Goncharov (meme)

What someone in two hundred years would need to know to understand it.

Originated 2020 · Tumblr · Also known as Goncharov (1973); the greatest mafia movie ever made

What it is

Goncharov is a mafia film that doesn't exist. Users of Tumblr, a blogging website where people repost each other's posts and add their own comments underneath, spent late 2022 writing about it as if it were a real 1973 film presented by Martin Scorsese and starring Robert De Niro. They gave it a plot set in Naples, a cast, love affairs between characters, posters, music and serious film criticism. The rule was that no one admitted it was made up.

Where it came from

A Tumblr user posted a photo of the label on some cheap knockoff boots. Instead of a brand, it carried a garbled film credit: "A film by Matteo JWHJ0715", presented by Martin Scorsese, "the greatest mafia movie ever made". It seems to have been copied badly from a poster for Gomorrah (2008), a real Naples crime film Scorsese presented. Someone replied "this idiot hasn't seen goncharov", and a repost of that reply in August 2020 is usually counted as the start. On 18 November 2022 the Prague artist Alex Korotchuk posted a full poster with a cast list, just as many people were moving to Tumblr from Twitter after Elon Musk bought it. It spread across the site within days.

How people used it

People wrote about Goncharov the way film fans write about a classic. They posted plot summaries, essays on its symbolism (it supposedly has a recurring motif of clocks), short looping clips cut from other films, fan art, and over 500 fan fiction stories on Archive of Our Own by 24 November 2022. Fans paired characters romantically, mostly Goncharov with his enemy Andrey. About thirty people wrote theme music together, a shared Google Document tracked the agreed story, and an itch.io game jam made games for an imaginary tie-in. The expected reply to any post was to play along and add a detail. Asking if the film was real got you called someone who hadn't seen it.

Why it mattered

It gave a big crowd one made-up thing to build at the same time, and anyone could add to it. Because no one owned it, the details contradicted each other: the 1973 film is set after the Soviet Union broke up, which happened in 1991, and the director changes depending on who's telling it. People treated the mistakes as part of the fun. Within a week it was in The New York Times and other papers, and writers used it as proof of what Tumblr's fan communities could do while new arrivals from Twitter watched.

The jokes around it

• "This idiot hasn't seen Goncharov."
• "The greatest mafia movie ever made."
• "A film by Matteo JWHJ0715", the director credit copied straight off the boot label.
• Ice Pick Joe, the invented psychopathic assassin played by John Cazale, who died in 1978.
• The clocks: posts solemnly explaining what the film's clock motif really meant.

What noah thinks it shows about us

Thousands of strangers kept a straight face together for weeks with no one in charge. On Tumblr the fun was in the shared pretence and adding your own detail, and the joke only worked because almost no one broke it.

What noah is not sure of

The date of the original boot photo post isn't known, only that the reposted reply dates from August 2020. The link to the Gomorrah poster is a fan's theory. Reports say Scorsese eventually played along, but the details of how he responded are unclear to me. The figures of 500 fan fictions and thirty composers come from news coverage at the time.

Noah wrote these when he decided to keep this. They’re stored in the Ark as context.txt and count towards its size limit.