III/3/C I Think We re Alone Now

While there are debates about the degree to which predominantly female fan communities legitimately embody a queer experience, I'd like to honor the metaphorical affinities between Hera's cluster of lesbian mothers and the family of vidders, where love by women in collaboration is the genesis of a hybrid brood that, like Hera, is part of "the shape of things to come." Fanvids are one manifestation of the irrepressible excess of media reproduction in today's technological context: digital video, in particular, levels the barriers between television and the internet, between producers and consumers of entertainment, making commercial texts available as raw materials to anyone with computer file sharing and editing capabilities. With growing volume and diversity as their tools become increasingly accessible and sophisticated, vids capitalize on this condition to celebrate, critique, and de/reconstruct mass media in what Anne Kustritz calls a "genre commensurate form." This is to say that they engage the source via its own visual language, appropriating its images (along with their webs of intertextual connotation) and instilling coherence across a fragmented re-edit by means of the music and lyrics of a song. As such, there's an ongoing debate among fans and fan scholars about how to assess fanvids' "transformative" status in comparison to medium variant derivatives (such as fan fiction and fan films that use original video): on one hand, vids make something new out of the text itself, but for the same reason their divergence from it is often less stark. In addition to the ideological dimensions of this moral discourse, infused as it is with assumptions about what genders/races/classes/nationalities of people are creatively enabled, the question has concrete legal ramifications: "transformative" standing is a key axis of a fair use defense of appropriative art. Certainly vidding articulates very different evaluative criteria from orthodox IP law or from a project like Videomaker in its form, themes, and orientation. While fanvids proper span a growing range of distinct genres and approaches, they may appear overly formulaic to outsiders because they rarely deviate from the conventional music video format. This uniformity, however, is a technique for building an interpretive community, wherein what's privileged is not novelty and widespread appeal, but rather the ability to speak compellingly through and about media to an intimate audience within familiar constraints. What's "original" about vidding is a technology of seeing: it is a literalization of fans' ocular prosthetics (the girlslash goggles, for one), rendering as montage the strategies of active viewing that are animated by love.

While "meta" (critical) and "gen" (general, including character study) vids are garnering increasing attention and acclaim, relationship and slash vids (such as Killa and T. Jonsey's famously erotic "Closer") are still at the heart of the form. Here I'd like to look in detail at a vid that manifests the girlslash goggling of Battlestar Galactica directly: "Save Yourself," a Kara/Sharon vid by jarrow272 {http://jarrow272.imeem.com/video/0u5Jn951/bsg_saveyourselfrm/}.

This project is representative of an orthodox aesthetic within today's vidding community, and screened at Vividcon 2007; it simultaneously addresses the core vidding audience, who are familiar with the genre's conventions but not necessarily with the nuances of the source, the assemblage of BSG enthusiasts situated within online media fandom, and the more localized coterie of BSG femslashers (it implies a tragic amour as a preferred reading, although its tone is not overtly romantic). Kara "Starbuck" Thrace, the gender non-conforming and ambiguously saintlike hotshot pilot, and Sharon "Boomer" Valerii, the rogue "sleeper agent" persona of Cylon model Eight, had a history together serving on Galactica in Sharon's pre-activation past, but in the course of the show's canon their relationship has accumulated only a few isolated moments of shared screentime. These scenes are intensely charged with both characters' ambivalence about the contradiction between their human friendship and Sharon's newfound Cylonicity, but the rest of the available lesbian reading inheres in the gaps and latencies of BSG's multidirectional narrative. "Save Yourself" occupies these conditions strategically by highlighting and capitalizing on the fragmentation of television editing, which represents affect via shot-reverse-shot patterns that are replicated here (and in many slash vids) using originally unrelated close-ups to evoke mutual emotion and desire. It also encodes the thematic question of the degree of permeability and transmissibility between the consciousness of individual Sharons (plus the ramifications of that for Kara and the ways she can know and has known her) by indiscriminately mixing images of Boomer and the other important Sharon copy, later distinguished with the callsign Athena. A heartfelt conversation in the brig wherein the characters broach this issue explicitly is cited as a pivotal moment in the vid (this is its first clip of them together, and it occurs more than two minutes in). Outside such judicious glimpses of onscreen Kara/Sharon snippets, however, "Save Yourself" is primarily staked on paralleling these two across multiple registers: movement and gesture (pairing shots of their eyes, hands, and pacing feet, for example) as well as circumstance (pairing the women firing guns, captive in hospital beds, and so on), suggesting the similarities of their experiences despite the fact the one is human and the other Cylon. With the strident, angsty rhythm and lyrics {http://lyricwiki.org/Stabbing_Westward:Save_Yourself} as a unifying element, "Save Yourself" constructs a metatexual explanation in music video form for the conspicuous under-elaboration of Kara and Sharon's relationship in canon (a common necessity of femslash interpretations of BSG, given that, for its rich abundance of female characters, it portrays few interactions between women): their love for each other cannot transcend the brutality to which they are individually subjected.

