The Tegan and Sara internet culture and fandom documentary is worth 100 minutes of your time

I didn’t watch this in the cinema, and I had a bit more to say about it than my usual one-line movie review format, so it didn’t fit into my monthly round-up, but I do want to wholeheartedly recommend you watch the Fanatical: The Catfishing of Tegan and Sara documentary that has recently been released.

It is about their desperately damaging and uncomfortable experience with someone’s long-term internet impersonation of Tegan Quin – “Fake Tegan” or “Fegan” as they are called here – who built up intense personal and bordering-on-romantic relationships online with a series of fans who 100% believed it was the real Tegan they were talking to.

I have to confess that the main way Tegan and Sara entered my life was via the medium of that insanely catchy song from the LEGO Movie, but, as this documentary shows, at the time, for them, everything was far from awesome.

The documentary is directed by Erin Lee Carr, and you don’t have to be a fan of Tegan and Sara to get something out of this. It has interesting things to say about internet culture and fandom. As Marya E Gates put it in their review …

“Although I was never a big Tegan and Sara fan, I saw a lot of my early days on the internet reflected in their confessions, as they spoke about meeting lifelong friends online through the shared love of something.”

As my former colleague working on internet community spaces Meg Pickard always used to explain it, you might gather in one place on the internet because you all like band x, but eventually you discover that three of you also keep gerbils, and that two of you live within a few miles of each other, and you discover all the ways your interests overlap, and the space stops being exclusively about band x, and becomes all about you. Tegan and Sara seem to have broken through at just the right time and in just the right queer space to have built one of the earliest waves of beloved internet communities.

[Tegan (L) and Sara in Fanatical: The Catfishing of Tegan and Sara]

But it is very difficult to keep beloved internet communities pleasant to be part of at scale, as Tegan and Sara discovered as their success grew, and especially if, as there was for them, there are malign actors involved.

I am blessed/cursed myself to be part of several toxic fandoms. And even in the fandoms that I wouldn’t consider to be particularly toxic, there is that edge of people rushing to instant negative judgement about the thing they claim to love, based on the flimsiest bits of information. That the people or thing they are fans of are lazy, greedy, not as good as they used to be, taking them and their devotion for granted.

Just a couple of days ago without warning a new radio edit of a Kate Bush song appeared on streaming services. Reaction in some quarters was instantly damning. I saw someone criticise what they called the “amateurish artwork”, and several people immediately reacted along the lines of “Oh, here comes another cash-grab reissue.”

Within hours it emerged that the “amateurish artwork” was Kate’s own sketch-work to promote an animation raising money for children impacted by war, accompanied by a carefully written essay from Kate herself about all the months and months of work and people involved to bring the little shrew to life.

Words of apology from the “fans” who had instantly slagged it off and jumped to wrong conclusion? Zero. None. Zip. Nada.

[Kate Bush’s “Little Shrew” artwork]

Our attention spans and the algorithms are hardwired – it seems – for sensationalism. “Ten terrible moments that finally killed SERIES X forever” is for some elements of fandom a much more clickable thumbnail, and a much, much easier video to make, than “Ten moments great VFX really enhanced this season of SERIES X with some informed commentary on how they were achieved”.

Alan Moore wrote about this in his typical ebullient style recently in a piece headlined “Fandom has toxified the world”, saying:

“I believe that fandom is a wonderful and vital organ of contemporary culture, without which that culture ultimately stagnates, atrophies and dies. At the same time, I’m sure that fandom is sometimes a grotesque blight that poisons the society surrounding it with its mean-spirited obsessions and ridiculous, unearned sense of entitlement …

[Comics fandom now is] an older animal for one thing, with a median age in its late 40s, fed, presumably, by a nostalgia that its energetic predecessor was too young to suffer from. And while the vulgar comic story was originally proffered solely to the working classes, soaring retail prices had precluded any audience save the more affluent; had gentrified a previously bustling and lively cultural slum neighbourhood. This boost in fandom’s age and status possibly explains its current sense of privilege, its tendency to carp and cavil rather than contribute or create.”

I digress. Back to the Tegan and Sara documentary and my tendency to carp and cavil rather than contribute or create. I very much enjoyed it, but it is not without its flaws. Sara is mostly absent, which is a shame as it would have been interesting to hear more about the impact on her and her relationship with Tegan caused by this. It also isn’t maybe as successful as it could be when it comes to pulling out to the wider picture of modern parasocial fandom.

I also – and this is ultimately a me problem – bristled slightly at the bits where they tried to explain things like what LiveJournal was, and where the term “stan” came from, which triggered my “do not cite and over-simplify the deep internet magic to me, I was there when it was written!” response, but I guess these things are two decades ago now and I am an old man yelling at clouds on a personal blog pretending it is still 2008 and that people are going to actually read it.

Tegan herself at one point wonders aloud whether she will come to regret the project stirring this all up again. Some of the interviews are incredibly awkward and a painful reliving of obviously distressing experiences for the victims, which raises issues about the ethics of it as a documentary project. Tegan meets some of the victims in person, some of which look like they bring closure, while at least two look like they very much do not.

But isn’t that always the unfair way with bullying and harassment crimes like this?

It is the victims who end up having to provide layer after layer of justification for how they have reacted and dealt with it, while the perpetrator(s) get to sit back and potentially enjoy now watching the wreckage unfold a decade later.

Definitely worth watching though, with some great archive footage of the duo and their fandom, and a strong and welcome evocation of life on nascent social media – and its potential for terrible cruelty. This documentary shows, essentially, why we can’t have nice things on the internet.

Fanatical: The Catfishing of Tegan and Sara is available to stream in the UK on Disney+. You can find all my one-line spoiler-free movie reviews here.