In January, a short film full of French stereotypes went viral. Its titular protagonist, Johanne Sacreblu, is the trans heiress to a baguette business in Paris; her paramour is the scion of a croissant company. Everyone is almost always wearing berets and striped shirts, while extras roam the streets in mime makeup. Sometimes, people dressed as characters from the French animated series Miraculous inexplicably appear. Also, the whole thing’s a musical.
Yet Johanne Sacreblu was not made by a French cast and crew. Rather, its mastermind is Camila Aurora, a trans Mexican director. She wanted to skewer the making of Emilia Pérez, the French-produced, Spanish-language musical set in Mexico City about a Mexican cartel boss who transitions to a woman. So Aurora followed in the footsteps of Jacques Audiard, the French auteur who directed Emilia Pérez: She assembled a team that largely didn’t match her characters’ cultural backgrounds, staged Johanne nowhere near where it takes place, and apparently did very little research—as Audiard admitted of his preparation for his film—into her story’s setting.
The result is a strikingly original critique of Emilia Pérez, the movie with the most Oscar nominations this year. The film has been receiving serious backlash online in the form of analytical essays and social-media posts, but Johanne is different. It’s an extremely silly, wholly inventive affair, complete with original music and choreography. Since the short’s debut on YouTube at the end of January, it has racked up more than 3 million views. As Héctor Guillén, a Mexico City–based screenwriter who began a social-media campaign decrying Emilia Pérez, put it to me, Johanne Sacreblu is “a sort of fan art.”
Make that anti-fan art. Anti-fans, as pop-culture scholars have termed them, are similar to hate-watchers: consumers who become fixated on what frustrates them. Both groups tend to target something in the zeitgeist, but unlike hate-watchers, anti-fans tend to construct something new out of their annoyance or contempt. “Anti-fans are folks who dig into something they dislike because there’s something about it that really irks them,” Melissa Click, an associate professor at Gonzaga University and the author of Anti-Fandom: Dislike and Hate in the Digital Age, told me. “There’s something that they can’t just ignore. It calls them in a certain way, in the same way that people who are fans of things get called into something.” And what they produce, Click added, can range from the relatively harmless (a meme or two, posted on a snarky subreddit) to the actively hateful (harassment of the subjects of their ire online or in person).
Dislike has long fueled art. Kendrick Lamar’s Grammy-winning “Not Like Us,” a track made amid a feud with the rapper Drake, wouldn’t exist without disdain. Nor would the live-action film version of Sonic the Hedgehog, whose design was overhauled after fans protested the character’s original look. But the internet encourages the transformation of antipathy into creative fodder, and enables its dissemination. On platforms such as TikTok and YouTube, creators build personal brands off parodying celebrities and constructing elaborate takedowns of what’s in the mainstream. They draw dedicated audiences interested in granular interrogations of pop culture. (The video essayist Jenny Nicholson’s four-hour dissection of Disney World’s Galactic Starcruiser—better known as “the Star Wars hotel”—went viral last summer.)
And the trajectory of Johanne Sacreblu suggests that online success can translate offline; the short film has enjoyed a limited theatrical run in Mexico City. Establishing yourself as a purveyor of anti-fan art seems to be good business, Suzanne Scott, the author of Fake Geek Girls: Fandom, Gender, and the Convergence Culture Industry, told me. Anti-fan art is, she said, “absolutely more visible as a phenomenon than it once was, and a lot of that has to do with the shareability of digital content … What I think is new and distinct about some of this is you see fans and fan influencers professionalizing themselves around this kind of content.”
Michael Pavano, an actor who began posting his impersonations of celebrities during the coronavirus pandemic, has certainly benefited from the spread of anti-fandom. In January, he struck internet gold with a parody of Blake Lively’s work in the romantic drama It Ends With Us. He wasn’t familiar with the Colleen Hoover novel upon which the film is based; he’d watched the movie one night and wanted to offer some “playful critique” afterward, he told me over Zoom. The next day, he’d donned a long auburn wig, turned on his camera, and uncannily captured Lively’s expression throughout the movie by curling his lips and exaggerating her pout. The clip has accumulated more than 46 million views on TikTok, becoming his most popular upload yet. Pavano followed up by eagerly posting several more takes on Lively, who, as he played her, always seemed unable to change her morose appearance.
