At a moment when fan communities have never been more powerful, creatives are picking up where Eminem left off a quarter century ago and exploring fan behavior through their art. From rose-tinted romances to more unsettling fare, the art of obsession is thriving.
Among the latest additions to that canon are author Jenny Tinghui Zhang’s bestselling novel Superfan, released in February, and Star, from artist and director of photography Petra Collins (with contributions from novelist Melissa Broder). Out next month, Star follows the rise of two fictional musical acts—a pop star, Ashley, and Siren8, a teen idol group—and the gradual devolution of fan admiration into obsession, and eventually, violence.
Here, in an exclusive conversation for Replica Hermes Bag Reviews, Zhang and Collins discuss fandom, horror, and what it means to be a woman in the public eye.
Jenny Tinghui Zhang: The book is so stunning. It feels like such a true portrayal of what I perceive to be stardom and celebrity, but what I know to be fandom and the velocity of being a fan. I think you’ve captured that so wonderfully, so I just wanted to say congratulations.
Petra Collins: Oh, that’s so sweet. Thank you so much.
I wanted to begin by asking you about the genesis of the project. What drew you to wanting to create Star?
I feel like it’s been a long time coming. It’s a topic that I’ve obviously grown up with, but it’s something that I’ve experienced so much through work and also through being a fan myself. I’m always looking at the subject of surveillance and surveilling others, and so much of that is in fan culture and celebrity. And I guess I’ve worked on music and with musicians for 15 years now, so I just felt like this was the perfect story to tell.
And I was ready to also make something that was… I feel like you can maybe tell in the book, but it’s my most cinematic work to date. So with this book, I’m also putting out a soundtrack so you can listen to the book as you read it.
I’m going to dig a little deeper into some of the things that you mentioned. You talked about—and you describe this in the book—you said, “For sixteen years I’ve watched the music world from behind the camera: the meteoric rises, the unravelings, the force of fandoms. I’ve witnessed icons being born and icons being devoured.” So I was curious: using that word witness, and your position as a witness for these 16 years, what felt most urgent for you, coming out of that experience, to convey with Star?
I think about it even more now because I think about the pop stars that I grew up with in the early 2000s. This book isn’t a period piece, but it hearkens to what was going on in that era. I just remember being a young woman and being so frightened for these girls. Nothing had happened to them yet, but now we see—obviously, as time has gone on—with Britney Spears and everyone… all these girls have a story. I remember that feeling from a young age.
And then, as I grew up and saw these people move through their careers, I kept a close eye on what I thought to be true—which is also a part of the book, too—the projection of your own fantasies or feelings onto these people. That’s another really interesting thing that I find, because obviously there’s stuff that I’ve seen, but then there’s also the fan aspect and the projection.
So I went from that to working in the music industry, making these videos, and working with these women, and just seeing what it was like from that angle—being exposed to so many people. And from my camera’s perspective, I thought it was really interesting being this third viewer. Because it’s like, I am also a fan, but I’m also [an extension] of that person or that artist. So it just created this interesting lens, and it got me really excited, because I’ve been thinking about this for years and years.
That was something I was really curious about, because obviously you are someone who’s behind the camera a lot, but you are also someone who is in front of the camera as a model, as an actress. You have your own devoted fan base. How did all of those positions and roles affect the way you approached the project? Because now you’re thinking from almost a three-pronged perspective.
Yeah. Well, it gives me a lot of empathy. I understand everyone’s point of view, which is bizarre, and I don’t think is necessarily a position that everyone sits in. It’s very interesting being able to know what it’s like to be in front of the camera—which is itself intense—then being behind it, but then also being someone who is a public figure. So it’s almost psychedelic, because I feel like I can tell it—and I’m saying this very lightly—but tell it from this god-like perspective.
I didn’t want the book to have any particular… there’s a story, and there’s obviously a murder, and stuff happens, but I think the book has this perspective where the story could be told from any angle, and it could be from anyone’s mind. And that really excited me. Because when I was approaching this, I was like, “Okay, who’s the anchor? Who’s the main person?” And it was just like—everybody. It’s a visual representation of the madness of living in that world as anybody.
In the book’s description, it mentions that it takes us through the story of the performers. We have Ashley and Siren8, of course, but we also see them through the eyes of their fans, and even their stalkers. So I was curious what it was about, in particular, the perspective of the fans—and maybe the stalkers—that was interesting to you and that you wanted to capture specifically.
