Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence?
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| High Concept Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence? |
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Saturday, July 05, 2003 The Pitch: It's like The Seven Percent Solution meets Billy The Kid! Crossing the street today, ruminating about The Sims and fanfic (there's a connection there, I just haven't quite figured out what it is yet), a thought stopped me short. Is Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen the most insanely well-researched piece of fanfic ever? Earlier, I'd been flipping through Jess Nevin's impressive Unofficial Companion (with a terrific Alan Moore interview I'll be quoting from below), and the idea sort of struck me.It helps that I've got the loosest definition of fanfic to go off of: fanfic, meaning fan fiction, or fiction crafted by a fan concerning the subject of the fan's admiration. In this world of corporately owned creations, the difference between fanfic and work-for-hire is essentially that the fan does it for love, the pro does it for money. Long after the X-Files had gotten old and stale, the X-Files fanfic had a strong allure for me, not least because the fanfic sought various types of resolution or closure (mainly erotic) that the TV show had no interest in pursuing. Although the most simple appeal of fanfic to the writer is the ability to take the reins of an admired character or mythos's control, erotic fanfic (and its position as the dominant portion of the fanfic landscape) points to something more. Fanfic is an attempt to experience something through a re-creation of an object of admiration or scrutiny that cannot be offered by that original object of scrutiny. My use of closure, clumsy as it is, points to what I mean. Although Moore's idea for the League had been a simple spin on the idea of the superhero group ("one of the ideas behind the League was that I was thinking about superhero groups and various reasons why they don't work....that lead me to thinking about characters of Nineteenth century fiction. I got to thinking about Wells and Verne and Stoker and Haggard adn the rest of them, Sax Rohmer, and wondered if it would be possible to put together a Justice League of the Nineteenth century..."), it changed dramatically ("[P]robably in the first issue when I suddenly realized that I had Stevenson's Hyde kill Zola's Nana upon Poe's Rue Morgue. And it suddenly struck me how poignant and funny and dramatic that was....I suddenly realized that I could make this more than a fantastic Victorian romp or adventure, where I could actually have a great deal of literary fun and maybe strike a few literary sparks by juxtaposing charcters from wildly different stories. That was probably the moment when the possiblities of the League first presented themselves to me.") Although it's tempting to thus think of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen as a sort of fanfic in which the subject is Victorian literature, Moore makes several mentions in the interview that the Victorian era is not the be-all and end-all of Moore's focus ("The Victorian period is a very, very rich one. But I only wandered into it by accident, and while I've enjoyed my stay there I wouldn't say that it was an era that fascinated me above all others."); indeed, Moore talks briefly about a possible fourth book of the League, which would include "a William S. Burroughs character" and "a Neal Cassidy character" and the League as it would exist in the 1950s. So to me it seems closer to say that Moore is actually writing fanfic about fiction itself, and the closure that he seeks, the surreptitious thrill that can't be experienced by the original, is the destruction of all fences, all borders, that separates each piece of fiction from each--his Almanac in the second series, where he tries to map a world that contains every imaginary place mentioned in fantasy literature, being the most extreme example of this. Every act of fiction is the same act, and so every piece of fiction happens in the same place. Copyrights, egos and differences in creative objectives prevent this fact from being acknowledged in literature itself, but Moore and O'Neill's League demolishes those obstacles as the pieces of fiction could never do, and shows us the wonderment of a fictional world that emulates the wonder of the real world. There's more to this, of course. I have some thoughts about this idea being both very post-modern and the most childish, basic, notion of literature available (as someone who remembers having my Star Wars figures fight alongside my Battlestar Galactica figures), and some thoughts about where and when fanfic becomes realfic and whether that's just the difference of a paycheck. But I've gotta get my ass out the door, so I'll have to hit it another time. posted by Jeff Lester | 8:01 PM | |
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