Obsessed To Excess

BY: Michael Arkin

Emmy Award-winning actress Sarah Paulson recently joined the ranks of performers whose fan base turned toxic after she admitted to wearing a fat suit to play Linda Tripp, Monica Lewinsky’s untrustworthy confidant in Ryan Murphy’s Impeachment: American Crime Story. The versatile actress once told Indiewire, “As an actress it’s none of my business whether you like me or not. It’s my job to play this character as authentically and truthfully and with as much commitment as possible.” So then, why did she confess regret to The Los Angeles Times for having donned the padded suit? She didn’t express the same remorse for wearing a blonde wig or glasses for the part. Was it the rage of her fans’ anti-fatphobia that ultimately tipped the scales? Like a personal ad in an old, faded copy of the Village Voice, did the casting specs specify no fatties need apply?

 

For decades, fans and the innocuous clubs they formed were the outgrowth of an audience’s desire for a more intimate connection with the actors, musicians, writers, athletes, politicians, and celebrities they admired. With the advent of radio, phonographs and television, the adoring public was no longer confined to enjoying their favorites in concert halls or movie theatres. Suddenly, they could enjoy them right in their own living rooms. Subsequent technological advances — videocassettes, DVDs, DVRs, and streaming — not only escalated people’s relationship with their idols, they enabled what Encycopedia.com termed “Obsessive repetition and study,” which in turn, gave rise to Superfans.

It wouldn’t be long before a dangerous variant emerged: the toxic fan. Described as a fan who employs verbal abuse, gatekeeping, harassment and other antisocial behaviors to claw their way to the top of the fan base hierarchy, these threatening fans require a platform to amplify their negative messages. They got that in spades with Facebook, Instagram and above all, Twitter. In real time they could share their opinions and more venomously, their obsessions.

Even before the Internet was commonplace, toxic fans were flexing their muscles to influence their idols. Consider the 1987 publication of Stephen King’s bestseller, Misery, whose antagonist, Annie (the self-anointed number one fan of the story’s protagonist, historical fiction writer, Paul Sheldon), is the archetypical toxic fan. Determined to keep him from killing off his most famous character, Misery Chastain, she kidnaps him and breaks his ankles with a sledgehammer to keep him from escaping. Once her prisoner, she forces him to write a new story that brings Misery back to life.

 

As Matt St. Clair mused on RogerEbert.com, “The moment held up a mirror to viewers who were so obsessively devoted to their favorite intellectual properties that they tried to hold artists hostage to their whims.” Inspired by the real-life blowback King received from fans when he dared to venture away from his usual horror genre to publish The Eyes of the Dragon (a tale of princes, dragons, and evil wizards), Misery foreshadowed the arrival of toxic fans with all their narcissistic sense of entitlement.

Wormies (aka casual fans) don’t have skin in that game, and will never understand the super-charged passions that motivate toxic fans. For a primer they may want to watch Trekkies, a documentary that provides insight to a club many don’t want to belong to – the world of Star Trek superfans where the most ardent not only dress like characters from the series, but occasionally speak Klingon, the language of warriors from the planet Qo’noS.

Like Star Trek, Star Wars’ fan base can also be fanatical. But unlike Star Trek’s audience, which celebrate the show’s sensibility of acceptance, there have been some highly visible and incendiary instances of racism and sexism among Star Wars fans. When Lilly Marie Tran, a Vietnamese-American actress, was cast as Rose in Star Wars: The Last Jedi, the reaction from fans was rabid and immediate. The movie was so disliked that one fan mounted a petition, claiming it was a travesty that “wiped out 30 years of stories,” and asked Lucasfilm to remove it from the canon.

Similarly impassioned Game of Thrones superfans were so displeased with the series’ final season, nearly 2 million of them signed a petition demanding that the cast redo the entire season.

When Justice League director Zach Snyder had to step away from the production due to the suicide of his daughter, post-production was turned over to Joss Whedon. One Warner Bros. executive told Vanity Fair, “When we got to see what Joss actually did, it was stupefying. Nobody wanted to admit what a piece of shit it was.” Fans, however, were not as restrained and mounted a #ReleasetheSnyderCut movement that got so heated and personal DC Entertainment president, Diane Nelson wound up deleting her Twitter account. Angry fans put up billboards in New York and Los Angeles, bought aerial advertising and mounted a petition that garnered 100,000 signatures. Their campaign worked. A Snyder Cut Version, which cost the studio tens of millions of dollars debuted on HBO Max in March 2021.

