I hope this isn’t too vague, but there’s almost an Occam’s Razor-like point at which a reasonably intelligent moviegoer will come to one conclusion and a wanking fan will come to another, usually because said fan’s expectations are projected onto the movie - so it has to be really deep and really good, and if other people don’t see it it’s because they don’t understand or haven’t done enough research, not because the filmmaker might have done something wrong.
The biggest instance of fanwanking I can think of is this (paraphrased) discussion from after The Phantom Menace came out.
Friend: I wonder if Darth Sidious and the Emperor/Senator Palpatine are the same person.
Me: They obviously are. They’re played by the same actor, look and sound alike, and there’s no reason to think they’re not the same guy. Use some common sense.
Friend: But- no- we don’t know! I mean, there’s no proof, you’re just assuming!
Me: You’re an idiot.
Bottom line: If a smart person who likes to discuss and debate a variety of topics, but doesn’t know a thing about the topic being fanboy’d (or 'girl’d) can’t participate in the discussion and find it interesting, you’re wanking.
[QUOTE=Futile Gesture]
Anything that takes events in Star Wars seriously is fanwankery. But as a series of films it does seem to attract this. People who believe that Lucas had an entire biblically proportioned saga planned out from day one; multi-themed, detailed and allegorically deep./QUOTE]
Your post made me recall an incident I had several years ago (pre-Phantom Menace) wherein I worked with a pair of Star Wars geeks in their purest, most unadulterated forms. At one point, as these two fanboys were dissecting the “overall story arc of the planned nine story cycle” - I dared to point out (IMO) a glaring fly in the ointment of that theory.
In “Star Wars” (the true original FIRST movie), Luke is obviously supposed to have the hots for Leia: he is awestruck by her holographic image; and when he does his “Errol Flynn” impression, swinging over the great Death Star chasm, Leia gives him “a kiss, for luck!” It is one of those “Big Hollywood Screen Kiss” (full on the lips) moment - the kind that only happens between two characters who are supposed to be romantically involved. Two pictures later, they are brother & sister! I doubt very much that Lucas would have written in that Big Screen Kiss moment if he really intended them to be siblings from the start.
Anyway, I mentioned this fact to my co-workers as evidence that Lucas reworked things a bit in the sequels. Well! I had never before seen saw people literally froth at the mouth as they did. They both turned beet red in anger by the idea. Their argument can best be summarized by saying “THAT WAS ONLY A LITTLE KISS, IT DIDN’T ME ANYTHING!!!” They abjectly refused to discuss anything about Star Wars with me for the rest of the time I worked there.
haha. That’s the very movie I was thinking of when I made my earlier post in this thread. I even started to give an example using it, but decided that I couldn’t frame it the way I wanted.
Actually, I do pay attention to what the director says in the commentary. If he says there’s an explanation (they cut a scene and the continuity was messed up, someone had to loop a line, there wasn’t enough money) for any given glitch in a film, I take that on board to some small degree.
Why? Because knowing there is a director helps me remember that this film was a made thing. It was not a magical silver window into a Story That Really Happened, it was a bunch of guys standing around on a sound stage with some equipment and a dog-eared set of hand-revised script pages trying to put together a story in a hundred separate pieces the wrong way round.
So if the director’s commentary says, “Oops, you know, I never noticed that God had three fingers in this scene,” I say, “Ah, a peek behind the curtain. It is now up to me to ignore this glitch, if I can.”
I agree, however, that if the director had felt it important that the God Of The Eight Fingers glitch should be explained to the audience then he’d have done it in the context of the film itself.
