Fire in the Hole: Negative Feelings in Silent Film Fan Communities Available to Purchase

Drawing on the letters female fans submitted to Motion Picture Magazine between 1914 and 1918, this article seeks to center negative feelings as a constitutional part of Hollywood reception during the World War I years. Emergent at this time, the language of affective film reception took up a combative tenor reflective of women’s lived experiences: anger, derision, and dissent pervade the first-person writings submitted by self-identified movie-loving “misses” and “girls.” Reading their published correspondence as proto-manifestations of feminist “troublemakers” and “killjoys” helps in historicizing early Hollywood fandom as an “intimate publics” commercially centered on women’s culture, but communally appropriated by female consumers as a means to express antisocial responses.