The past is a canon

Historical fiction as fanfiction; Oppenheimer (2023) and Hilary Mantel

I don’t like to see people acting baffled that Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer movie is popular. “When else could you imagine people sitting through a 3 hour movie about physics?! Nolan is a genius!” Setting aside the question of Nolan being a genius (truly, I don’t want to hear it) — the movie is not about physics. The movie is about the weapon that shaped the American century, and the movie is about people; the people 80 years ago who built something terrible and who fundamentally altered our lives. 

Of course people today are interested in that. People will always be interested in that; it is simple snobbery to believe that this is high-brow stuff, that ordinary people don’t care about the nuclear bombs dropped in World War 2, and that only physicists care about physics or about the people who do physics, especially when the physics makes the bombs. 

But the film also resonates so deeply because it tries to get inside the man. Nolan is making a palpable attempt to offer — or to render, with some balance — a stream of recognisable human experiences, particularly those of Oppenheimer, though also of those around him.¹ The exploration of human emotion is pretty clearly the only thing Nolan cares about in this project, and he is broadly successful in it. Even when the film shows you Kitty, or Teller, or the bomb, or Strauss, in all their own glory, it still revolves around Oppenheimer.  A commitment to that focus allows Nolan to deliver an emotional film.

I think people respond to that. Most of us will never read American Prometheus or The Making of the Atomic Bomb; that really is a more rarefied audience. But long-form prose is demanding, and Nolan makes a much more accessible art. In this project specifically, which I think is his best work, he does this very clever thing — I did not say genius — of obsessively following a human story, an emotional story, situated inside an event that we all have access to, and that we all agree matters. He takes us deeper into a context we think we know already, and when we get there, he shows it to us again. 

Essentially, to be blunt, this is fanfiction. People who write fanfiction are doing this. All that defines fanfiction is that it engages reasonably deeply with a canon text that we all, more or less, understand.² And yes, alright, it is true that sometimes all that happens in fanfiction is that writers take two attractive characters and smash their mouths and genitals together like literary human barbies — but that is also, more or less, how Florence Pugh and Cillian Murphy’s bodies were narratively treated by Nolan. (And like go off king, who could blame you, shoot your shot.) But there is a substantial subset of fanfic writers who emotionally interrogate the texts they draw from. When they do this, they exhibit the same keen vigour that defines the best historical fiction. 

Literary establishment figures love to say condescending shit about “fanfiction isn’t real fiction” or “fanfiction isn’t good for you” or “fanfic writers could learn a thing or two from [whatever dusty sources]”, as if people who read and write thousands of words of fiction in their free time for the pure joy of doing it need to learn fucking anything from anyone. I mean, I truly think not. In fact, I actually think that lots of writers, especially historical fiction writers, could learn a lot from fanfiction. 

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It is impossible to talk about historical fiction in the year of our lord 2023 without a discussion of Hilary Mantel.

She is the greatest to ever do it. I’m talking about her in present tense because I still can’t believe she died; she feels immortal to me purely on the strength of her work and her talent. And sort of the real reason for this essay is that recently I dislocated my ankle and watched approximately 500 hours of her video interviews which are up on YouTube and now I’m here to write about it. Because Hilary Mantel is not only indeed the greatest historical fiction author of our age and possibly any age, but more interestingly for my purposes, I believe her fiction marks out what is exemplary about fanfiction, and the similarities between her work and the best parts of fanfiction are a large part of what marks her out from her peers. 

The reason Hilary Mantel is such a fucking legend is because her central question about any person at all times is what is it like to be that person. Not “what details or setting would make this scene accurate” or “how did this complex plot thing happen” or “how can I show off my depth of understanding of continental geopolitics in 1534”. To focus in on the internal experience of being a particular person, rather than trying to bookkeep the details of their external situation (or worse, adjudicating them), is a working definition of emotional intelligence, and it is this quality that sets apart all truly great writers. (Here again, as so often, any native English-speaker immediately thinks of Shakespeare, even if only to recoil and dismiss him. But I am on his side.) 

