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Flights of Fanciful Fandom: Influences
May. 3rd, 2020 11:13 amMy older DVDs/BluRays have been a great comfort while shut it. I’ve been watching some of my favorites, noticing things about them I hadn’t caught before. For instance, Tim Minear, one of the Powers That Be, so to speak, for both Angel and Wonderfalls wrote some of the episodes I enjoyed the most on Angel; Somnambulist, Are You Now or Have You Ever Been? and Darla. He mentioned a lot of film influences he brought to bear in Are You Now or Have You Ever Been?, one of which I believe was Stanley Kubrick. This was very interesting because both Bryan Fuller and Jeff Davis acknowledge Kubrick as a source of inspiration for certain scenes in Hannibal and Teen Wolf.
Look like I’m not the only one who enjoys a flight of fanciful fandom, not that I thought I was alone. What impresses and inspires me about the above artists is they’ve shown that you can be successful doing this.
I’ve always been fascinated by how new life can be breathed into existing works of art by allowing them to influence fresh creations. It’s different from copying them. Wonderfalls, Angel, Hannibal, and Teen Wolf ae all unique series in their own right, yet I can see other influences in the imagery and words. Sometimes it’s a very subtle thing, because the creator brings their own vision, their influences to pot to simmer and bubble with what once influenced them, creating a unique stew.
I remember a moment which in Wonderfalls, which struck me as very Twin Peaks in Wax Lion, the very first episode. Karen Tyler was sitting in her sister’s trailer with a red backdrop behind her, wearing a black dress, smoking. This reminded me so much of Dale Cooper’s dream of Laura Palmer in the red room, aided by the fact that Jaye went to Karen and hugged her, the two of them reminding me a lot of Donna and Laura. Was this a deliberate homage? I don’t know, although Bryan Fuller appears to like Twin Peaks and has mentioned it during commentaries. (Hannibal, not Wonderfalls. Will Graham on Hannibal also reminds me a lot of Laura Palmer in being gifted, damned, possessing a divided heart which creates a nightmare existence in his own life and on several occassions choosing to let himself be killed.) How much of this is simply what I’m seeing? I’m not the only X-Files fan who thought of Twin Peaks in a surreal episode where Mulder ate piece after piece of pie, but the creators cited something else entirely as the influence.
Sometimes it feels like film and television is creating its own mythology, its own vision, which every image adds to. The ones that attract me draw me into an emotional core, which affects the characters as well as the setting, blending them together. The landscape becomes part of the emotional journey, their current state of mind. The truer everything is to that state, the happier I am. The more everyone veers away from such a core or ignores it, the more frustrated I get. It’s a lot easier to spot the characters and the setting veering off if I’m a fan watching than if I’m doing the writing myself. Problems become a lot more visible when I have the leisure to spot them than when I’m racing to meet a madcap schedule. Is fanfic easier than original stories? I’m not sure. I’m not dealing with deadlines in fanfic, although I get anxious about readers getting anxious themselves, waiting for the next part of an ongoing work. They’ve waited a long time for certain series while I’ve been distracted or caught up in my orginal projects. If I think about that, I’ll panick and falter. How many other people have panicked? The vision of the successes that inspired us, they can be a guiding light in the middle of the panic and the worry. I find they soothe me, get me thinking about the elements I savoured in them, why do I savour them? How can I use them to inspire myself? Absorbing the rush of creativity such works provide is one of my greatest pleasures as a viewer. The trick is figuring out how to channel that rush into works of my own.
Fanfic has been a welcome outlet for the passion I feel when I fall in love with a series so much, I can’t let it go. I want it to continue, to find new life in a story, a character interaction that I long to explore. I also want to create my own stories, though, using elements in the series I’ve loved to shape my own tales.
It’s difficult. It requires constant work, but it’s work that satisfies me like no other.
Look like I’m not the only one who enjoys a flight of fanciful fandom, not that I thought I was alone. What impresses and inspires me about the above artists is they’ve shown that you can be successful doing this.
I’ve always been fascinated by how new life can be breathed into existing works of art by allowing them to influence fresh creations. It’s different from copying them. Wonderfalls, Angel, Hannibal, and Teen Wolf ae all unique series in their own right, yet I can see other influences in the imagery and words. Sometimes it’s a very subtle thing, because the creator brings their own vision, their influences to pot to simmer and bubble with what once influenced them, creating a unique stew.
I remember a moment which in Wonderfalls, which struck me as very Twin Peaks in Wax Lion, the very first episode. Karen Tyler was sitting in her sister’s trailer with a red backdrop behind her, wearing a black dress, smoking. This reminded me so much of Dale Cooper’s dream of Laura Palmer in the red room, aided by the fact that Jaye went to Karen and hugged her, the two of them reminding me a lot of Donna and Laura. Was this a deliberate homage? I don’t know, although Bryan Fuller appears to like Twin Peaks and has mentioned it during commentaries. (Hannibal, not Wonderfalls. Will Graham on Hannibal also reminds me a lot of Laura Palmer in being gifted, damned, possessing a divided heart which creates a nightmare existence in his own life and on several occassions choosing to let himself be killed.) How much of this is simply what I’m seeing? I’m not the only X-Files fan who thought of Twin Peaks in a surreal episode where Mulder ate piece after piece of pie, but the creators cited something else entirely as the influence.
Sometimes it feels like film and television is creating its own mythology, its own vision, which every image adds to. The ones that attract me draw me into an emotional core, which affects the characters as well as the setting, blending them together. The landscape becomes part of the emotional journey, their current state of mind. The truer everything is to that state, the happier I am. The more everyone veers away from such a core or ignores it, the more frustrated I get. It’s a lot easier to spot the characters and the setting veering off if I’m a fan watching than if I’m doing the writing myself. Problems become a lot more visible when I have the leisure to spot them than when I’m racing to meet a madcap schedule. Is fanfic easier than original stories? I’m not sure. I’m not dealing with deadlines in fanfic, although I get anxious about readers getting anxious themselves, waiting for the next part of an ongoing work. They’ve waited a long time for certain series while I’ve been distracted or caught up in my orginal projects. If I think about that, I’ll panick and falter. How many other people have panicked? The vision of the successes that inspired us, they can be a guiding light in the middle of the panic and the worry. I find they soothe me, get me thinking about the elements I savoured in them, why do I savour them? How can I use them to inspire myself? Absorbing the rush of creativity such works provide is one of my greatest pleasures as a viewer. The trick is figuring out how to channel that rush into works of my own.
Fanfic has been a welcome outlet for the passion I feel when I fall in love with a series so much, I can’t let it go. I want it to continue, to find new life in a story, a character interaction that I long to explore. I also want to create my own stories, though, using elements in the series I’ve loved to shape my own tales.
It’s difficult. It requires constant work, but it’s work that satisfies me like no other.
