Trolling Shakespeare: Bad objects and the antifan discourses of Roland Emmerich's Anonymous
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Roland Emmerich's film Anonymous does more than simply advance an alternative theory of the authorship of Shakespeare's plays—it actively seeks to raise the ire of Shakespeareans by depicting a buffoonish, illiterate, and greedy Shakespeare who is wholly incapable of writing the plays. And it worked: in protest of the film's release, Stratford-upon-Avon shrouded statues of Shakespeare and street signs bearing his name. This response is, perhaps, curious; in his film, Emmerich makes little effort toward rhetorical nuance or speculative accuracy based on evidentiary gaps. Instead, he prefers to launch a broadside of sensational but easily countered claims. I contend that Anonymous mobilizes various antifan discourses, primarily by trolling Shakespeare and Shakespeareans wherein eliciting anger and tail-chasing—rather than debate—is the goal. Equally important, however, is the film's disdain for fandom in general, as Elizabethan fans are depicted as overly emotional and easily manipulated by cultural producers and real artists. The result is a film that trolls those who hatewatch it, offering a mutually supportive experience wherein two oppositional forms of antifandom ultimately—and paradoxically—offer pleasure to each other.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".