The “socially inept” movie fans Roger Ebert couldn’t stand: “Excruciatingly boring to talk to such people”
As much as Roger Ebert loved cinema, and he loved it a lot, since he dedicated most of his adult life to it, he didn’t have anywhere near as much affection for certain groups who enjoyed certain kinds of movies.
Obviously, just because you’re a critic, it doesn’t mean you can’t hold a grudge against cinephiles of a different persuasion. He did have a point, though, and if anything, that point has only been reinforced in the years following his death, reiterating Ebert’s habit of being the filmic Nostradamus of his day.
There’s a huge difference between enjoying a movie for what it is and not enjoying a movie because of what it isn’t. It’s something that’s become increasingly endemic to franchises, but auteurs aren’t immune, either, as the nonsensical outcry over casting, American accents, and armour in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey has shown.
Whenever a filmmaker says their picture is being made by the fans, for the fans, it’s often a red flag, since they may as well come out and admit that it’s pandering, key-jangling, nostalgic service. On the other hand, when a well-known property doesn’t give the diehards exactly what they want in precisely the way they want it, they can’t type their social media messages of fury, rage, and misery fast enough.
Ebert, ahead of the curve again, spelled it out as far back as 2009. “A lot of fans are basically fans of fandom itself. It’s all about them,” he explained. “They have mastered the Star Wars or Star Trek universes or whatever, but their objects of veneration are useful mainly as a backdrop to their own devotion.”
To that end, he suggested, not inaccurately, that “anyone who would camp out in a tent on the sidewalk for weeks in order to be first in line for a movie is more into camping on the sidewalk than movies.” Harsh, maybe, but not as harsh as when he offered that “extreme fandom may serve as a security blanket for the socially inept, who use its extreme structure as a substitute for social skills.”
From his perspective, as someone who loved movies, as opposed to a specific set of movies from a particular series, the last thing he wanted to do was find himself stuck talking to an obsessive, because they didn’t know anything about anything else. “That’s why it’s excruciatingly boring to talk to such people,” Ebert proffered. “They’re always asking you questions you know the answer to.”
His criticism was limited to Star Trek and Star Wars, but it rings truer than ever today. You can add Marvel and DC’s shared superhero universes, Harry Potter, everyone who moans about a video game adaptation not being a beat-for-beat recreation of the video game it’s adapting, and Zack Snyder to that list, and that’s just a few of them, and we’ve not even mentioned the music industry.
These days, the way the world works, especially on the internet, is that if you say you like apples, it’s offensive to imply the erasure of oranges. Trekkies and whatever Star Wars fans call themselves may have gotten there first, but the problem is only getting worse, and Ebert saw it coming.
