30 THENEWYORKER, SEPTEMBER 16, 2019
Statler Hilton hotel, in New York, under
a banner that read “Star Trek Lives!”
Rock and roll dragged Lisztomania
into the twentieth century, as Elvis Pres-
ley fans swooned and screamed—a phe-
nomenon immortalized in the title of
his 1959 compilation album, “50,000,000
Elvis Fans Can’t Be Wrong.” Beatle-
mania further crystallized the image of
the screaming female fan. An under-
appreciated aspect of the band’s appear-
ance on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” in
1964, is that it spotlighted not just the
Beatles but the hysterical audience. The
“screaming teen” stereotype has often
inspired hand-wringing or contempt, a
way of policing adolescent-female li-
bido. The fan scholar Mark Duffett has
suggested that “fan screaming may be
a form of ‘affective citizenship,’ ” a com-
munal defiance of ladylike behavior.
Like television, the Internet broad-
ened and intensified fandom. When
Jenkins published “Textual Poachers,”
digital fandom was “mostly guys at
M.I.T. and military bases typing ‘Star
Trek’ into computers while at work,”
he said. Nineties shows such as “The
X-Files” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”
spawned passionate fan communities
that used the Web to gather, complain,
or hunt for romantic subtext. (“Ship-
pers” are fans who, often disregarding
narrative logic, advocate for certain
characters to couple up.) But stronger
fandoms meant a stronger sense of own-
ership, which could put writers and
producers on the defensive. The ABC
show “Lost,” which ran from 2004 to
2010, inspired elaborate theorizing
about its mysteries, and fans revolted
when the finale didn’t deliver answers.
One of the showrunners, Damon Lin-
delof, later lamented the conflicting
demands of viewers: “There were things
that they wanted, but they also wanted
to be surprised.” Millions of dollars
ride on the contradiction.
At Comic-Con, I met Steve San-
sweet by the “Star Wars” pavilion. In
1977, Sansweet was a thirty-one-year-
old Wall Street Journal reporter working
in Los Angeles, and he was invited to
an advance screening of “Star Wars,” at
Twentieth Century Fox. “I liked all the
hardware and the aliens, the story line,
the good-versus-evil,” he recalled. “The
mythology was sort of there, but under-
neath the surface of the hero’s journey.”
He saved his ticket, which became the
first item in a collection that has grown
to more than three hundred thousand
pieces, including a Darth Vader mask
shown in “Return of the Jedi” and a fan
portrait of Princess Leia made of but-
tons. The collection now occupies a nine-
thousand-square-foot museum in Pet-
aluma, California, called the Rancho
Obi-Wan. Guinness World Records has
named it the world’s largest collection
of “Star Wars” memorabilia.
In 1990, Sansweet heard that Lucas-
film was planning to publish an official
guide to collectibles. “I cold-called and
said, ‘If anybody’s doing a price guide,
it should be me!’ ” Six years later, as he
was working on his third “Star Wars”
book (he has now published seventeen),
Lucasfilm offered him a temporary job
in fan outreach. The fan community
had been relatively quiet since “Return
of the Jedi,” in 1983, but now the orig-
inal trilogy was getting rereleased in
advance of a set of prequels. Sansweet
left his position as the Journal ’s L.A.
bureau chief to reignite the base. “I fol-
lowed my bliss, as Joseph Campbell
would say,” he told me. “And they for-
got to fire me after a year, so I stayed
there fifteen years.”
Sansweet visited at least a dozen
conventions per year and oversaw the
distribution of promotional images to
magazines for fans. But he also acted
as a fan advocate inside Lucasfilm.
When a group called the Final FirstLegion started gathering in Imperial
cosplay, he recalled, “people at Lucasfilm
were a little antsy—suppose somebody
robs a bank in a Stormtrooper costume?”
Sansweet convinced the studio that, as
long as it set ground rules, the exposure
could be good. After “The Phantom
Menace” came out, in 1999, he was re-
sponsible for answering mountains of
letters about Jar Jar Binks, the polariz-
ing comic-relief alien. The character
was sidelined in later films, but San-sweet insisted that there were more pro-
Jar Jar letters than anti-Jar Jar letters,
because children loved him. “And it was
before the explosion of vile that we see
on the Internet these days from differ-
ent fandoms,” he said, sighing. “The
political situation in this country has
spread to pop culture. That’s the unfor-
tunate part of fandom: the Dark Side.”W
hen I was a teen-ager, in the
nineties, I was obsessed with
NBC’s Must-See TV lineup on Thurs-
day nights, anchored by “Friends,” “Sein-
feld,” and “ER.” Every week, I would
go to my friend Charles’s house to watch.
I especially loved Phoebe, Lisa Kudrow ’s
character on “Friends.” The first Web
site I ever visited was called Phoebe’s
Songbook, a fan collection of her lyr-
ics. (I had read about it in Entertain-
ment Weekly.) In tenth grade, I owned
branded T-shirts for all three shows,
and on Friday mornings I would go to
school wearing the shirt corresponding
to whichever show I thought had been
the best the night before.
In retrospect, this is probably the
most embarrassing fact I can share about
my high-school years, but at the time
I felt more secure in this aspect of my
identity than I did in many others. The
shirts were my Twitter. My fan com-
munity was Charles and me. There was
something pure about my fandom, an
unabashed teen longing that didn’t know
to hold back. Had I waited twenty years,
I would have been able to connect with
a vast network of Phoebe stans. Thanks
to streaming, “Friends” fandom remains
a global phenomenon, particularly
among millennials, who are apparently
nostalgic for a world in which friends
interacted over coffee instead of on In-
stagram. At Comic-Con, people lined
up at the Warner Bros. pavilion to pose
on a replica of the Central Perk sofa.
As I walked through the hall, I found
myself thinking less about the negative
side of fandom than about its benefits.
At its core, fandom is a love story, like
something out of Greek myth; it’s Pyg-
malion falling in love with someone
else’s statue. Like romantic love, it can
range from gentle companionship—
cosplay and curtain fic—to deranged
obsession. The psycho stalker fan is its
own archetype—Robert De Niro’s Ru-
pert Pupkin, in “The King of Comedy,”