s (fictional) one room school house.
But I have not read the Oz book series yet. It is the technicolor Judy Garland film version that introduces me to Dorothy’s trip down the yellow brick road. Again, my grandmother is involved. The only time I distinctly remember watching this film as a child is at her house on the bulky television set in the living room (my hippie parents will not purchase a TV until I am nine) though I must have watched it many other times in order to develop the level of obsession that necessitates that my immediate family refer to me as “Dorothy” instead of Lucia for an entire year, my toddler brother stand in for Dorothy’s canine companion “Toto” while my mother is roped into playing the part of “Auntie Em”-the comforting maternal figure at the beginning and end of the fantastic journey-or that our family friend Janie sew me an Oz-themed bonnet and apron set.
That bonnet, twenty-four years old and fading, is now worn by the well-loved Raggedy Ann doll who sits atop my dresser in my “big girl” apartment-the only material memento of my childhood I’ve got-in this far away city where I have landed to go to graduate school in media studies (where everyone is “overly-involved” with texts).
The next time I remember watching the Wizard of Oz is in a lecture hall my second year in college in my first introductory film studies class. I write a paper about it in order to demonstrate that I understand how representational codes in narrative film function. I get an A on the paper, but it’s written in precise, dry prose and doesn’t in any way reveal to me (or a reader) anything about how this movie took over my imagination as a child. To be honest, I don’t entirely understand it myself anymore, but the story of my “Dorothy year” is a pivotal anecdote I tell people I’m getting to know. I was this crazy little girl, I explain, who wanted to crawl inside stories. Who wanted to live and breathe and eat them up. Literally. At ten years old, I will have an Anne of Green Gables cookbook and teach myself how to make shortbread and raspberry tarts and watercress sandwiches like the characters in the books have for afternoon tea. I will also wander around the woods abutting my parents’ house giving favorite spots romantic names-just like Anne!-and writing poems like I imagine she would.
The specter of Dorothy pops up again in the “Queer film” class I take my second year in undergrad. It is there that I learn about gay mens’ “camp” readings of the film (and Judy Garland’s oeuvre in general)-about how this marginalized group found meanings and resonances perhaps not intended by the original authors, ones undoubtedly different than those I discovered as a little girl. I think then about how perhaps these meanings aren’t so much “discovered” as they are created by viewers “in relationship” with the original film, and that in doing so we make the story feel like it is “ours.” We can make a loop-reflecting ourselves back to ourselves in what might seem like unlikely mirrors.
My mother never understood my investment in fiction. She used to worry that I spent too much time reading books and watching movies. “Escapism,” she called it. “Well, I could be doing hard drugs instead, mom. Wouldn’t that be worse?” And so it was my grandmother who did matinee movie double hitters with me when I came to visit her. Or Janie of bonnet-and-apron-sewing fame who brought over videotapes of Northern Exposure (the first television series that drew me in) and consented to multiple viewings (and active discussions) of Heathers, the satiric, dark teenage comedy that captivated me before I had even experienced first hand what it was like to feel “alienated” as an intelligent oddball in high school.
I like to think that my grandmother and Janie recognized that my brain was whirring and my passion was stirring during those years when I was writing in my diary about the plots and characters of the afternoon soap operas I wasn’t supposed to be watching. I do know that their attention made me feel validated-like my interests weren’t frivolous.
It was Janie who bought me a Tivo digital video recorder as a graduation present-an appropriate gift for someone who has just completed a degree in Feminist Studies and Film & Digital Media. Of course, it was my pop-culture-illiterate mother who helped me with the application fees and GRE test prep I needed to apply to graduate school in a field she still didn’t quite comprehend.
Through the combination of those two programs of study in college, I began to explore how the stories a culture tells about itself to itself have social relevance. Fantasy wasn’t just the provence of four-year-olds with over-active imaginations! Any number of -isms are involved. And multi-million dollar industries. The fact that even at an early age I gravitated towards narratives with primary female characters perhaps meant something. Not to mention the fact that when I played Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles with little boys as a kid I bristled at their suggestions that I be the “girl reporter” April O’Neill. I wanted to be a Ninja Turtle too, you see.
