In the last decade, there’s been a reckoning with the way fame so often turns into a means to abuse women. Rather than making celebrities happier, their position in the public spotlight has contributed to mental health and substance issue problems, often leading to tragedy.
But while legacy media can look back at its treatment of Britney Spears in the 2000s and see its flaws, the same issues persist, with the new wrinkle that fans themselves can demand direct access via social media.
Lesbian pop star Chappell Roan has received a massive backlash as she’s spoken in the last few months about experiencing fame as mostly negative. The indie rock duo Tegan and Sara, made up of two queer identical twins, haven’t gone through the same degree of commercial success, but their story, recounted in Erin Lee Carr’s documentary, “Fanatical: The Catfishing of Tegan and Sara,” tells a smaller one about the dangers of parasocial relationships and the expectations of constant access placed on musicians. In its final minute, Tegan Quin says “fan culture is…I want to know more, but you won’t ever get to know me.”
“Fanatical” introduces the audience to Tegan and Sara. The sisters began making music while quite young, finding an audience in their teens. They were signed to Neil Young’s Vapor label in 2000, after already dropping one album independently. Quickly, they found a following of young queer women who didn’t see their lives reflected in mainstream pop and rock music of the period. Their rise also coincided with early forms of social media. A Tegan and Sara forum became popular, and they established presences on LiveJournal and Facebook. The band were known for their accessibility, spending hours signing autographs and talking with fans after their concerts. So it did not seem strange that a Facebook account purporting to belong to Tegan would engage in years-long correspondence with them, leaking unreleased demos and revealing personal secrets. In 2011, this reached a crisis, as Tegan and Sara realized the fruits of a hack of their personal files had been spread online.
“Fanatical” turns into a quest to discover the identity of “Fegan,” as Tegan comes to call her “fake Tegan” imposter. While Fegan started off friendly, her texts and DMs with fans could become creepily sexual or even abusive. It seems as though the catfishing was done by a disgruntled, obsessed fan. Yet while the mystery behind the person’s actions pushes “Fanatical” forward, it’s more melancholy reflection than thriller. Tegan says this experience made her less trusting. As Tegan and Sara grew more popular, they had to keep fans at a greater distance.
Carr has an extensive history of true crime documentaries for Vice, HBO and Netflix, as well as a 2021 film about Britney Spears’ conservatorship. “Fanatical” avoids the worst excesses of these genre. If anything, its style is tasteful, but stodgy: subjects placed at the exact center of the frame, images of tweets and other online communications, a constant drone of barely audible music, muted lighting. Carr places herself in the story, a bit awkwardly, when it seems possible that she and Tegan could finally track down Fegan. Aspects of true crime are present in “Fanatical,” but they’re the hook, not the film’s meat.
Rather than engaging in generalizations about the current state of fandom (apart from a digression into the meaning of the word “stan” and its origin in Eminem’s song about a fan who kills his wife and himself), “Fanatical” sticks to the experiences of Tegan and her audience. It treats Carr and Tegan’s encounters with the latter carefully, as several women who were burned by Fegan testify that they now have negative associations with Tegan and Sara’s music. The drama of “Fanatical” is real, but it comes second to the disenchantment that both Tegan and the band’s fans come to feel. Time after time, it rolls out stories about a woman who believes she’s befriended Tegan only to find, sometimes after several years, that she’s been tricked, despite the trickle of personal material. The fraud has been going on for 16 years and may still be happening.
TikToks in which musicians speak directly to their audience have become central to marketing, but they also foster the illusion of a one-on-one relationship. If personal access to a public figure seems too be good to be true, it probably is. “Fanatical” pursues the emotional damage caused by the impersonation, including the entitled attitudes directed at Tegan, rather than treating it as a closed case.
“Fanatical: The Catfishing of Tegan and Sara” | Directed by Erin Lee Carr | Hulu | Oct. 18th
