Fran Magazine: Issue #104

Why is Challengers driving a certain subgroup of people I know a very particular 2011 type of insane

📝 Thanks for reading Fran Magazine, a biweekly blog by Fran Hoepfner (me). The way this works is that Wednesday (regular) issues are free for all and Sunday (dispatch) and reread diary issues are for paid subscribers only. Consider subscribing or upgrading your subscription for access to more Fran Magazine, and feel free to follow me on Instagram or Letterboxd.

A note on campus protests

I am obviously horrified by the violence enacted upon protesters at NYU, CUNY, and Columbia University at the hands of the NYPD and corresponding forces, as well as the violence that’s broken out across college campuses across the country, involving a number of friends of mine in teaching and graduate student positions. I’ve been asked by a few people about updates regarding the New School encampment on the campus at which I teach. The New School’s encampment is actually indoors — we lack the green space of other campuses — at the University Center and it very recently took up residence at a second location. I’ve been by the New School encampment. It’s very lowkey, very peaceful, benefitting from the security of an indoor space with little outside agitation. The New School has said as of right now it has no intention of involving the NYPD, but of course, that can change. For a country that loves to champion children as being the future, there is an infuriating amount of hypocritical and violent doubt that students — especially those of a generation who have tried and failed to fight gun violence, climate change, etc. — do not know what is best. A country whose police force stands outside while children are being murdered while actively throwing other students down flights of stairs, well… I think those actions speak much louder than the professed values, and I hope that students and teachers continue to take up action, and I am very proud of the students at the New School for their actions thus far.

Mervyn May… BEGINS!

The first Mervyn May discussion post will be this Wednesday! I’m going to start my read TODAY! Please read up until page 89 or at least get really close and do your best. See you all SOON!

Where do broken hearts go

Every now and then I am struck by a particular kind of wackadoo thought that goes something like, “Wow, this is just like a One Direction song.” For those out of the loop or maybe fifteen years old (thank you for reading Fran Magazine, Generation Alpha!), One Direction was an “English/Irish” boyband that existed from 2010 to 2015. It is from One Direction that we get the Don’t Worry Darling’s press tour star Harry Styles and various Walgreens radio’s star Niall Horan, and three other guys who are not worth getting into right now unless you really need that information.¹ Not to be like “I was there when it was all happening,” but I was, like, basically there when it was all happening — moving to the UK for a year right when the group finished their X Factor run and around for all the music videos to come out across the pond before they’d eventually cross over in 2012. There is a particularly great feeling to being 19 or 20 years old and jumping on the bandwagon of a thing you barely understand.

I did and do still love their music, even though I understand them to be packaged and processed and mostly empty vessels for hardly sexy, Christian-adjacent-sounding pop music.² I was always compelled by the ways in which One Direction popped off more than other contemporary and later attempts at US/UK-driven boybands (The Wanted, for one, but also later efforts like Why Don’t We — I think these bands are basically what people think One Direction sound like… WRONG). The gist of this to me was that people had a desire to project their public fantasies on One Direction³ either as their boyfriend or boyfriends to each other. That there was a whole fanfiction enterprise that existed around One Direction sustained the band through potholes that a lesser group would have fallen into. Their overall aura was always just vague enough to project a kind of complexity into, and they were also all a little funny.

I don’t return to their music very often, not out of a lack of interest, but a respect of having moved on a little and being 33 years old. But recently I have made a return to their fourth aptly-titled studio album “FOUR.”

in dialogue with clare magazine

Brief periods of intense 1D listening have occurred throughout the past decade, most notably in famously insane years: 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021. This is the first in a long time, sparked by a specific kind of nostalgic mania that exists in a post-Challengers world.

Enough has been written about the actual quality and events of the new Luca Guadagnino film Challengers (some of it by me, much of it not) that I won’t bother getting into my particular review, of which I’ll just say there’s like at least a half dozen, maybe even a full dozen, things not working about the film that are totally decimated by other aspects of what a fun relief it feels like in the face of “IP summer” on the horizon and also because I started sending texts that included the phrase “josh oconnor spring” as early as January of this past year. What has fascinated me in the near-week since the film’s release is the bizarre and retrograde response to the film that I can only describe as a “violently 2011” type of phenomenon. All of which is to say: it’s a movie that has, for the first time in a minute, unlocked the brains of a certain type of online person in the early 2010s — the fanfic people, the Tumblr people, the fujoshis.⁴

In the Sunday Dispatch this past week, I mentioned that Challengers feels like it exists at the opposite end of the spectrum that Saltburn lives on — or, crudely put, they’re each other’s tether. Challengers screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes is 34 or 35; Emerald Fennell is 38. These are “elder millennial”⁵ filmmakers with some degree of understanding as to how the Internet works.⁶ Beyond all that, these are creative people who existed at an age when some of the perhaps now-highest paid minds of a generation were posting NBC Hannibal gifsets or whatever and have now (hopefully) fallen in with the rest of society. These are people who know what four, two-second images can and will be replicated and reposted across the Internet (stool grab, churro, sugar, etc.).

