In this chapter, I will consider how the ‘cult’ status of texts1and icons hinges both on audience distinctions/valorisations and upon textual and iconic characteristics. Rather than existing as a genre, cult texts and icons can be more usefully analysed via Wittgenstein’s notion of ‘family resemblances’: ‘a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of detail’ (1988:32).
I would suggest that there can be no final and absolute classification of the media cult (see Jerslev 1992), for just as different generations within the ‘family’ may recombine qualities and attributes, then so too may new ‘media cults’ produce further recombinations of family attributes, or even the generation of new ‘basic’ traits. However, the notion of ‘family resemblances’ has the benefit of allowing for this flexibility, rather than implying an absolutely fixed definition of ‘cult’. The fact that many cults possess ‘sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of detail’ also leads us to consider the possibility that certain textual and iconic forms predispose their audiences toward cult ‘devotion’.
The cult object is hence neither textually programmable nor entirely textually arbitrary. The media cult is paradoxical (Winnicott (1971); see chapter 4) in that it is both ‘found’ (consisting of textual qualities and properties) and ‘created’ (in the manner of Durkheimian ‘sacredness’ discussed in the previous chapter) by the viewer.
In the next section I will consider the ‘family resemblances’ of cult texts: auteurism, endlessly deferred narrative, and hyperdiegesis. I will then move on to address cult icons in the second section of the chapter. Icons, I will argue, combine endlessly deferred narrative with qualities of ‘denarration’.
The family resemblances of cult texts Eco (1995b) lists three primary conditions of the cult text:
1 The furnishing of an entire narrative world which the fan can return to as if it were a private, sectarian space…(198).
2 detachability or non-organic ‘ricketiness’ such that phrases, scenes and feelings can be lifted out of the text….
of an author, being a ‘text of texts’ which has no origin other than pure textuality (199). The third attribute becomes the basis for Eco’s discussion of Casablanca, which he distinguishes from Raiders of the Lost Ark and ET on the basis that these are intertextually self-conscious, and ‘programmed’ in terms of their heritage (1995b:210–1). By contrast, Casablanca is praised as belonging to a lost moment, one in which intertextuality was more spontaneous, unthought and naively ‘authentic’.2This is one of two romantic binary oppositions in Eco’s work. Distrusting postmodern intertextuality, Eco also seemingly distrusts the film in relation to the book. Given the latter’s potential for re-reading and reader activity, cult books supposedly manage to combine organic wholeness with cult status (ibid.: 198). Film is viewed as a medium in which cult status is irreconcilable with organic unity, since this filmic unity would prevent the detachability necessary to the existence of the cult (ibid.).
Though ground-breaking, Eco’s work has not aged well.3Its notion that a film has to be watched all the way through in one sitting makes little sense in video or DVD-based fan cultures, while its insistence that the films of Lucas and Spielberg do not merit cult consideration alongside Casablanca suggests a matter of generational taste weakly disguised as a theoretical distinction (see chapter 3). Eco’s concern with ‘detachability’ and ‘living textuality’ is also complicated by the auteurism which many media cults display.4
If, contra Eco, Star Wars can be considered as cultish (see Brooker 1997, 1999b) then this status cannot be divorced from the fantasised ‘presence’ of George Lucas as creator- auteur, and as a romanticised and ‘revolutionary’ figure in the history of film. In his introduction to Cult TV: The Essential Critical Guide (Lewis and Stempel 1993:7), Patrick McGoohan distinguishes the ‘revolutionary’ creators of cult shows:
[Cult programmes] attract a fanatical following. They have something which fascinates their acolytes who view favourite shows time after time without diminishing enjoyment. Why? Perhaps the answer is that these programmes were made by enthusiasts who believed passionately in their work, and the energy of their belief is transmitted to a select audience sympathetic to the theme and themselves hungry for an enthusiasm.
In such accounts, it is the auteur which acts as a point of coherence and continuity in relation to the world of the media cult.5In production terms, televisually this is likely to be the Executive Producer-Creator-Writer figure or ‘hyphenate’ (Thompson 1990:36), for example The X-Files’ Chris Carter, Star Trek’s Gene Roddenberry, Blake’s 7’s Terry Nation, Babylon 5’s J.Michael Straczynski. Although the auteur figure is problematised by the collaborative nature of industry creation, fans continue to recuperate trusted auteur figures (see Lavery (1995) and Nochimson (1997)). A similar game of textual authorisation has been played out across The X-Files, where ‘stand out’ episodes are often marked as such by the writing/directing of Chris Carter.
