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Featured Articles: Fans and Groupies; Anna May Wong
FANS AND GROUPIES
Although the academic study of fans and fan culture has a relatively recent history, the subjects of that study have been with us for a very long time. The American usage of the word “fan” dates from the end of the nineteenth century and originally referred to baseball enthusiasts. However, this construction and usage may have been inspired by the term “fancy,” which originated earlier in that century and referred to the followers of a certain sport, especially boxing. Its usage and construction have always had decidedly popular connotations and, until the late twentieth century, were most usually employed in reference to activities associated with the working and middle classes. If one liked classical music they were aficionados, if they liked Tin Pan Alley songs they were fans.
The creation of the idea of the fan in America is inextricably intertwined with the rise of commercial entertainment. Theater audiences in America were some of the first fans and the extent of their fervor can be seen in the Astor Place Riot, which occurred in New York City in 1849. P.T. Barnum’s empire of humbug, dime museums, and circuses marks the beginning of the practice of publicizing the activity of fans and not just the objects of their attention. Indeed his concert tour featuring Jenny Lind in 1850 was as much about the size of the crowds as it was about Lind’s performances. With the creation of new printing techniques and the increase in literacy after the Civil War, there were more objects for fans’ devotions. Many became followers of the “penny dreadfuls,” a new type of pulp fiction, while after the turn of the century, the newly created comics in the tabloid newspapers elicited strong followings.
With the rise of recorded music and motion pictures, an entirely new mass form of fandom was created. It was possible to become a fan of an actor or musician without ever being in their presence. The movie industry was particularly adept at both creating and meeting demand for information about those who made films and, in fact, the rise of Hollywood relied upon a star system that was based in fan culture. New types of media were created to encourage movie consumption, beginning with magazines such as Motion Picture Story and Photoplay which began publishing in 1911, that were packaged for motion picture fans. This trend was followed in the 1920s by the introduction of the newspaper (and then radio) gossip column by Walter Winchell. The best known of these columnists were Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons, who held great power from the 1930s to the 1950s by deciding which rumors to reveal and which to keep quiet. Their function was to reveal information about the movie stars to their fans, while their approach was primarily that of a provocateur. With the rise of scandal tabloid magazines such as Confidential Magazine in the post-World War II era, the rules of the game changed. Through the use of electronic eavesdropping devices, private detectives, and long range photography, these magazines pioneered the fan media discourse which still remains in place today and which sustains contemporary television “infotainment” and gossip websites (e.g., tmz.com and perezhilton).
Until the rise of media and cultural studies, fans and fan cultures were considered not of sufficient gravity to be addressed by the academy. Beginning with the study of film and television fans and fan cultures in the 1970s, this field now includes the study of any and all types of discourse on fandom. These studies employ various methodologies to address questions of everything from the effect of media on its consumers to the fans’ economic impact. In the late twentieth century, media—recorded music, television, and films—became America’s biggest export. For this reason, fans have been studied with greater interest not only by those in the academy and advertising, but also by business in general.
One fan subculture that has had a particularly widespread effect on fandom is that of the groupie. Initially associated with the rock and roll music subculture in the 1960s, both the term and the approach employed by the groupies have become ubiquitous in American fan culture. The original rock groupies were young women who aggressively sought out the company, both physical and sexual, of rock stars. They began more as muses and companions, but after their characterization as mindless “starfuckers” in a 1969 edition of Rolling Stone, they gradually became more of a trope of pornographic male fantasy. The potency and longevity of this fantasy is seen in the fact that the Oscar-winning film from 2000 Almost Famous is a fictionalized account of events in the life of groupie Pennie Lane. The term “groupie” has also become largely interchangeable with that of “fan,” although it intimates a high degree of zealousness.
Lisa L. Rhodes
Bibliography
Burks, John, Jerry Hopkins, and Paul Nelson, Groupies and Other Girls, Rolling Stone, 15 Feb. 1969:11-26.
Desjardins, Mary, Systematizing Scandal: Confidential Magazine, Stardom, and the State of California, inHeadline Hollywood: A Century of Film Scandal, ed. by David A. Cook and Adrienne L. McLean (Rutgers 2001), 206-231.
Jenkins, Henry, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (Routledge 1992).
Jenkins, Henry, Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture (N.Y. Univ. Press 2006).
Levine, Lawrence W., Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Harvard Univ. Press 1988).
Lewis, Lisa, The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media (Routledge 1992).