Before long, however, he began seeing comments that were criticizing Lively herself. These arrived as Lively became embroiled in a legal battle against the film’s director, an ongoing, headline-making case that divided viewers of It Ends With Us. Pavano felt that he needed to be more careful about how much Lively-related material he published. He was concerned that his work seemed to pander to the actor’s critics, which was not his intention. “For me, it’s not about hate at all,” he said. He paused the impressions, telling his followers at the end of January that he “might wait a couple weeks before I post her again.” But his new audience never stopped requesting more Lively, and Pavano told me that he felt that the actor’s other roles, such as her work in the TV show Gossip Girl, were still worth riffing on—just for “silly fun.” “If Blake did reach out and say, you know, I’m not okay with this; this is really hurtful to me, of course I would listen,” he added. “I would never capitalize on someone else’s obvious hurt.” Last Sunday, Pavano indulged his audience by going live on TikTok for 12 hours, staying in character as variations of Lively’s roles—including her part in It Ends With Us—the whole time.
The relationship between fans and the subjects of their admiration has always been tricky. What begins as support—of a public figure, a pop-culture phenomenon, a franchise—can grow into obsession. The same goes for anti-fans; their dislike can turn noxious, and creators within this genre who attract their own devotees risk perpetuating the cycle. Just as fandoms can become perilously passionate, so too can anti-fandoms. “People who have hated things have always existed,” Click explained, “but being able to find other people so easily who also hate the thing you hate is something that’s new.”
The key to generating anti-fan art that doesn’t elicit actual hostility, then, is care—authentic appreciation for the material being judged. Pavano may be mocking Lively’s performance, but he’s also studying it closely. Whenever he chooses a celebrity or an actor’s work to imitate, he told me, he’ll practice their quirks in the mirror for so long, he starts to feel like they’re a part of him. “It is sort of like a possession,” he said with a laugh. “I visualize myself as this person … and I keep doing it until I feel the person.”
Someone like the YouTuber Jenny Nicholson, too, is obviously deeply engaged with the various subjects of her critique. She often dresses up in the relevant franchise’s merchandise—a headband sporting Na’vi ears while talking about Avatar, for instance—and contributes robust context about a subject’s history; she makes it plain that she understands her topic’s appeal. The team behind Johanne Sacreblu also scrutinized Emilia Pérez with rigor; the short opens with a number set in the streets of France, the same way Audiard’s film does with Mexico. Such analysis doesn’t mean that these creators love what they scorn; they establish their bona fides to show how informed they are to viewers who might suspect otherwise. “They lead with this kind of deep fan knowledge and affect,” Scott said, “so that when they are critical, it’s coming off both as informed and … so you don’t get the sense that they’re doing it in bad faith.”
The best anti-fan art produces a clarifying effect, in other words, rather than inspiring pure derision. They’re works of respectful rebellion that cut through the growing hum of online chatter and that, Click said, “might encourage us to become more critical consumers,” the kind who generate thoughtful analyses of pop culture. In the case of Emilia Pérez, the objections to it have grown cacophonous. There have been essays by Mexican viewers denouncing its crude rendering of Mexico’s drug-related violence; damning statements from LGBTQ advocacy organizations such as GLAAD, which called the film “a profoundly retrograde portrayal of a trans woman”; and social-media posts condemning the offensive missives made by the movie’s star.
But Johanne Sacreblu delivers something fresh along with its creator’s evident disapproval of Emilia Pérez. Guillén told me he admired that Aurora, “instead of just trying to diminish other people’s work,” made something original; in doing so, she highlighted what she found ludicrous about Audiard’s approach while also offering a dose of humor, not anger. As he put it, “I think it’s way better to create something, right?” After all, without art, there wouldn’t be fans—or anti-fans.
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