Communal Creativity on Tumblr: Gatekeep, Gaslight, Goncharov
Last November, Martin Scorsese’s 1973 movie Goncharov celebrated its 50th anniversary… and its 1st.
November 2022, I’m checking my Tumblr dashboard like the morning paper. What have my American friends been talking about while I was asleep? I see my friend Gus has reblogged a large amount of posts about Goncharov. The first one that grabs me is a drawing of two men in suits, covered in blood, kissing each other hungrily. The kind of homoerotic violence you get from mafia movies, because, as Kent L. Brintnall says ‘violence makes the homoeroticism of many "male" genres invisible; it is a structural mechanism of plausible deniability’ (2004: 72). This is a niche I’m really interested in so I follow the tag, excited to find a new piece of media about it. What is Goncharov? A cursory glance at the #goncharov tag will tell you it’s a mafia movie produced by Martin Scorsese and released in 1973 starring Robert de Niro, Cybill Shepherd, Harvey Keitel, Gene Hackman, and Al Pacino, about Russian mobsters trying to settle in Naples, Italy. Now if you go through your mental bank of mafia movies and find that it doesn’t ring a bell, that is because Goncharov is not real.
On August 21, 2020, Tumblr user zootycoon-archive posted a picture of boots with a misprinted tag where instead of the brand, it featured the credits for a non-existent Martin Scorsese movie Goncharov, to which another user replied ‘this idiot hasn’t seen goncharov’ (2020). The original post has now reached a little under 300,000 notes. On November 18, 2022, a user called beelzebub posted a made-up poster for Goncharov which catapulted the movie into the creative phenomenon it became. The poster has almost 95,000 notes and features the full cast, with De Niro standing front and centre, holding a Tommy gun in a thick winter coat. On his left, under the bright colored domes of a Russian Orthodox church, Cybill Shepherd and Gene Hackman are your Russian characters, Goncharov’s wife Katya, and her brother Valery Michailov. On his right, under the crowded foothill houses of Naples, the Italians, eyepatched-Harvey Keitel as Andrey Daddano and Al Pacino as Mario Ambrosini. The title at the top is riddled with bullet holes and the tagline says ‘The greatest mafia movie ever made’, which beezlebub has used in the caption with one difference: ‘(n)ever made’ (2022). From then, Tumblr erupted. For an entire weekend, the site saw an outpouring of artworks, blog posts, and memes as the community came together to do what they do best: lie. Create an entire movie from scratch, and convince people that it was real.
What Tumblr perfectly understood was genre and audience. With Scorsese’s work being so rich, it became easy to patchwork scenes from movies like Goodfellas and The Godfather into plausible screen captures of Goncharov. The community created a story that followed the mafia genre and hit the expected markers: a stranger coming to town, Russian women wearing fur coats and hiding guns under their dresses, men in suits wiping blood from their face, shoutouts, homoeroticism, and metaphors. But what the Tumblr users also understood were the rules of the games: you had to post about it like you would any media. Like your friend could see your post and be mistaken into thinking it was a real movie, and then they were in on the bit, like a website-wide game of tag. Goncharov is a piece of art that exists not in and of itself, but as a discussion of itself, as an appreciation of the form. Even Wonder Woman actress Lynda Carter participated in the joke by posting two black-and-white pictures of her and Henry Winkler at the 1977 Golden Globes and captioning it ‘Me and ‘The Fonz’ at premiere of Goncharov (1973) at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre’ (2022).
This communal creativity was what made the difference between Goncharov and Zepotha, another pretend movie that started on TikTok. Goncharov was inclusive and urged the people to create, whereas Zepotha, by the nature of being on TikTok, was exclusive of other people and didn’t have any creative outcome. Zepotha was supposed to be a fake horror movie from the 80s however, instead of inviting users to create more of it, it ran on the basis of going into unrelated videos’ comment sections and saying to the creators they looked like they were actors from the Zepotha movie (Hoste, 2023). A Tumblr user talked about Goncharov’s inclusive nature and being on the outside of a joke where people won’t admit something isn’t real: ‘When that happens it feels like they're laughing at your expense, watching you get increasingly frustrated at the dissonance and taking that frustration as part of the bit, turning you into part of the punchline. I'm not seeing any of that with Goncharov’ (2022).
Goncharov went from a community-based meme into a weird purpose-less niche after falling in the general public’s eye after major news outlets started reporting on it, like The Guardian or Variety. Readers of the New York Times have posted comments such as ‘So the Times thinks it is cute to lie outrageously and then praise those who continue to promote it?’ (2022). I know I said that Tumblr’s favorite thing to do was lying, but isn’t lying a little bit like creating? Isn’t it the basis of imagination? Does art need a purpose or can it just be fun? New York Times readers, don’t you ever do anything for the joy of the joke? For the joy of having Martin Scorsese himself acknowledge Goncharov and play into the bit by saying he ‘made that film years ago’ (2022)?
