Docucharacters: public persona as character in film, television, and fandom

Abstract

Screen characters function to personalise narrative actions for viewers, help us form judgements and understanding of moral points of view, and give us a way to make affective connections to media texts. This is true of both purely fictional characters in film and television narratives, and the real-life characters of the public figures that populate the news cycle. But how does character function when these two realms of fact and fiction merge, when the text of an actual public image is further fleshed out with speculation and fictionalisation in media ranging from Hollywood biopic to erotic fan fiction? Despite the centrality of characters in understanding media texts, there is a small body of scholarly work on fictional characters in screen media, and even less on real people as fictionalised characters. The latter has been touched on in studies of the biopic, historical literary fiction, and historical film, but we also see real people turned into characters in other media forms, such as sketch comedy, fan fiction, and celebrities playing fictional versions of themselves on screen. This thesis proposes the ontological category of “docucharacter” as a means of considering how public and private selves come together through the interpretive work of media producers and audiences across this variety of film, television, and fannish media forms. To define the docucharacter, I draw on celebrity studies approaches to the intertextuality of the public image, Erving Goffman's theories of self-presentation, and Murray Smith’s typology of character engagement. These foundational theories are used to articulate the divide between the public and private selves of prominent individuals and how this divide is broached in various manifestations of the docucharacter. I argue that the central process of adapting a public persona to a character is one of merging the public and private selves. By replicating what is known about the public figure, a plausible private self can be constructed in ways that permit simulated access to a version of the public figure, creating an illusion of the kind of access to celebrity that is unattainable without the frame of dramatization or fictionalisation. Working with texts that adapt still-living public figures to fictionalised and dramatized forms, the case studies in this thesis examine docucharacters that have been instrumental in shaping popular understanding of their subjects among audiences large and small. Through these case studies, I illustrate how the nuances of textual factors such as genre, medium, audience, and mode of production shape the end product, defining the docucharacter in its various forms. Chapter one focuses on the business celebrity of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and how it is adapted to the neoclassical biopic in The Social Network (Fincher 2010). Chapter two continues a consideration of The Social Network by looking at its fan audience and the real person fan fiction written about the film's docucharacters and the actors who portray them. Chapter three focuses on the political celebrity of former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin and how it is adapted by both Saturday Night Live's (NBC 1975 - ) satirical sketch comedy and the HBO movie Game Change (Roach 2012). Chapter four looks at the performance of celebrities as fictionalised versions of themselves in film and television, with a primary focus on comedian Louis C.K. and his television series Louie (FX 2010 - ) as a means of authenticating his performance persona as a true self. Through the process of defining the docucharacter, this thesis proposes a character-based method for considering biopics and other fictionalised works based on true stories. I also argue that across different types of screen media, there are similar principles that underpin the creation of a character from a public persona. Perhaps, in illuminating these similarities, we can enhance our understanding of broader narratives of selfhood and the role of the imagination in the production and consumption of celebrity culture.