Umbreto Eco asks what, beyond being loved, transforms a film such as Casablanca (1942) into a cult artifact. First, he argues, the work must come to us as a “completely furnished world so that its fans can quote characters and episodes as if they were aspects of the private sectarian world.” Second, the work must be encyclopedic, containing a rich array of information that can be drilled, practiced, and mastered by devoted consumers.
The film need not be well made, but it must provide resources consumers can use in contructing their own fantasies: “In order to transform a work into a cult object one must be able to brea, dislocate, unhinge it so one can remember only parts of it, irrespective of their original relationship to the whole.” And the cult film need not be coherent: the more different directions it pushes, the more different communities it can sustain and the more different experiences it can provide, the better. We experience the cult movie, he suggests, not as having “one central idea but many,” as “a disconnected series of images, of peaks, of visual icebergs.”
Henry Jenkin’s
Convergence Culture.