It was also in college-but not in class-that I discovered the character who is still to date my favorite “Girl Ninja Turtle:” Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I was twenty-two years old and depressed. There was a failed love affair and general ennui. I spent a month solid (when I wasn’t in class, doing homework, at work or asleep) with this teenage girl charged with the herculean task of saving the world from demons and vampires and whatever the plural form of apocalypse is. I was with her through victory and witty banter and heartache. And I found that when the cycle of reruns was over, my heart ached less. Moreover, my brain was all jazzed up with thoughts about serial narrative and viewers’ prolonged relationships with texts. In my television studies classes that term I learned about “intertextuality” and postmodern storytelling tropes and the fact that a lot of scholars took readers' relationships with popular texts seriously.
I also heard tell of a lot of other people (outside of academia) who, like me, dreamed up answers to what happened in between episodes or chapters, people who sometimes imagined different directions the characters they loved could go. And so the next time I got it bad for a fictional universe-this time one with aliens masquerading as “normal” teenagers in a small southwestern town-I knew where to go. I went online and sought out stories written by people (usually women) like me about the characters we shared.
I’d found media fandom. Or it had found me.
Years later I’ve written multiple books worth of fiction in about a dozen fictional universes that I may not have created but that I’ve made mine. I’ve created new characters and made ones from television shows meet other ones from books. I’ve written essays relating my love of a fictional character to feminist film theory-not for a grade but because I wanted to talk to other people who loved Buffy. I’ve been witness to debates about gender, race, sexuality and the kind of underwear given characters sport. Some of my closest friends are people I met because of things like how we both thought the idea of a female Vampire Slayer and a male Vampire as lesbian lovers was kinda neat. I regularly communicate with people from other cities, states and countries about yes, TV, movies and books, but also my cat, their children, my fears and hopes about my career, you name it.
The thing about stories is that they give us a common discourse.
This summer I waited on the street at midnight with hundreds of other people to buy the last Harry Potter book. People wearing Wizard’s robes and carrying homemade magic wands, some as small as I was when I still fit into my Wizard of Oz outfit. People who may or may not be members of the dispersed (and often fractious) club that calls itself fandom. People like myself, my friends and one of my University professors who spent much of that evening in the bar across the street from the bookstore drinking beer and discussing the concept of intellectual property, how Harry Potter fits Freud’s “Family Romance” archetype, and who Hermione Granger should end up with in the end. I flew home to visit my friends and family and over the course of a month I “talked Potter” with everyone from the middle-aged businessman on my return flight to my 12-year old girl cousin who loves playing sports and counts Ginny Weasley as a role model.
My love of fiction as a rhetorical mode (and playground) isn’t something I keep out of my “work” as an academic, even when I’m applying critical methodology to the texts I analyze. Likewise, I don’t leave my political and intellectual investments out of my “extra-curricular” engagement-my intimacies-with fictional universes and characters.
And now I have people in my life who will listen when I suggest that my obsession with the relationship between Ron and Hermione from Harry Potter might be a displaced form of “self-love” since I identify with aspects of both of those characters. It’s kind of silly, a bit of game, to consider my own psychology as a twenty-eight year old woman through the lens of characters from a children’s book, but at the same time it’s also a way of thinking about my gendered identity as hybrid, of trying to understand myself.
And this Halloween? I dressed up as Ron Weasley, wand and all. It was fun.
*****
3. Now I'm gonna go and watch Serenity with commentary and take notes. Question: Does anyone have any links/citations for Joss interviews etc. that talk about the role of the success of Firefly on DVD in the studios greenlighting of the movie?
eta: Via kita0610 (who REALLY loves me): RUPERT RUPERT RUPERT. EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEH!
2. The following is the first draft of an "autobiographical" essay I'm turning in for my Gender & Autobiography class next week. It's uh, basically a "Fannish Origin Narrative" kinda, I guess.
Textual Intimacy: A Love Story
I have always been intimate with texts, with fiction.
