The Price (multifandom vid)

Vid
Title:	The Price
Creator:	thingswithwings
Date:	June 16, 2011
Format:	digital
Length:	4m 54s
Music:	"The Price" by Wax Mannequin
Genre:
Fandom:	Multiple Fandoms
Footage:	The X-Files, Supernatural, Angel: The Series, Doctor Who (new), The Matrix films, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Spiderman 1 2 and 3, Batman (1989), Batman Forever, Batman Begins, Batman: The Dark Knight, Gladiator, Stargate: SG-1, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek XI, Lost, Battlestar Galactica (2003), Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 24, Earth: Final Conflict, Torchwood, Doctor Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, Criminal Minds, Dexter, White Collar, House MD, Starsky & Hutch, Spartacus: Blood and Sand, Prison Break, Numb3rs, and The Mentalist.
URL:	original vid announcement YouTube
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The Price is a multiple fandom vid that focuses on the phenomena of manpain. The vid, summarized by the vidder as "Mr. Billowy Coat King of Pain," is an expose on the manpain phenomenon and culminates in a sequence of shots of characters crying a single perfect tear, with post-process tear-sparkle added on. The vid links to a the vidder's meta post on the subject which attracted a great deal of conversation in the comments and in other posts.

The vid was selected by the OTW to part of its Test Suite of Fair Use Vids before the Library of Congress.

Reactions/Reviews

The Price is the missing link between Lum and Sisabet's Women's Work and Sisabet and Sweetestdrain's On the Prowl)

I write too many men in various states of trauma, pain, loss, grief and responsibility to be anything but ambivalent about thingswithwings new manpain vid....I'm nowhere near as sure that by writing about men in pain, I won't wind up being dismissed as brainwashed by popular culture and [various negatives associated with writers of manpain here], and part of that is the slipperiness of the definition evidenced in the very vid itself and the deliberate inclusion of things that, while not actually being manpain, happen to look like it from one perspective or another. So I'm ambivalent. Not violently opposed or going "NO! IT'S WRONG AND EVIL AND THINGS ARE NEVER LIKE THAT!" Just . . . ambivalent. Mixed feelings.

"I like for the way [the vid] gets away from the celebratory nature of the vids about fandom that focus on boys, and I think shows the flip side of choosing to focus most of our interactions on the shows and characters fandom collectively chooses to build huge fandoms around. This is, perhaps, an arguable choice as a vid about fandom, but I include it because I do believe it’s making a critical point about fandom as much as it’s critiquing media tropes. I do think it's meant to show how fandom interacts with many shows, and to point out how it can often be problematic, or at least reinforcing of problematic media representation. Part of the vid, to me, is critiquing the fannish tendency to focus on the pain and emotions of mostly white men, at the expense of women and characters of color. As cesperanza said in the post linked above, though with a different view of "The Price" than mine, it’s the creators who make the tears but it’s fandom who makes them sparkle. And to once again quote [personal profile] ghost_lingering n her comments re: The Price, she explains, "the shot at the end with all the people comforting Daniel and crowding around him makes me sick and I saw elsewhere in the comments someone say that those people crowding around are like fandom, they're us, that's what we do." To me, "The Price" is almost the flip side of all the other vids I've discussed here; the subordination of the narratives of women and people of color is the price we pay to get all those fanworks about Sam and Dean and many of the men shown in "Us" and "On the Prowl." (Though it is, of course, still focusing attention on male characters, but at least in a critical way).