morgan leigh.

I spent today in a coffee shop in the Village going down the rabbit hole of One Direction fandom. I’m giving a paper at the NEMLA’s annual conference in the spring as part of a roundtable on fandom and scholarship on One Direction tinhatters and the fourth wall (here are an article and a primer on the phenomenon, for those of you blessedly out-of-the-know). Basically this meant that I wound up hunched over my computer, thanking my lucky stars that I had wound up in a corner table and didn’t have to worry about people walking past seeing that I was scrolling through a horrifying array of images and gifs of still-sort-of-pubescent boys in vaguely compromising positions.
As I waded through endless enraged comments and evangelizing about the pure and true love between Louis Tomlinson and Harry Styles (name-smushed into “Larry Stylinson,” whom I absolutely thought was a member of the band for an impressively long time), two band members who have gotten used to wearily proclaiming their heterosexuality over the past year, I found myself returning again and again, in my mind, toTodd Haynes’ 1998 cult classic Velvet Goldmine, the film on which I wrote my senior thesis last year. For those of you who haven’t seen it, it’s basically an imaginary biopic of David Bowie, if David Bowie werea whole lot gayer than he is in reality.

Read more: The Ballad of Larry Stylinson: “Velvet Goldmine,” One Direction, and Obsessive Fan Culture
This is basically a love letter to Velvet Goldmine, which is a masterpiece, and really all about what fandom can do to a person. You should watch it, though you don’t have to have done so to read this (minimal spoilers!).
(And, on a semi-related note, MY PAPER IS GOING TO BE THE ABSOLUTE SHIT. It’s not like I had to work hard to find material, hoo-boy.)

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I spent today in a coffee shop in the Village going down the rabbit hole of One Direction fandom. I’m giving a paper at the NEMLA’s annual conference in the spring as part of a roundtable on fandom and scholarship on One Direction tinhatters and the fourth wall (here are an article and a primer on the phenomenon, for those of you blessedly out-of-the-know). Basically this meant that I wound up hunched over my computer, thanking my lucky stars that I had wound up in a corner table and didn’t have to worry about people walking past seeing that I was scrolling through a horrifying array of images and gifs of still-sort-of-pubescent boys in vaguely compromising positions.

As I waded through endless enraged comments and evangelizing about the pure and true love between Louis Tomlinson and Harry Styles (name-smushed into “Larry Stylinson,” whom I absolutely thought was a member of the band for an impressively long time), two band members who have gotten used to wearily proclaiming their heterosexuality over the past year, I found myself returning again and again, in my mind, toTodd Haynes’ 1998 cult classic Velvet Goldmine, the film on which I wrote my senior thesis last year. For those of you who haven’t seen it, it’s basically an imaginary biopic of David Bowie, if David Bowie werea whole lot gayer than he is in reality.

This is basically a love letter to Velvet Goldmine, which is a masterpiece, and really all about what fandom can do to a person. You should watch it, though you don’t have to have done so to read this (minimal spoilers!).

(And, on a semi-related note, MY PAPER IS GOING TO BE THE ABSOLUTE SHIT. It’s not like I had to work hard to find material, hoo-boy.)

Posted January 6, 2013 at 12:43am in velvet goldmine fandom tinhatting david bowie | 46 notes