Cult Television (review)

As this volume of essays suggests, cult television depends in large part on a fan community that shares esoteric language and knowledge. Cult Television offers the uninitiated a glimpse into these interpretive communities, as contributors unveil fanscapes and metaverses, and divulge the meaning of terms like "Orionspace," "Uma Peel," and "the Picard maneuver." The collection also strives to theorize cult television and illuminate the texts, production strategies, and fans that drive the phenomenon.

The book divides into three sections: "Cult," "Fictions," and "Fans." The essays in the first section raise theoretical questions about the nature of "cult objects" and "cult television." French scholar Philippe Le Guern opens the discussion, analyzing media cults from a sociological stance. Adopting a "constructionist" approach, he compares them to religious cults, addresses issues of high vs. low aesthetics, broaches the idea of "rarity" as a defining trait, and rethinks the assumption of the "fan" as "fanatic." He concludes that a cult text is value-laden and produces enthusiastic and unified social communities that engage in the practice of rituals (9). Mark Jancovich and Nathan Hunt reinforce this idea of social construction by arguing that cult TV is not inherent in the text itself but in fans' positioning of the text (and themselves) as distinct from "the mainstream" and "the easy and transparent readings" of middlebrow taste (27-8). In her essay on Babylon 5, avowed fan Petra Kuppers affirms the cult text as "the bricolage work of both writer and consumer" (54) by detailing how series creator J. M. Straczynski interacts with his fans on the Internet in metatexual discussions. Roberta Pearson offers a similar argument from example, analyzing the conflation of actor Patrick Stewart with Star Trek's Jean-Luc Picard to posit cult TV's heightened dependence on actor/character identification. (When Stewart played Prospero in The Tempest, he drew a burst of laughter when he made the mistake of performing the "Picard maneuver"—tugging on the front of his doublet.)

Textual readings form the center of "Fictions." Sara Gwenllian-Jones concentrates on imaginative settings, outlining the "exotic and ethereal" worlds that serve as cult TV's "virtual reality" (83). "Char-actor," by David Black, returns to the theme of actor/character conflation by contrasting Uma Thurman's portrait of Mrs. Emma Peel in the 1998 film The Avengers (derisively labeled "Uma Peel") with earlier TV incarnations, raising crucial issues about film adaptations. Karen Backstein selects key episodes of The X-Files to explore the theme of "Otherness," minority cultures, and "white power," pointing out the program's equivocal views on "the alien." Mary Hammond posits in Buffy, the Vampire Slayer a metaphoric struggle between the Old and New worlds, as an American teen encounters representations of Old World ambiguities—like Angel as "European decadence" (157) or Spike as the cool but dangerous British other.

The book culminates in four thoughtful essays on fandom. Alan McKee revisits the conceptual binary between the "production" and "consumption" of popular texts, questioning the theoretical divide between "powerful" media industries and the "powerless" fan (169). By reporting Internet debates about what Dr. Who fans consider the text's "canon," McKee urges a reconsideration of the production/consumption split, especially in the Internet age. Fan response to Toby Miller's book about The Avengers caused him to rethink the "active-audience/critic relation" (191). After reexamining the active viewer and the political right, he identifies a "profoundly apolitical" fan option based on pleasure. Appreciating the "sweet and joyous" (193) activity of these fans, Miller nonetheless rejects cultism as necessarily progressive. Jeffrey Sconce makes a provocative connection between Star Trek and the Heaven's Gate cult, infamous for its tragic mass suicide in 1997. Observing that "[a]ll narrative . . . asks its readers to become temporarily delusional" (216), Sconce describes the textual seduction of Star Trek's metaverse—"a fictional enclave for smart people in a dumb world" (217). But he concludes that members of the cult went astray not in their devotion to the mythology of Star Trek but in their...