The quickest route to fury or despair is to look at what people post in forums on line. I’m a fool to do it. But I have been sucked into the reading a lot of the reactions to last night’s Lost finale, which, I will admit was the background noise to my ongoing paper shuffling and apartment clearing. Given that it was the first episode I watched all the way through, I don’t really have much feeling about it one way or the other. It was on, that was it.
But the responses have take me back to some of my earlier musings about fandom, and after experiencing growing disquiet I’ve isolated the one sort of response that is making my blood boil: the people who condescendingly discuss the venality or ineptitude of the people who make the show in terms that imply that they themselves know how such things should be made.
Here’s my problem: unless you yourself create things and get your living by the making of them, I would ask you to think long and hard about making that argument.
Do you write TV shows? Movies? Comics? Novels? Do you work to convince other people to make them with you? Have you directed a play? Had to convince someone else to committ their resources to your idea week after week? Do you edit film? Craft sets? Act? Do you over and over again initiate the process of creation and see it through to it’s conclusion? If so I’m happy to hear what you have to say about where a fellow creator has gone wrong, dropped the ball, take a short cut, gone for the cheap shot. There are accomplished novelists and film makers on my friends list here on lj and in the blogosphere. I’d be happy to hear their thoughts on consistency and characterization and story telling, because when they do chose to tell me something about it they speak from a genuine understanding of the process. They know from experience what the delights and difficulties are. Much of the fan carping I’ve read online seems to be coming from people who don’t understand the process of actually getting thing done, getting things made. They reside in the safety of knowing that their decisions will never be second guessed by thousands of people they have never met. From that standpoint it’s easy to always be pure.
I don’t give a rat’s tuchus about Lost, and I don’t believe that its makers deserve exemption from criticism simply because they got it up on the screen, (what I saw last night didn’t necessarily make me want to see any more) but the blithe ignorance of some in the fan community takes my breath away.
One final thought: Fandom may be connoisseurship, but it is certainly not expertise. To know about something is not necessarily to understand how it came to be.
Tags: daily photo, fandom, lost, making things, rant, tv