Jewett, Robert and John Shelton Lawrence. �Trekkie Religion and the Werther Effect.� The American Monomyth. Garden City, USA: Anchor Press/Doubleday. 1977.
This book is frustrating me. Jewett and Lawrence seem to come up with interesting ideas to apply to pop culture, but then apply them with the grace of drunken rhinoceri. I this case, we have the idea that Star Trek fandom behaves like a religion, and that there is precedent for the fan-to-faithful slip that happens in fan communities.
They argue that Trek is like a religion and use its fanatical fan-base as evidence. The fans� enthusiasm and passion for the show, combined with what J&L argue are the show�s mythic qualities (in Chapter 1), makes it effectively a religion, but one that is wrapped-up in a candy-coating of secularism and science. In my horror at their factual errors and free-wheelin� method, from the previous chapter, I didn�t give them the credit they�re due for pointing out something very important about Star Trek. It is a vehicle for American values, though of a particular kind.
�Projecting traditional American values and repressions into imaginary planets where their workability can be fantasized apparently enhances believability. What has failed in American experience is nevertheless affirmed to be �true� because it is depicted operating successfully in outer space� (32-33). Which is to say that Trek enacts American values, such as isolationism in the Prime Directive, Imperialism in Kirk�s constant meddling with alien worlds, sexual Puritanism in Spock�s asceticism, sexual revolution and �free love� in Kirk�s dalliances with alien women, etc. It�s important to note that there is nothing necessarily malevolent here. Most art carries the politics and ethics of its culture. We should not condemn that practise, though we might want to condemn the actual politics or ethics that are carried. This distinction is important!
What Trek does is project those American values out into the universe as if they were literally universal. As in most science fiction, the human race comes to represent the country or culture of the creators. In American sci-fi, �Earth� means �America� and �human� means �American,� and so too with British or Japanese science fiction. The home culture is projected out to the whole race, and, in Trek or Doctor Who for example, that race goes around the universe teaching people how to be �better� (I.e., more American, more British, etc.).
This practise is nothing particularly new. It�s just another iteration of the faulty universal, but science fiction and fantasy do it in within imaginary worlds so that those values can actually be universal, if the artists depict them that way, thus creating a narrative that is internally accurate, but still ideologically effective. Vulcans are Puritanical. There�s no disputing that fact because that�s the way they�re written. They do, by their presence and the fact that the show glorifies their practises, represent a kind of argument for asceticism and rejection of a certain kind of sexuality. Of course, there are counter-examples within the show, as well. Kirk�s sexuality reprents the exact opposite of Vulcan commitment sans sex; he�s is passionate and lusty, but never commits to any woman, only to his ship and his duty. In either case, though, SF/fantasy can side-step certain obvious objections to the practises they represent by saying �it�s not real,� which it isn�t! However, even if �it�s not real,� it can still carry a very real payload of ideological content.
However, at no time in the chapter do J&L actually define �religion.� They point out fan emulation of redeemer figures, like Kirk and Spock, and they claim ritualistic behaviour without actually referring to any. They compare fan practises with those of �mystery religions,� but then fail to define them, either, though from context, they are presumably cultish organisations that we, the readers, are supposed to take to be �bad� in some way. But they never say exactly how religion works, therefore the comparison to Trekkies is quite empty.
They do, however, define something they call the Werther Effect, in reference to an 18th-century novel by Geothe, The Sorrows of Young Werther, in which a young man commits suicide when he can�t have the woman he loves. The book was so popular that several fans committed suicide because of their own unrequited loves, and either left notes referring to the novel, or had the book on their persons when they died. This, they claim, is a historical parallel to the kind of devotion found among Trekkies, and they name that devotion �The Werther Effect.�
They define it thusly: �In the Werther effect a member of the audience (a) experiences a work of fantasy within a secular context that (b) helps to shape the viewer�s sense of what is real and desirable, in such a way that (c) the viewer takes actions consistent with the vision inspired by the interaction between his own fantasy and popular entertainments. A Werther effect is the form of voluntary behavior alteration produced by interaction with a powerful artifact of popular culture. It is a religious type of ethical scheme within a nonreligious context, occurring regardless of the intent of the artifact�s creators. It characteristically embodies a redefinition of the boundary between fact and fantasy� (36)
This definition of the Werther Effect, and its ties to religious emulation of heroic characters, is, first, very similar to Barthe�s definition of �myth� as �depoliticized speech,� communication that pretends to have no ideological content as a way to hide its ideological content, and deliver it in such a way that the reader/viewer has his metaphorical guard down. The SF/fantasy �it�s not real� defense is a great example of Barthean myth. It�s a semiotic Trojan horse (which is really a Greek horse, as Bernard of Yes, Minister explained, so many years ago).
Second, though, the Werther Effect is really just the implicitly bad or superficial kind of myth interpretation that Campbell describes. J&L�s examples of people changing their behaviour are all very literal. Men and boys emulate the lead characters: �A sixteen-year-old youth resembling Leonard Nimoy has had his hair cut and his eyebrows shaped in slanted Vulcan style. He almost always wears a blue velour shirt [�]� (33). Women tend towards not wanting to emulate the characters, but to have sex with them: �One enterprising group of girls tried black-magic rituals to make their Star Trek heroes fall in love with them� (34).
The myth reading that J&L are attributing to Trekkies is pretty shallow. It is what Cambell called the �Do thus� model, as opposed to the �Know this� model (319). It is mere ritual rather than deep understanding. Considering how indebted The American Monomyth is to The Hero with a Thousand Faces, I expect Jewett and Lawrence to not just make up names for things that Campbell already named. They�re perfectly free to dispute Campbell�s construction in order to deconstruct it, but they don�t do that. Again, alas.
The chapter essentially argues that fandom ought to be studied like a religion in order to draw attention to it and make a point that I entirely agree with: �The complex interaction between individual imaginations and popular artifacts should [�] be brought to consciousness and subjected to criticism. One must avoid both Puritanical ban and the bubble-gum cop-out� (36).
J&L are essentially talking about the twin poles of cultural studies, the �pop culture will destroy us all� model�which assumes a populace that can be moved to violence at the drop of a hat�and the �pop culture has no effect whatsoever� model�which assumes a monolithic populace that�s incapable of change at all. At both extremes, we assume that the mass audience is a bunch of morons. I don�t think Jewett and Lawrence have fully avoided enacting the same mistaken logic in their book, but I do applaud the effort. The book�s heart is in the right place, anyway.
What they�ve really failed to recognise is that fandom is a thing unto itself, a cultural practise that is not exactly without precedent, at least not in the 20th century. No analogy to religion is necessary to describe it. It is a thing unto itself. It should be studied in its own right. Certainly, there are similarities between fandom and religious practise, but there are also similarities to minority culture behaviour, and many conceptual techniques left over from literary analysis. This might sound like my solution to everything, but instead of trying to slot this practise into a pre-existing category, why not just admit that it�s a permutation of a bunch of activities, practises, methods, and concepts combined in a new way? We need neither find an old category, nor create a new one. We simply look at the intersection of all of those practises as having, by their existence, defined a cultural space in which fan communities already live.
There now, was that so hard?
Posted by orion at May 9, 2006 5:25 PM