The 1962 hit film in the United States was a release entitled The Music Man. Based on the 1957 Broadway play of the same name, the story is set in the year 1912 and relates how a con man, “Professor” Harold Hill, arrives in a rural Iowa town with the intent of scamming the local population out of its money. The fake professor’s plan is to form a band for the school kids, collect the funds for instruments and then, before the children play a single note of music, take the first available train out of town…his wallet, naturally, fat with the parent’s money.

Following the typical narrative arc of movies of that era, Professor Hill’s plans are interrupted by a love interest and various twists and turns in the plot. Hill is finally backed into a corner to show the results of his “Think System” in which the children are supposed to learn to play an instrument just by thinking about it.

In the end, even though the children sound terrible, the parents see the band members as they wish them to be—with the youngsters as accomplished musicians. The dishonest professor escapes intact, love prevails, and all ends well.

In the very last scene, a teenage girl is waiting outside the school as the band members file out the front door and onto Main Street. She too, instead of seeing the kids in their ill-fitting uniforms and who clearly can’t play, envisions what she wishes to see—a striking drum major and how, as the title song goes “Seventy-six trombones led the big parade with one hundred and ten coronets close at hand.” Although her eyes and ears tell her otherwise, her imagination sees and hears musical perfection. Music Man Last Scene

The meaning of The Music Man is pretty clear.  In order to escape our mundane lives, we often ignore reality and see our idols the way we want them to be. To flee boredom, we take flights of fancy to a place where our heroes become our friends and we inhabit their world instead of ours.

The Music Man is, of course, harmless entertainment. A feel-good early 1960s movie with an unsurprising ending. Yet when I look at modern Fandom (See Note 1) The Music Man helps in discovering the border between what is innocent fun and what is an obsession—an obsession in which we sacrifice our own personalities and subsume ourselves to the idea of a celebrity. I say “the idea of a celebrity” for we will most likely never meet, nor spend any meaningful time, with the objects of our affections—and no, greeting your hero at the airport, in a hotel lobby, or at an autograph signing doesn’t count. When you meet your celebrity hero in one of those locations, he or she will almost always prove to be unsurprisingly friendly. Remember, they are quite good at playing that role.

On my flights over the years, I have chatted with prime ministers, a queen, elite athletes, politicians, and movie actors. Yet, so what? I am quite obviously not part of their inner group and we know nothing of each other apart from having been polite to one another as I welcomed them on board. Yet all too frequently we in the general public feel certain that there is a special bond between us—something that leads us to make significant emotional investitures in them. This leads me to ask, are these investitures innocent fun or are they unhealthy for all parties—the fan and the celebrity alike?

Another facet of Fandom is that of the serious groupies. I am careful here not to be judgmental as many of them are cognizant of exactly what they are doing and that is completely their business. This is beyond my purview so I will leave the description of that lifestyle to those who were, such as Pamela Des Barres, active in that scene.

Where Fandom becomes problematic however, is when fans blindly subjugate themselves to an unrealistic ideal of celebrity. As most of us know, if we insist on putting someone up on a pedestal, they will surely fall. Add in the factor that a great number of celebrities don’t want to be on that pedestal in the first place, and the extreme fan is left chasing the wind for the perfect celebrity is both a figment of one’s imagination and the product of a clever public relations department.

Although the 1960s television series Star Trek was not at first a commercial success, over the years it became a science-fiction juggernaut that has influenced hundreds of books and films. Recognize the phrase “Beam me up Scotty?” Certainly—just as billions around the globe do! 

As the fervor for Star Trek grew, however, conventions started to spring up where fans would hunker down in hotel convention centers on weekends and spend hours discussing the smallest and most arcane details of the show and the universe it depicted.

Around the mid-1980s the writers on the comedy program Saturday Night Live (SNL) invited William Shatner, Captain James T. Kirk himself, to poke a little fun at this ardent fan behavior. The video quality of this clip is poor and unfortunately incomplete, but you can see a hint of the humor: Shatner on SNL

What made this little skit infamous, however, is how vigorously Shatner was criticized as the fans thought he was directly attacking them. Wow…perhaps I am being judgmental, but if you can’t occasionally laugh at yourself then maybe you need lighten up a bit.   

“So?” you might say. It is not my business what hobbies people have and how they spend their free time. True, it should not be my business and in fact, fans and serious hobbyists often help us understand 1001 things. Just tune into YouTube to see great examples of not only their passion and dedication, but also their admirable willingness to teach us that which we do not know. I hope you understand that I am trying to be very careful here with my criticisms.