Fiction, like all art, is primarily an emotional endeavour, and it succeeds or fails on the basis of its emotional sense. For this reason, an excessive cultural preoccupation with the logical structure of the plot marks out our time as an era which is fundamentally hostile to fiction and to art more broadly. It is not important for events in a movie or a novel to make logical sense. It matters that they make sense emotionally. This is because of all the arts in general, it is specifically fiction which concerns itself with human relational life. And relational experiences do not make any sense intellectually. They require emotional engagement.

Mantel is the genius of this. It’s not just about how she treats Cromwell, and not even just Cromwell or Henry or Anne Boleyn.  Consider her treatment of Wolsey. At no time do we get the sense that Mantel is really concerned with the details of Wolsey’s to-ing and fro-ing, the historical reasons for his ascent to power, nor the reasons for his fall. She knows all of that, but she knows it purely to further her main agenda which is this: what it is like to be Wolsey, and for others to be with him. What jokes does he make. Where will he be indecisive, where will he be foolish or cruel. What tires him or irks him. How do the people around him react to the sound of his voice. 

And how then is he positioned next to our main event, which is Cromwell. This is the point at which it is necessary for the novelist to introduce a sense of balance. She understands that given the aims of her specific work, we have to see Wolsey’s relationship to Cromwell rendered both tightly and fully, to the exclusion of any other creative priority including the rendering of Wolsey in himself. This is what sets Mantel apart from other historical fiction writers. Wolsey is defined emotionally, with a recognisable interiority, and yet fully entangled in relationship with others and most importantly with the central other, Cromwell. More academically-concerned writers might think that since the historical Wolsey’s main concern at the time was certainly Henry, that we should be focused on his relationship to Henry. But the emotional focus of this work is Cromwell, so that is the facet of Wolsey it is necessary to pinpoint and evoke. We are all partially defined in relation to each other — not only, not wholly, but in part. Fiction, among all the arts, plumbs the depths of those bivalent definitions. 

But that is why people write fanfiction. A failure to understand this urge is behind much of the dismissal and critique of the art. People are not primarily writing it to change the plot or explore the setting, they are doing it to interrogate the characters. It is a demand for access to more emotion, to more relational understanding; it shows a dissatisfaction with the scope of the relationships in the culture and the media we have. That creative protest is more than neutral, especially in our current media landscape. It is good. It is good to pick up a pen or open a your laptop and ask for more and then possibly make it yourself. It beats the hell out of complaining in the group chat and scrolling linkedin or tiktok.

And it is vulnerable. Anyone who writes fanfiction is vulnerable, in the way that any writer who shows themselves is vulnerable; and writers of fanfiction always show themselves. For this very reason, I think other sorts of online nerds and various literary commentariats like to scoff at it, but to scoff at fanfiction is to scoff at emotional life. Yes, I will stand by this — if most fanfiction is crude, amateurish, simplistic, wishful and fantastic, it is because our emotional lives are like that, and it only hurts us further to cringe at it. If you ask most people about their heart’s desire, and if somehow you could make them feel safe enough to answer you, it would look a lot like a 15 year old girl’s self-insertion Star Wars fanfiction, and that is pretty much the best case scenario, because it means you are not dealing with a black hole or a sadist or a hack. 

It’s not coincidental that Mantel talks so much in interviews about wanting to know Thomas Cromwell. You can feel that driving urge through every word. And it is exactly this same urge that drives people to write 100,000 word novels about Sylvain from Fire Emblem. (Don’t get me started on the similarities between Thomas Cromwell and Sylvain from Fire Emblem!) Even when Mantel says her preoccupation is with “how did he do it?”, this is not in the sense of a factual Machiavellian political account. She means this, too, emotionally. How is it possible for a person to experience what he experienced, and to do the things he did. What would that even be like. The first book opens with Cromwell getting his guts kicked out by his father. It’s not a metaphor for something. It’s about getting your guts kicked out by your father. This is not the work of a “personal is political” sloganeer. Of course one needs to know the facts and do the research. But what is the research for? To understand the circumstances, yes, but also to understand the anxieties of the era, so to understand the anxieties of the man. 