Auteurism brings with it an ideology of quality: if much mass culture is supposedly unauthored—supposedly being generated according to formulaic industrial guidelines— then ‘high culture’ reading strategies intrude on this space through the recuperation of the
trusted Creator.6 Where no obvious candidate for the role of auteur is apparent, then the functions of authorial discourse can, as Doctor Who illustrates, be split across personnel (the typical triumvirate would be one of producer-director-star). The line between creator and audience is blurred by the fact that the former supposedly communicates an intense private vision to the latter.
The auteur’s extratextual ‘presence’ is in part produced by the fans themselves, but its legitimacy always predates fans’ involvement through being offered up as an official extratextual/publicity narrative. A designated ‘author’ is hence likely to be offered up by shows which aspire to any sort of cult status. In contrast, forms close to ‘cult’ such as soap opera are far more likely to be non-authored within official publicity discourses, although fans may contest this non-authorisation.7 It has been suggested by Jenkins (1992a) that the auteur/non-auteur distinction between, say, Twin Peaks and more traditional soaps is a matter of gendered reading practices, with male followers of Lynch’s master-puzzle focusing on hermeneutic readings, i.e. attempting to ‘crack’ the narrative enigmas of the programme by referring to Lynch’s supposed intentions. This rests uneasily alongside Jenkins’s own discussion of ‘Star Trek, genre and authorship’ (1995) which examines the extratextual Roddenberry-as-Creator narrative, and yet at the same time admits that Star Trek has a huge female following. This popularity can only imply that the officially licensed and extratextual view of Gene Roddenberry plays its part independent of gendered reading practices. Similarly, in the case of Twin Peaks the Lynch-as-auteur micro-narrative was licensed by pre-broadcast publicity (particularly magazine and newspaper adverts) and would therefore seem likely to have represented a frame of reference for both male and female fans (see Brown 1996:60), even if the intensity of certain fans’ engagement with the notion of Lynch-as- auteur (i.e. on alt.tv.twinpeaks) may have been gendered.
That both film and TV media cults consistently possess an author-creator suggests that what John Ellis neglected in his analysis of television (Ellis 1982) was the ability of cult TV to recuperate the author-function (Foucault 1977). This recurring construction of the auteur (Andrew 1993) indicates the indivisibility of romantic ideologies of authorship and the inscription of cult status. Shakespearean texts, for instance, boast immense longevity, enduring interest in the absence of ‘new’ Shakespearean works, complex audience (reader) demographics, and a very loyal and vocal readership. Equally, Shakespeare’s texts have been reworked by devotees and have been reinvented across media as a myriad of modern restagings, film adaptations and books-of-the-film. In this sense ‘Shakespeare’, and the minutely detailed attention which many (academic) readers bring to these texts, could be identified as the perfect media cult (Star Trek is but a blip on the cultural timeline by comparison) in terms of its expansion beyond an original point of textual and historical context (see Bristol (1996:viii–ix) for a consideration of Shakespeare alongside the Beatles and the Elvis cult; see also Davidhazi (1998) on ‘the romantic cult of Shakespeare’).
The comparison between media cults and ‘the Shakespeare myth’ (Holderness 1988a, 1988b) is instructive: despite commonalities,8 cult forms differ from this ‘cult of Shakespeare’ in that their ‘creator function’ is linked to a specific form of narrative; one which continues without end but which, unlike soap opera narrative, remains focused on
particular themes and issues of (character) identity. The issue here is the extent to which media cults thereby display a characteristic narrative form, which I will term ‘perpetuated hermeneutic’ (Tulloch and Alvarado 1983:133) or ‘endlessly deferred narrative’. Recognising this form means recognising the textual determinations of cult status, and the sense in which the cult text is found rather than purely created by the cult audience. At stake is the identification of the cult as a set of inter-related forms which are common across different media. Cult TV; cult films; cult books—these all display combinations of ‘endlessly deferred narrative’ and ‘hyperdiegesis’ (see, for example, Hills (2000b) on the Discworld novels of Terry Pratchett).