Loneliness

My first concern is that I believe excessive Fandom might stem from loneliness. In 2000 Dr. Robert Putnam published the book Bowling Alone in which he foresaw the emptiness that was creeping into American life as many of us no longer participated in group events. Written at the cusp of the internet age, Putnam was concerned what effect this deepening isolation would eventually have on our society. Now, 25 years later and with so many of us leading lives online and investing ourselves in those we don’t really know, we can sadly see the results of the lack of personal interaction.

Incivility

My second worry stems from the serious levels of incivility that Fandom can generate. While it would be a stretch to argue that Fandom is the cause of incivility, it certainly can amplify it. Let me use a long story of the Beatles as an example: 

During the Covid-19 crisis I listened to countless podcasts—a good number that were about the Beatles. I find the Beatles fascinating and I enjoyed how certain podcasters turned a phrase and offered insights in discussing them. I soon discovered that I was more interested in the cultural history of the Beatles phenomenon and the world events surrounding it than I ever was in the music itself—as outstanding as it is.  

As questions arose, I would naïvely plunge into the online discussions that accompanied these programs. Little did I know that I was stepping into an area strewn with landmines. (See Note 2 for exceptions) 

While the Beatles are indeed important, I quickly realized how defensive people are about their “chosen” favorite Beatle and the history of the fab Four. There is, apparently, no detail too small in the Beatles’ legacy that is not ripe for heated arguments nor is there a limit to the emotional investiture that fans put into the group—a group, by the way, that broke up in 1970. The fervor of these fans and how prickly some of them are was at first an odd surprise…then it became disconcerting.

In the Beatles world you are apparently either a Paul McCartney or a John Lennon loyalist and you pitch your tent with the appropriate army from where you can argue until eternity which of the two Liverpudlians was more indispensable to the success of the group. Excuse my childlike innocence in thinking that it could have been both of them working as a team… And let’s not even go into the topic of Yoko Ono where you will find another universe of nastiness from fans.

As a quick aside, Matt Williams, on his first-rate Pop Goes the ‘60s YouTube channel, keeps a keen eye open for the irrationality that sprouts up in Fandom. While I encourage you to watch the entire episode, the segment from the 5th to the 13th minute offers an excellent example of this peculiar strain of Fandom that seems to be, simultaneously, both fawning and insincere. You can see it here: Matt Williams on Beatle Fandom

I use the Beatles as an example and I don’t mean to be unfair to those who cherish the group, but walking into this level of Fandom was a radical experience in witnessing how we can lose our capability to separate the art from the artist and, in turn, the artist from the real world. Some of these Beatles’ fans do everyone a disservice when they become angry and hostile in defending their celebrity heroes. At that point, are these partisans even themselves any longer? 

I can no longer count the number of tongue-lashings that I have endured in the comments sections of various sites for asking probing questions. For example, I was curious about the Beatles’ formative months that they spent, in the early 1960s, playing in the seedy clubs on the Reeperbahn in Hamburg, Germany. This is when they started to really gel as a group and hone their distinctive sound. According to legend, the Beatles were nearly superhuman in their work—sometimes laboring away for as many as an astonishing ten hours a day over the course of a couple of months!

When my naïveté got the better of me, I dared ask the Beatles’ fans if these hours were really all that punishing. They were, after all, young men of 20 and they were obviously enjoying playing for an audience. One should be able to safely assume that they were having the time of their lives.  

Many of the fan responses were swift, vicious and frequently potty-mouthed invectives with no real clear explanation other than that since I am not a musician, I am therefore woefully incapable of understanding the pressures of playing night after night for three months in a seedy bar. Incapable? Incapable of understanding that young ambitious individuals undertook long hours in pursuit of their dreams by doing what they loved to do? Unfathomable isn’t it that people work hard?

Power imbalances in relationships

My third problem with modern Fandom regards the power imbalance between fans and their idols. I find it unsettling that society has made great efforts in recent years to iron out certain power imbalances, yet men and women willingly toss aside those hard-won gains in order to worship a celebrity idol—who is, of course, a fallible human. Sadly, when taken too far this behavior chips away at the fabric of genuine relationships—relationships that are crucial in healthy personal and societal lives.

