blog intrigue

I followed Diane’s link to Rance today. (No, Diane, I hadn’t heard about him either.) An anonymous celebrity blogger. Not just any old celeb, either, but the kind that ends up on magazine covers and gets award nominations and has paparazzi swarms follow him on occasion. A movie star, in other words. A self-reflective, appropriately ironic one who writes well. Not bad reading.

The question pops into your head immediately, doesn’t it? Is this guy for real or is he just someone in the biz who can fake the talk and fudge the walk? It’s clear from his blog that he runs into this skepticism all the time. He seems amused by it. Which strikes me as the appropriate response.

It comes up a lot, I find. Is this person for real or is this another Kaycee Nicole, faking a dramatic life for the attention it garners? It came up last week on Teresa Nielson Hayden’s blog, a discussion about another intriguingly positioned blogger and whether she was the real McCoy. Maybe it’s the nature of blogs and online journals, that we can create ourselves however we choose, our words are all you have to judge us by – not our faces, not our voices, not our parents or even our pets. If I put up a picture of my cats, say, who’s to say that's not a shot I lifted from somewhere in an effort to have sexier felines and therefore seem hipper/cooler/dorkier myself?

I remember a wonderful writer, Acanit, who posted an online journal in 2001 as a former TV journalist, an Iranian living in America. The photos on her site showed she was a knockout. That right there made people suspicious, I think. And she wrote about difficult things and also about sex (which of course garners attention). Her stories were almost too perfect, some people said. As if they were written rather than lived. Created from someone’s imagination. And then one day she pulled her site down and she was gone. She had reasons, a love affair she didn’t want to talk about, but a lot of people said her cover was about to blow and so she got out quick.

I always wondered. They all seemed so certain, her critics. But what if they were wrong? How would you feel to have your existence doubted? And why? People get so passionate, so intent on debunking bloggers/journallers they think are making it all up. And yes, it’s important to know if you’re going to enter into a friendship with that person, if, in the case of Kaycee Nicole, you're going to send care packages and cry at a manufactured death. But in this case? If Rance isn’t really a movie star, who does that hurt? He tells a good story, he gives an intriguing glimpse into that life. We want to see. If he’s imagining instead of living the life of a movie star, it’s still a fun read. No harm done.

But that’s not quite true, is it? Because people would feel – as people have felt – duped. Tricked. Even betrayed, as silly as that seems. Nobody wants to be the brunt of a joke. And when you read a blogger’s account of his life, you feel a kind of intimacy that feels real for all that it’s virtual. If it turns out to be a fake, you’re left with nothing. And so people analyze word choices, suss out authenticity in the choice of story material, and try to protect their hearts or at least their dignity. I understand that, I do. But I think sometimes, as with this guy Rance, you just have to shrug, smile, and go along for the ride.

And that’s okay too.

Posted by Tamar at April 12, 2004 11:10 PM