Cult texts differ crucially from cultish objects of enduring fascination and affection such as the saga of the Royal Family. Since this tabloid drama is encoded as ‘real’ (or at least possesses actual referents) it can offer no ‘author-function’ or creator-auteur: there is no ‘subject-who-is-supposed-to-know’, no guarantor of trust underlying the open- ended royal tale. The narrative in this instance is ‘endlessly deferred’ simply by virtue of its realism.9
The cult’s ‘endlessly deferred narrative’ is distinct from Barthes’s ‘hermeneutic code’ (1974) since this operates across a single narrative.10 ‘Endlessly deferred narrative’ is also distinct from the decentred narrative non-resolution of soap operas, which always continue to pose a number of questions, none of particular priority or significance, even while (temporarily) resolving elements of ongoing stories. The cult form, by contrast, typically focuses its endlessly deferred narrative around a singular question or related set of questions. This ‘endlessly deferred narrative’ typically lends the cult programme both its encapsulated identity and its title; consider, for example The Prisoner (where and why is Number Six imprisoned? Did he escape?) and The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (in which we get extracts from ‘the Guide’ but are never privy to its entirety, leaving it open to reinvention as a source of narrative information and revelation). Another example of this process is Doctor Who, which is actually a question as well as a title: the show’s central character was not latterly called ‘Doctor Who’ but ‘the Doctor’. ‘Doctor Who?’ is thus the question addressed throughout the programme’s history in a variety of ways. The central character is therefore offered up as a mystery, or as ‘unfinished’/unknown. Over 26 years a fairly comprehensive sense of the Doctor’s identity was eventually arrived at, only to be destabilised in the final few seasons (1988–89) where it was hinted that previous programme knowledge was only partial. Threatened with narrative exhaustion, the programme struggled to find a way to ‘regenerate’ the sense of mystery which it had carried since its inception. Doctor Who projects its endlessly deferred narrative almost entirely upon the (non-) identity of its (anti)hero: other cult series have displayed similar tendencies with regards to particular characters.
‘Classic’ Star Trek, for instance, offered the character of Mr Spock, who as the only alien aboard the Enterprise presented an opportunity for endlessly deferred narrative. Spock’s status as a half-Vulcan introduced an ongoing question regarding the nature of this difference which was addressed in particular episodes as well as being developed by Leonard Nimoy (see Nimoy 1995:66 and 71). Over time—and across many episodes scattered throughout Star Trek’s transmission sequence—the character of Spock is ‘unfolded’ in terms of a familial history, sexuality, mating rituals, culture, beliefs and
distinctive skills. Thus the ‘mystery’ of the character’s identity is not considered as part of one distinct storyline but functions across the entirety of the meta-text that is Star Trek. The collapse of an endlessly deferred narrative—whether by design or exhaustion— can signal a crisis point for any cult form: Moonlighting, for instance, enjoyed a dedicated, involved and loyal audience (and is featured as a ‘cult’ show in the niche magazine Cult Times) until it fatally resolved the sexual tension which existed between its co-stars. The ‘will they, won’t they’ tease which had stretched across the ‘episodic but non-discrete’ paradox of the programme then ceased to act as a lure. Moonlighting entered the world of soap opera, in which the resolution of one narrative thread opened up a new set of possibilities, and thereby sacrificed the focal point of its own endlessly deferred narrative.
Identifying ‘endlessly deferred narratives’ in The X-Files, Babylon 511 and The
Fugitive, Craig Hinton illustrates the commonality which fan writers perceive across the network or cluster of shows considered to be cults:
In the same way that Babylon 5 has garnered popularity, The X-Files is doing the same: they both give the audience a definite goal and they’ll stay for the duration. It worked in the sixties with The Fugitive, and it still works today. We know that Scully and Mulder will eventually stumble on the truth, and we’re all more than happy to hang around for the duration… Everyone likes a secret.
