Why Fans Love Crap

I recently enjoyed Uncanny X-Men Omnibus, Vol. 1 (this isn't my review; that will be a later post). When I respond strongly to something one way or another, I like to see what other people have to say about it. Thus I happened across Tucker Stone's liveblog of his reading of this Omnibus in a single sitting (parts: one, two, three, four, five). He's candid from the beginning that he brings to the reading a "dislike for the X-Men," which he says "solely stems" at that point, before he's read the comics, "from the arbitrary nature of how people end up reading, and liking, spandex super-hero comics in the first place." I don't read his stuff regularly, but from what I recall when I was making the comics blogospheric rounds during Blackest Night, I had a pretty good idea what to expect. Sure enough, it's par for course, though he does kick it up a notch at the end with this dick move. I figured it would sour my enjoyment a bit, but I read it anyway (for the sake of the critical discourse), and it did.

Now, the run of X-Men reprinted in this volume (from Giant Size X-Men #1 through X-Men #131), plus the dozen remaining issues from artist John Byrne's tenure that somehow didn't fit into this 800+ page doorstop, is considered by many to be one of the best in the history of the whole X-franchise, and even in superhero comics, period. Is it really as mockable as Stone makes it out to be? As someone who loves it, I honestly have to admit that, yeah, it kinda is.

X-fans won't thank me for drawing this comparison, but I was reminded, reading Stone's remarks, of this extended, ferocious mockery of the Twilight series (and here's more where that came from). There, too, we have something much beloved by legions of fans, that seems to positively invite every nasty thing any hater has to say about it. Twilight actually prompted a lot of head-scratching and even soul-searching among feminist critics who couldn't see past its myriad problems, but nevertheless felt reluctant to dismiss outright something loved so intensely by so many female readers. There was genuine effort to understand what fans got out of it. And no matter what the answer, the question remained--couldn't those fans get that from something better?

Well, maybe not.

It's remarkable how the most passionate fandoms tend to form around material that's quite flawed and/or ridiculous from the perspective of someone who isn't a fan. I suspect it's no accident. I'll try to explain here the underlying dynamic I think is at work.

I trust that everyone reading this has at one time or another experienced immersion in a book, comic, or movie. You begin with a fairly diffuse awareness not only of the text (i.e. the work in question, regardless of medium), but also of your surroundings, the passage of time, various bodily sensations like your posture and comfort, etc. Gradually, as conditions permit and the text rewards your attention with an experience that is pleasurable or gratifying in some way, your focus narrows. This narrowing is also an intensification; you don't just stop paying attention to your surroundings, but rather, the attention allocated to them actually redirects to the rewarding stimulus, heightening the experience that much more. As this reallocation continues to be rewarded, the attentional system grows resistant to diverting any attention away from the experience. At this point, the attentional system effectively screens out potentially distracting stimuli that don't cross a rising threshold (i.e. addressing you by name might not be enough to get your attention; someone might have to jostle you by the shoulder or snap their fingers in front of your face before you notice).

The cognitive mechanism that makes such immersion possible is really just an extension of the normal filtering that permits us not to be overloaded with incoming information all the time. As Daniel Goleman summarizes:

There are compelling reasons for this arrangement in the design of the mind.  It is much to our benefit that the raw information that passes from sensory storage to awareness sifts through a smart filter.  The region of consciousness would be far too cluttered were it not reached by a vastly reduced information flow. . . .

The idea that information passes through an intelligent filter led to what has become the prevailing view of how information flows through the mind. . . . In this model what enters through the senses gets a thorough, automatic scan by long-term memory--specifically by "semantic" memory, the repository of meanings and knowledge about the world.  For example, every bundle of sounds automatically is directed to an "address" in semantic memory that yields its meaning.  If you hear the word "grunt," semantic memory recognizes its meaning; if you hear a grunt, semantic memory also recognizes that the sound is not a word.

All this filtering goes on out of awareness.  What gets through to awareness is what messages have pertinence to whatever mental activity is current.  If you are looking for restaurants, you will notice signs for them and not for gas stations; if you are skimming through the newspaper, you will notice those items that you care about.  What gets through enters awareness, and only what is useful occupies that mental space. . . .

In scanning incoming information, semantic memory need not go into every detail; it need only sort out what is and is not relevant to the concern of the moment.  Irrelevant information is only partly analyzed, if just to the point of recognizing its irrelevancy.  What is relevant gets fuller processing.

