The Fictional Man

“The worst thing, though... the worst thing is that she doesn’t see me. She’s invented a character with my name and my face, who’s done some of the things I’ve done, and a whole lot more besides, and she’s invented a whole bunch of motives and reasons for that character, so she can hate it better. And then I’ve got to live inside this... thing she’s built.” She sighed. “And what the hell, I guess I’ve done the same to her. You ever do that with someone you love, Niles? Make a fake one just so’s you can pretend you understand them?”
Niles hesitated, then nodded. “All the time.”

“Jesus fucking Christ.” Bob leaned forward, jabbing his finger at Niles. “You’re not better than me, Niles. You’re just as... as made-up as me, you know that? You’re just as fake as I am. More so, with your goddamned pretending to be, I don’t know, fucking Norman Mailer or whoever it is this week, pretending your fucking Kurt Power is some kind of immortal Joseph Campbell bullshit instead of a load of crap hacked out for a paycheck... Your personality’s just as ‘imaginary,’ Niles. It’s just as much an invention as mine is. Except you know what? I was thought up by a good writer.”

“Like life, then,” Liz said, softly. She was looking at him playfully. “I’m not sure I like the sound of that.”
“Well, not exactly like life,” Niles said, smiling despite himself. “It’s a bit more exciting. Beloved side characters die, and there’s lots of sex and infidelity – and only a few locations, if you’re on TV, because there’s not much of a budget. And it’ll probably end with someone learning some kind of lesson – you know, the moral of the story.”
Liz burst out laughing. “That’s just like life,” she said, the California overtaking her voice a little, “you only have a few locations in that, when you think about it. And you’ve not got much of a budget.”

“Hollywood is lousy right now with that – remakes, reboots, whatever, it’s just like... like digging up graves and stealing corpses, you know? It’s all these bland, imagination-free assholes admitting that there aren’t any original ideas left in the world, that all there is is this endless going back to the past... I mean, everyone hates remakes. Remakes are over. When a studio says they’re doing a remake it makes me want to be sick, actually physically sick.” He stared balefully at Niles for a moment. “So what we’re doing here – and I want to make sure you understand this – is not remaking a movie. What we’re doing here is taking a movie from the past and making it again now.” He leaned forward, looking Niles right in the eye. “Only better.”

People could fill blogs and tumblrs with adoring gifs of a particular character, a cartoon or comic-book icon – there was nothing strange about that. Nobody saw much difference between a tumblr devoted to Thor or Loki and one devoted to James Dean or Brad Pitt.

Some, admittedly, took it a little further. They might start sleeping with a body pillow or a ‘real doll’ of their favourite character, touching and stroking it in the night. Or they might photoshop a cartoon horse into their arms or their bed and put the resulting pictures up on Facebook. That might make the general public feel a little queasy.