That is genius. But she is not alone in it. Some other successful examples of this kind of work are Shakespeare’s Henriad, which our descendants will still be quoting in the year 3023, and there are several very decent examples in Australian film: The Sapphires (2012), The True History of the Kelly Gang (2019), and Rabbit-Proof Fence (2002). Actually really you should check out The Sapphires, which manages to be funny and beautiful even though it touches both the Vietnam war and Australia’s Stolen Generations; it is hard to imagine a more particular emotional path. And fiction does need to be particular. It cannot be abstract. It resists generality. That is because fiction, unlike academic work or blog posts (though I try), is tethered very deeply to life. This will happen even if it is unwanted and unintentional. It will happen even if the fiction is bad. When it is bad, its badness is revealing. That’s what makes it difficult to stomach.

We are now ready to return to a discussion of Christopher Nolan. Despite the usual female characterisation clunkers (but all hail Emily Blunt!), the movie succeeds because of its emotional focus. This focus itself was a source of consternation and confusion. I think some people didn’t see how deeply the film engaged with the gravity of Oppenheimer’s actions because it did not show the experience of Japanese people directly. But the film is not about Japanese people directly, and it would be insulting to suggest that it could be, since the film is about Oppenheimer. Other films are about Japanese victims of American military decisions, and should be — in fact much of Japanese cinema made after World War 2 grapples directly, if subtly, with that whole experience, and if you’d like to see this then you must watch An Autumn Afternoon (1962), and you should not complain about a dearth of such art if you don’t watch it. 

But this film, Oppenheimer (2023), is about one man grappling with the enormous horror of his own actions. (Okay it’s also about watching Robert Downey Jr be a cunty villain. If only all our academic nemeses were so camp and chic! I’d watch it again just for him.) If you aren’t sure what position the narrative has on American war crimes, you can rewatch the scene where Oppenheimer is giving a victory speech and finds himself dissociating so badly that he hallucinates stepping into the husk of one of his Japanese victims’ corpses. This should be reasonably clarifying. 

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Individual works of fiction cannot do and be everything because individual people cannot do and be everything. Fiction in general succeeds as a whole. I think there is a certain strand of political thinking that has crept its way over into art which says that there should not be any art about Oppenheimer or Thomas Cromwell, because they held power and did bad things, so that all art should be about their victims. And certainly, there should be art about their victims, and the canon of English-speaking history has a long tradition of murdering and silencing them a second time by taking them out of the record, and this must end. But to think that there should be no art — which is to say, no feelings — about bad men is to misunderstand emotional life. That is not how human interest works. It is wrong, of course, to valorise, excuse, lie about, or glamorise what is harmful, what is evil. But it is not wrong to be curious about it. It is not wrong to engage with it. It is part of life. 

The fanfiction girlies know all of this very well. You will rarely find written work more transgressive and yet emotionally gripping than what you can find in fanfiction, especially (but not exclusively) in erotic fanfiction. Because it is anonymous, it is not constrained by concern for reputation or decorum, so it can engage seriously with transgression while remaining emotionally honest. There are powerful themes around sexual identity, consent and gender essentialism explored in online fanfiction that will never make it to published fiction in any format, ever — and they probably shouldn’t; they are situated where they belong. But it would be nice to see a bit more genuinely emotional transgressive work in movies and published fiction.³ It’s not that you cannot find fiction about transgression, but in these offerings you can often sense detatchment. Mere transgression is not interesting (I never finished Naked Lunch). We care about transgression when we feel that it matters. 

To take this on successfully requires an emotional depth and seriousness, or at the very least a passion, which is why it’s usually advisable not to write about things like sexual assault or racism unless you’ve been affected by them — not because it’s politically or intellectually risky but because it requires a depth of feeling you probably do not possess. But on the other hand, one does not have to have experienced something directly to have been affected by it, or have feeling for it. But on the third hand, you do have to have been affected by it and have feeling for it. People can usually tell.  

To avoid selecting on the outcome, it probably falls to me to point out some pieces of art which I think are doing this badly. I’m not sure how highly I actually rate Oppenheimer, although I definitely liked it. I would like to see another interpretation of his story, and it is necessary to let the dust settle before we really know whether something is good. Hamilton (musical) is a decent example of that problem. I enjoyed it very much in July 2016, but it is aging badly; I doubt it will stand the test of time. Not because it is not emotional, but because it is not mature — it is sentimental, and moreover, it is naive. It could not have been written in or after the Trump era because the American liberal sensibility that underpins it did not survive the Trump presidency. This is also true of the West Wing and basically all work by Sorkin. But you don’t need me to tell you that. 