 

Intellectual property holders often rely on superfans to make up these financial shortfalls. According to the Wall Street Journal, “In the age of Spotify where fans no longer need to buy an entire album to hear their favorite song, superfans, who are willing to shell out cash for collectibles from album covers to luggage tags, are increasingly important to a star’s bottom line.” One of the most glaring examples is Korean boyband BTS, which released 51 different products in the first in months of 2020.

 

If the industry handed out awards to the performer who has been the most successful at cultivating her loyal fans, chances are Taylor Swift would have to clear another shelf in her trophy room. When the then 16-year-old singer released her first album, Taylor Swift in 2006, her songs, full of confessional teenage angst, were so relatable that her young fans felt that they had found not only a new favorite singer, they had found a new best friend.

 

Either the savviest teen idol/marketer ever or genuinely the sweetest girl in the world (or perhaps both), Swift used social media to build a relationship with her fans who felt she was talking directly to them. She hid Easter eggs in her album materials and when she mounted her first tour, set up meet and greets, offering fans the ability to take selfies and share a pizza with her. She teased new albums on Instagram, and was unafraid to pull back the curtain on her private life including her failed relationships.

Starting with the release of Red, she invited a select group of her most loyal fans, known as Swifties, to Secret Sessions — listening parties in her home. She baked them chocolate chip cookies, posed for photos, held their hands and proved that despite all the trappings of her celebrity, she was just one of them. She backed it up by doing good deeds – donating 100% of profits from her song Ronan (about a fan’s son who died of cancer) to fight the disease. She’s paid off fans’ student loans and recruited others to dance with her in the Shake it Off music video. She showed up unexpectedly at a fan’s front door and made a surprise appearance at another’s bridal shower. She’s even taken to Tumblr to send personal messages to fans who are nursing their own broken hearts.

Who wouldn’t love her? The producers of Netflix’s Ginny and Georgia to begin with. Earlier this year, the show about a young mother and her teenage daughter poked fun at Swift’s dating history when one of the characters said, “You go through men faster than Taylor Swift.”
It didn’t take long for Swift to take to Twitter. “Hey Ginny & Georgia, 2010 called and it wants its lazy, deeply sexist joke back. How about we stop degrading hard-working women by defining this horse sh*t as funny.”

A number of her cultivated loyal legions took to social media, harassing the show’s writers and cast. When journalist Carrie Courogen spoke out about Ms. Swift’s statement, she became a target of their harassment and doxing (sharing private information including addresses and phone numbers).

While harassment doesn’t necessarily mean stalking, being hunted by superfans has long been a familiar Hollywood plotline. Think Robert DeNiro in The Fan, Whitney Houston in The Bodyguard and Darren Criss in The Assassination of Gianni Versace. The stalkers in these productions share one misconception: equating knowing everything about their idols with actually knowing them.

Throw away the script and you’ve driven into new territory. Case in point: The Kardashians. When you air everything on TV including your gynecological laundry, your infidelities, your plastic surgeries, and your dad’s sexual reassignment, people no longer feel sorry for you. Sometime you break the Internet, which was Kim Kardashian’s goal when she posted the infamous photo of her balancing a champagne glass on her more than ample derriere, but sometimes the Internet breaks you. You’re not overexposed, you’re an overexposer. When you have 25 million Twitter followers, do you really think you wouldn’t have a stalker taking the bait? No wonder the Kardashian girls and Momma have been stalked, robbed and in Kim’s case, tied up and held at gunpoint. Thank God, no one pulled the trigger.

 

While nobody can hold celebrities responsible for the behavior of their fans, sometimes they become the victim of them. Most notable was Grammy winner Selena Quintanilla, alternately known as the Mexican Madonna and the Queen of Tejano Music. In 1995 the 23-year-old singer was on the verge of crossover superstardom when the president of her fan club murdered her.

Selena needed a fan club president because she came to prominence before the age of social media. For all its curation, the biggest winners in social media are the celebrities themselves. Armed with an iPhone Taylor Swift doesn’t need a president of her fan club. She is the president. Who would dare take a pot shot at her, knowing if they did, an army of Swifties will mobilize and take Swift action?