Allow me to offer an example from a field other than music. The actor Neil Patrick Harris starred in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s television series Doogie Howser. Harris played a character who, as a mere teenager, finishes medical school. In real life Harris was only fifteen when the filming started and twenty when it finished. While he was perhaps too old to be called a true child actor, he was still very young. That tender age did not stop a great number of women, however, from sending him fan mail in which they expressed a desire to marry him. Wow…they had never met him other than through the television screen and yet they wished to marry him.

Then there is the case of a true child actor Fred Savage from the original Wonder Years. He was of elementary school age when he stared in a television series and, most bizarrely, he too was receiving “advanced” marriage proposals for when he got older. 

In an even more prurient and bizarre example, there are the thousands, yes thousands, of fans who took the side of either Johnny Depp or his ex-wife Amber Heard in their recent sordid, and very public, court battles. Did any of these fans ever spend a day with Johnny or Amber? Were they close friends with them? Maybe they grew up and went to school with them? Doubtful. Most likely their only interaction with them was through film and interviews.

I know that I as a male have to tread carefully with the following remarks, but there is another, and darker, aspect of Fandom that is downright unsettling. We all know the seriously unwise things men have done regarding women, but I am shocked at the willingness of women to openly gush when it comes to the admiration of their idols—they comment on everything from their hair to their smiles and everything in between and how much even long dead musicians remain the love of their lives.

I could see this as just innocent fun if these women were back in 8th grade history class and had a crush on the boy sitting next to them, but in a world in which women are constantly vulnerable to any number of malign and dangerous men, they seem to ignore some pretty clear warning signs—and even when some of their idols have, or had, a reputation of violence against women. I ask you to think about that for a moment. If I as an older male can see the bright-red blinking warning signs, then they must be pretty clear.

To the credit of various celebrities, many of them have pushed back against this unhealthy social construct as they feel increasingly uncomfortable in their perceived roles. The great jazz musician Miles Davis, for example, even went so far as to turn his back to the audience when he thought that the fans were putting him above his art.  

Other artists express their discomfort with these power imbalances by limiting their interviews, pulling back from a public life, and avoiding the spotlight when possible. They argue that what they do is transactional. They write a book, give a concert, or star in a film and the audience pays for that. While the audience deserve the artist’s best effort, the artists contend, rightfully in my opinion, that the relationship should stop there. Can you blame them for the revulsion they feel against fans who are overly deferential, slavish, and servile? 

What then can bring Fandom back to reality?

As a ray of hope to help guide us back into the realm of reality and civility, I look to the 1970s American professional baseball player Bill “Spaceman” Lee. Bill Lee was an eccentric. Part athlete, part poet, and part philosopher he served as a counterculture figure in the relatively conservative world of major league baseball.

Being an eccentric however, does not mean that he was a fool—far from it. He had, after all, reached the pinnacle of his sport so even though much of what he said was humorous, he could also be intelligent and serious.

You can rightfully disagree with Bill Lee on many topics, but already in the early 1990s he was warning that Fandom was making fans far too passive and he encouraged them, to not just watch games and memorize statistics, but rather to get out and in any way possible participate in the game. Lee recognized that even the humblest level of involvement would lead to a more rewarding fan experience. 

Most of us, obviously, will never be elites in our chosen field, yet there are hundreds of ways in which we can “get in the game” as Bill Lee phrased it. Take a guitar lesson, go to a local government meeting, help coach a kid’s sports league, teach someone to read, or even set up the chairs for a concert. These might seem unglamorous, but they offer a rich storehouse of insights. The world looks different at the nuts-and-bolts level, and as Teddy Roosevelt said over 100 years ago, it is best when we climb into the arena and give things a try rather than watching it all from the outside.  

A last thought

Over the years I have come to the conclusion that it is good and normal that we admire individuals for what they can do—how they move us in song, how they bedazzle us on the athletic field, how they bring us technological innovation, how they lead us in military battles, and how contribute to a better society. It is fitting that we acknowledge their accomplishments for not only have they changed our lives, but they have inspired us to be better in so many ways. 

But when it comes to our daily human interactions, don’t we really choose our closest friends for who they are rather than what they can do? Don’t we learn the good, the bad and the ugly of our friends yet still appreciate who they are?  Fandom glosses over this—much to its disadvantage. Be dazzled and impressed on occasion with the great and the good of this world, but remember we are happiest and most comfortable with the persons we know and love. 

Stay old at heart!