Well, it’s a position that I have so much compassion for. The way that I approach it in this book is a little bit more of a modern take on fandom, because it’s obviously changed over the last 10 years. But I think the access that we have to each other is not natural. And it creates this… we have all these crazy parasocial relationships, and it creates this reality that is just insane and unattainable. Even I catch myself feeling this way, too. It’s really sad, because it’s such a system where everything feeds into each other, and no one is at fault.
So when dealing with the fans and the stalkers, I hope I show how that can happen. I shot it very romantically and beautifully in my head, but that was something that was really weighing on me—that we’re creating a system that just doesn’t benefit anyone, at the end of the day. It’s so hard to love something so much and then be [led to believe that you] have full access to it, and then it’s also very difficult as a creator—as these pop stars—to be doing something that they love, but then having their fans maybe be a threat to them. It’s not normal. It’s not a way to live or function. And I don’t think it breeds art—it breeds fear. And we’re not protecting the women that we have in these spaces.
On that topic—and this goes into the idea of access—your work has dealt with the internet and the idea of being alone with the internet before. The internet is definitely something that comes into play when we talk about the access that we have now. How do you think about the role of the internet in terms of fandom?
I think the way that fandom used to be, let’s say in the ’70s, or ’80s, or ’90s—the ’90s were maybe the beginning of it being a little more invasive, with tabloids—but I think people were still able to separate the artist from the celebrity, and also see them as human beings. Because there was this shield; you’d see photos of them in a magazine, but you weren’t seeing them every day eating lunch, or scrolling through a million images of them.
So you didn’t have this super-personal relationship with your idols. And I think it’s dangerous—the point that we’ve gotten to. It’s very dangerous, and a little too close. You lose that threshold where there’s almost no fantasy, and that makes it feel real and fake at the same time. It’s just bizarre. And it gets to this point—where the book goes—where it becomes this wild, psychedelic space, where you’re like, okay, this person can be in my living room, or my bed, every second with me. So I guess that’s the change that I’ve seen.
And another thing I was thinking about recently—when Instagram started, or when people started making profiles, I remember being so freaked out about how much your avatar represented you. I was trying to figure out how, in people’s brains, you split time between your avatar and your real-life self. Now, talking about this, it doesn’t even make sense. But when we didn’t have that, it was a really scary, foreign concept to me.
Well, it is a really trippy concept, because if you think about it, none of it is actually tangible or real. There’s nothing, at the end of the day, that you can actually hold on to.
Yes, exactly. And it’s just in our minds. And another thing that I always thought about—this was very early on, I guess, in cyberbullying on Instagram—I remember thinking, it’s crazy to post a photo, let’s say of your body, and then have a ton of people commenting on it. And at the time, I was like—if those people said that to you in real life… Now we can’t separate that anymore, because it’s so common. We’re really in the era of criticism and critics, and it’s normalized. But it freaked me out, because I was like—what’s stopping people from internalizing that and then living it out in real life? That really, really scared me.
And again, a lot of people who get thrust into stardom are young, and your brain is not equipped to deal with that. It’s already so much. I was talking to a filmmaker last night, and we were just talking about how wild it is to be on stage—to have that much energy directed at you—and how to even process that.
Even my very limited experience of being on a stage—even just the feeling of those bright lights, outside of people’s eyes looking at you—it’s really strange.
And it’s not normal for us as humans, because we see that as a threat, naturally. So if you’re experiencing that on your phone constantly, and then also in venues and in person, I just don’t know what kind of way that is to live. It’s very scary.
I feel like now that we’re talking about this, I’m thinking about the deer—the doe—that you have in the book. And I feel like that’s actually such a representation of what we’re talking about: this feeling of being captured and perceived.
That was intentional. It’s one of my favorite visual references, because I love the idea of a deer caught in headlights on the road—and also how powerful those animals are—but then the car drives toward them, and that’s it. That’s a great metaphor for what happens to these people, or these girls. They get contained in this very scary way. And also, another part of the deer is that it’s seen as a magical creature, which is how I see the girls in the book being perceived. So it’s a very sad symbol to me.
I got a lot of horror imagery, particularly Japanese horror, in this book. Is there something about celebrity and stardom that lends itself to horror—and vice versa?
Yes. It’s so funny, because it’s something that always creeps in for me. If I look at my first body of work as a teenager, I’m like, these are so dark and so scary. And it really is how I was perceiving girlhood, and perceiving being a woman and being hunted. So for me, when I was shooting this, I wasn’t necessarily setting out to make something overtly horror-driven. I had references, but I think it’s just so embedded in that story for me that it comes out naturally. Because it wouldn’t feel real to do it any other way.