As Linda Codega puts it perfectly ‘[Goncharov] is an expressive culmination of fandom culture, analysis, and an incredible celebration of the creativity that is at the heart of the social media site. The importance of Goncharov (1973) isn’t the canon; it’s what you do with it’ (2022). Does it matter whether or not Goncharov is a lie? In a letter to Elizabeth Otis, John Steinbeck writes about La Morte d’Arthur: ‘So many scholars have spent so much time trying to establish whether Arthur ever existed at all that they have lost track of the single truth that he exists over and over’ (1957). Goncharov is made true by the single fact that someone believes it is true, that someone went out of their way to make it true. The outpouring of art that resulted from Goncharov is a testament to the community’s love for the genre and for the form.
‘A story is true. A story is untrue. As time extends, it matters less and less. The stories we want to believe, those are the ones that survive, despite upheaval and transition and progress. Those are the stories that shape history’ (Steinberg, Levine and Van Patten, 2017). This is a quote from STARZ’s TV series Black Sails, which bears no relevance to Goncharov but connects with the core idea at its centre. Goncharov has shaped Internet history in the last years by bringing a community together with a single objective: to create. To experience the joy of ‘purpose-less’ art. To get Martin Scorsese’s Wikipedia locked for editing because people keep trying to add Goncharov (Iphys, 2022). If you ever find yourself wanting to see some beautiful art, or even trying to discover a new movie, go look at the #goncharov tag on Tumblr. Reconstruct the puzzle, witness communal creativity. The Internet is but a click away.
References:
ambandonedambition. 2020. ‘this idiot hasn’t seen goncharov’. Tumblr. August 22, 2020. Available at: https://www.tumblr.com/loseremo/627117270398894080
a-treatise-on-velociraptors. 2022. ‘I think what makes Goncharov work as a joke concept [...]’. Tumblr. November 20, 2022. Available at: https://www.tumblr.com/a-treatise-on-velociraptors/701475378261311488
beezlebub. 2022. ‘Goncharov (1973) dir. Martin Scorsese [...]’. Tumblr. November 18, 2022. Available at: https://www.tumblr.com/beelzeebub/701284869475614720
BRINTNALL, Kent L. 2004. ‘TARANTINO'S INCARNATIONAL THEOLOGY: "Reservoir Dogs", Crucifixions and Spectacular Violence’. CrossCurrents, Vol. 54, No. 1, The Passion of Cinema: Religion, Film, and Visual Ethics (SPRING 2004), pp. 66-75. JSTOR. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24460743
CARTER, Lynda [@reallyndacarter]. 2022. ‘Me and “The Fonz” at the premiere [...]. Tumblr. November 21, 2022. Available at: https://www.tumblr.com/reallyndacarter/701549463325622273
CODEGA, Linda. 2022. ‘Martin Scorsese's Goncharov (1973) Is the Greatest Mafia Movie Never Made’. Gizmodo. November 22, 2022. Available at: https://gizmodo.com/scorsese-goncharov-1973-tumblr-explained-mafia-movie-1849812229
HOSTE, Elliot. 2023. ‘Zepotha, the viral horror film that doesn’t actually exist’. Dazed Digital. August 15, 2023. Available at: https://www.dazeddigital.com/film-tv/article/60591/1/zepotha-viral-tiktok-80s-horror-film-doesnt-actually-exist-explainer
iphyslitterator. 2022. ‘As of this writing, Goncharov has been added and removed [...]’. Tumblr. November 21, 2022. Available at: https://www.tumblr.com/iphyslitterator/701563770171998208/
KIRCHER, Madison Malone. 2022. ‘The Fake Scorsese Film You Haven’t Seen. Or Have You?’ The New York Times. Comment section. November 22, 2022. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/22/style/goncharov-scorsese-tumblr.html#commentsContainer&permid=121646346
SCORSESE, Francesca [@francescascorsese]. 2022. TikTok [Video]. November 25, 2022. Available at: https://www.tiktok.com/@francescascorsese/video/7170024294574050602
STEINBECK, John. 1957. Letters to Elizabeth: A Selection of Letters from John Steinbeck to Elizabeth Otis. ed. SHASKY, Florian J. and RIGGS, Susan F. 1978. San Francisco: Book Club of California.
STEINBERG, Jonathan E, LEVINE Robert and VAN PATTEN, Tyler. 2017. Black Sails. STARZ [TV series]. April 2, 2017.