The vast majority of film fans, males and females, Barbas argues, were not the enthralled to the fictional worlds of the cinema its critics painted them as. Instead, Barbas argues, film fans, impacted as they were by a late modernity and early postmodernity of increasing consumer capitalism, increasing urbanity, the decline of naturalist and puritanical notions of sex, and increasingly tactile and "realistic" media like film, "realistic" media which made it difficult to distinguish reality from fiction and to distinguish the real lives of film stars from the propaganda of the Hollywood star making system and the film fan magazines that grew up around them, actually tried to discern the difference between reality and fantasy and actor and celebrity. Film fans, Barbas argues, particularly in the 1910s, were not the morons of their critics sensationalistic fantasies. Instead, Barbas argues, they were pushing back against the simulations of late modernity and early postmodernity. They tried to distinguish the Barnum like hokum of the Hollywood star making machinery from the reality they wanted to know about. They wanted to know whether the stars they came to admire, adore, and even emulate--some began to dress like, speak like, and purchase the consumer goods their favourite celebrities shilled for--were as they appeared to be on the big screen.
Hollywood and the flm fan magazines, claims Barbas, tried to answer the question of whether Hollywood stars and celebrities were like the characters they played on the screen. In general, they answered that question in the affirmative. Hollywood fans, however, were, as Barbas notes, quite aware of the fact that Hollywood was manipulating them for profit, but that didn't stop them from trying to distinguish fantasy from reality and they lobbied, via letters they wrote to film magazines, and formed film fan clubs to try to get at what the celebrities they saw on the big screen were really like.
Like so much historical research grounded in archival analysis Barbas's archival research adds colour, tangibility, and vitality to her argument. However, like a lot of research and writing grounded in archival research, one is left wondering, given that such research is generally not based on a random sample, how generalisable Barbas's data and the conclusions she draws about film fans from it is. One of Barbas's conclusions one might want to question for instance, is her argument that film fan practises were grounded in an attempt to uncover and ascertain how Hollywood was suckering them. Barbas makes the case that film fans tried to deconstruct and, in the process, understand the propagandistic manipulations of late modernity and postmodernity, propagandistic simulations that would also be used to obtain American support for World War I and to buy the products of the new consumer society. But film fans were, as Barbas notes, also, simultaneously, manipulated into emulating the fictions the new consumer industries and cultural industries were trying to "sell" them. The reality, if I can still use this word in the empirical sense, is that in late modernity and early postmodernity the utilitarian empiricism of industrial late modernity met the manipulations of the new media and produced individuals who were both empirically oriented while at the same time interpellated or drawn into a fantasy world in which buying product was also buying into, often unconsciously, a certain "reality" or meaning system and certain identities that were consistent with the brave new world of consumer capitalism and culture, a conclusion Charles Eckert came to earlier in his seminal articles on Hollywood, Hollywood stars, and consumerism.
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