1 - Never the Twain Shall Meet: Touch, Double-Sidedness and Race in the Pages of Picture Show

Summary

Fan magazine scholarship has become more concerned in recent years with interactivity: the nebulous issue of what readers actually do with their magazines. Marsha Orgeron (2009) proposes that thinking about interactivity allows us to look beyond commercial paradigms and explore how fan magazines enabled readers to see themselves as engaged participants and critics. Letters pages in particular have become a means of exploring how these magazines facilitated community building and the creation of codes of behaviour for these communities (Orgeron 2009; Stead 2011; Lanckman 2020). The ways in which magazine readers interacted with publications and, through these, with broader cultures of fandom and cinema have become central to scholarship on the form.

This chapter takes a more close-up view on issues of interactivity by moving beyond textual evidence like the fan letter or competition to think about how magazine design invites material, tactile interaction. Sally Stein's important early article on design in women's magazines acknowledges the tangibility of such publications, the way their very non-linear layout and design means that ‘we not only will the process to continue by physically turning the pages […] but that we “freely” negotiate a “personal” path through the magazine labyrinth’ (1985, 7). More recently, Orgeron suggests that correspondence, competitions and discourses of self-improvement in the fan magazine ‘operate within the same framework of empowerment, providing a very tangible, attainable mode of participation for the otherwise potentially disconnected fan’ (2009, 9). She concludes by asserting that

making fans believe that what they said and did mattered was a necessary precondition for a marketplace in which the primary products were as intangible as the movies and the stars who populated them. (2009, 19)

Fan magazines traded on tangibility. Making film performers and film worlds meaningful involved making them material, even touchable, on the magazine page. Yet while scholars have explored in depth the tactile, haptic and intimate possibilities of film spectatorship (Marks 2000; Bruno 2007; Barker 2009), this has not incorporated elements of film and fan culture beyond the film text itself. I therefore argue for the need for close analysis of magazine design and its role in making cinema tangible.