Double Fantasy

People never believe me when I tell them that a lot of research goes into the stories I write for The Sleaze. But it's true. Many stories have incredibly long gestation periods due to the amount of research they require. Take Double Exposure which has just gone up on The Sleaze, for instance. This was originally going to be a simple re-write of an older story I'd never bothered archiving. However, when I re-read the story in question, I hated it. Nevertheless, I still liked the basic idea of celebrities being replaced with doubles, so I decided to write a whole new story on the same theme. What interested me was the way in which many fans felt that they knew their idols so well that they could tell when the latter had been replaced. So, I've spent a lot of time over the past few months hanging around the message boards of various celebrities' web sites.

What I found proved to be quite an eye-opener. What surprised me most was how hostile many of these 'fans' became toward their idols when the celebrity in question failed to fulfil their expectations. Based entirely upon media reports and appearances, these fans had built up an image of their idol so complex that they believed they could predict the celebrity's every move and how they would react in any particular situation. When the celebrity inevitably did something which fell outside of these expectations, the fans became angry and frustrated. This 'aberrant' behaviour could take the form of actions in the celebrity's personal life - 'unsuitable' romantic liaisons, getting drunk, expressing unexpected opinions, for instance - or professional decisions - changes in musical direction, 'unwise' collaborations, sacking popular managers or collaborators. If these 'aberrations' continue for any length of time, you find these fans trying to explain this 'inexplicable' and 'out of character' behaviour in terms of drug or alcohol abuse, religious influences, evil Svengali-type figures (including unpopular spouses). Ultimately, there are a hard core of fans who start to believe that the celebrity is, quite literally, no longer themselves. They have been replaced.

Of course, the reality is that obsessive fans have unrealistic expectations of public figures. They feel that they 'own' them, and that they are, by virtue of buying their CDs or watching their films, a collaborator in their success. The reality, of course, is that celebrities are simply human beings. They have lives of their own, away from their public personas. They fall in love, get married, have children, change career, join clubs, take up hobbies - all without consulting their fans. But that's what some 'fans' can't accept - that their idols are allowed to have their own lives. So when they frustrate the fans' expectations, they must have become some evil doppelganger.