To my mind, Goncharov is one of the greatest artifacts of the social media age. Goncharov—or, I should say, Goncharov (1973)—is a film about the Naples mafia, directed by Matteo JWHJ0715, presented by Martin Scorsese, starring Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Harvey Keitel, and others. And, crucially: Goncharov, the film, does not actually exist.

But Goncharov—as a social media object—does exist. Goncharov is both a meme and an ad-hoc, collaborative, fan-made project. The meme appears to have originated with a Tumblr post in which a user shared a photo of a pair of boots where “instead of the brand name on the tag, they have the name of an apparently nonexistent Martin Scorsese movie???” In 2020, the photo began circling widely when another user reblogged it, adding the comment: “This idiot hasn’t seen Goncharov.” 

While the meme accrued some status across Tumblr following the comment, the co-creation of the nonexistent film’s lore didn’t fully kick off until 2022, when a poster made by Tumblr user beelzeebub gave the meme escape velocity, launching a collaborative process of digital storytelling. Tumblr users (and eventually, Twitter/X and TikTok users) drew from Beelzeebub’s poster to create text posts, moodboards, gifsets, introductory PowerPoints, and memes about the nonexistent film. Some users created a collective Google Doc outlining key characters, plot points, scenes, and motifs from the film. Goncharov now has over 700 fanfiction entries on the site AO3. 

Goncharov illustrates the blurry boundaries between “fan” and “creator” in the social media age. At its peak of virality, those who made “fan content” about Goncharov were also creating Goncharov. Across a variety of posts, Goncharov’s creator-fans established the film’s homoerotic subtext, minor characters (the meme favourite “Ice Pick Joe”), recurring motifs (clocks), and compliance with the Hays Code (even though the film’s release date postdates the code’s abandonment). The democratization inherent to the creation of Goncharov, in which users worked together to create something for no profit, illuminates the generative potential and pleasure of online fandom production. 

At the same time, despite Goncharov’s collaborative nature as a collectively generated discursive space created by a wide array of social media prosumers/produsers, it also indexes both fluency with the conventions of Scorsese’s auteurist vision, as well as a nostalgic desire for auteurism itself. Much of the film’s content is drawn directly from Scorsese’s oeuvre and style. But creator-fans also debate the original text of the photo of knockoff boots: “Martin Scorsese presents a film by Matteo JWHJ0715,” disputing whether Scorsese or Matteo has primary authorship of the film. These memes and discussions about the “authorship” of a nonexistent text point to how Goncharov indexes the livewire questions of auteurism, authorship, and ownership in the social media age. To ask who Goncharov’s “auteur” is to point to the desire for auteurism itself, even within a collaboratively authored online meme.