A Little Delight: Goncharov (1973)

This is a love letter to Tumblr, really.

Dear Reader,

I actually feel more comfortable on Tumblr than on Twitter, partially because I’ve been there since I was 14, but also because the creative spirit of Tumblr is simply unmatched. Maybe it’s the fact that it’s always been a little bit feral (sometimes to everyone’s detriment, *cough* yourfaveisproblematic). Frankly, I’ll even defend the Mishapocalypse; it may have been cringe but at least it was creative. This week’s running joke on Tumblr (it’s more of a collaborative creative project) is an unearthed Martin Scorsese production named Goncharov (1973), written/possibly directed by Matteo JWHJ0715 (Italian mother, license plate father).

I’m sure you’ve read about this fake movie by now, but just in case you haven’t, here is an article about it. I’ve heard multiple people joke that Tumblr has read meaning into the most minuscule details of media for years, so we’ve just reached the point of cutting out the middleman to create discourse about the media without the media. Tumblr users have created an entire score, countless drawings of fan art, full paragraphs of costume analysis, fake gifsets, script pages, edits, fake screenshots from a Netflix documentary about Matteo JWHJ0715, the list goes on. There’s more fanfiction written on AO3 about this fake movie than there is about Avatar, the highest grossing film of all time. Interestingly, although there are some minor inconsistencies, the Gonchlore is all mostly consistent with itself, despite the fact that a masterpost wasn’t written until several days after it started. I’m so mad that I can’t watch this movie; there are some genuinely great lines in the Gonch canon and it sounds like it would absolutely slap. People are so delightfully creative.

I know people have joked about the fact that it’s surprising that this movie is a Cold War mafia film, which might not be what you’d expect from Tumblr, but this whole phenomenon feels like the best encapsulation of Tumblr, to be honest. It’s so Tumblr that people are writing essays about the clock symbolism in Goncharov, about a character’s desperate need/inability to outrun their fate. The whole project is also incredibly collaborative; every new piece of the Gonch canon builds on previous users’ work. I think it’s very Tumblr that it’s both a meta joke about Tumblr’s own tendencies towards discourse and a meta joke about the intangibility of the perfect mafia movie. And—skip this sentence if you don’t like to hear someone compare one piece of art to another—frankly, it brightens my spirits that when Tumblr users are given a blank slate, they’ll create an artistic and thoughtful Scorsese/JWHJ0715 movie laden with subtext and complex characters instead of a Marvel movie that you forget about within a week (speaking of Scorsese lol).

My favorite part about the entire bit is that people have been incredibly willing to explain it to anyone who doesn’t know what’s happening. Sure, everyone is pretending it’s a real movie, sometimes even to the point of spending hours of their time to create Goncharov (1973) work. But if someone asks what’s going on, they’ll take time to explain it in depth, and they’re still tagging Goncharov posts with “unreality” for anyone who experiences issues like psychosis.

I disconnect from the news and social media every Shabbos, and it’s always a slow process of gradually unearthing the things I missed. Last Saturday night I logged in to find that 1) two men almost attacked a New York City synagogue on Shabbos and there was an ongoing shooting in Club Q, and 2) Tumblr users birthed this entire creative project overnight. It’s necessary to read the news and this is a frightening time, but you also need to keep your spirits up, and sometimes the solution is a fake Russian mafia film set in Italy with homoerotic subtext. People never stop creating funny, creative, genuinely beautiful little marvels. And there will always be kind people in the world who give me joy every week, no matter what.

Love, Lily

P.S. Please scroll through the Goncharov trivia page, it’s the best thing I’ve ever read.

P.P.S. Justice for Katya, who has never done anything wrong ever, except a couple murders perhaps.