RPF, HPF, and Based On A True Story, or What if Hollywood ficced them First?

[elspethdixon]

I myself have never participated in any real RPS fandoms—I couldn’t tell N’Sync and the Backstreet Boys apart even back when they were all over MTV and the radio, which should give you some idea of the level of my interest in boybands, and when it comes to television and movies, I’m far more interested in the characters than the actual actors. I’d rather read about Jack Sparrow having sex with Will and Elizabeth Turner than about Johnny Depp, Keira Knightly, and Orlando Bloom performing the exact same sex acts, because Jack, Will, and Elizabeth are the ones I saw on screen and got all fangirly over. Mr. Depp, Ms. Knightly, and Mr. Bloom may be the talented and pretty people who helped create Jack, Will, and Elizabeth, but are they 18th century pirates?

Not that I’m totally against actorfic. When someone writes orgy fic featuring Shakespeare and the Lord Chamberlain’s men, then I’ll be all over actorfic like white on rice. Especially if they throw Marlowe into the mix as well. Mmmm… Marlowe.

And that begs the question: when exactly is RPS “RPS,” and when does it become something else? Sitting down at a computer and writing Depp/Bloom or Sean Bean/ Viggo Mortenson fic could theoretically get me sued for libel (though not for slander; to quote J. J. Jameson, “Slander is spoken. Libel is printed.”), but I could not only freely pen Marlowe slash, I could actually get it published. I submit as evidence Melissa Scott & Lisa A. Barnett’s Armor of Light. For that matter, I give you Shakespeare in Love, which might not be slash, but is certainly some degree of RPF. and totally stole the Oscar that should have gone to Saving Private Ryan

Granted, Mr. Mortenson et al are currently alive and well with their own agents and lawyers and press people to perform the aforementioned suing, and Christopher Marlowe has been dead for several hundred years, and moreover, left no descendants, but that’s the legal reasoning, not the moral argument. Why is Depp/Bloom squicky and wrong, and Shakespeare/Marlowe less so? Hell, I consider historical RPS less squicky than RPS with modern celebrities (as well as more interesting, since I’m a history geek), but I don’t know why.

And what about fic written for films and television series that are based on real people and events? To what extent is, say, a Doc/Wyatt slash fic based on Tombstone regular fanfic, and to what extent is it historical RPS? Wyatt Earp and John H. Holliday were, after all, real people. What about fic for a miniseries like Band of Brothers, which was based on a book that told the story of a real life army unit? What if I wrote fic for Good Night and Good Luck or Walk the Line or Capote?

Not only did Hollywood do the film equivalent of RPF in those movies, they used actual footage of Senator Joe McCarthy in Good Night and Good Luck, completely without his consent and permission, since he’s dead, and probably would have refused to give the film his blessing even were he alive to do so. His Hed Was Pastede On Yay! Granted, it was footage from a public broadcast, and therefore presumably up for grabs to anyone who cleared it with CBS first, but you see where I’m going with this, right?

If Hollywood or some published author has “done fic” about a celebrity or historical person first, does it absolve RPS writers who choose to write about those people of fic-writing sin, or does my Doc/Wyatt slash earn me a place in the Special Hell right next to the Timbertrick people?

Comments

[elspethdixon.livejournal.com]

In a sense, a very real sense, historical writing is fanfiction. People writing it are fans of the event and write from that bias.

Having done an undergraduate history thesis on the Civil War, I can get behind that idea. Every time I found a new primary or secondary source, I had to check when and where it was first published. Sometimes the battles had different names. Sometimes the ships had different names. Underwater mines were either a thing of genius, a bloody nuisance, or an abomination in violation of all laws of war, depending on whether the person writing about them was a Confederate naval officer, a blockade runner trying to sneak into Charleston harbor in the dark, or Union naval officers who were irritated that they hadn't thought of them first.

Even films about history have their own editorial slant: to stay with the Civil War genre, there's Birth of a Nation or Glory, Gone With the Wind, or Cold Mountain.

[bladesno1.livejournal.com]

Exactly. That's the essense of historical story telling. At best we can nail down when things happened, mostly. At worst, we're left with patchy, biased accounts that need so much triangulation, they're nearly impossible to substantiate. Umberto Eco wrote wonderfully about this in Travels in Hypereality. The fractured interpretation of historical 'fact'. The idea that we can re-create anything historical or historically is fundamentally flawed. That was 'then'. There is no now that will ever be even remotely like then. For more reasons than can be counted.
I spent a good chunk of my life studying medieval history. My experience is just as you say. I loved learning that Spain stopped drawing England on their maps for something like a hundred years after the sinking of the armada. Talk about revisionist history.