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Vitafiction as a Mode of Self-Fashioning: The Case of Michael J. Fox in Curb Your Enthusiasm

2015; Ohio State University Press; Volume: 23; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/nar.2015.0016

1538-974X

Louise Brix Jacobsen,

Crime and Detective Fiction Studies

Vitafiction as a Mode of Self-Fashioning: The Case of Michael J. Fox in Curb Your Enthusiasm Louise Brix Jacobsen (bio) Introduction Celebrities playing fictionalized versions of themselves in movies, TV series, commercials, and campaigns has become a widespread media cultural phenomenon. John Malkovich in Being John Malkovich. Julia Roberts in Oceans 12. Emma Watson and Rihanna in This Is the End. Kate Winslet, Ben Stiller, Daniel Radcliffe and others in Extras, and numerous American celebrities in The Larry Sanders Show. George Clooney in commercials for Nespresso, Madonna for BMW, and Brad Pitt for Heineken. Even President Barack Obama used this strategy at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2013, where he starred as Daniel Day-Lewis playing Obama in the spoof follow-up for Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln. Perhaps one of the most conspicuous and remarkable platforms for this kind of self-acting is the American TV series Curb Your Enthusiasm (2000–present). In the show, the famous Seinfeld-creator Larry David stars as the famous Seinfeld-creator Larry David. He has the same name, the same job, and the same friends that he has in real life. A number of American celebrities, such as Richard Lewis, Ted Danson, Diane Keaton, Martin Scorsese, Anne Bancroft, Meg Ryan, and the entire cast of Seinfeld co-star in the show where they, like Larry David, seemingly act as themselves. In [End Page 252] Curb Your Enthusiasm, however, things happen that definitely do not happen in real life as we know it, and the celebrity appearances are very often characterized by exaggerated and very unsympathetic behavior. In the Season 8 wrap-up (2011), Larry has a squabble with movie and TV-celebrity Michael J. Fox. Fox also has the same name that he has in real life, and more importantly he has the same family relations and he suffers from Parkinson’s disease, just as he does in real life. Both Fox and David show unpleasant backstage behavior that most people would do everything to hide. Larry is, as always, a small-minded selfish polemic who ends up in embarrassing situations, and Fox uses his Parkinson’s disease for his own benefit and to get back at Larry. These kinds of appearances raise a number of pressing questions: Why explicitly connect unsympathetic behavior to the biographical name? Why be unsympathetic on purpose? And how do we as viewers decode, judge, and relate to appearances that seem to be simultaneously fictional and non-fictional? An answer to this, I suggest, lies in the narrative mode I have labeled “vitafiction,” and more specifically in the audiovisual version of that mode.1 In this article, I will be primarily concerned with audiovisual vitafiction, but I will also address the relation of the general mode in relation to the more widely known genre of autofiction. In the subgenre of audiovisual vitafiction represented by Curb, celebrities play fictionalized versions of themselves, and their roles cannot be completely separated from who they are as real people. In the vitafictional mode, fictionality operates together with an obtrusive surplus of biographical details (hence curriculum vita). When celebrities play themselves, their names match and there are typically a number of significant points of resemblance, e.g. career, family, and acquaintances. However, fictionality is just as purposefully intrusive, because things can happen that definitely have not happened in reality. The concurrent surplus of fictionality and biographical details invites the recipient to negotiate between vitafictional appearance and the receiver’s media cultural knowledge. The receiver experiences a hesitation that I have labeled “biographical undecidability” (“The Clown and the Rumor,” “Frank Hvam”). Hence, the receiver assesses what she perceives from the vitafictional appearance in relation to what she knows from other media platforms. It follows that the vitafictional mode can be determined as an intermedially-founded mode, which is created and operated relationally and contextually in the interplay between sender, receiver, artwork, and other media texts. Through a continuous feedback loop between these positions, vitafiction can affect the media landscape from which it was created. The vitafictional productions and vitafictional appearances always operate in liminal spaces. If they leave this space they will no longer be vitafictional. The framework for this article is...