One bad film that comes to mind is the Thatcher biopic The Iron Lady (2011), which cannot even be saved by Meryl Streep’s performance, exactly because it is focused on a thing — Thatcher’s dementia — which the work’s creators cannot get inside of. Not even reasoning by analogy will get you anywhere close to being inside of dementia. Instead the film’s creators seem titillated by contrasting it to Thatcher’s power in her earlier life, and they seek to display this contrast rather than to engage with her experiences. (And yes, to engage with her monstrous aspects, as part of her political and emotional life.) To see her instead portrayed in dementia this way is to be a spectator. It cannot be effective. Spectating human feeling is hostile. It is a borderline violating act.

This kind of intellectual or clinical interest in what happens to the subject of a biopic is rancid because it is detached. Even if it was offering a detached view of a happy experience, it would still be rancid, purely because it is so barren, so completely void of life. It is the aesthetic equivalent of someone writing fanfiction about the military structure in Attack on Titan, or exploring the magic system in Harry Potter. Nobody cares about the magic system in Harry Potter, and if you do care, then you should render this caring into a blog post or an essay.⁴ ⁵ (This is no shade on blog posts, some of my best work is blog posts). Okay fine, I admit, these are not bad interests. But you cannot turn these interests into fiction. You have to ask yourself what it is like to be Professor Snape. 

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When fanfiction is derided for being insufficiently creative, it is because this type of work is obviously, inherently, derivative. But almost all writing is derivative, in the sense that it is produced in conversation with a canon.

It is possible in theory and sometimes in practice to write entirely freely, bouncing off nothing … but it is vanishingly rare. Almost all writers are readers. The deeper the reading, the better the writing seems to get. What is the work of Dante but self-insertion fanfiction? There is no other word for it! And while Shakespeare never inserts himself (classy), he pulls relentlessly from source material. What is Hamlet, what is Julius Ceaser, what is Macbeth? It’s not a coincidence that this stuff is enduring. To write from existing matter like this is to make a direct bid for entry into the set of things which endure. And that is also true of fanfiction, though the bid is much more limited and gentle. People see the canon, and they want to add a little piece to it. There’s something very loving in that act.

Yes, much of what gets posted under the broad heading of fanfiction is bad writing. But so is most published fiction! Most of everything is bad, things being bad is the default. But some fanfiction is extremely good, because it is so shamelessly anchored in a canon, and makes its home in other people’s guts. Published fiction could do more of this, and I think it would make it better. In fact most of what makes things bad in fiction is not that they are too derivative but that they are not derivative enough. 

There is a difference between being cliche because you are ignorant and being cliche because you understand when a tradition is working. There is a difference between being (emotionally) born yesterday and writing boring and predictable narratives for (grown-up) children, and understanding the cultural context that certain forms of established stories are embedded in and the power they have over us. Mantel’s novels are so good because they are so heavily derivative of known and established historical fact, and then she injects something new into it — her own thoughts, her own perspective. The best fanfiction is highly derivative plus injective in this way too. (You have to admit it, like it or not, these freaks are inventive. On god.) 

Deeply understanding what is already present is what provides the possibility to go beyond. If we do not choose to pull from the works and insights of those who came before us, we will be firmly educated in these insights by a curriculum of mistakes, and this takes much longer than reading the sources. Your first thought on anything is never that original. Digest a million other people’s thoughts and you may have better luck. This happens in life as well as fiction. And even once you consume and digest it and add in new thoughts of your own, you have to know that one insight, one person, one novel is always limited, in scope as well as perspective — the collaborated corpus is the true, collective art. 

The past is a canon we are all entangled with. Whether we know it or not, our combined human history is the reference we all share, and it is emotionally complex beyond any corpus of texts imaginable. Of course structural powers and systemic forces matter, of course political systems and expediencies matter, but power is concentrated in individuals, and individuals have emotional histories. 

