Fans have been criticised heavily via the press as well as academic works. They have been given evil associations and stereotypes hugely based on the news coverage and opinions of extreme cases such as that of Mark David Chapman and John Hinckley. Joli Jenson mentions these cases briefly to give an example of the obsessive loner type as opposed to the frenzied crowd member in her academic piece, "Fandom as Pathology: The consequences of Characterisation". Again, both these definitions are negative opinions on the fan, but the text also touches on the way some people blame the "media influences for fan obsession" (Jenson; 92; 10) and these characterisations. The essay states that fans are "a response to the star system" meaning that "passivity is ascribed to the fan- (Jenson; 92; 10) This essay seeks to explore just how true it is to say that fans are passive and "entirely convinced by media artifice". An analysis of a site dedicated to the film star Ryan Phillippe, created by a fan, as well as references to others fan sites such those dedicated to James Dean will be used to help achieve this. .
The argument Ruddock has given in the question to this essay is a fairly strong one, and has been commented on by films such as The Fan (Tony Scott, 1996) and Nurse Betty (Neil LaBute, 2000), a film about a woman who is in love with her favourite soap opera character and travels to California to meet him after her husband dies. The assumption that fans cannot distinguish the boundaries, as Henry Jenkins argues:.
between fact and fiction, speaking of characters as if they .
had an existence apart from their textual manifestations, .
entering into the realm of the fiction as if it were a tangible .
place they can inhabit and explore.
(Jenkins; 92; 18).
can be challenged by looking at the ways some fans do actually use their knowledge of some fictional characters but apply them for their own creative purposes or self-expression.
