Fan Edits

 

Fan edits--the pop culture enthusiast's directorial debut.  Fan edits have been around since the dawn of YouTube but have significantly increased in production quality since the emergence of TikTok (eg. to the point of teenagers using greenscreens to make themselves look like they're in the very film/television show they're editing). 

The point of fan edits is one of appreciation.  One can dramatically or thirst-illy edit their favorite celebrity, fictional character, or movie scene (I will be honest, this summer I did get a good amount of Steve Harrington fan edits on my TikTok fyp. . .what can I say? I'm a big fan). 

However, in regards to fan edits, I think of John Berger's Ways of Seeing text.  He criticizes the replication and reproduction of paintings, arguing that copies distort the original meaning of the painting (especially as more and more copies are made) and therefore take away from the painting's original substance and intelligent value.  

I wonder--does the same apply to film and fan edits? Does it lower the quality/merit of the piece of media being edited, reducing it to "fandom" and nothing more? Or does it enhance the already-existing medium? Sure, fan edit production takes place on someone's Macbook with spliced and trimmed clips sequenced together to create a theoretical "shrine" in motion.  Creators will edit sad movie scenes to make them sadder; they'll edit hot people to sexy sounding songs just to make them hotter (bringing us back to scopophilia--I've seen one before of just someone's hands; once again, the female gaze at work).  Does this fandom-based visual analysis alter the meaning of its master copy, the original media, like John Berger suggests?