05.21.08
The age of a fangirl
This past March, on Sunday morning at Norwescon, as we were packing up to check out of our room, I saw the trailer for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
I’d been deliberately avoiding the trailer for this movie. Despite how often I ran across it posted on blogs and forums, despite how excited friends were getting about it, I refused to watch it. I hadn’t been to any movies at which the trailer was screened. I had not wanted to see this trailer, had not wanted to get a (very carefully shaped) preview of the film. But without warning, there it was on Sunday morning on the convention’s in-house channel, and despite my prior avoidance, I couldn’t help watching it.
As the first shadowed scenes played, one by one, with the hint of music from past films playing under them, I found a lump rising in my throat. As Indy’s hat landed on the ground, I found my eyes filling with tears. And by the time the entire thing had run its course, with music and motifs and characters that were intimately familiar to me and yet put in new settings, I was openly weeping.
I wiped the tears from my cheeks and said to my husband, half-angrily and half-wistfully, “Dammit, I am supposed to be too old for this kind of fangirl nonsense.”
Gently, and with great understanding, he replied, “But you’re not.”
My entry into the world of fandom—of unabashed nerdiness and obsessive preoccupation with a made-up universe—started with Star Wars. And Star Wars led to Raiders of the Lost Ark, because of course a fan of that first universe would be thrilled about a movie that put Harrison Ford and George Lucas together again and matched them with the boy genius of Stephen Spielberg. I was all fired up about it from the moment I found out about it (in those quaint, long-ago days, from a story in the entertainment section in our local newspaper), and I followed all the scraps of news I could get over the year or so until its release, an impossibly long time for an obsessed adolescent nerd.
I saw Raiders at a preview, before it even opened wide; I still have the full-page newspaper ad advertising it. To go to it, I had to wheedle my parents into dropping me off at a mall a fair distance from our house, and allowing me to be there quite late on a school night. The preview itself was free, but to see it I had to buy a ticket to The Legend of the Lone Ranger, a terrible and massively failed attempt at reviving the Lone Ranger franchise, and that is notable here only for the fact that stuntman Terry Leonard did the same “under a moving vehicle” stunt in this as in Raiders, except he got badly injured doing it in this film. Anyway, I sat through the terrible Lone Ranger movie (which even at that young and relatively uncritical age I could tell was a terrible movie), and afterwards was rewarded by being one of the first to see this new adventure that I’d been waiting for so long.
I came out of it transformed. I was still a fangirl, nerdy and obsessive about this made-up universe (and I’ve still got tons of tie-in merchandise and a scrapbook of press clippings and ephemera to prove it); but I was also a fan of the movie itself, as a work and an experience. I can trace my profound love of the form of motion pictures directly to this movie. I would see it another 20 times that summer, in line with the whole nerdy obsessive fangirl thing; but each time I saw it, I also learned something new about how to make a great movie, and about how to appreciate films. It taught me about not only the technical aspects (oh yes, I learned all about how they made the bad guys’ faces melt off), but about the importance of the harder-to-quantify elements such as pacing and tone and how to use light and how film editing can be a kind of alchemy. It’s not a perfect movie—there’s no such thing—but there’s so much about it that works perfectly that my love for it only deepened with exposure and time. Raiders remains one of my all-time favorites, and incredibly important in my experiences as a fan and a film critic.
And part of the reason it is so high in my estimation is that its sequels didn’t measure up, and believe me, the fangirl was profoundly disappointed by that. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom gave me a headache the first time I saw it, a loud, cluttered, juvenile, screaming theme-park ride that battered at my senses for two hours and left me vaguely offended for reasons I wouldn’t fully understand for several years. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade would be a pretty decent adventure movie if only it wasn’t a follow-up to Raiders of the Lost Ark, but since it is, its pale copy of the first one’s general plot and its over-reliance on bad comedy and Sean Connery’s charisma can’t help but be kind of disappointing (although I do still adore the opening sequence, which gave me a crush on River Phoenix that remains all too bittersweet). The sequels are excellent examples of how incredibly difficult it is to re-create the alchemy that makes truly great movies; whatever spirit had infused Raiders, it wasn’t something any of its makers could seem to capture again.
And so, all these many years later, I was skeptical, if not downright fearful, when I heard that they were, indeed, going to give it another shot, and that is why I avoided the trailers and kept the new movie out of my thoughts for as long as I could. It’s not just the impossibility of lightning in a bottle, either. It’s that I am not the same person who fell in love all those years ago. The new movie will be filtered through 27 years of experience, education, and cynicism, and the thought of it not only being disappointing but possibly being bad enough to taint the original is deeply upsetting. I’ve already lived through the crushing fannish nightmare of the Star Wars prequels, movies so bad and such betrayals of their progenitors that not even fangirl enthusiasm could overlook it, movies that have actually made me regret being a fan. I don’t want to go through anything like that with a new Indiana Jones film. With a new Indiana Jones film, the stakes are even higher, because it’s not just obsessive fangirlness, but also something that has become a core passion for me. I don’t want to have the foundation of one of the greatest loves of my life shaken. And thus I did my best to ignore the new film’s existence for as long as I could.
Yet when it was suddenly sprung on me after all that time studiously avoiding it, I reacted at a deep, near-primal level that I didn’t really even have control of. All of the right touchstones were there in that trailer, the familiar motifs and the music I know in my very bones and the images designed to whet my appetite and make me want more, and the knowledge—the cynical, decades-in-learning knowledge—that the entire trailer was very carefully crafted to evoke exactly that kind of response couldn’t stop me from reacting to it as if I were a breathless teenage fangirl all over again. And that’s why I wept: I wept in memory of all the joy the made-up world of Indiana Jones has brought me, and in gratitude for the great passion it introduced into my life. And I also wept for the intense fear I have that the new film might betray that joy and passion, and for the hope that it might, somehow, manage to reinforce them after all, and maybe even add to them. My husband was right: I’m not beyond being a fangirl, because being a fangirl has been the foundation of some very important things in my life. And it would just be foolish for me to deny that, as foolish as it was for me to deny for all those months that Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull exists.
As I write this, it’s less than two hours until the movie opens. I am no longer the fangirl who had to be the first one there on opening day; opening days aren’t really my thing anymore, too much crowding and hassle and waiting in line, so I won’t be there tonight anyway, and I’ve honestly not entirely decided yet that I will be going to see it at all. Of course, I can say that with the almost-certain knowledge that my husband will manage to coax me into it, one way or another. If I don’t go, I’ll never know, for good or bad. But if I do go, I’ll definitely know, for good or bad. And I suppose, in the end, it’s better that I know.