Fandom, Pilgrimage, and Media Landscapes

Inside Breaking Bad’s Los Pollos Hermanos restaurant, which is a Twisters restaurant in Albuquerque (image from John Phelan)

A fandom pilgrimage is among the increasingly more common dimensions of contemporary fandom that push fandom beyond a digital presence or small local social collectives.  Many digital fandoms have their own imagined materiality, with numerous fan pages including meticulously reconstructed maps:  the LOTR, Star Wars, and Star Trek fandoms have fabricated enormously complex imaginary world maps based on the detailed source material in the canon.  But google maps also have been prepared for real-world landscapes like the Walking Dead graphic novel as well as the Georgia scene of The Walking Dead’s televised zombie apocalypse; New York City-based series including the teen drama Gossip Girl, 30 Rock, and Seinfeld; The OC; Star Wars filming locations; Twin Peaks; a disguised TARDIS; the fairy tale drama Once Upon a Time; and a stunning map that inventories over 2000 movie filming locations.

The remains of the Mos Eisley cantina (image from Colin Kenworthy).

Fandom has pushed itself into the concrete material world in ways that establish a tangible presence for fanhood: T-shirts, for instance, signal fanhood in public spaces; conventions allow fans to see and even get a picture or chat with the creative talent from media fandoms; and a vast range of branded commodities and fan craft goods confirm fanhood from office desks and living room mantels.  Fan pilgrimages now have become one of contemporary fandom’s highest claims to devotion.  There are canned tours of many fan spaces, but most sites are perfectly accessible to any committed fan with a satellite map, and many fans have sought out seemingly obscure places from their fan passions.  For instance, Anakin Skywalker’s home in Mos Espa is rapidly being overcome by Tunisian sands, and it and earlier Star Wars sets in the region including the Mos Eisley cantina and Lars homestead have been the subject of especially devoted fan migrations.

Pilgrimage targets a specific space that has elevated meaningfulness in the canon, which could perhaps include Jerusalem and Mos Eisley alike.  Stijn Reijnders accepts the similarities between religious and secular pilgrimages, but he argues that the distinction between religious pilgrimage and a trek to the Walking Dead set is that the latter is fueled by an imaginative suspension of disbelief in which fans “surrendered themselves willingly to the power of their imaginations.”  A pilgrimage to a site like those in the Tunisian desert is an especially committed journey that forcefully takes fans out of their everyday lives in much the same way as a pilgrimage to a sacred site:  the classic trip to the lands in scripture demanded a significant physical journey that followed years of learning the sacred texts and planning a pilgrimage that tore the pilgrim from their prosaic lives, but we might circumspectly approach the journeys to these fandom spaces in comparable terms.  The trip to Sunnydale High School and the hellmouth in the library, for instance, demands a somewhat less arduous trip to Torrance High School in Los Angeles, but for most fans it requires a commitment to leave their homes to trek to a distant place for the physical experience of being in the space celebrated in their canonical texts.

The Tunisian remains of Tatooine (image from Veronique Debord).

Pilgrimages involve the collection of relics from the site, and some places offer up tourist curios that evoke the power of the place and memorialize the trip; in the Near East, for instance, packets of soil or water from holy sites are marketed at the sites as well as online.  Most of these things are iconic representations of the fandom—a Walking Dead key chain, a Soprano’s t-shirt—that reproduce immediately recognizable fandom symbols.  In Albuquerque, for instance, local merchants offer products like bags of candy meth, Los Pollos Hermanos fry batter, and “Bathing Bad” bath salts.  These iconic things are distinct from material relics that have a concrete material connection to the site (e.g.,the true cross and Holy Nails, or the pink teddy bear from Breaking Bad), though some devoted fans are likely thieving pieces of the sets that are a material relic of their fandom.

Gorn Rock near Los Angeles has appeared in Outer Limits, Star Trek, Bonanza, and Roswell, and the geeks on Big Bang Theory stop at Gorn Rock while wearing Star Trek uniforms (image from Husnock)

The most common “artifacts” people collect are pictures, somewhat ironically representing the “real” embodied experience of tourism with a digital confirmation of the journey immediately distributed on facebook, flickr, and similar digital spaces.  Radi Martino’s abandonment photography project on the Tunisian Star Wars sets somewhat ambitiously links indigenous peoples with the ruined sets, but fans are much more likely to take pictures of themselves on the sets, placing themselves in the midst of their fandoms.  Those pictures make a fans’ idiosyncratic and personal devotion tangible; they represent the material presence of a fandom while they simultaneously fashion a sense of intimacy with other fans (and perhaps facebook friends as well).