I’ve long tried to figure out the formula that makes some of these things take and some of these things elude this type of subculture completely. Though some might be able to argue that Saltburn had what Challengers had, that there was a robust type of fandom culture around, I’ll argue no, it didn’t, in part because I wasn’t seeing screenshots of Tumblr back on my Twitter feed like it was 2011. There are a few reasons I think Saltburn fell short of the mark. The first of which is that it didn’t let the two guys who would might presumably write fanfiction about actually interact with each other that much. Fennell is trying and failing to have her cake and eat it too — introducing too many obscure elements like “Carey Mulligan is Poor Dear Pamela” and a creepy butler who amounts to very little. The side characters in Challengers, outside of one or two, have all of three lines. These are non-entities. There is no room for distraction.

Beyond that I think one of the things that Kuritzke’s script is doing in playing in the world of tropes, of character sketch rather than character rapsheet, relying on performance, tic, gesture, and glance to fuel the tension rather than “autobiographical details.” When Caroline and I spoke on the phone yesterday about the film, she doubled down on calling Guadagnino the George Cukor of our time. I mostly disagree in that I think more than anything Guadagnino is just “an Italian guy,” but she clarified that part of what she meant was maybe more of a “reverse Cukor” situation: whereas old movie stars would go to Cukor to revive or zhuzh up their career, new stars seek out Guadagnino to learn the type of “old dog” tricks that movies used to really run on. Part of my initial complaint about the film was that it felt chaste; I do think it could afford to be a little more, uh, Italian, I guess, but that chastity feels like part of the thrill — this is why whole groups of women I know go insane for Jimmy Stewart, etc.

Part of what excites a fandom, I feel, is being able to fill in some degree of blanks. When I first saw Challengers almost a month ago, I felt a little annoyed at how segmented the characters felt — how they didn’t really surprise within their “type.”⁷ There is a deliberate vagueness that excites any kind of writer, a desire, maybe, with enough free hours in the day to fill in the blanks. My first year teaching creative writing, I’d always have a handful of students who were really at the top of their game and inevitably where I asked if they’d been writing for a while, they’d be forced to explain what Wattpad is to me⁸ and how they’d cut their teeth writing for an anonymous audience of their peers.

Years and years ago, which is to say, 2019, I was out to dinner for a friend’s birthday meeting and introducing myself to a handful of strangers I never saw again. I got caught up talking to a woman about the book I was writing — which would go on to not sell <3 — and how it was about the complicated, embittered, and slightly erotic friendship between two male coworkers. “Is it the kind of thing someone would write fic about?” she asked with the utmost sense of seriousness. I hadn’t really considered that in the work of original fiction I’d done; certainly there were homoerotic undertones, but it was mostly a novel about the types of jealousy and complicity that fuel a lot of adult professional relationships. I remember shrugging off the question, and being told, in turn, that’s really the only reason why anyone should consider writing about more than one fictional man.

I look back on this conversation with a great deal of fondness, wishing, mostly, I’d had a funnier answer about the doomed project I was working on. Maybe it would have been a better time overall had I been trying to write something that people I didn’t know would write fanfiction about on the Internet. Still, that wasn’t really my goal, and isn’t with most of my writing. But I have profound affection for those who are always seeking those opportunities, as distant as they may feel from myself. As I watch whatever is going on with the Challengers fandom bloom and blossom and contort before my eyes, I can tell it’s already lapping me at a rate where I’ll soon tap out. I am a little old to keep listening to One Direction, sure, but it’s nice to touch down for a moment here and there.

1. My email is franhoepfner at gmail dot com.

2. Harry’s solo music has mostly elided this trap, falling into “lite rock,” Tame Impala-y sort of stuff written about like eight producers, though his live shows more than prove his charisma as some kind of pop/“rock” star. Niall’s solo music is the most One Direction-y, which I say with great love and some exhaustion.

3. See also: that Anne Hathaway/Nicholas Galitzine movie coming out on this weekend that I’m always tempted to call “No One But You” (it’s called The Idea Of You)

4. The most significant entry into this canon from Western media has to be Succession, which had about three to a dozen annoying sub-fandoms within it. For more evidence of this, you should know that they’re already comparing Zendaya’s Tashi Duncan to Jeremy Strong’s Kendall Roy, lol.

5. Kill me for using this phrase.

6. Both Challengers and Fennell’s last film Promising Young Woman are trapped in a fairly 2014-2016 type of Internet (though I think both are “set” in 2019) — these protagonists are using phone mostly for apps that have existed for over a decade and are “on phone” but not “online,” if that distinction feels clear.

7. I felt this specifically about Mike Faist’s Art, who on rewatch I’ve come to appreciate the subtleties of, though he’ll never beat the EXTRA EXTRA HEAR ALL ABOUT IT allegations.

8. The number of Challengers fanfic on Wattpad is steadily growing — it’s a bit lol to me that its most popular story right now is about an original character. On the other notable fanfic site Archive of Our Own (“Ao3”), the number of Challengers uploads have steadily doubled every day since late last week.