The Greatest Mafia Film (N)ever Made

Texts imagined, texts loved, texts deconstructed.

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This idiot hasn’t seen Goncharov

This past week, a two-year-old Tumblr joke post resurfaced in the form of one of the most exciting instances of communal creation I ever had the pleasure to witness.

The post concerns a pair of boots the user zootycoon bought with a patch on the tongues referencing a Martin Scorsese movie named Goncharov, bearing the bold tagline “The Greatest Mafiamovie [sic] Ever Made”. The problem is, Goncharov doesn’t exist. But Tumblr users knew what they had to do, immediately jumping on the joke with the dry remark “This idiot hasn’t seen Goncharov”.

The birth of it all.

Goncharov boots circulated for a while, becoming a well-recognized, but ultimately a passing joke amongst the userbase. It was uncovered that the cheap, off-brand boots likely tried to invoke and butchered the word Gomorrah, a real film Martin Scorsese has once been involved in, but overall the post stagnated. That is until, as of the time of writing literally two days ago, user beelzeebub decided to take the joke to another level, producing a very professional promotional poster for Goncharov (1973). It is an admirable piece of graphic design that could fool any inattentive observer, if not for the tiny details, like the user crediting themselves for ‘production services’ and the writer being credited as ‘Matteo JWHJ 0715’, a reference to the world salad on the patch that birthed Goncharov, likely a butchering of the Gomorrah director Matteo Garrone. This poster establishes the core cast, the basic setting (Naples, Italy, apparently) and even makes nods to possible themes within the movie (The new tagline, “Winter comes to Naples” and the imagery of the St. Basil’s cathedral in Moscow implies some kind of contrasting of the criminal 1970s underbellies of the Soviet Union and Italy). And ever since beelzeebub’s little exercise in some simple PhotoShop fun, Tumblr has been having a fucking day.

Beelzeebub’s fated Goncharov poster

Users came up with the basic plot, circulate fake screencaps from the film, discuss the supposed themes and character work present in the film, get in arguments over their disagreements concerning those themes and characters, make fanart and write fanfictions (some of those bearing the hilarious tag ‘canon non-compliant’, as if there is a stable canon to refer to). Google searches for Goncharov skyrocketed as multiple people were confused as to what the hell is going on, to which the snarkier users just rebutted “This idiot hasn’t seen Goncharov”.

Now, this is all a fun story, one that harks back to other famous cases of hoax films and literature, but it’s nothing new. In fact, Goncharov isn’t even the first Tumblr hoax I’ve seen this year: a few months earlier, befuddled user girlblocker expressed how fast-paced and frenzied fan reactions are to the My Chemical Romance tour and them playing deep cuts for the first time in decades, coming up with a fictitious example of a B-side song that hasn’t been heard since 2010 named Volcano Shake ‘Em Up. I don’t think you need me to explain what happened next. Now VSEU not only has semi-established lyrics and sound, but entire arguments about how to interpret the song thematically.

This begs the question: what the fuck is going on? What is the meaning of this? There are plenty of existing Scorsese films and My Chem songs to unravel and bicker over, are there not? All of these questions have been plaguing me, at this point this is the patented Unsafe Pin writing process, so let me offer a thesis that unites these and other, what I would like to call, imagined texts: contributing to fandom and text analysis is less about truth (objective meanings and even properties) and more about play (exercise of creativity, critical thinking and community). It’s all about the friends we make along the way.

Now, for the love of god, buckle in, this is gonna be long.

The H-word

Firstly, the issue around the word ‘hoax’ itself needs to be addressed.

I will keep this short and sweet, the gist of it is I think we can all agree ‘hoax’ carries a certain negative connotation. I understand it’s increasingly being used in jovial terms, but it still has a slight tinge of a joke being played in a cruel way, bad faith. This is why I choose to use the confusing term ‘imagined text’ instead of it. Academically, it is completely worthless, show me a goddamn text that isn’t imagined, so after you finish this piece (or don’t, I’m not your boss), don’t even worry about it. ‘Imagined text’ cuts more to the core of these works, which you will see were created out of something else than purely the desire to deceive and humiliate, and focuses on their creative aspect.

Wow! This (knowledge) is worthless!

I’m not going to surprise anyone by saying both of these imagined texts were created to be inside jokes. However, the comedy lies not only in sharing knowledge unavailable to an outsider.

