Fan Service, Easter Eggs
A character or scene is “fan service” if it’s put into the story just to please the fans. This is, allegedly, a serious flaw. For an example of the flaw in action, consider Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. At the climax of The Force Awakens, two episodes earlier in the series, Kylo Ren and Rey face off for a lightsaber duel. Having just killed Han Solo, Ren says to Rey, “It’s just us now.” The remark had a larger resonance. The field had been cleared, and new blood could now take the story in new directions. That’s what happened in The Last Jedi, which saw both Leia and Luke die, the last ties to the past. But audiences complained. So, for The Rise of Skywalker, Emperor Palpatine was resurrected, and our hearts sank. The editor of the film admitted it herself: “Look, sure, it’s fan service.”
But there’s something funny about this criticism. How could pleasing the fans be a flaw in a film? Even if doing so should not be the whole point, isn’t it one of the points? You could argue that great art must be esoteric, intelligible and enjoyable only to the snobbish elite. I will not.
A better argument is that The Rise of Skywalker is failed fan service: the Emperor’s return was put in to please the fans, but the fans were not pleased. But even successful fan service can mar a film. The key to understanding how is in the word “just,” in the definition of fan service: putting stuff into a story “just” to please the fans.1 If that’s the only reason the stuff is there, then the storytellers have failed to provide a good explanation, internal to the story, of why that stuff happens. It’s nice to see the Millennium Falcon again, in The Force Awakens, but why is it is parked on the same planet where the lost map to Luke Skywalker has been recovered? The galaxy is a big place! From a perspective inside the story, this is a bit of a coincidence. That’s the flaw: that an event so well motivated from an external perspective, is, internally, unexplained. The Falcon’s reappearance feels forced into a plot that was not well-prepared to receive it. To the reappearance of Palpatine in The Rise of Skywalker, this analysis applies a hundredfold. (Still, that scene in The Force Awakens where we see The Falcon again, for the first time in so long, I do love it.)
For a while, I was content with these thoughts. But—don’t easter eggs prove me wrong? When Indiana Jones recovers the Ark of the Convent, the hieroglyphics on the walls of the Well of Souls include images of…R2-D2 and C-3PO. There to please the fans? Check. There just to please the fans? Double-check: not only is there no good internal reason for the presence of such markings, the internal reasons are all against it, ancient Egyptians not having been on the emotional roller-coaster that is Star Wars fandom. Raiders of the Lost Ark is not, however, the worse for this.
My current hypothesis is that internal/external mismatches like this are okay, even good, when it’s all a joke, accompanied by a wink and a nudge. I’m no expert on humor, but one theory says that jokes (some of them) work by way of playful incongruity: breaking norms, rules, or expectations, in a playful context where the violation is not to be met with serious reprimand. John Morreall defends this idea in Comic Relief: A Comprehensive Philosophy of Humor. “I love cats—they taste a lot of like chicken”: hearing this joke, one expects features that make cats good companions, before the switch provides features that make them good food. The joke, Morreall says, breaks a rule of conversation—avoid ambiguity—but some rules can be broken without doing anything wrong, by a comic on stage, or a filmmaker with his tongue in his cheek. In a similar way, the R2-D2 hieroglyphic is amusing by way of breaking a rule of aesthetics: don’t put stuff in for only external reasons. In this special circumstance, that doesn’t count as a flaw.
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Working on this piece, I discovered that fan service has a racier definition, in the context of Japanese anime. From this, we may avert our eyes.
Thank you for verbalising something I’ve always felt. I particularly get annoyed when it’s simply a ‘reference’ that adds nothing to the story but makes the audience feel clever. The most egregious example for me is the Kennedy reference in Oppenheimer. It added nothing to the anyway B-plot line, but audiences in both my viewings gasped as if it was something major.