(Con)fusing Identities
Joanna Colangelo
Returning to the Set: Conclusions and Projections
It seems unlikely that SVU (or any other show's) writers and producers would significantly change an already-successful character based on vidfic; after all, just like fanfic, vidfic is just that—a fantasy world for fans to textualize what could (and probably should) never happen on television. However, that is not to say that writers and producers cannot reference the creation of vidfic as a way to keep their audience engaged—as a way to continuously tease the audience concerning what is to come. As much as vidfic is expressing fabricated storylines, it also represents the underlying psychological desires for a character or plot development. In that sense, fans are essentially handing their Achilles Heal of television viewing to the producers—for as long as fans may think that their vidfic could become a reality, they will likely continue to watch the show. In assuming that SVU, or rather, Olivia Benson's fan base is drawn to her vulnerability, it was suspicious that during the promotions for the show's eighth season (and importantly, the first season to air after the widespread hype of Youtube), producers and writers of SVU had continuously posted to the show's official blogs that in the upcoming season, Benson would "get the rug pulled out from under her" and that "Olivia's going to have an extraordinary thing happen in her personal life. By the second half of the season, Olivia and Elliot Stabler will really need each other." [17] Not coincidentally, Neal Baer, the show's executive producer, posted that specific quote on NBC's official blog following the show's eighth season premiere—also the last episode before a six-week Hargitay hiatus of maternity leave. One could read this plot teaser as simply a way to keep viewers (and Benson fans) involved in the show. However, consider the tone of this statement. With any number of Benson details to release in the effort to keep fans engaged during the character's absence, the producers framed a statement that directly reflects the emotional/dramatic traits overwhelmingly dominant in the Benson/Hargitay vidfic from the past year's Youtube catalog.
Not surprisingly, then, Baer's post had spurred multiple threads on SVU fan message boards, including those on www.imdb.com and nbc.com, all of which were aimed at speculating what "extraordinary thing" would happen in Benson's personal life. User, "evadnderle's" post on NBC's official Law and Order: SVU Message Board, can perhaps best summarize the majority of posts. [18] The post suggests a number of options: that Benson meets her father, that she arrests a half-sibling who is a rapist (thus, fueling her fears of a genetic predisposition to violence), that she, herself, is raped or that she gets raped and subsequently becomes pregnant. Interestingly, however, the user, "ant," replies to this post by writing, "many of the storylines you suggested already exist...in the realm of fanfictions! they're a lot of fun for all those plot twists that you want to happen, but know never will." When realizing the levels of intertextuality within this character speculation, the role of the Internet becomes extraordinarily powerful, both in the ways in which SVU producers have (either consciously or unconsciously) utilized the Youtube image of Benson/Hargitay for publicity, but also in the ways in which one-time fanfic/vidfic is admittedly being recognized as pure fiction, yet at the same time, it is also being parlayed as potential "real" plot lines within the same online fan community. In essence, the final wall between Benson and Hargitay has been broken: the Youtube identity of Benson/Hargitay has evolved beyond the Internet (where there was no barrier to stop it) and has made its way back to the set of SVU—the stage on which the character and actor both emerged. Yet, the returning identity exists as ambiguously as the Internet itself, and where Dyer said in a pre-Internet world that fans could never fully accept the authentic identity of celebrities without being plagued by the questions of promotional spin, we can see how the age of the Internet has not only answered the question of "really," but it has essentially put the power of promotion in the hands of the fans. The major season eight plot teaser of SVU was written (or posted) by the show's executive producer, but it may have been constructed purely out of the multi-textual voices of the show's online fan community. The show was merely playing off of what already existed as Benson/Hargitay's virtual identity; what actually happened to that character in season eight is almost immaterial—it is simply the fact that this constructed identity has taken on enough power to emerge from a fan community, be molded by "real" producers and then reapplied back to television and SVU, where it was once born as uni-textual—that merits the examination of the Internet in transforming the traditional scholarship of fandom.