Narratively, "Save Yourself" presents an impressionistic chronicle of violence, opening by introducing Kara and Sharon in close-ups and locating them within the apocalyptic context of space battles and explosions. The body sections are composed around occasions of trauma: Kara's intimate losses and crash landing and Sharon's dawning panic about her activities as a Cylon saboteur (season 1) in the first verse, their separate experiences of hospitalization and incarceration (season 2) in the second verse (though the topical segments don't break cleanly with the musical divisions, for the most part, fostering a seamless feel). While numerous physical assaults against Kara are included, her main thread in the vid is her terrifying detainment in a covert Cylon facility on Caprica after being shot (and, it is strongly hinted, having surgery performed on her ovary). The most concentrated and disturbing Sharon passage begins during the song's bridge, and incorporates her outing as a Cylon, her own horror and attempted suicide, the ensuing barbarity of her tenure in shackles and aborted rape, and the faked death of her child. Just as the vid touches visually on Kara and Sharon's relationship at the beginning ("searching for an angel") and middle (their scene in the brig) for emphasis, the fulcrum here (at 3:05) flashes back to the standoff involving the two of them upon their return from Caprica, leading into a fluid concluding section punctuated by Sharon's multiple shootings. At the end, Kara escapes from her Cylon captor, while the final image is of Boomer's dead body (though of course she survives by downloading, and both characters go on to have further near-death experiences in season 3).

"Save Yourself"'s panorama of physical and emotional abuse, inscribed across two interconnected women, evokes the specter of homophobic and/or racist violence as much as the recuperation of homosexual and/or interracial love. The pathos of the closet Cylon is unavoidably inflected as a queer allegory, and this dimension is even more strongly accented in the vid, wherein Sharon is kept from Kara by a catalogue of cruelty (from insults scrawled in her locker to punitive sexual assault). The conjectured relationship between Sharon and Kara is thus transgressive by virtue of being same-sex and of being inter-technic (human-Cylon), and the vid's tragic saga of forcible heartbreak yokes these two registers together. While "Save Yourself" is hardly a celebratory slash romance, in this sense, metatextually it gleefully exposes a submerged intimacy – its own existence as an artwork, that is, contradicts its pessimistic diegetic implication that Starbuck and Boomer will never be together. This buoyancy is perhaps most apparent in Jarrow's second-order mashup of the vid which, as per an informal divertissement among vidders, plays the existing video montage against a different audio track – a commentary in itself on the malleability of media in this technological context. The "I Think We're Alone Now" version {download}, which sets "Save Yourself" to Tiffany's classic anthem of forbidden love {http://lyricwiki.org/Tiffany:I_Think_We%27re_Alone_Now}, is exuberantly perverse in its juxtaposition of brutal images and candy pop, and features uncannily and hilariously perfect alignments at points between the vid's narrative and the song, between its images and the lyrics. "We gotta hide what we're doing / Cuz what would they say / If they ever knew," Tiffany sings, "And then you put your arms around me / ...I think we're alone now," and it sounds like a happy ending for Kara/Sharon and illicit couples everywhere (human-Cylon, girl-girl, and otherwise subtextual). Not to mention a happy ending for vidders and other creative fans themselves, running away from admonitions to "watch how you play" to tumble into their hideaway where they can be alone, "holding on to one another's hand," (re)producing to "the beating of our hearts." But reappropriating and remediating love undercover and on the run is only a provisional triumph, of course, easily evading vain attempts at enforced textual containment but not escaping normative and protocological hierarchies of power.