Distraction, nostalgia, connection

Harry Styles may not be a god, but artist Sarah Johnson built him a shrine.

A diminutive gold frame, no bigger than a stamp, surrounds a small printed-out picture of the pop star. There is a hand-painted leather Gucci purse placed beneath the photo, with a glass dish displaying plasticine slices of watermelon. Tiny candles surround the scene. A Barbie-sized stiletto sits upon a pale pink section of silk. The entire piece is held within a wooden pentagonal frame roughly ten inches tall. In a video posted to TikTok, Johnson plays Styles’ song “Adore You” as she lights the candles in an act of worship.

The word fan is short for fanatic. During Covid-19, consumption of pop culture feels like one of the few ways to safely engage with the world at large, and fan communities have blossomed. For the moment, fans can no longer meet their favorite artists or see them perform in real-life. As a result, they have no choice but to take their passions online. The changing nature of fandom reflects this distinct period of time, emphasizing the need for people to find community and meaning for wherever they can get it.

“The main difference is what’s affected everyone – the inability to get together in person,” says Paul Booth, professor of Communication at DePaul University in Chicago and self-described “Dr. Who” fan. He discusses the key changes in fan behavior since the pandemic began. “I think, for fans, having a community to rely on for social support is crucial right now,” he adds.

According to a Nielson Global Media report, media consumption in the United States has gone up 215% according to data comparing March 2019 to March 2020.

Fans turn to pop culture during this time for a variety of reasons including distraction, nostalgia and community, according to Booth. “Pop culture has a lot to offer people. It is a mirror for our understanding of the world.”

People around the globe are attempting to combat the coronavirus pandemic through self-quarantine. It is one of the few times in history that almost the entire planet has been encouraged to stay at home and isolate, with four billion people confined this year. Rising media consumption can be viewed as a coping mechanism. Fans are using their fandoms in new ways, displaying the need for common interests and community during uncertain times.

Johnson, 28, is an artist and designer living in Los Angeles. The ends of her short blond hair are pastel lavender, a result of her quarantine boredom. Her hands constantly move and gesture when she talks about the difficulties of these last eight months. In 2019, she moved into a one-bedroom apartment, her first time living alone. When Covid-19 struck the country, she was optimistic that through self-quarantine and heeding advice to “flatten the curve,” the pandemic would end quickly.

She spent the next five months that apartment. Groceries were delivered, supplies came and went, and she saw no one. To keep loneliness and personal demons at bay, Johnson focused on her career. Her strategy worked, for a short while.

As the months went by, depression crept up on Johnson. Each morning, her eyes blinked open, first with sadness, then indifference. She was alone, with no end in sight. The monotony of quarantine seemed endless. Despite her best efforts, cases continued to rise. When she opened her eyes one morning, she knew she needed a change. She needed to start creating something that she could share with others.

In times of crisis many turn to religious figures as sources of hope and affirmation. Johnson also needed to find that strength through her creative endeavor. So far, she’s made shrines dedicated to Harry Styles, Timothée Chalamet, Lizzo and Dolly Parton, with plans to make more.

“I am not religious,” she says. “The shrines came out of me wanting a way to distract myself and honestly, I thought the religious lens was pretty funny. God and politics and whatever have let people down. Timothée Chalamet hasn’t let me down yet,” she adds, laughing.

Johnson says it’s been comforting to look at the pre-pandemic world through music, books and television. Things look different now, but the lives of characters in shows like “Gilmore Girls” remain unchanged by the fears and pains of Covid-19.

Johnson began to build miniature religious icons to express her appreciation for artists’ work as well as her anxiety about the pandemic.

“I was just so tired and stressed out,” she says. “Making the shrines helped me focus on things I love instead of freaking out about the state of the world.”

Soon after posting her creations online, she was flooded with comments and messages from people across the globe. Some wanted to purchase her work, others wanted to tell her about their own connections to the pieces. She was delighted that her efforts brought strangers together. This was her first foray into the world of fandom and she was bolstered by the sense of community from other fans online.

Henry Jenkins, the Provost Professor of Communication, Journalism, Cinematic Arts and Education at the University of Southern California, studies fandom.

“I think all kinds of cultural capital is more important right now than ever before,” he says. “Because we are so isolated, the desire to connect with other human beings is that much more intense […] anything that creates an emotional common ground with someone else is enormously valuable during the pandemic and the lockdown.”

Jenkins says that when you are a fan of something, whether it be a person or a work of art, it becomes part of your personality. That’s why fandom feels intimate.

“Talking about pop culture with someone else is a way of sharing our values, our aspirations, our anxieties,” he states.

Caitlin Chang understands Jenkins’ definition of fandom more than most. She is a super fan of the Korean pop group BTS. She went to eight of their concerts in 2019 and had plans to attend nine more this year. In 2018, Chang camped out overnight outside the Staples Center to be one of the first in line to watch the band during their soundcheck. Succeeding, she wept, pressed against the metal barrier as they performed. “I was crying and one of the members was like, ‘Why are you crying?’ and that made me cry more,” she says.

