Fan Guide

 

 

I'm A Lebowski, You're A Lebowski is essentially a go-to guide for fans of The Big Lebowski. The fact that it features photographs, real locations and interviews with the stars of the film, including John Turturro, John Goodman and Julianne Moore - and a foreword by the Dude himself, Jeff Bridges - emphasises the painstaking lengths the writers went to in order to make something that their fan community would be proud of. The book also contains a glossary, trivia questions and the ultimate soundtrack listing, which suggests that fans would expect nothing less of the writers, as they created the Lebowski Fest and therefore it follows that they have greater access to behind-the-scenes information, given that they were able to get most of the original cast on-board.

 

Furthermore, there is also the implication that the content is factual and that the facts seem to be in order, which emphasises how a key role played by these high-status 'superfans' involves ensuring that the fans feel secure, as they can take everything in this book at face value and therefore it helps them to confirm or otherwise strengthen their devotion to the phenomenon that is The Big Lebowski.

 

It also helps them to attract new fans to The Big Lebowski, as they already have all that they need to do regarding the phenomenon.

 

 

 

The theory of 'textual poaching', first developed by French scholar Michel de Certeau and later developed by Henry Jenkins, asserts that fans are not obsessive nerds who are out-of-touch with reality, which was how they were perceived, but instead appropriate texts for themselves.

 

De Certeau argues that audiences are not passive consumers but instead active interpreters. In his book, The Practice of Everyday Life, De Certeau talked about how people individualise mass culture by interpreting texts beyond the dominant meaning which has been decided by the elite (academics, teachers, authors etc) who monopolise the readings. They take elements "poached" and reworked from popular media in order to construct their own alternative culture. For example, many 'fans' did not like the ending of The Sopranos and tried to explain how its protagonist, Tony Soprano, actually died, and so made videos on YouTube analysing the final scene of The Sopranos in some detail. This can also be applied to the aforementioned book,  I'm a Lebowski, You're a Lebowski, as the way the fans of The Big Lebowski have interpreted the film would not have been how the film critics would have interpreted the film on its original cinema release.

This ‘poaching’ is a resistance strategy for the individual, however it is inherently weak compared to the dominant culture and will generally be an act which is pushed underground. Jenkins’ book then takes the active audience theory and applies it to fan cultures which ‘poach’ from their beloved text to create new texts such as fan fiction, filk (folk songs) and manuals/dictionaries to ‘fill-out’ further details not originally explained in the text. For instance, in  I'm a Lebowski, You're a Lebowski, they made an English-Achiever translation guide. Jenkins' extension of the term “poaching” discusses how a fan can simultaneously interpret a text through both the dominant and oppositional reading, allowing readers to stick as closely to the ‘canon’ (official rules and principles put forward in the original text) as they wish. Poaching blurs the line between producer and consumer by giving the reader power to produce their own work based upon their own interpretation. It also offers a form of escapism from reality through the sub-cultures and fan communities created.