"Us" by blimvisible

Link to Youtube version.


Self-described by the filmmaker as a "multifandom metavid," this video deals (quite eloquently, in my opinion) with the plight of fan creativity in relation to recent firestorms over fair-use and copyright. However, in my mind, this is interesting not just from a legal standpoint, but also because it allows us to rethink how we have traditionally thought of individual creativity and authorship.

As with so many fan videos, this one appropriates the lyrics of a popular song, Regina Spektor’s “Us,” in order to recontextualize the meaning of the remixed images under a new unity. The lyrics here seem instructive: the refrain “it’s contagious” could be taken to refer to the viral nature of Web 2.0 participation; the line about “living in a den of thieves” played over the image of Jack Sparrow is obviously a reference to the pejorative labeling of fans as pirates; and the line “tourists come to stare at us” could be taken as a jab at academics who take an ‘anthropological’ approach to studying fans as specimens (although the way the filmmaker inserts Henry Jenkins at this point may be a little harsh, as he is a self-confessed Aca-Fan.) The video’s inclusion of many pop cultural texts commonly appropriated by fans (including Star Trek, The Matrix, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, The X Files, etc.) situates it within a larger, community practices of fan creativity.

The video’s end seems to be a metaphorical call to arms for fans to take off their masks of anonymity, and V for Vandetta style, incite a revolution. Whether political activity through fandom is possible in the way that Van Zoonen and Jenkins conceptualize it is, of course, very much up for grabs, but as I alluded to earlier I think that there is definitely something to be said about the politics of collective creativity.

This politicized notion of collective creativity, of course, has a rich theoretical history. In the 1930s, Walter Benjamin’s seminal essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” told us that the mystifying “aura” and monetary value surrounding the original piece of art would be destroyed as the work was mechanically reproduced, allowing it to be appropriated, added to, and recreated by anyone according to their subjectivity and context. Off his model, we can conceive of copyright and intellectual property in the following way: as an institution built on particular notions of the Romantic, individual genius and “original ideas” which are totally ahistorical, and which have historically been shown to limit, rather than “protect,” the progress of creativity and knowledge. As RiP: A Remix Manifesto recounts (drawing on Benjamin), you can’t truly own an idea or call it your own or original, because ideas always posit a relationship between tradition and innovation, the past and the future. Likewise, the artistic work is never a piece of original genius, but an amalgamation of choices from a distinct set of languages or codes, with novel or even subversive juxtapositions producing the impression of what we call “originality.”

Of course, Jenkins saw many of these same aspects in the activities of fans working within the Web 2.0 context of the internet. Terming them “prosumers” (a hybrid producer-consumer), he later expanded the breadth of the concept to describe the current “fan-ification” of the general audience that we have today. From Harry/Malfoy slash videos on Youtube to a DJ’s mash-up of her favorite songs to Shepard Fairey’s infamous appropriation of an AP photo as fodder for his Obama Hope poster, there are numerous examples of everyday consumers (not just fan subcultures) taking the “found objects” of pop culture and the ideas of the public domain, and creatively using them as elements of their self expression.

But then again, isn’t all creativity appropriation? How is this practice any different from the pastiche of any Quentin Tarantino film, or the tropes of any genre film for that matter? Or Picasso paying homage to African art, and making it a paradigm of modernist painting? Or even a student citing the ideas of an author as the building blocks for the rhetorical argument of her paper, much as I have done here? It would seem that, when it comes to the visual, aural, or artistic, people have a tendency to think of these works as if they were thought up out of thin air. Thus, I would argue that what these fan works begin to point to is part of a bigger shift in our conceptions of creativity: not as whole pieces of raw, original expression issuing forth from the unconscious of an artist, but as texts consisting of historical tropes or codes juxtaposed in novel or interesting ways. If we can just get away from this romantic notion that every thought or art work is somehow the product of one individual, we might just realize that we are building on the foundations of our histories and each other, and that a language exists for anyone and everyone to use –not just as the rarified artist of essential genius, or indeed, as the intellectual property of a corporation. Perhaps too, if it is acknowledged that we speak through images and music just as we speak with words, we couldn’t brand a group that has finally taken a hold of their culture with the pejorative label of pirates or thieves… Even if their "parts are slightly used." :)