Taking part in these imagined texts can be an affirming way of demonstrating expertise that is so niche and runs so deep, it is in other contexts completely absurd - comedic. In the case of Goncharov, Tumblr users get to partake in the joy of reveling in their out-of-the-way little corner of the internet and its etiquette. As I already said, this kind of practical joke is not new to the Tumblrsphere and participating in the so-called “jokes of the week” (recent examples including either buying or ridiculing the new worthless checkmarks or clowning Queen Elizabeth, may she rest in piss) is already a time-honored tradition. Knowing what any of these things are is completely useless and may even get you a side-eye for being too terminally online, but on Tumblr, where users are mostly self-aware enough to realize this predicament, you can get to, if only for a few hours, just laugh along with others at outsiders not understanding Goncharov and at yourself for understanding Goncharov too well. It’s also a way to demonstrate expertise in the interests already sprawling on the site, since many users were already fanatically obsessed with Scorsese and Al Pacino (included in the cast of Goncharov) movies and producing the kinds of posts people make in connection to movies they love (web-weaving posts, fanart, theories). Similarly, people riffing on VSEU get to demonstrate their expertise in My Chem deep cuts and lore not only by instantly (or nearly so) recognizing the song as a fabrication, but by connecting the imagined text to the already sprawling mythology the band and the fans constructed around My Chemical Romance. To reiterate, in real life, it’s highly unlikely that encyclopedic knowledge about an emo band would get you anything else than being branded as ‘fun at parties’ (include the italicization when uttering), but Tumblr is the ‘inside’ of the inside joke, so no one will bat an eye.

Why are you mad, it’s literally a joke (/srs /gen)

Another part of what this makes this kind of imagined text appealing (here the word ‘hoax’ really would fit better, but I already committed) is that it is an effective way to construct a straw man and air grief.

In a lot of the more famous cases, the bad-faith intention of such satire is quite obvious. Argue as he might, Alan Sokal did not submit his hoax article out of any genuine concern for the ‘intellectual rigor’ in Cultural Studies, but out of aggravation induced by the never-ending jacking off competition between STEM and Humanities, and apparent political grief. Similarly, I, Libertine might be an insightful commentary on how facetious intellectuals and bestseller compilers were in the 1950s, but it is nothing short of mean-spirited. While I will not argue against the genuine good these hoaxes might’ve done for the environments they were criticizing, the fact remains that these imagined texts were constructed to make fun of groups of which the creators were outsiders¹, hence lacking knowledge that might’ve made the texts more humorous and/or insightful.

In contrast, since Goncharov and VSEU are explicitly more inside jokes than outright hoaxes, the satire they contain is more self-directed and is taken less aggressively. However, this should not diminish the seriousness of the concerns people raise through the medium of these imagined texts, but the presupposition that these texts are to be taken jovially largely eliminates the danger of people taking these concerns in the worst faith possible and becoming defensive (happens often on Tumblr, if you would believe). In the sphere of Goncharov, the criticism mostly concerns the shallowness and misguidedness of the kind of film crit Tumblr engages in (something even I couldn’t resist dipping my toes in): the instinct to interpret everything through an American lens, to reduce a film purely to shipping, but also the valid, but still semi-elitist reactionary outrage about other people who enjoy films ‘more shallowly’. That last point especially works in favor of demonstrating how this kind of humor can be productively self-deprecating, satirizing a quality you might indulge in unironically at other times. Common avenues for criticism taken in the My Chem fandom, working through the matrix of VSEU, include both urgent material concerns (Ray Toro, the only member of color in the band, being repeatedly sidelined in fan content, his exclusion having a distinct tinge of racism) and more nebulous, self-aware commentary (the way fans shoehorn every aspect of the band’s creative output into a wider (band-sanctioned, but largely fan-created) mythology). If I hated both you and myself more, I’d delve deeper into those distinctions between a joke being on other people, either outside of or in-group, or directed at the person contributing to the comedic effect of the text themselves, but nobody has time for that. If I take any longer to get this piece out, I’ll miss my narrow window of the joke still being relevant and the interest in it being maximized.

The ideal fusion of all these different ways to achieve a comedic effect in an imagined text is, I believe, House of Leaves. That is not to say that House of Leaves is comedic, if I may, against my every instinct, categorize and define it to only one genre, it would be horror. It does, however, entertain both the bitter and joyous side of satirising textual analysis.