Obviously, this scanning and sorting process is amazingly rapid.  It's also sensitive and responsive to pain and pleasure.  In one series of experiments cited by Goleman, subjects looked at pictures that juxtaposed neutral images with distressing ones; in some cases, eye-tracking determined that a subject's gaze could go right to the edge of a distressing image and trace its outline without ever straying into it:

Spence, in trying to figure out just how such a trick might be possible, suggests there must be some part of the visual system that takes a "pre-look," glimpses [the distressing stimulus] in peripheral vision, marks it as a psychological danger area, and guides the gaze to the safe areas.  The whole operation never reaches awareness.

These filtering mechanisms, in extreme circumstances, make it possible for people living under tyrannical regimes not to notice things they're forbidden to acknowledge, or enable people in dysfunctional families not to notice ongoing abuse, etc.  But such mechanisms needn't only function defensively, to manage anxiety by screening out intolerably threatening information.  In the kind of immersion I describe above, they function to maximize pleasure by screening out whatever threatens the pleasurable experience.

Now we come to an interesting juncture. It seems commonsensical to think a text that poses no internal obstacles to the reward it offers will deliver the most rewarding experience--to think, for example, that something better than Twilight might deliver everything Twilight offers, only better. But we're talking here about the operation of a system that will continue to pursue a reward as long as a text continues to provide it, just as flowers turn toward sunlight and roots grow toward water.  If the system encounters obstacles or threats to that reward within the text, it will continue to narrow its focus to exclude them. Thus, a poor writing style goes unnoticed, technical mistakes are ignored, awkward plot developments are accepted, embarrassment and self-consciousness aren't provoked by one's enjoyment of story elements that might otherwise seem silly or childish, etc.

Again, this deeper level of immersion I'm proposing isn't simply a matter of selectively switching attention off, but of redirecting it, in this case, from the textual elements that might compromise the experience to the textual elements that support and deliver the experience. And again, this heightened attentional focus on those elements makes the experience that much more vivid. Actually, the process itself is intensified here, since what must be ignored is part of the text, not peripheral to the experience (as, for example, awareness of one's surroundings is peripheral to the experience of the text), and the system must therefore work harder to exclude it by focusing harder on the rewarding elements.   

Ironically, then, the more diffuse attention permitted by a better text wouldn't deliver quite as potent a dose of the rewarding experience as that delivered by a text where problematic aspects force this more extreme narrowing of attention.

And there's more to it even than that.  Naturally, the "smart filter" that makes all this possible is neither infallible nor unlimited.  Sometimes it lets something through that it should screen out.  Sometimes a flaw crosses the threshold of being too bad or obvious to be ignored. If an experience is rewarding enough, though, backup mechanisms can come into play to continue protecting and pursuing it, even when the filter fails.  Thus, for example, a flaw obtrusive enough to break through into awareness isn't permitted to ruin the experience, but is instead interpreted in a more positive light, as a distinguishing element or stylistic touch that actually enhances it.  This is how fans can say, in all sincerity, "To me, that's part of the charm," when non-fans, incredulous that anyone could like something so awful, point out a problem that seems especially glaring (I've discussed this before here).  Creators influenced by such a text might deliberately imitate the flaw in their own work, or incorporate it into their style.   

The catch in all of this, of course, is that a text really needs to be sufficiently rewarding in the first place, and must continue to reward the increasing investment of attention at each progressive degree of immersion.  None of this will work if a text is just crap, pure and simple, through and through.  Flaws are all too apparent when a text doesn't make it worth the attentional system's while to screen out or reinterpret them.

Obviously, what's experienced as rewarding will vary wildly from person to person (or even the same person in different states of mind), as will the thresholds up to which flaws can be tolerated.  But popular culture can help tune large numbers of people's internal settings to within a shared range, and something like Twilight manages to be a monster breakout commercial success by striking just the right balance for such a "harmonized" mass audience.

I don't know if it's possible for a creator to strike that balance on purpose; I certainly wouldn't recommend trying it by deliberately crafting flaws into a work.  No text is going to be perfect, so as long as a text succeeds in being rewarding enough, this dynamic will be operative to some degree, in any case. 

I'll close by posing a question to which I don't have an answer, as I've just begun to think about it.  What is the critic's role, when faced with such a text?  I don't think it's to convince all those stupid fans that what they stupidly love is just a bunch of stupid shit, and make them feel stupid for loving it.  It seems like there should be some critical balance between an objective assessment that notes the flaws for what they are, and an acknowledgment that the text works in a special way (a way that most critics, by temperament and training, are in no position to experience firsthand), in large part because of those very flaws.  I don't know.  Your thoughts, Groovy Agers . . . ?