(Hinton 1995) This cultish intertextuality is repeatedly evident when scanning Cult Times: Nowhere Man, for example, is described in terms of two previously successful cults: ‘Nowhere Man creator and executive producer Lawrence Herzog is a pretty hip individual who can quote you chapter and verse [note the self-conscious presence of a religious discourse] on such cult fare as The Prisoner… [but] Nowhere Man…goes beyond the easy tag of The Fugitive meets The X-Files’ (Cult Times, no author credited, November 1995:10). Nowhere Man would appear to be an almost perfect cult object in that it echoes previous cult successes, has a creator-auteur responsible for writing key episodes which develop the show’s mythology, boasts a lead character named Tom Veil (the veil of mystery and obscurity?) and has production personnel in common with other cult shows. It also offers the drip-feed of piecemeal revelation and the persistent opening up of further speculation which together create the powerful drive of the endlessly deferred narrative, possibly the most powerful of all audience-hooking narrative forms.12
This brief summary could be taken to indicate that Nowhere Man is a self-consciously designed cult text, and that therefore this cult text is purely ‘found’ (i.e. it exists objectively through production decisions) rather than being paradoxically both (subjectively) ‘created’ and (objectively) ‘found’. This apparent resolution of what I have posited as an essential paradox is, however, itself a falsification: despite securing coverage in Cult Times, Nowhere Man failed to secure a dedicated cult following; it was deemed by fans to be too preprogrammed, i.e. it did not leave enough space for subjective ‘creation’, and hence could not function as a viable cult form. In this sense, then, neither coverage in cult ‘niche media’ (Thornton 1995) nor production strategies and extratextual publicity regimes can successfully anchor a media cult: audience engagement—which
can be textually inferred, but which cannot be wholly read off from the text—remains the acid test of the media cult. Inferring a cult audience on the basis of textual evidence remains problematic precisely because any such inference must take into account how the given text can be fitted into an intertextual network of existing cult texts by fans’ extratextual valorisations.13 If the text concerned is highly likely to be perceived as a ‘clone’ of a preceding cult text (e.g. Dark Skies as an imitation of The X-Files) then this factor will severely impair its cult potential and its incitement of audience attachment. Extratextual publicity regimes and niche media coverage therefore threaten the cult status of the text in the same moment that they assist in the realisation of this status; by aligning a text too firmly with cult precedents, cult potential can be clearly signalled, but simultaneously destroyed through the very transparency and clarity of this interpellation. ‘Nowhere Man…goes beyond the easy tag of The Fugitive meets The X-Files’, insisted Cult Times, but the anxiety raised by this disclaimer was clearly enough to more than hint at its reverse. The potential cult text is, in this instance, too clearly commodified, i.e. it functions to recruit an overly specific audience (the ‘cult audience’ as a defined subculture).
Arguably, cult shows win most of their popularity with audiences while they exist in the phase of directed and focused narrative enigma: the survival rate beyond this is limited, as Twin Peaks discovered to its cost. The endlessly deferred narrative of ‘Who killed Laura Palmer?’ provided an audience-winning focus around which surreal ‘clues’ and potentially meaningless/meaningful characterisation could proliferate. However, when the ‘identity’ of Bob—the spirit presence—was revealed and precipitated hermeneutic collapse, the series struggled to redefine a focused position from which to regenerate mystery. The ongoing battle between Agent Cooper and his nemesis Windom Earle proved to be too detached from the hook of season one to hold a wide audience, and the show entered a terminal decline. In spite of this, or rather because of it, Twin Peaks’s final episode managed to produce the ‘Grand Non-narrative’ through which martyred cult shows strive to ensure their immortality: had Agent Cooper, our one (relatively) stable point of identification himself been possessed by ‘Bob’? This ‘Grand Non-narrative’ has also been enacted by cancelled shows like Quantum Leap (has Sam met the ‘person’ or God-like entity who has been leaping him through time?), The Prisoner, and Blake’s 7 (has Avon been killed? In this case the desire to know is pointedly frustrated by virtue of the fact that the final moments of the soundtrack—a number of gunshots—play over a blacked out screen and then the end credits). This posing of a mystery even in the face of cancellation may help to explain the enduring presence of many cult shows. Sometimes the most endlessly deferred narrative of all is that which will never officially be answered or closed down, remaining open to multiple fan productions, speculations and recreations.14
The media cult also tends to focus on issues of ‘epistemological eclipse’ and ‘ontological operation’, i.e. the problematisation of (outer) knowledge and the realisation of (inner) self-knowledge. Other contemporary forms do not address these topics in so ready a fashion.15 Diegetic mechanisms prevalent within the majority of popular culture do not operate in the manner of ‘epistemological eclipse’: the narrative game of the cult form is thus distinct from that of soap opera (unfinished-unfocused/‘realist’); the
detective novel (finished-focused/ ‘revelatory’) and the avant-garde (finished- unfocused/‘suprarealist’) in terms of its unfinished and focused narrative expanse (which could, especially in the light of the previous chapter, be dubbed ‘religious’).
Another defining attribute of the cult text is hyperdiegesis: the creation of a vast and detailed narrative space, only a fraction of which is ever directly seen or encountered within the text,16 but which nevertheless appears to operate according to principles of