At four years old, I am Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz in my free time. Which is all of it-I haven’t started school yet though I am teaching myself how to read out of the McGuffey readers I inherited from my grandmother, with their leather-bound covers and archaic “See Spot Run” language. Years later when I fall in love with the Anne of Green Gables novels I will be delighted to discover that these are the same textbooks used in Anne’s (fictional) one room school house.
But I have not read the Oz book series yet. It is the technicolor Judy Garland film version that introduces me to Dorothy’s trip down the yellow brick road. Again, my grandmother is involved. The only time I distinctly remember watching this film as a child is at her house on the bulky television set in the living room (my hippie parents will not purchase a TV until I am nine) though I must have watched it many other times in order to develop the level of obsession that necessitates that my immediate family refer to me as “Dorothy” instead of Lucia for an entire year, my toddler brother stand in for Dorothy’s canine companion “Toto” while my mother is roped into playing the part of “Auntie Em”-the comforting maternal figure at the beginning and end of the fantastic journey-or that our family friend Janie sew me an Oz-themed bonnet and apron set.
That bonnet, twenty-four years old and fading, is now worn by the well-loved Raggedy Ann doll who sits atop my dresser in my “big girl” apartment-the only material memento of my childhood I’ve got-in this far away city where I have landed to go to graduate school in media studies (where everyone is “overly-involved” with texts).
The next time I remember watching the Wizard of Oz is in a lecture hall my second year in college in my first introductory film studies class. I write a paper about it in order to demonstrate that I understand how representational codes in narrative film function. I get an A on the paper, but it’s written in precise, dry prose and doesn’t in any way reveal to me (or a reader) anything about how this movie took over my imagination as a child. To be honest, I don’t entirely understand it myself anymore, but the story of my “Dorothy year” is a pivotal anecdote I tell people I’m getting to know. I was this crazy little girl, I explain, who wanted to crawl inside stories. Who wanted to live and breathe and eat them up. Literally. At ten years old, I will have an Anne of Green Gables cookbook and teach myself how to make shortbread and raspberry tarts and watercress sandwiches like the characters in the books have for afternoon tea. I will also wander around the woods abutting my parents’ house giving favorite spots romantic names-just like Anne!-and writing poems like I imagine she would.
The specter of Dorothy pops up again in the “Queer film” class I take my second year in undergrad. It is there that I learn about gay mens’ “camp” readings of the film (and Judy Garland’s oeuvre in general)-about how this marginalized group found meanings and resonances perhaps not intended by the original authors, ones undoubtedly different than those I discovered as a little girl. I think then about how perhaps these meanings aren’t so much “discovered” as they are created by viewers “in relationship” with the original film, and that in doing so we make the story feel like it is “ours.” We can make a loop-reflecting ourselves back to ourselves in what might seem like unlikely mirrors.
My mother never understood my investment in fiction. She used to worry that I spent too much time reading books and watching movies. “Escapism,” she called it. “Well, I could be doing hard drugs instead, mom. Wouldn’t that be worse?” And so it was my grandmother who did matinee movie double hitters with me when I came to visit her. Or Janie of bonnet-and-apron-sewing fame who brought over videotapes of Northern Exposure (the first television series that drew me in) and consented to multiple viewings (and active discussions) of Heathers, the satiric, dark teenage comedy that captivated me before I had even experienced first hand what it was like to feel “alienated” as an intelligent oddball in high school.
I like to think that my grandmother and Janie recognized that my brain was whirring and my passion was stirring during those years when I was writing in my diary about the plots and characters of the afternoon soap operas I wasn’t supposed to be watching. I do know that their attention made me feel validated-like my interests weren’t frivolous.
It was Janie who bought me a Tivo digital video recorder as a graduation present-an appropriate gift for someone who has just completed a degree in Feminist Studies and Film & Digital Media. Of course, it was my pop-culture-illiterate mother who helped me with the application fees and GRE test prep I needed to apply to graduate school in a field she still didn’t quite comprehend.