Anything that touches on what it’s like being a woman, or dealing with girlhood or womanhood—I’m just like, immediately, it is horror. Especially at that level of being perceived and surveilled—it’s frightening. But yeah, I was also such a horror fan as a young girl, because it felt the closest to my experience growing up. It was the genre I could relate to the most.
And there’s also humor in it. I don’t know if that always comes across, but sometimes it’s like—this is so ridiculous it’s funny. I have a lobotomy scene—it’s ridiculous. It’s so scary it’s ridiculous, and it’s also something that existed in history for women. So it is funny to me. And on set, we had this character—the guy who plays the image of the stalker—and he’d just be standing there, waiting. He was so sweet and normal, but we put him in these creepy outfits. And we’d all just look at him and be like, “This is so scary—and also kind of ridiculous.”
That’s amazing. I had some questions about process. So in the book’s introduction, you said, “With Star, I went back to the way I shot when I first began taking photographs. There’s something honest in that early instinct, quiet, imperfect, intuitive, that I wanted to return to.” What prompted that desire to return to almost the beginning for you, and what was it like to do that?
Oh, it was incredible. I think this happens with every artist, but the longer you work, you pick up so many new skills, and you develop a more complicated way of working—which is far from how you started. Because I started when I was a teenager, and I did everything low-budget, myself. I was just running around with my subjects, really picking up what felt best.
But as you grow, and as you gain success, sometimes that’s not always the best thing for the work. Sometimes you have to go back to how you were working. I love a smaller crew. I love being able to just get in there and get down and dirty with the work. So part of it was wanting to abandon everything I’d learned and return to that way of working.
But also, when I was taking those photos, I was looking at them through a more cinematic lens. The reason I started taking photos was because I wanted to make a movie, but the easiest way to do that was to take photographs. So I was like, I need to drop everything and just pick up my camera—I still use the same one—and work as if I were making a super tiny indie film. Really working with the actors, no crazy lighting—it’s all real locations, too.
That was so fun, because you get to really play and be in the moment, and it feels as real as possible. I love sets, but they can take away the element of reality a little bit. And when we were in real locations—like the forest, or the bath, or especially the hospital—it became something else entirely.
The hospital was the most intense. I love those photos so much, because that’s a space I’ve always been scared of. When I was younger, I really struggled with my body. I did ballet, and I had to quit because I kept dislocating my knees. I felt like my body was betraying me when I was 11, 12, 13 years old. I was in and out of hospitals a lot. So I wanted to go into a space that made me uncomfortable and make it feel beautiful. And I feel like those photos really do that. We were in an outpatient clinic at night, so no one was there, but the music was still playing in the hallways. It was eerie, but also really special.
I just have one last question for you. Something I’ve been thinking about a lot with my own book is the role that my obsessive tendencies have played in my writing process. Oftentimes, the things I’m obsessed with become fuel for my work. So I was curious about your relationship to obsession—whether your obsessions, past or present, have fueled your art, and whether there’s anything you’re obsessed with right now.
Yes—100%. I’m someone who gets obsessed with things, and then I want to look at them and work with them forever. There are films I’ve watched ad nauseam—so many times—because I can’t get over how they make me feel, or how they were made. And being behind the camera, you also get obsessed with your subjects. I get obsessed with wanting to see how a person expresses themselves.
So I feel lucky in that sense—I get to have real people as my “obsession,” instead of just consuming media. It’s like artist and muse. I was obsessed with everyone I worked with on this book, and I think you can feel that in the photos. The cast is just beyond. And honestly, that’s what fueled the book. I had an idea going in, but it wasn’t until I met everyone and saw what they could do that it became something bigger than what I had imagined.
As for what I’m obsessed with now… I really love crafting and dolls. I’ve always been obsessed with miniatures, and I just went to a doll convention a couple months ago. I love seeing collectsors—people who are so deeply invested in what they do. It’s fascinating to talk to them, to understand why these objects matter so much. I also love going to rare book fairs. I just love seeing what people feel connected to, what inspires them, and hearing why. I think that’s my obsession—I want to understand what people love, and then figure out how I can feel that, too.
It sounds like you’re obsessed with people, and I think that translates into every aspect of your work.
My number one question—which annoys everyone in my life—is: “What are you thinking?” I’m constantly asking it. It’s almost like a tick. I just need to know. Even strangers—I’ll make up entire stories in my head. I was in Italy with my boyfriend, and we were at a restaurant. Nothing was happening, but people were coming in and out, and I convinced myself there was this whole situation where someone was extorting the chef. Afterward, I told him, and he was like, “That’s not what was happening.” But I think it’s because I want to create stories.
This conversation has been edited and condensed. Petra Collins: STAR is out April 14.