Rhodes, Lisa L., Electric Ladyland: Women in Rock Culture (Univ. of Pa. Press 2005).
*******
ANNA MAY WONG
Like many iconoclasts, Anna May Wong represents contradiction, the biggest being her duality as both a racial minority and a Hollywood star during a period of profound xenophobia in the US. A popular, Chinese American actress who made 55 films between 1919 and 1961, Wong was nevertheless a second-class citizen in a racist industry that capitalized on her exoticism, talent, and beauty. Above all, Wong is known as the first Asian American movie star who has become an empowering symbol for marginalized artists.
Born January 3, 1905 as Huang Liu Tsong, Anna May Wong was a third generation Californian who was raised near Los Angeles Chinatown, where film crews came to shoot near her father’s laundry. As a teenager obsessed with the silent screen, Wong began acting as an extra at age 14.
The films that cemented Wong’s stardom epitomize Hollywood’s zeal for “yellow peril” discourses and typecast as her as either victim or victimizer. In her breakthrough film, The Toll of the Sea (1922), which was a variation of a classic Orientalist narrative, Pucini’s Madama Butterfly, Wong is “Lotus Blossom,” who, like many characters she would play, dies a tragic death. In the Thief of Bagdad (1924), a high budget spectacle starring marquee idol Douglas Fairbanks, Wong personifies the Dragon Lady as a scheming Mongol slave who deceives her mistress. In Picadilly (1929), one of Britain’s greatest silent films, Wong again plays a seductive, man-stealing dancer. In her most high-profile, yet supporting, role as a murderous prostitute in Josef von Sternberg’s Shanghai Express (1932), many agree that Wong upstages star Marlene Dietrich.
Hollywood’s racist glass ceiling reached a limit when Wong, the most well-known Chinese actress in Hollywood, was not considered for the lead in the film adaptation of Pearl Buck’s novel, The Good Earth (1937), which was set in China. When MGM hired Paul Muni as the film’s male lead, this automatically ruled out Wong as his potential co-star due to the Hays Code, which prohibited on-screen miscegenation. Instead of Wong, MGM chose German-born Luise Rainer, whose yellowface portrayal won an Academy Award.
In retaliation to Hollywood, Wong frequently went abroad to work and to keep herself in the public eye. Although Wong had a large fan-base in China, she received harsh criticism in the Chinese press for her portrayals of unsympathetic characters. To the contrary, she was adored in Europe, where she cultivated a glamorous, cosmopolitan persona and hobnobbed with artists and the intelligentsia. In Berlin, Paris, and London, she acted in films and stage plays whose representations of interracial relationships were more liberal.
Wong’s inability to kiss her white co-stars mirrored her inability to marry non-Chinese in real life. Although she had clandestine relationships with older, often married, white directors Marshall Neilan and Tod Browning, Wong remained single. In later years, Wong suffered from complications of liver disease brought on by years of alcoholism. She died of a heart attack at the age of 56 on February 3rd 1961 in Santa Monica, California.
Wong was often criticized for personifying xenophobic stereotypes. However, in recent years, she has been reconsidered as an important cultural icon, especially for members of marginalized cultures. Artists Andy Warhol and Ray Johnson have created works that celebrate her queer, “campy” appeal. Wong blazed a trail for Asian American actresses like Nancy Kwan and Lucy Liu and has been the subject of poems and plays by John Yau, Jessica Hagedorn, and Elizabeth Wong. These examples show that Wong has left a profound legacy through a powerful, complex, Asian American female persona that was ahead of her time.
Jun Okada
Bibliography
Chan, Anthony B. Perpetually Cool: The Many Lives of Anna May Wong (1905-1961 (The Scarecrow Press 2003).
Hodges, Graham Russell. Anna May Wong: From Laundryman’s Daughter to Hollywood Legend (Palgrave Macmillan 2004).
Leong, Karen J. The China Mystique: Pearl S. Buck, Anna May Wong, Mayling Soong, and the Transformation of American Orientalism (Univ. of California Press 2005).
Liu, Cynthia W. “When Dragon Ladies Die, Do They Come Back as Butterflies? Re-imagining Anna May Wong.” Countervisions: Asian American Film Criticism.Darrell Hamamoto and Sandra Liu, Eds. (Temple University Press 2000) pp. 23-39.
Parreņas-Shimizu, Celine. The Hypersexuality of Race: Performing Asian/Asian American Women on Stage and Screen (Duke University Press 2007).
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