We all intuitively understand this. Even social scientists — I’m biased, but I’ll say the best social scientists — know the limits of social science. There is a point where institutional, social and economic power ends, and psychological power begins. We know people go against their own incentives and defy external forces for emotional reasons; or they conform when they shouldn’t for emotional reasons; or they do what they should do, but for emotional reasons. Sometimes we do things that are unexplainable.⁶ That, too, rends us in some manner — we want to be explainable, but we all know we aren’t. That’s what it means to be lonely. We don’t have to like it, in fact we mostly hate it, but on some level we can’t escape it. Our primary experience of ourselves is emotional. The more logical you think you are, the more chillingly true that is. 

And yet it is precisely because of that embarrassing, isolating and often-hated internal world that we ever see parts of ourselves in other people, even when we have what appear to be very different outward contexts and external worlds. This is true in fictional characters and so too in historical figures or other real people, who sometimes — especially if we have not met them, or do not try hard to know them — may as well be fictional to us. But no matter. We can relate to them anyway, and this, too, is what fanfiction is about. Fanfiction uses existing settings to contain, control and anchor the creative process, and then it uses existing characters as avatars or cosmonauts, to explore the emotional perils of the world from the safety of the desk or bedroom. It exploits the presence of the shared canon to form a kind of creative reference system, making it closer in timbre to a folk art or a craft, promulgated not by one or few gifted and genius individuals but by an artistic community that works together to create a shared whole. 

I’m aware it may be perceived as anti-truth or anti-science to compare history or reality to a narrative canon. I do not do this to bring the truths of history or physical reality down, but to bring the literary canon up. Of course the facts are important. But the feelings are important too. It is as real and meaningful to reinterpret J. Robert Oppenheimer as it is to reinterpret Othello.⁷

Our collective past is a real thing that happened, and there are claims about it which are true or false. But we interpret it as we interpret almost everything — through a narrative, which has to be handled carefully to be handled well. It is essential for any canon or body of texts to contain multiple narratives and perspectives on the same events and issues if that canon seeks to refer seriously to collective human life. Fanfiction, like other forms of creative repurposing and reinterpretation, is part of that. Historical fiction is a particularly relevant part of it. As things change, so too do our perspectives. There is no other way to carry the canon with us, no other way to keep in contact with our past. 

Reinterpretations of literary canons — from Uhura_fangirl_69 rewriting the ending for Spock and Kirk all the way back to Shakespeare rewriting the ending of Monmouth’s story of Lear — link us too into the shared past of the collective. Not only in the sense of knowing where we came from, but also in the sense of knowing where we’re going, what is changing, and which of the previous constraints actually bind. It does this for us even when it is bad, and yeah, like, truly, I can’t stress enough that I admit it that most of it is bad. Most of everything is bad forever. It’s just a miracle and proof that god loves us that we ever do or write or feel anything good.  It is not essential for the interpretation to be good. It is essential for it to be iterative.

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NO I am not providing a fanfiction recs list. Get your own hobbies. 

1. Yes the portrait of his love life is cringe, but it is also painfully real. He and Kitty as parents were grossly and perfectly honest too. And if nothing else I think people in academia recognise the frenetic, unhinged energy of smart idiots being dickheads in the lab.

2. Things merely inspired by other texts are not fanfiction, though there is substantial grey area in what it means to be “inspired”.

3. There is some good emotional and transgressive published fiction, and I badly wanted to take a detour here to discuss it, but it isn’t historical, and sometimes one has to stay on theme. I’ll circle back to it in future blog posts.

4. As you can guess, I think HPMOR is heinous garbage not worth the fibre-optic cable it is delivered on, and we should have drummed Elizier Yudkowsky out of polite society then.

5. This is also why George Orwell’s nonfiction is so much better than his fiction — he is interested in systems.

6. I keep wanting to switch out the franken-word “unexplainable” for its more literary and abstract form — “inexplicable”. But it sounds too fancy. The experience I am describing is clunky and base.

7. WHERE is our reinterpretation of Othello!!!! We fucking need one! Okay relatedly I would also like to see another interpretation of the Oppenheimer story, or someone else’s story in that area, or just more reckoning with this period of American history. While tooling around looking for it after I wrote this blog post, I found this excellent review by Matt Zoller Seitz, which I think broadly says what I’m saying but more succinctly & possibly better: https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/oppenheimer-film-review-2023