As a child I was riveted by Mark Twain’s novel The Prince and the Pauper. To me it was a story about risk, and it fueled my childlike fantasy that a little girl, my double, might appear and take my place, prompting a feeling of freedom that was both terrifying and exciting. (What if my double were to usurp my place in my parents’ hearts for good?! What if I could never come home again?!) Whispered among the adults, stories about Tito got my child’s imagination going, especially the one about Tito not being the real Tito, but his double. These rumors were given legs by the fact (real or imagined) that apart from speaking several languages, Tito also played the piano. People could never get their heads around that piano. How, for Christ’s sake, did a poor kid from Zagorje complete a locksmith’s apprenticeship, set up the Partisan movement, defeat the Germans, establish the Yugoslav state, and learn to play the piano?
Rumors about doubles have often accompanied kings, dictators, presidents, and generals. Irakli Kvirikadze’s film Comrade Stalin Goes To Africa (Poezda tovarišča Stalina v Afriku, 1991) is a bitter comedy about an ordinary Soviet worker, a Jew, who as a result of his striking physical resemblance to Stalin is arrested by the NKVD and drilled for months in how to impersonate Stalin. When the luckless worker finally completes his secret training, news of Stalin’s death arrives from Moscow and the NKVD puts a bullet in his temple. It might seem quite by the by, but today, successfully cloned embryos are destroyed in laboratories when the embryos are between twelve and fourteen days old. For the time being that is apparently the allowed lifespan of a human clone.
In his 2008 autobiography Feliks Dadajev confirmed the rumors about Stalin’s doubles. Dadajev, an old man pushing ninety, a former dancer and juggler, was Stalin’s lookalike (apart from the ears, “My ears were smaller” claims Dadajev), his official double. Doubles served as targets for potential assassins (apparently there were two attempts on Stalin’s life), stood in as Stalin’s surrogates at parades, and traveled to and from airports to confuse the assassins. Trailed by journalists, in 1945 Dadajev traveled to the famous Yalta conference. The real Stalin was already there.
Literature and film have frequently exploited the motif of the double, the twin, and the lookalike. Alexandre Dumas (the story of Louis XIV and his twin brother), Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Anthony Hope, and Bolesław Prus are but a handful of the writers who have been fascinated by the theme. Anthony Hope’s novel The Prisoner of Zenda has seen endless movie remakes. Charlie Chaplin’s masterpiece The Great Dictator is a story about a double. Karaoke-people, wannabes, fans, they buzz around famous people like flies. Give me a celebrity and I’ll give you a double; it doesn’t matter if it’s Paul McCartney, Elvis, Princess Diana, Paris Hilton, or even Bill Gates.
Želimir Žilnik’s film Tito A Second Time Among the Serbs (Tito po drugi put među Srbima, 1994) is an intelligent work of cinematic provocation. An actor who physically resembles Tito appears on the streets of Belgrade, and passersby, ordinary people, spontaneously get in on the joke and have a chat. During the course of the conversation, the game takes an unexpected turn. For a second people forget he’s an impostor and, as if in a kind of regressive psychotherapeutic séance, some accuse Tito of being “guilty for everything” (for the war, for the disintegration of Yugoslavia), while others urge him to return, because “everything was much better” when he was alive.
There is an anecdote about Charlie Chaplin, apparently true, that underscores my childhood nightmare about doubles, the one inflamed by Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper. The story goes that sometime in the thirties Charlie Chaplin entered a Charlie Chaplin lookalike competition. They say he didn’t even make the final.
Fans
Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451 (and let’s not forget François Truffaut’s screen adaption) depicts a bleak future of a world without books. A forest-dwelling group of “outlaws,” book-lovers, are humanity’s only hope for salvation from total cultural amnesia. They are book-people, a living library, each having memorized a book by heart.
Visiting Moscow for the first time in the mid-eighties, I was invited by friends for a walk in a nearby forest. Given what I saw, my literary-orientated imagination promptly made associations with the community of book-lovers in Bradbury’s novel. It was mid-winter and people sat on makeshift stools playing chess, their breath hanging in the air, others were just out for a stroll, and many (and not just in the forest!) recited Russian poetry by heart. My political imagination was inculcated with Tito’s historic “NO” to Stalin, anti-totalitarianism, Zamyatin’s novel We, Orwell’s 1984, dissident underground culture, and the Soviet everyday (many books really were banned), and so like everyone else I had read Bradbury’s novel as a fierce critique of a totalitarian (of course Soviet) regime. Much later, Bradbury rejected this interpretation, and he claimed that his criticism was targeted at the totalitarianizing influence of television. In the early sixties Bradbury had believed that television would wipe out books and literature.
If we were to try to translate a few things from Bradbury’s novel into today’s language, Guy Montag (played in Truffaut’s film by the unforgettable Oscar Werner) would be a newly-initiated fan, and the people huddled in the forest would be fans. Their community would be a fandom, bound together by their common fascination with books. For those outside the community — particularly those who write, produce, or sell books, the forest-dwellers would be a much-valued fanbase. Within their fandom, fans often communicate in slang, fanspeak. The forest in which Guy Montag meets the book-lovers would be called a convention (or con). If some of the book-people were dressed as literary heros, this would be called cosplay.[1] Given that people from the forest learn by heart and recite fragments out loud, this would be called fanac (fan activity). If the book-lovers were to offer Montag a publication that details their activities, it would be a fanzine.
Bradbury’s novel was published in 1953, in a time when television (in black and white) had just begun its historic invasion of American homes. The idea of television as opium for the people (Bradbury uses the word opium) would appear just a few years later. The commercialization of the Internet, a phenomenon of the past decade, has given the culture of fandoms and fans an unprecedented boost. Today almost every pop culture “product” has its own fandom, irrespective of whether this product is a TV show, film, cartoon, comic strip, video game, or book from any of the popular genres (horror, fantasy, romance, science fiction, vampire, gothic, etc.). If we take science fiction as an example, there are numerous forms (film, cartoons, comics, TV series, literature), genres within these forms, and within these genres, sub-genres. Further divisions run along the lines of age (children, teenagers, adults), gender, ethnicity, and sexual orientation. Fandoms themselves are broken down into groups, subgroups, and sub-subgroups, structured in complex communities.