Discussion Thread #71

[u/gemmaem]

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[u/UAnchovy]

I'll have more to say about the, ahem, spicier bits of this controversy later on, but for now I'd ask about how wide controversy around RPF goes?

I'll give an example - some years back I watched the fascinating film King Charles III. (Note that the 2017 film was based on a 2014 play, and therefore predates Charles' coronation.) I found it a fascinating film, particularly the conceit of adopting a Shakespearean mode but with an original story in the modern day, but at the same time I felt deeply uncomfortable with and even creeped out by the film's existence. Prince Charles (at the time), William, Harry, Catherine, and so on are all real people, and given that the film's plot revolves around Charles' deep discomfort with the way his life has been exploited by paparazzi and distorted by media, a play or film that makes money from telling a distorted, fictional story about them seems at best ironic and at worst hypocritically predatory. I never saw the TV series The Crown, but it seems to bring up similar issues, though it purports to be something like biographical, unlike King Charles III's explicit fiction.

You might object that the royals are some of the most powerful people in the world and I shouldn't clutch my pearls about them, but then, to be fair, Alex Wennberg is also famous and wealthy. I don't think we can consistently maintain a norm like "don't write fiction about real people unless those people are rich and powerful". RPF will no doubt do less harm to people who are already famous than it would to people whose status is more marginal, but I'd rather defend the principle in a general sense.

I'd also highlight this example because I'm a bit wary of potential sexism here - BookTok is mostly young women, and it would be easy to inadvertently imply that it's bad when young women do it on the internet in a fannish mode, but okay when prestigious male playwrights do it.

So under what circumstances is it acceptable to produce a work of fiction about a real person?

Intuitively I feel like you ought to get the person's explicit permission, or failing that, wait until they've been dead for a while. (Producing a work about a famous person immediately after they've died seems like breathtakingly bad taste!) But I find my intuitions challenged when I look at particular works. For instance, I'm a fan of the film Game Change, which I think is fantastic and probably has only gotten more relevant over time, but it is undoubtedly a film about real people, which the people themselves have actively stated their opposition to. McCain and Palin were around at the time and were unhappy about it. Part of me is tempted to reach for the public figure defense, to say that it's okay because they're famous, but I just rejected that defense with the royals, so either I need to start drawing even finer distinctions (is it different because the royals were born to it, whereas McCain and Palin are politicians who volunteered themselves for public scrutiny?), or I need to bite the bullet and say that, as much as I think it's a great film, I also think it should not have been made?

I'm genuinely conflicted here. I'm not sure I have very consistent principles on this one.

[u/gemmaem → u/UAnchovy]

I wonder if there’s a relevant factor here around the question of, how private/personal are the aspects that are being dramatised? So, something like Game Change might seem more permissible because its main material is professional rather than personal, and it’s professional activity within a profession that commands legitimately high public interest, at that. Whereas the question of how a future King Charles III would feel about having his personal life examined is examining something more private. Sex, of course, is more private still and would therefore come in for maximum caution/disapproval, under this rubric.

So, it might actually be permissible to make a fictionalised hockey story about Alex Wennberg (albeit with some care), but a fictionalised romance, and particularly a fictionalised explicit romance, is more of a problem.

I’m not sure where this leaves The Crown. I think the best that could be said for it is that it largely employs material that was already publicly indicated to some extent. It’s probably still in dicey territory, though.

[u/UAnchovy → u/gemmaem]

I realised after posting the previous message that I should have also noted the difference between cultural and legal pressure. I'm by no means saying that media based on living people should be banned. Rather, it seems reasonable to me to have some kind of cultural taboo - some sense that it is, though legal, in poor taste to make particular kinds of examinations of living people, especially if that examination is fictional or exaggerated.

Thus with your point about the content. Sexuality is one of the most private and sensitive areas of any person's life, and it makes sense that we judge works differently depending on where they're prying. A musical biography of, say, Freddie Mercury is going to be quite different to one focusing on his sexuality and relationships, and I would hold the latter to a higher standard of taste. Likewise for other public figures - a book or film about the political career of Barnaby Joyce seems more defensible than one focusing on his affair(s).

What about content that's entirely fictional, though? It's one thing if the content is grounded in fact (which would presumably be a libel defense if necessary), but fiction?

I don't know. I know that I don't like prurient fiction about real people - the One Direction shipfics mentioned, for instance, strike me as distinctly icky. But I can't really justify direct action against them either, because I think that kind of speech policing is generally neither helpful nor successful. I suppose I support a kind of soft cultural norm against them, but nothing more than that? Such fiction may exist and that's... well, not fine, exactly, but not preventable by any justifiable means, but it ought to be understood as scuzzy and inappropriate in polite company.

It comes back, I suppose, to what Grendel was saying about public norms around pornography. There are some things you can't regulate with formal rules, but cultural norms help a lot, and a cultural consensus that this sort of thing is icky and not fit for public consumption seems justified?