Chang speaks enthusiastically about BTS, though the start of her fascination had little to do with their music. Her love of the group is more related to their personalities and their message. She respects their social activism and the overarching message of their music: love yourself.

She began listening to BTS’s music during her junior year at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She laughs about her introduction to the band. Chang is Korean but speaks only conversationally in the language and doesn’t understand some of the lyrics of their music. She says that the beginning of her obsession was funny because her friends told her, “You went to one of the whitest schools ever, like, why did this happen?”

Her rise to fandom was gradual but intense. Three years ago, when she discovered her favorite music, she started, “binge-watching everything,” and becoming more active on social media fan pages for the band. Chang smiles when she talks about simpler times. She made some friends online whom she would eventually meet in real life at concerts or fan conventions.

When Covid-19 began, Chang, like Sarah Johnson, assumed the pandemic would be over quickly.

“That was the first devastating part of the quarantine,” she says about her realization that she would no longer be able to travel to attend those nine concerts.

She ramped up her engagement with the BTS fan community online. She was already an active member but with the outside world shut down, and little to do in her home, she needed the support from the group. She is constantly referencing her friends online. When the group performed a live-stream concert this year, she watched at home alone while discussing every nuance of the show over social media. It’s as close as she can get to a concert for the moment.

The BTS ARMY (as they refer to themselves) provided Chang with an outlet for connection. Her adoration for the group has fused with her love for the other fans. BTS appears online now and again to tell this group that they are missed but Chang admits she feels more sadness about not being able to see her friends than the band.

It’s the BTS ARMY that has gotten Chang through the pandemic, not BTS itself.

Fans like Chang and Johnson are able to connect and support one another throughout the pandemic. They talk about their adoration for Harry Styles or their malaise over missed concerts. Their behavior reflects an overall desire for community and distraction from the perils of the pandemic.

Musician Paige Beedie has found her community in fandom through different means. Beedie, 24, has used her interest in pop culture, in television specifically, to fuel a sense of nostalgia for a pre-pandemic world.

“I mean, I definitely am a fan of tv shows,” she says. “Friends, The Office, Sex and the City, Gossip Girl… [I’m] very much a binge re-watcher.”

Panicked when the pandemic started, Beedie originally baked, painted and did other crafts to dull her fears that her family, friends or herself might get sick. As a Master’s student at the University of Southern California, she was living alone in Los Angeles, away from her family in Vancouver, Canada. She says that 99% of her time is spent alone in her apartment.

Beedie thoughtfully discusses her quarantine experience at the start of the pandemic, and she’s clear about how living alone has affected her mental health.

“There was a lot of unknowns,” she says of the early months. Crafting did not alleviate her anxiety, but television did. For Beedie, watching and re-watching TV shows from the early aughts reminded her of her life prior to the pandemic. She could live in a memory.

“I was feeling a lot, like everybody. A lot of sadness, and a lot of pain, and a lot of concern. And I think that TV just kind of reminded me of a time when I didn’t feel that way so much.”

Beedie has watched “Gossip Girl” a “bajillion times.” Movies and television used to be a communal experience she shared with her sister where the two would go to movie theatres to watch films with a crowd or get together to watch their favorite shows. Now that theatres are closed, Beedie’s sense of community doesn’t come from a crowd of eager movie-goers, it comes from the characters on the screen.

“Gossip Girl” plays in the background of Beedie’s home for the majority of the day. Familiar voices fill the space and allow her to imagine having friends in her living room.

“There’s kind of a mimicry of a social interaction,” she admits. Beedie can recite the lines from her favorite episodes and watching those episodes allows her to reminisce about the past without dreading the future. Her passion for “Sex and the City” or “Gossip Girl” has helped her mental health during the pandemic due to their predictability.

Like Johnson and Chang, Beedie longs for community. Unlike those two, she finds it in near-constant engagement with the characters from the shows she watches.

“These people,” she says of the characters, “They’re not real but then they end up being so familiar to you because you’ve seen like nine seasons or whatever.” Though Beedie’s actions look different than the behavior of Johnson and Chang, the desire for interaction is the same.

Since the pandemic began, most people’s lives have become lonelier, according to Time. Loneliness and desire for community in the pandemic are not singular to fans but to the world at large. Time reports, “If the stereotype of a lonely person is a frail, elderly adult who lives alone, the coronavirus pandemic has exposed the truth that was there all along: anyone, anywhere, of any age can experience loneliness.”

Building a shrine, watching a livestream, or reciting dialogue from a decade-old TV show are all acts of reaching out to the world for support. They are ways to connect, regardless of social groups or personal upheavals. Whether through distraction, community, or nostalgia, the women here each take a piece of pop culture and use it to get through their day to day.

When asked what she prays about to her shrines, Johnson thinks for a minute, then breaks out into a chuckle. “I don’t actually pray to them, really,” she says, with slight hesitance. “Well, I guess I kind of make little wishes which can be seen as praying.” What does she wish for?

“I wish for things to go back to normal as fast as possible.”