Modern fandom and mob mentality.
I can’t fathom a lot of things.
Some of them are:
Working yourself up enough to punch someone in the face.
Not liking bread.
Seeing a cockroach and not wanting to light your house on fire.
Littering without remorse.
Standing up as soon as a flight lands and pressing your cheek up against the attendant call button for 20 minutes.
I could go on. In fact, I did. I shaved this list down.
But more than anything, I’ve always been dumbfounded by the intensity of the parasocial relationship between a performer and their audience to the point that individuals find themselves weeping at the sight of their favorite artist.
I’m writing about this to wrap words around it because this subject has always fascinated and terrified me.
A few things got it rolling around in my noggin again recently:
A concert I attended of a well-known band I didn’t know.
An annual screening of Bo Burnham’s Inside.
A conversation with a friend.
Fans losing their marbles is nothing new. Concertgoers, obsessed enough with their idols that they go by a signifying name to distinguish their fanbase, have been liquifying at the sight of their admired artists for generations. Elvis Presley Fanatics, Beatlemania, Beliebers, Swifties (for the love of god, don’t come for me. I respect you, I just struggle to understand you)—whatever name they go by, fan clubs of all shapes and sizes have been flocking to the stages of their beloved performers for years, crying, screaming, losing their shit.
I have nothing against admiring a performer. I’m a big fan of several artists, some of whom I will pay good money to see perform live. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the purity of fandom on its surface. Buy the T-shirt, spend your money on those over-priced tickets, throw a release party, follow a performer’s career, do what you want.
If what an artist creates brings you joy, relief, and entertainment and makes you feel less alone, by all means, eat it up.
Where I become engrossingly curious is the enveloping intensity of the emotional response some audiences have when in the presence of those with fame.
I get it on the level of fans resonating deeply with what an artist creates—their lyrics, their sound, their story, what they represent. But I have a hard time imagining how the presence of a talented individual one doesn’t know personally could elicit such a reaction that you pummel fellow concert attendees to get a little closer to the stage they’re standing on.
I’m not trying to say people shouldn’t get excited about whatever the hell they want to be excited about. I’m just utterly perplexed and fascinated by what grips people in such a way that it draws them to idolize other human beings to such an action-provoking degree.
There’s admiration, and then there’s obsession, but where’s the line when it comes to fandom?
When is a fanbase cute, and when is it a cause for concern?
Here’s my thought:
Humans are biologically wired to seek to belong in a group, helping ensure their safety and survival. With that in mind, I can understand how, in the buzz of a live show, the room's energy is contagious and exciting, and concertgoers fundamentally need to match that emotional temperature to assert their belonging. Or, across social media, they might feel the urge to match the engagement of the fanbase they want to belong to to secure their standing with that group. They don’t want to deviate from that group’s norm because, ultimately, those who run in the direction of the stampede with all their might are more likely to survive.
I found this quote from an Elvis concert attendee in the 1950s. Edie Garland said of her concert experience, “I honestly did not know why people were so excited, but I knew I’d better act like I was too, so I studied the girls around me and did my best to imitate the screams with hands to my heart and hair and arms waving the air. I remember being embarrassed that I didn’t get what seemed so obvious to my peers. It makes me laugh today to remember that truly there was innocence in my lifetime and it’s my Elvis memory that brings me to treasure it from this thereafter.”
Though Edie’s Elvis show and my recent concert experience are decades apart, I’m familiar with the pressure to conform in the way she describes. In a sea of screaming, dancing, weeping attendees, you feel like a real geriatric stick in the mud by not emulating the same behaviors. On top of that, for me, I felt like it was rude to the friends that invited me to the show if I wasn’t visibly showing them how I was enjoying it in the same way they were.
As people jumped, sang along, and twirled around me, I kept my eyes on the stage, stood still with a beer in my hand, and studied the band. In other words, I was a complete buzzkill compared to the crowd I was in. I felt the push to blend in for social survival’s sake but rejected the urge because I was genuinely concerned the lead singer needed help. He does, but it’s also his shtick to be mentally falling apart on stage, I learned (I’ll buy you a coffee/be impressed if you guess who this is).
So I drank my beer and listened like a NERD.
But this concert experience added another drop in the bucket of my thoughts on this subject.
The need to belong to a group and use similar interests as a factor in establishing it isn’t a mysterious concept. It’s clear that devout fanbases reflect a deeply embedded characteristic of human nature: the survival available when you’re ingrained into the fabric of a group.
Where it gets wild to me is how our tools for establishing belonging have evolved to become floppy-haired boy bands and idolizing famous figures whose lives resemble nothing of our own. It seems the allegiance to such entities is disproportionate to what they are at the end of the day: entertainment.
Former New York Times movie critic A.O. Scott wrote in his farewell piece, “And Now Let’s Review,” that “Fan culture is rooted in conformity, obedience, group identity, and mob behavior, and its rise mirrors and models the spread of intolerant, authoritarian, aggressive tendencies in our politics and our communal life.” In this article, Scott is touching on his years of reviewing movies and the hype he watched people drum up around specific films or franchises regardless of their quality. He includes that the “social media hordes” of modern fandom represent, “an anti-democratic, anti-intellectual mindset that is harmful to the cause of art and antithetical to the spirit of movies.”
I love a grumpy article, and A.O. Scott is the grandpa for the job.
Whether it’s an Elvis concert, a Marvel movie, fashion, writing, whatever—if it’s used to express an idea or message, art seems to have no choice but to be inherently socially political because of how humans use it to distinguish themselves into exclusive groups.
I get it. It’s just so odd.
I don’t think it’s necessarily wrong of society to have a propensity to find safety in this hive mentality inspired by art. Still, it’s just mind-boggling to me that you would cast your wholehearted allegiance to a performer you don’t know. Admire them if their work represents something you want to stand for, but wouldn’t your loyalty be to those shared values and not the person who holds them?
A scene in the book White Noise by Don Delillo added to my ongoing contemplation of mob mentality. The main character, Jack Gladney, is a professor who, in one scene, is tag-teaming a lecture with his colleague Murray. They’re delving into their topics of expertise—Hitler and Elvis—ping-ponging with each other to draw connections between the figures’ backstories in this theatric exchange in front of Murray’s class.
Gladney starts to portray a scene of crowds coming to hear Hitler speak in the early days of gaining his power. Murray takes a seat to listen. In Gladney’s dramatic description of the audience gathering, he says, “But wait. How familiar this all seems, how close to ordinary. Crowds come, get worked up, touch and press—people eager to be transported. Isn’t this ordinary? We know all this. There must have been something different about those crowds. What was it? Let me whisper the terrible word, from the Old English, from the Old German, from the Old Norse. Death.” He continues, “Crowds came to form a shield against their own dying. To break off from the crowd is to risk death as an individual, to face dying alone. Crowds came for this reason above all others. They were there to be a crowd.”
When discussing the concept of mob mentality, the picture Gladney paints of these Nazi crowds is clearly on a much more consequential and monumental scale than that of modern fandom. I wouldn’t dare equate the two.
However, I think an underlying theme can be found.
“People eager to be transported.”
“To break from the crowd is to risk death as an individual…”
“Crowds came to form a shield…”
“They were there to be a crowd.”
I’d say these observations could be said to a greater or lesser degree about a devout fanbase experiencing their pop culture idols today. Using a leader, figurehead, or performer as the mark of one’s belonging to a group seems to be a natural occurrence in human nature, I suppose.
But I can’t get over it.
I can’t fathom.
I can’t compute.
Maybe it’s me.