watch me do an acrobatic leap from Helen Mirren to fanfic meta
Last night Helen Mirren and Forest Whitaker won Oscars for playing real people. As did Reese Witherspoon and Philip Seymour Hoffman last year. Apparently the Academy voters particularly value the ability to convincingly inhabit and portray a character for whom we have an outside reference, and it seems that at least in North America, people and the media feel similarly: how many times in the past few weeks, for instance, have I heard the anecdote about Mirren catching sight of herself in a mirror while she was in costume and being startled by how much she looked like Elizabeth II?
So here's the acrobatic leap segue: If serious film so strongly values characterization based on imitation, why doesn't serious fiction?
(Caveat: I know I'm flagrantly and no doubt problematically disregarding genre distinction. A fair comparison would be between film biography and written biography, not between film biography and fiction--of any kind, but especially fanfiction, from which, incidentally, I would probably exclude the category of real people fic because from what I know if it (admittedly not much), it really isn't so much about imitation. Nevertheless, I want to focus on the idea of what kind of skill is being valued: in both cases, the imitation of a character that exists outside of the text under consideration.)
In fanfic, characterization is among the chief criteria of value: how well does this character ring true to what I know of her/him from the show/film/book/etc.? And it seems to me that this is the same criterion of value that leads Academy voters to give the acting awards they've given in the past couple of years: how well does Helen Mirren ring true as Queen Elizabeth, or Forest Whitaker as Idi Amin?
So why the predominant valuation of originality in fiction, when we're quite happy with imitation in film? Why does the fictional imitation of real people hold a higher place in the overall cultural hierarchy than the fictional imitation of already fictional characters? (Especially when, conversely, the fictional imitation of real people holds a far lower place in the fanfiction cultural hierarchy.) This starts down the road of a longstanding cultural tendency to value nonfiction over fiction (the roots of which, in English literature at least, go back to the Early Modern period if not before; the practice then becomes quite thoroughly entrenched by the 18th century. And in the 19th century, biography becomes an extremely popular genre, and one that is consistently valued above the other extremely popular genre, fiction). Another tangent could takes us down the copyright road: how does imitation become devalued (as an act of cultural production) when that which is imitated is someone else's copyrighted original creation, as opposed to someone else's life?
At any rate, I don't think I really have an argument here. But the question of imitation as an art, as an act of cultural production, as entertainment is an interesting one, at least to me. Feel free to chime in with thoughts, opinions, brilliant discussion points, etc.!
So here's the acrobatic leap segue: If serious film so strongly values characterization based on imitation, why doesn't serious fiction?
(Caveat: I know I'm flagrantly and no doubt problematically disregarding genre distinction. A fair comparison would be between film biography and written biography, not between film biography and fiction--of any kind, but especially fanfiction, from which, incidentally, I would probably exclude the category of real people fic because from what I know if it (admittedly not much), it really isn't so much about imitation. Nevertheless, I want to focus on the idea of what kind of skill is being valued: in both cases, the imitation of a character that exists outside of the text under consideration.)
In fanfic, characterization is among the chief criteria of value: how well does this character ring true to what I know of her/him from the show/film/book/etc.? And it seems to me that this is the same criterion of value that leads Academy voters to give the acting awards they've given in the past couple of years: how well does Helen Mirren ring true as Queen Elizabeth, or Forest Whitaker as Idi Amin?
So why the predominant valuation of originality in fiction, when we're quite happy with imitation in film? Why does the fictional imitation of real people hold a higher place in the overall cultural hierarchy than the fictional imitation of already fictional characters? (Especially when, conversely, the fictional imitation of real people holds a far lower place in the fanfiction cultural hierarchy.) This starts down the road of a longstanding cultural tendency to value nonfiction over fiction (the roots of which, in English literature at least, go back to the Early Modern period if not before; the practice then becomes quite thoroughly entrenched by the 18th century. And in the 19th century, biography becomes an extremely popular genre, and one that is consistently valued above the other extremely popular genre, fiction). Another tangent could takes us down the copyright road: how does imitation become devalued (as an act of cultural production) when that which is imitated is someone else's copyrighted original creation, as opposed to someone else's life?
At any rate, I don't think I really have an argument here. But the question of imitation as an art, as an act of cultural production, as entertainment is an interesting one, at least to me. Feel free to chime in with thoughts, opinions, brilliant discussion points, etc.!