The Willing Immersion of the Fictional Audience

The essay by Walter J. Ong, “The Writer’s Audience is Always a Fiction” produces the theory of different audiences. There’s the dimension in which the author projects the audience for their work by assuming the audiences of related texts. The author expresses himself with an audience in mind. The second dimension of audience is the expectation that the audience is willing to be there. The readers allow themselves to be what the writer wants, but only if the text is already familiar to them. If they can already relate to the text prior to actually immersing themselves, they will be more inclined to actually be the audience.

            For readers to become a willing audience, they, in part, need to fictionalize themselves. They understand the story is about to be laid out for them and accept the fictional world. Ong talks about how the phrase “Once upon a time” for example immediately expresses how the story is fictional. The phrase is associated with children tales, establishing the fictional world. In Princess and the Frog, for example, the movie begins with the mother reading Tiana the story of kissing the frog into a prince. This is a story all to well known. And in the scene where she does kiss the frog, that story is again brought up, the frog showing how the story is supposed to go. Just showing the book in the film reminds readers to fictionalize themselves into the story.



            This fictional audience being willing to absorb a text is an interesting notion. Creating a work for an audience based off of the fact that they know a similar one is a strange way to capture an audience. But then the writer needs to be able to maintain their fictional audience’s attention. A remake of the exact same story will not enthrall an audience forever. So what a lot of authors do is take a familiar concept and switch it up to keep their fictional audience’s interest. There has got to be a reason to keep watching. In Princess and the Frog, the story does not go like the original one does. So as the audience watches, this new twist brings the audience into the story, because while the framework is familiar, this new twist keeps them involved. The same could be said for Enchanted. Disney movies are notorious for singing and dancing to express the character’s thoughts. For Patrick Dempsey’s character to go against that grain creates a fresh take on a cliché story. We watch Amy Adam’s character sing through Central Park as Dempsey continually comments about how crazy it is that other people are singing and join in. His lack of involvement in the spectacle is unique to the Disney tradition.

            Another way that writers put a spin on something familiar is the remix. They take something familiar and completely change it to present something entirely new. The author expects his fictional audience to note the familiar and move on from there. The Mary Poppins fan trailer, for instance, takes the classic film and completely distorts the original concept. We see the same scenes as the original trailer, like the sliding on the railing, but with darker undertones. The music is changed and the scenes are darker. The writer has taken a light-hearted family comedy that everyone knows and loves and created a horror trailer. The original intended audience was not for the horror genre, but this new trailer created a different audience. The Mr. Rogers remix does a little of both with connecting to the original intended audience and also a different one. The remix is using the same message Mr. Rogers did, but altering his voice and cutting together specific phrases to tell a different story. The fictional audience is expected to use Mr. Rogers as a relatable point for the text, yet the rest of the piece is original.

            Certain fictional audiences are expected to want to be wrapped up in the text, so long as they have some prior knowledge to work with. These remixes and twists on classic stories show how writers can create an audience by connecting with them.