House of Leaves…

In its hefty 740 pages it builds an unmatched satirical imitation of sprawling, dense, and jargon-filled academic papers analyzing a seemingly straight-forward piece of media, in this case an amateur documentary/horror film named The Navidson Record. Now tell me if you heard this one before, but the twist of the book is that The Navidson Record (and many other academic writings both regarding and unrelated to it the author references) do not exist, even in the universe of the book. Zampano, the author of the massive manuscript, died before its discovery, leaving this great mystery of what it all means. House of Leaves consists of so much more than just that and I cannot recommend it passionately enough, but for our intents and purposes let’s focus on the academic analysis part of the book. The way it differs from, say, the Sokal Affair, is that we never get the feeling that the analysis of The Navidson Record, unintelligble as it may be, is written this way by Zampano out of some malice, desire to confuse or mislead, or even hapless unawareness to how impenetrable his writing is. It’s constructed so lovingly, its endless references and footnotes coming off as the unquenchable desire to be heard and understood. In this way, the analysis of The Navidson Record echoes the invigorating undertaking of bloggers to analyze and deconstruct Goncharov much more than it does the dry cynicism of Alan Sokal.

I always maintained that House of Leaves is a love story. It is in so many ways that we don’t have the time to get into, but as it is relevant to our discussion, there are two main takeaways. Firstly, House of Leaves stands in stark opposition to the Alan Sokals of the world, showcasing how much love, humanity, and the need to connect every academic paper, no matter how failed in its communicability, exudes. Secondly, House of Leaves is a love letter to how meaning is created through community, as Goncharov would be nothing without people talking about it, so would The Navidson Record without Zampano writing and deconstructing it and other characters in the book reacting to that act.

…also, somehow, House of Leaves

MILF (Man, I Love Fiction)

Now that we peeled off the shell of Goncharov and the like being simply a funny or socially relevant joke to participate in, House of Leaves conveniently led us to the juicy core of why imagined texts based on all kinds of media thrive on- and offline: We love celebrating stuff we already loved beforehand in new ways!

Both Goncharov and VSEU, while being tongue-in-cheek and critically minded, are clearly used to celebrate what Tumblr users already love about Scorsese movies and My Chemical Romance. People tease out the gay subtext in Goncharov like they lovingly do for other Al Pacino pictures (he does have a habit of taking on those roles, doesn’t he), they write paragraphs of fake academic analysis and gather collections of screencaps to celebrate the writing and visual beauty of the movie. They quite literally project the kind of painstaking analysis and fan-creation they do for existing works onto these imagined ones.

Call me snotty and sentimental, but I believe people enjoy loving things just as much, if not more, than hating them. Especially if they can share that joy with others. So much so, that if an existing text does not fit the criteria for celebration, they will just create an imagined one out of thin air. Plenty of well-executed homo-eroticism in Scorsese movies, but no such luck if you’re looking for lesbo-eroticism? Goncharov has you covered. Listened to all the existing My Chem songs too much, and now they are just white noise with nothing new to be said about them? Good thing you can literally gush about whatever you want with VSEU. And there is a perfect third case study to confirm my suspicions that humans just like to enjoy things and have fun, despite the limited capabilities of existing media to provide that - Bingus.

Bingus, literally the coolest character ever

Bingus is a non-playable character in the Dungeons and Dragons gameplay podcast The Adventure Zone, except he wasn’t created by the Dungeon Master or the players of the campaign, but the fans of the podcast. Bingus was born as a joke about how abundant NPCs that appear once and never again in the campaign are, to the point where somebody had to make a running list of all the characters in that world, including Bingus as an exasperated laugh. The canon campaign itself was considered by long-time fans of the show to be a drag and characters to like and grow attached to were few and far between, and yet it sucks to admit that you cannot earnestly engage with media you used to love anymore. Bingus allowed fans to have it both ways: ignore the increasingly disappointing canon, but still lovingly engage with what it could be. While canonical characters and storylines fumbled, Bingus was having an enlightening character arc, and fans were able to mine more joy from The Adventure Zone².

Friends We Make Along the Way

Producing texts, as we understand them to exist in the world, is a communal affair.

In our everyday life, we recommend texts based on what they are ‘about’ to friends and family, and it’s a mistake to think that established meaning is solely a product of the author. If I may so humbly say after just one semester of this hell, Cultural Studies scholars don’t agree on much of anything, but they especially don’t agree about where a certain ‘meaning’ of a text is or comes from, and especially not who put it there. But I am not interested in producing anything academically relevant here, so… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. All I know is that the creation, from material inscription of plot beats and chord progressions, and the establishment of discourse around such imagined texts as Bingus, VSEU, Goncharov, and even I, Libertine, is an especially communal affair.

Constructing an imagined text together out of thin air to love and to take apart by analysis is a radical defiance against auteur theory, still widely held as gospel in our pop-culture environment. Communally hallucinating Goncharov not only proves that you don’t even need Scorsese to make a ‘Scorsese film’, it also raises questions about how many other people were involved in making movies he was involved with as iconic as they are, and who puts the effort in to interpret and disseminate their meanings after the production stage. A similar case is presented in House of Leaves, as writing the titular document is a work including Will Navidson and his team, Zampano and his helpers, Johnny, and the editors. While it’s less optimistic in what that kind of amalgamous creation does to the people contributing to it, it still makes the point that you can either get lost in the lack of fixed meaning or make peace with and revel in it.