This shell cottage in West Wales appeared in the Harry Potter film The Deathly Hallows (image from Russ Hamer)

Tanya Erzen’s fascinating study of Forks, Washington contemplates the complex effects of such tourism on local identity, economics, and commercialism.  The modest timber community of just more than 3000 residents is the scene of the vampire romance novels and movie series Twilight, and a steady flow of the enormously popular series’ fans have journeyed to the town four hours from Seattle.  Forks had been chosen by series author Stephenie Meyer without having ever ventured to the place, simply using the community because it evoked a small town in a damp, rainy region, and the last two movies in the series were shot in Vancouver.  Yet this did not prevent the state from printing Twilight tourism maps; an Italian restaurant named itself after the scene of Bella and Edward’s first date, and a house that has been labeled the home of Bella Swan’s family; and a firm provides Twilight tours that imagine the novels and movies as they might have played out in the Olympic peninsula logging town.  Fans are desperate for a material, embodied experience of Twilight, and Forks became the magnet for those desires.  An isolated place that was wounded by a declining timber industry, 20% of the Forks community lives below the poverty line, and while the town enjoyed a rush of tourism through the five films between 2008 and 2012 it is unclear how long such profits will touch the town.  Certainly many more communities have been eager to commercialize fan tourism, even in the case of somewhat challenging fandoms like Breaking Bad’s meth dealers, the Soprano’s raw violence, or Walking Dead’s zombie apocalypse.  Such communities willing to host fevered fandoms underscore that fan pilgrimage, communities’ economic fates, and the political economy of fan consumption are intimately connected.

References

Janice M. Bogstad and Philip E. Kaveny (eds)

2011 Picturing Tolkien: Essays on Peter Jackson’s the Lord of the Rings Film Trilogy.   McFarland and Company, Jefferson, NC.

Juan Eduardo Campo

1998 American Pilgrimage Landscapes.  Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 558: 40-56.  (subscription access)

Erika Doss

2002 Believing in Elvis: Popular Piety in Material Culture.  In Practicing religion in the age of the media: Explorations in media, religion, and culture, eds Stewart M. Hoover and Lynn Schofield Clark, pp. 63-86.  Columbia University Press, New York.

Tanya Erzen

2011 The Vampire Capital of the World: Commerce and Enchantment in Forks, Washington.  In Theorizing Twilight: Essays on What’s at Stake in a Post-Vampire World, eds Maggie Parke and Natalie Wilson, pp.11-24.  McFarland and Company, Jefferson, NC.

2012 Fanpire: The Twilight Saga and the Women Who Love It.  Beacon Press, New York.

Henry Jenkins

2006 Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture.  New York University Press, New York.

2012 Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture.  2nd Edition.  Routledge, New York.

Ralph D. Lorenz, Nabil Gasmi, Jani Radebaugh, Jason W. Barnes, and Gian G. Ori

2013 Dunes on planet Tatooine: Observation of barchan migration at the Star Wars film set in Tunisia.  Geomorphology (final version subscription access)

Ernest Mathijs and Murray Pomerance (eds)

2006 From Hobbits to Hollywood: Essays on Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings.  Editions Rodopi, Amsterdam.

Stijn Reijnders

2011 Places of the Imagination: Media, Tourism, Culture.  Ashgate Publishing Group, Farnham, Surrey, GBR.

Gary Vikan

2013 From The Holy Land To Graceland: Sacred People, Places and Things in Our Lives.  University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

Nicola J. Watson

2006 The Literary Tourist: Readers and Places in Romantic and Victorian Britain.  Palgrave, UK.

Images

Deathly Hallows shell cottage image from Russ Hamer

DHARMA housing image from Hakilon

Gollum’s Falls image from Mike Rosenberg

Gorn Rock image from Hosnick

Lars Homestead image from Stefan Krasowski

Mos Eisley Cantina image from Colin Kenworthy

Pollos Hermanos image from John Phelan

Tatooine image from Veronique Debord

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