Pick up the latest issue of Entertainment Weekly and you’ll find another one of the magazine’s reunion covers. You’re familiar with the motif: actors you love from that show you like, looking a little older (but not too much older, thanks to airbrushing) and a lot more relaxed.
This one celebrates the 10th anniversary of Breaking Bad by assembling Anna Gunn, Bryan Cranston, Aaron Paul and Bob Odenkirk for a photo shoot promoting the show’s Comic-Con panel later this month and, while they’re at it, reminding us that Odenkirk’s frequently brilliant prequel series Better Call Saul returns for its fourth season in August.
Nostalgia is the primary driver of pop culture right now, and everyone likes to be reminded of the stories and characters they’ve loved (or loved to hate, whatever). Give me more of that thing I like. And more often than not, the actors and creators are happy to oblige: who wouldn’t want to spend an afternoon hanging out with old friends, celebrating a thing they made together?
But the frequency of EW’s reunion covers – so popular they’ve spawned their own PeopleTV web series – suggests to me a deeper problem. Have we finally reached the point where the celebration of old stuff shouts down the introduction of new stuff? As Jeff Goldblum said in that popular movie from 25 years ago, just because you can bring something back from the dead doesn’t necessarily mean that you should. He was talking about dinosaurs, of course but so am I, in a way.
This week, Toronto’s very own Fan Expo announced this year’s convention will feature not one, but two very special cast reunion of beloved movies: Cary Elwes, Chris Sarandon and Wallace Shawn will be here to celebrate The Princess Bride, and Michael J. Fox will make his first Fan Expo appearance alongside his Back To The Future cast mates Christopher Lloyd, Lea Thompson and Tom Wilson.
I love those movies. And I honestly just don’t get it.
Sure, it’s a chance for people to be in the same room with the actors they love from that thing they like. That’s nice. The actors get paid, which is also nice. But what’s the value to the audience? Aren’t they just paying to hear these people tell the same stories they’ve told in documentaries, on talk shows and audio commentaries, and in print interviews for the last three decades? When a band gets back together, at least they play their songs.
Maybe – just maybe – all the pandering to various fan bases is doing more harm than good. The panels at Comic-Con, where thousands of people gather with the casts and crews of their favourite shows, are great for a sense of community, but they also create a sense of power – an ownership that extends beyond the consumption of the product being served. Now that producers have realized exactly how much money fans are willing to spend, there’s no stopping them. The world is a merch table.
And I’m not just talking about Funko Pops of every clone Tatiana Maslany plays on Orphan Black – that’s so last year. Want to see an exacting re-creation of Ferris Bueller’s bedroom? There’s a documentary about it, and an attendant VR experience, made right here in Toronto! Our city is also host to the Secret Sessions, which bills itself as a “movie experience” that makes immersive theatre out of beloved cinematic properties like The Princess Bride and my beloved Shaun Of The Dead. (I will never attend one.)
If anything, the last few years have shown us fans are the worst guardians of a property: the parallel rise of nerd culture with the toxic waste of comment boards and chat rooms has led to a level of fan entitlement that demands satisfaction at the expense of creativity.
Just look at the latest embarrassment: the laughable demands for a remake of The Last Jedi that would “fix” the things Rian Johnson’s Star Wars sequel supposedly got wrong,
This new version, written and produced by self-styled “true fans,” would let Luke Skywalker be a badass Jedi who steps up to the evil First Order rather than a weary old man who reconnects with his purpose and chooses to be a symbol of hope and resistance.
Yes, these people are a small coterie of idiots who have no idea how intellectual property works, and very little understanding of the concepts of character development or artistic intent and possibly even drama. But they’ve convinced themselves they can do this because, in their minds, they’re the ones who brought Star Wars back in the first place. Isn’t that what Disney told them when it made The Force Awakens?
“This is for the fans” used to mean something very specific: “It’s the thing you like, made the way you remember it!” But a new generation of fans, nurtured in the echo chambers of social media and instant gratification of the internet, believes they alone are “the fans” – and if something isn’t precisely to their liking, it’s either a deliberate insult or evidence of a conspiracy against them. Accommodating these people isn’t going to improve popular culture it’s only going to poison it further. Who wants a Star Wars reunion panel where someone grabs the mic to ask Mark Hamill why he sold out Luke Skywalker?
Okay, that’s a worst-case scenario. And nothing like that is going to happen at the panels for Back To The Future and The Princess Bride, which are far less divisive among fans – perhaps because no one’s tried to follow them up 30 years later and take stock of their points of view and politics. Returning to the past means you don’t have to engage in the present, after all.
normw@nowtoronto.com | @wilnervision