However, I believe a perfect imagined text is still to come, because as communal creators we still tend to rely on the tropes and patterns present in works we are riffing off. This isn’t only present in outright spoofs like Goncharov and VSEU, even I, Libertine, which doesn’t have direct source material so to speak, is supposedly a scandalous story of a social climber infiltrating the royal court, which sounds like dozens of other half-remembered novels. This is one of the dangers in radical communal creation, popular and recognizable notions are more likely to be co-signed into the flexible, but still widely believed ‘canon’, while experimental contributions are likely to be left marginalized. Say, homo-eroticism being present in Goncharov is believable as it’s already a feature in the films it draws from, but it having actual butt-naked gay sex on screen is off the table. Even imagined texts with singular creators step on the rake of relying on tired axioms: Both the Sokal Affair and The Navidson Record analysis part of House of Leaves rely on the platitude about academic Humanities writing being convoluted and jargonistic, but I will do them a favor and file that under ‘genre convention’ instead of ‘stereotypical trope’. As I argued previously, in my opinion one of these texts uses that platitude in better and more interesting ways than the other, but the fact is they both use it.

Analysis Is a Game

Oh my god we are three thousand words in, just get to the point already.

Ultimately, what all of this highlights is why people engage in text analysis, even one as cannibalistic as in the cases of Goncharov and VSEU. Even the mere act of spoofing, such as the Sokal affair and I, Libertine, are also a part of wider analysis of the genres they were spoofing. A while ago, I encountered Art Is a Game by C. Thi Nguyen and promptly incorporated it into my personal philosophy, seeing as it spoke into existence something I already innately believed to be true:

“We don’t study art and have long conversations about it just in order to understand the art. It’s actually the other way around. We take on the task of trying to understand art so that we may have those delightful conversations and be propelled into those wonderful studies. We have shaped our practice of art appreciation for the joys of the process.”

Nguyen argues that while the local goal (stakes of the game) in the game of art is to be correct in your interpretation, the purpose (point of the game) is engagement in interpretation itself. And while I heartily agree with the second part, it raises some interesting questions about why people would engage in this game with imagined texts, where being ‘correct’ in an interpretation is impossible. Striving for correctness is quite literally obsolete when there is no stable text to refer to when an interpretation is challenged. So I will simply have to disagree with Nguyen’s supposition that ‘aiming at correctness’, which involves referring to a stable cultural object, is what makes the game of art fun.

And, also, this suggestion is just so boringly outdated. With full respect to Nguyen, I genuinely adore Art Is a Game: Move over, old man, who even aims at correctness in postmodern times anyway? I would argue interpreting imagined texts does not have local goals at all, or at least no strictly defined rules except for ‘here’s a funny post to riff off, create, have fun’. The existence, if you might call it so, of imagined texts like Goncharov highlights the instability of meaning in real texts, and while some might say that this makes textual analysis lose its stakes, I argue that it becomes even more engaging for those that choose to participate. Far from the notion of ‘anything goes’, this electrifies the drive to create and then justify new interpretations, rather than certain analyses being cemented and unquestioned. Your traditional art analysts are playing checkers, Tumblr users discussing VSEU are playing 5D chess.

To reiterate my thesis statement, I believe contributing to fandom and text analysis is less about truth (objective meanings and even properties) and more about play (exercise of creativity, critical thinking and community). From me gathering that the writer of my textbook really likes Adventure Time while just trying to study, to House of Leaves revealing that even the driest academic analysis is a search for human connection and a plea for understanding, to Tumblr users going crazy over some knock-off boots, we just cannot leave art alone. We build things just to take them apart, we write texts just to analyze them to death, but, god, it just doesn’t get old, does it?

Remember when this thing was me telling y’all about this funny Tumblr spoof I found? Good times.

1. I am aware that Jean Shepherd, the originator of I, Libertine, is a writer and thus would have been familiar with the machinations and flaws of the book-rating industry. However, I include all of the people who requested the book from their local stores under the term ‘creators’, as imagined texts are a communal creation, and I imagine most of them were doing it out of petty annoyance and not deep concern for the state of literature criticism. Similar thoughts apply to Sokal, who, while being an academic, is a physicist and not a humanitarian.

2. Look, I’d love to recount the entire story of Bingus, but at this point the word count is already too high for my error-checker extension to process, so if you want to hear about Bingus in full glory, consult this video.