Through the combination of those two programs of study in college, I began to explore how the stories a culture tells about itself to itself have social relevance. Fantasy wasn’t just the provence of four-year-olds with over-active imaginations! Any number of -isms are involved. And multi-million dollar industries. The fact that even at an early age I gravitated towards narratives with primary female characters perhaps meant something. Not to mention the fact that when I played Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles with little boys as a kid I bristled at their suggestions that I be the “girl reporter” April O’Neill. I wanted to be a Ninja Turtle too, you see.
It was also in college-but not in class-that I discovered the character who is still to date my favorite “Girl Ninja Turtle:” Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I was twenty-two years old and depressed. There was a failed love affair and general ennui. I spent a month solid (when I wasn’t in class, doing homework, at work or asleep) with this teenage girl charged with the herculean task of saving the world from demons and vampires and whatever the plural form of apocalypse is. I was with her through victory and witty banter and heartache. And I found that when the cycle of reruns was over, my heart ached less. Moreover, my brain was all jazzed up with thoughts about serial narrative and viewers’ prolonged relationships with texts. In my television studies classes that term I learned about “intertextuality” and postmodern storytelling tropes and the fact that a lot of scholars took readers' relationships with popular texts seriously.
I also heard tell of a lot of other people (outside of academia) who, like me, dreamed up answers to what happened in between episodes or chapters, people who sometimes imagined different directions the characters they loved could go. And so the next time I got it bad for a fictional universe-this time one with aliens masquerading as “normal” teenagers in a small southwestern town-I knew where to go. I went online and sought out stories written by people (usually women) like me about the characters we shared.
I’d found media fandom. Or it had found me.
Years later I’ve written multiple books worth of fiction in about a dozen fictional universes that I may not have created but that I’ve made mine. I’ve created new characters and made ones from television shows meet other ones from books. I’ve written essays relating my love of a fictional character to feminist film theory-not for a grade but because I wanted to talk to other people who loved Buffy. I’ve been witness to debates about gender, race, sexuality and the kind of underwear given characters sport. Some of my closest friends are people I met because of things like how we both thought the idea of a female Vampire Slayer and a male Vampire as lesbian lovers was kinda neat. I regularly communicate with people from other cities, states and countries about yes, TV, movies and books, but also my cat, their children, my fears and hopes about my career, you name it.
The thing about stories is that they give us a common discourse.
This summer I waited on the street at midnight with hundreds of other people to buy the last Harry Potter book. People wearing Wizard’s robes and carrying homemade magic wands, some as small as I was when I still fit into my Wizard of Oz outfit. People who may or may not be members of the dispersed (and often fractious) club that calls itself fandom. People like myself, my friends and one of my University professors who spent much of that evening in the bar across the street from the bookstore drinking beer and discussing the concept of intellectual property, how Harry Potter fits Freud’s “Family Romance” archetype, and who Hermione Granger should end up with in the end. I flew home to visit my friends and family and over the course of a month I “talked Potter” with everyone from the middle-aged businessman on my return flight to my 12-year old girl cousin who loves playing sports and counts Ginny Weasley as a role model.
My love of fiction as a rhetorical mode (and playground) isn’t something I keep out of my “work” as an academic, even when I’m applying critical methodology to the texts I analyze. Likewise, I don’t leave my political and intellectual investments out of my “extra-curricular” engagement-my intimacies-with fictional universes and characters.
And now I have people in my life who will listen when I suggest that my obsession with the relationship between Ron and Hermione from Harry Potter might be a displaced form of “self-love” since I identify with aspects of both of those characters. It’s kind of silly, a bit of game, to consider my own psychology as a twenty-eight year old woman through the lens of characters from a children’s book, but at the same time it’s also a way of thinking about my gendered identity as hybrid, of trying to understand myself.
And this Halloween? I dressed up as Ron Weasley, wand and all. It was fun.
*****
3. Now I'm gonna go and watch Serenity with commentary and take notes. Question: Does anyone have any links/citations for Joss interviews etc. that talk about the role of the success of Firefly on DVD in the studios greenlighting of the movie?
eta: Via kita0610 (who REALLY loves me): RUPERT RUPERT RUPERT. EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEH!