Littérature scientifique sur le sujet « Charlie Priest (Fictional character) »

The article studies the reflection of Carlist and ‘Liberal’ mythological concepts, formed in 1830s– 1890s in Spain, in the novel Zumalacárregui by Benito Pérez Galdós. There is given a brief overview of some previous research works concerning Galdós´s National Episodes and the novel Zumalacárregui. The paper focuses on the ways of representation of general Tomás de Zumalacárregui (1788–1835) in the novel and shows the processes of creating the myths related to the general. In the 19–20th centuries, Zumalacárregui became a hero for the representatives of three different ideologies: Carlism, Francoism, and Basque Nationalism. It is shown that mythologization of the general began just after his death in 1835. Based on the text of the novel, there are made conclusions concerning the sources that Galdós used when creating it. The writer studied the most relevant memoirs about the First Carlist War. The paper shows how Galdós’s text was influenced by the memoirs of A. Sabatier, Ch. F. Henningsen, F. von Lichnowsky, J. A. Zarátiegui, F. Fernández de Córdoba, and H. Du-Casse. It is also noted that Galdós could have been inspired by some pictures created in the traditions of ‘Carlist visual art’. It is concluded that the writer used both Carlist and ‘Liberal’ myths concerning Tomás de Zumalacárregui. The text of the novel is divided into two parts, ‘historical’ and ‘narrative’. The ‘historical part’, i. e. a general description of the First Carlist War military operations carried out in 1834–1835, is mainly based on Carlist sources. In this part, the general Zumalacárregui is described as a war hero. The ‘narrative part’ mainly refers to ‘Liberal’ sources. The author introduced in this part a fictional character, priest José Fago, being the general’s ‘double’. Through Fago’s moral doubts and hesitations Galdós showed the internal tension of Zumalacárregui.

<p>When assessing the previous experience in the research of intertextuality as problematical should be acknowledged the choice of terms being used, definition of units subject to analysis and systematization according to certain criteria. For solution of problematic issues recognition of intertexteme is offered as the lowest representation of intertextuality. When the mechanism of intertextuality is reviewed structurally, it reveals in correlation of the form and semantics. In order to the text unit, taken from the source text and entered into another text, to become a intertexteme, it should meet two essential conditions: various forms of modification must not destroy the recognition of form, it is an external sign; but semantics of the intertexteme is never identical with its semantics in the source text.</p><p>In the intertextuality studies the difficulties are caused by determination of the form and the modification of it. Intertexteme may be represented by a single word (Eve, Samson, Katre, etc.), the expression (I have lost my son, Judas has hung himself, red Marx shepherds calves, etc.), longer text or a fragment, such as folk song. In order to all the intertextemes to be analyzed as one-level elements, form of intertexteme should represent a generalized model - the frame, which was introduced into linguistics to designate the human cognitive experience reflected in the language at the 70ties of 20th century by American linguist Charles Fillmore (Fillmore 2006).</p><p>Components of situation covered by the source and intertexteme frames are selected in the same way as for the semantic theory of syntax on proposition or situation reflected in the sentence (Ceplītis, Rozenbergs, Valdmanis 1989: 93). In the frame of source and intertexteme three types of components have to be acknowledged as essential: subject, function, object. The analysis of the term “function” introduced in analysis of fairy-tales by Vladimir Prop (Пропп 1998: 19) is more accurate than "predicate" of the theory of syntax.</p><p>For accurate determination of intertextemes an original typology model of intertextemes developed by a structural approach is offered. It is based on the combination of the attitudes of form and semantics. For its description the principle of analogy is used - consistency of the model and the object to be displayed in a certain proportion. For intertextuality expressions of the Latgalian original plays six types have been found. Four basic types of intertextemes include:</p><p>componentary intertexteme – such an intertexteme, where variables of the source form (subject and object) can be replaced by appropriate equivalents, while keeping the same semantics, the fixed component is a function, for example, the red Marx (source (Lk 15: 15) frame subject – The Prodigal Son), shepherds (function) calves (source frame object – swine) in the play "At the Photographer” written by Pīters Apšinīks (1935);</p><p>componentary commutative intertexteme – an intertexteme in which the corresponding variable components of the source and intertexteme are mutually changing places (source and intertexteme frames have at least two subjects each), but the intertexteme retains basic semantics of the source, such as the biblical text (Mk 6: 17–28, Mt 14: 3–11), also known as the Salome motif, the ruler Herod at the request of Herodias’ daughter Salome cuts down John the Baptist's head, but in drama "Sunken Palace" by Francis Trasuns (1928) Herodias’ daughter counterpart Dzylna according to order from Commissioner Viļaks leaves to kill the hero Bolvs and to bring his head;</p><p>semantically modified intertexteme – an intertexteme, which, while preserving the source frame subject component, yet the semantics or the source subject function in the intertexteme is supplemented, modified, but not destroyed, for example, in the drama "Fire" by Konstance Daugule (1914) the nature of group of women's characters of three generations Eve (past ) → Katre (present) → Ane (future): Eve represents the older generation and to her name of the first woman's of humanity (Gen 3: 20) makes her within the women's trio of drama to be founder of the wedding policy implemented by Katre (supplement of the function). Katre resembles the domineering Russian Empress Catherine II and is the current master of situation in the family, but like as Eve has married into a wealthy house not due to love. Nature and name of Anis character as an intertexteme points to several sources. In Russian literature, the best-known Anna, who was unable to resolve the problem of realization of her femininity, which leads to disaster, is Anna Karenina (Tolstoy 1985), as the most outstanding child avatar image of women is recognized Anya Ranevskaya of Anton Chekhov's comedy "The Cherry Orchard" (Chekhov 2005), similarly indecisive is also heroine Hannah Reis of the Izhok- Leibush Perez’s one-act play "Burns” (Perez 1972);</p><p>semantically polar intertexteme – an intertexteme, where the intertexteme semantics is in polar opposition to the source semantics, but the components remain the same, for example, in the drama "Vocation" (1930) by Naaizmērstule selfish father calls his son prodigal for chosing the Catholic priest vocation, while in the Christian perception his son's choice is appraised as the highest fulfillment of Holy Spirit, and the father in this case has to be considered prodigal; in comedy "Native Land" by Ontons Rupainis (1936), Anna annoys her sweetheart Gabris with a folksong distich "I would not follow the path where boyard’s son is going ", forcing him to guess subtext of the game that everything should be understood the other way.</p><p>Defective intertextemes have to be divided into two auxiliary types:</p><p>formal intertexteme – defective intertexteme in the form that creates an inkling of intertextuality and connotations, but intertextual semantics is not detectable, for example name of one-act play "Eve’s Mistake" by Pīters Apšinīks (1937) creates a connotation of the Old Testament Eve, wherewith the main promulgator of the semantics is a function-naming component “mistake” creating connotations of the relationship sphere with Adam, her man, with the devil, in form of the paradise garden tempter serpent, or other forms of femininity; contents of the play destroys the a line of possible associations, Eve turns out to be rural woman confused in a modern city bank;</p><p>sourceless intertexteme – defective intertexteme, form of which has nothing to do with the source text, but it raises intertextual connotations of specific source, such as play "Prodigal Son" by Jezups Kazlas for creation of background from Scriptures is using fictional succession of person’s names, such as Digs, Barzacs, Romars, Rogaļs, Janyrs, but the reader/spectator can believe them to be authentic Biblical characters.</p><p>When assessing the results of the study, conclusion should be made that, first, the very fact of intertextuality in texts written in Latgalian at the first-half of the 20th century is indicative of creative ideas and extensive searches of the Latgalian dramatists; second, experience and open typology model gained in research of the phenomenon of intertextuality as an effective methodological tool is usable also in subsequent studies, and may be offered to others.</p>

Many theories address the material adaptations that organisms—including humans—make to their environments, and many address the adaptation of art to different forms. The film Adaptation (Spike Jonze, 2002) by Charlie Kaufman, ostensibly an adaptation of Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief, addresses both kinds of adaptation, but also suggests how humans might psychically adapt to their emotional and mental environments, namely by doubling or multiplying their identities to create companions and helpmates who can help them cope with emotional and mental stresses. To expose some of Kaufman’s adaptive moves, I will draw on Wolfgang Iser’s literary anthropology, aimed at exploring “what literature may tell us about our anthropological makeup,” particularly “the human need for make-believe even when it is known to be what it is” (vii). Iser’s theory considers the use of imagination, particularly in the realm of fiction, as a way to “meet certain anthropological needs,” as a tool for human adaptation to social or cultural needs (264). Because of Iser’s emphasis on the importance of both the writer’s and reader’s roles, both may use performances of reading and writing to remake themselves in ways that allow them to function more effectively. Kaufman certainly does in his role as adapter: a type of reader who also writes. Kaufman uses imagination to adapt to his situation, just as humans have always needed their imaginations to adapt to their environments, a need as strong as biological adaptation, considering their psychic needs. Kaufman’s script addresses the major difficulty of how to match a book like The Orchid Thief with expectations for a Hollywood film, including a plot, dynamic characters, and a hook that drives the story. His film persona laments the lack of an overarching, coherent narrative, the relatively small portion of the book where the fascinating title character John LaRoche appears, and, in his conversation with the writing guru Robert McKee, the lack of any change in the people in the book, mainly Orlean and LaRoche. Seemingly promising parts of the book, like the court case, end in a few anti-climactic paragraphs about dropped charges and no-contest pleas, as LaRoche’s grand plan is judicially out-maneuvered. Interspersed with these lamentations are all the false starts and dead ends of Charlie’s composition, represented here in two ways: through watching Charlie type or speak his ideas, and through glimpses of these ideas actualized in film. These abortive attempts set up our expectations for his eventual solution, while showing us the films that never were and capturing some of The Orchid Thief’s non-narrative brilliance. Kaufman manages this, however, by creating the metanarrative of the screenplay’s composition, into which he writes the story of Orlean’s composition of her book. In other words, Kaufman adapts to the problem of adapting the book to a screenplay by thematizing adaptation itself, a concept that fits well with the book’s discussion of adaptation in the biological world. The contrast between Kaufman’s feverish, agonized composition process and Orlean’s placid, cool work creates a dramatic tension in the story, and Kaufman takes revenge on this fantasy of Orlean’s unflappable persona by forcing that persona to unravel more and more as the script progresses. Of course, neither in her book nor in her real life, it should be pointed out, does Orlean suffer from unbearable loneliness, fall in love with LaRoche, use drugs, or turn homicidal. Kaufman, combining selections from the extratextual world, from Orlean’s text, and from his imagination, doubles the real world and the world of the screenplay, distorting them both in the process, but also creating something new. When a new text combines parts of other texts, this doubling multiplies because of the complexity of the relationships involved, since the contexts of all these texts shift when put in new relations to one another. Iser remarks on how the selection of texts and their resulting recontextualization operates on other texts through the reader’s performance, namely by triggering a multiplication of voices, when all of the texts come together and are affected by each other in the recipient’s consciousness (Iser, 237-8). This explanation yields insight into how the performativity of the fictionalizing act and the act of representation merge, through the author’s selection and the recipient’s imagination, when all these different texts are finally placed in a medium where they can interact. The selections and combinations of Kaufman’s script come to fruition in the viewer’s mind, creating a potential for new ideas, new meaning: in other words, intellectual evolution, an adaptation specific to human beings. Iser emphasizes that representation does not merely mirror the existing, but instead creates something new (236). This power of imagination means that we can use make-believe to imagine ourselves in different ways in order to live successfully. This imagining brings together the performances of readers and writers not only to create something new but to cope with the world. For Iser, the creating is the coping, and it tells us something about human nature and how it adapts. Adaptation and The Orchid Thief both refer to Darwin’s The Various Contrivances by Which Orchids Are Fertilized by Insects and The Origin of Species, outlining his theories of evolution, based on species’ adaptation to their environments. The film invokes Darwin’s words, ideas, and likeness several times: the sequence of film showing the evolution of life, Charlie’s description of this scene for his screenplay, LaRoche and Orlean’s conversation about Darwin, a shot of Darwin’s writings on tape in LaRoche’s van, an imagined scene of Darwin writing the words we hear in narration, a shot of a book of Darwin’s writing in Charlie’s room, and numerous mentions of adaptation and mutation throughout the film in dialogue. The selection of this particular idea, magnified in the film through all of these references, provides a framework for the viewer to understand Kaufman’s choices and the rationalization behind them. Not only do orchids evolve—through mutation—to adapt to their environments, but so do people and ideas, just like the character Charlie Kaufman and his fictional screenplay, as well as the real Charlie Kaufman and his real screenplay. When the elements selected from these extratextual sources are brought together in the text, they “mutually inscribe themselves into one another. Every word becomes dialogic, and every semantic field is doubled by another” (Iser, 238). When combined like this, each element is present in every other one, even if it is literally absent. Sometimes the awareness of what is not present is greater than at others; sometimes, “the present serv[es] only to spotlight the absent” (Iser, 238). Combination doubles meaning by creating an absence for every presence, so that everything said is twofold, the said and the not-said. This doubling is compounded by the text’s self-disclosed fictionality so that what is missing from the text is always already present there as well (Iser, 239). Charlie’s script brings together the elements of writing and Hollywood with the text of Orlean’s book, and his inclusion of these elements creates additional possibilities for the film, many of which are realized through elements that are absent from the book but made present in the film. For example, the romance in the film, which is not present and is even denied in Orlean’s text, only actualizes possibilities already extant in potential in the reader’s mind: for example, Orlean’s rebuttal of any attraction between her and LaRoche (in an interview published in post-film versions of the book and incorporated in the screenplay) introduces the idea to the reader/viewer even if it had not already occurred spontaneously, and this denied possibility explodes in the movie’s latter half, irresistibly demanding exploration, if only because Hollywood films demand romance. In the film, what is absent, yet always present, is a true adaptation of Orlean’s book into a film. It is the subject of the film, and thus always present in one way, but what results is not really an adaptation of the book in the more usual sense. Fictionality enacts one other doubling through the “text’s disclosure of itself as fiction” (Iser, 238). This disclosure happens through two means: “The attitude to be imposed on the reader, and … what the text is meant to represent” (Iser, 238). Including a representation of the writing process—mind you, not the actual writing process—exposes the fictionalizing act, which imposes an attitude on the viewer of taking what is seen as play, as “make-believe”; this is not to say that the play is not purposeful, but it is difficult to lose sight of the film as staged due to the recursiveness of hearing something being composed that we have already seen staged on the screen. Other examples include references to other films, using musical scenes to break tension, and lore about Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942) being partly written by twins. These pointers move the viewer to adopt different attitudes to the represented world, and as the tropes are warped here—a musical scene becomes a poignant connection between Charlie and Donald, rather than a beach-blanket, road-trip romp—the viewer gains a different perspective on movie-making. Thus, the viewer is mutated by Adaptation too, becoming, through the process of watching, the kind of audience Kaufman desires. Iser addresses the results of “self-disclosed fictionality” on the recipient of such a fictionalizing act (238-9). As applied to film, if viewers are freed from having to take the film as real, the different attitude to reality the film imposes can be more easily accepted. Thus, new attitudes can be accepted in play, learned through performances of reading or viewing. These attitudes may (although do not necessarily) remain with viewers beyond the represented world’s boundaries, marking a permanent evolution. This possibility of change is important to the disclosure of what the text is meant to represent, which is adaptation, in all its many senses. The writer can, through the fictionalizing act, produce a text; but the text’s recipient must complete the performance of representation through bringing what is represented to fruition through imagination, as Iser explains. Things are made present through imagination that have no reality outside of the text, are made to exist as if they are real in the reader’s imagination. Thus, through the whole process of representation, the fictionalizing act and the reader’s performance, what is not accessible in the extratextual world can be held in the mind, which is the making of make-believe (Iser, 243). Even then, the inaccessible may not be achieved, but only approached through these means: “Aesthetic semblance … neither transcends a given reality nor mediates between idea and manifestation; it is an indication that the inaccessible can only be approached by being staged” (Iser, 243). However, inaccessibility does not reduce the desire for what we cannot possess, as Orlean repeatedly witnesses; we can try to get what we desire, but ultimately it must be inaccessible because we cannot hold onto it at all. The staging of something inaccessible may not be the same as having it, but the manner of staging can also reveal something about what is sought—in this case, passion for Orlean, and perfect adaptation to one’s environment for Kaufman. The inaccessible is often figured as a blank in literature and film; solidifying it into form robs it of its power because the actual can never be the same as that pure potential—think of Orlean’s astonished and disappointed line in the film when she finally sees the ghost orchid: “It’s a flower.” Fear of disappointment prevents her from attempting to see the orchid in the real world, as she explains in her book; she would rather leave the possibility of any fulfillment she might receive in its perfect state of imagination. Even a pure reproduction is impossible, since representation ever creates something new. Film adaptation, of course, falls into this category; that Kaufman’s film does not equal Orlean’s book is obvious to anyone who has experienced both, but Kaufman’s script increases the audience’s awareness of this non-equation of film adaptations to their primary texts, as well as the possibility of the adaptation creating something new. Because of the performative quality of the reader’s role, actualizing the potential of a text, making it tangible through his or her imagination, we must cast Charlie Kaufman’s writing as a performance of reading as well. Iser posits a triadic relationship of the real, the fictional, and the imaginary, in place of the traditional dyad of the real and the fictional. The imaginary is the blank space and formless material made concrete through the fictionalizing act. In Orlean’s book, Florida is the imaginary; she writes, “Florida was to Americans what America had always been to the rest of the world—a fresh, free, unspoiled start. Florida is a wet, warm, tropical place, essentially featureless, and infinitely transformable. … Its essential character can be repeatedly reimagined” (123). For the character Kaufman, the screenplay is the imaginary; it is “infinitely transformable,” and can be “repeatedly reimagined”. Through the unformed potential of the screenplay that he imagines, he can do anything, access anything, even the inaccessible. He can use the screenplay to create fifty movies in one, to create a documentary and a Hollywood action film, a romance, a thriller. He can also use this space of infinite possibility to solve the problem of writing the real screenplay, by writing himself a new self and a partner in the form of a twin brother. Brian McHale explains that the dominant mode of postmodernist fiction is ontological. While McHale’s concern is primarily with questions about the modes of being of the worlds constructed by postmodernist fiction, the construction of new worlds often coincides with attempts by ontologically confused characters to understand themselves and their places in the world—sometimes they solve these problems by creating new worlds to suit (McHale, 9-10). Dick Higgins’s provocative question, quoted by McHale, “Which of my selves is to do [‘what is to be done’]?” highlights the quandary of characters in postmodernist fiction and, we might add, in postmodernist films (McHale, 10). The priority becomes determining the quality of one’s own being, or, given the problem of a certain kind of external reality, determining which self can best adapt to the new world. Kaufman creates multiple ontological layers to approach one of his problems, namely how to adapt a plotless book with no character development into a film. The film’s worlds multiply as he writes the screenplay before our eyes—often after an event that Charlie’s dictations echo—then erases, rewrites, and erases and rewrites, over and over again. I extend McHale’s thesis, however, in that, along with creating new worlds within the text to solve their ontological problems, characters create new selves to solve the problem of who to be in order to live meaningfully. To solve his multitude of problems, Kaufman creates not only a representation of himself in his screenplay (and one might argue, many representations), but also a twin brother who can help him do what he cannot. Kaufman creates at least two other selves to do what needs to be done in the real world and in the film’s world: that is, solving the intractable problem of making a movie out of this book, and for both himself and the character of Susan Orlean, connecting to other people. Kaufman does include a glimpse of the book that is true to its character, but he can’t make a movie out of just this, and a perfect reproduction of the book is impossible anyway—it is inaccessible, which is part of what causes Charlie such agonies. The theme of adaptation introduced by the subject of orchids ultimately provides a way to transform the book into a movie. Consequently, Charlie adapts to the problem in his environment, this unwritten screenplay, by multiplying himself. The character Robert McKee (a real name coincidentally significant in true Dickensian style) presents Charlie with the key to solving the twin problems of the screenplay and his own life; McKee tells Charlie that if characters don’t change there is no story; Charlie is skeptical, at first, at there being people in the world who actually do things, but McKee convinces him it is true. So Charlie, with Donald’s help, changes the characters from The Orchid Thief who do not change, or at least whom we don’t see change because of Orlean’s presentation of them. LaRoche as represented by Orlean does not change; the objects of his passion change, but not his relationship to them. Orlean herself refuses to change, to accept connections to other living things—she gives away the gifts of orchids from the orchid people she interviews. She articulates her lack of connection in an interview after the book’s publication. Kaufman includes this statement in the film, when Donald interviews her while pretending to be Charlie. This statement exposes her detachment, and we certainly do not wonder any more at her dispassionateness, although she says she wishes she had a passion. She claims her passion is for her subjects, but it is hard to believe that when we hear her comments about the relationships of reporters with their subjects. Ultimately, the book is disappointing because the one person present throughout never changes—refuses change, in fact, even when given the opportunity to connect with extraordinary people who might help her to change. For example, she reports, but does not explore, the implications of LaRoche’s change of passion from orchids to computers after his family tragedy; he says, and Kaufman emphasizes this in the film, that he loves computers because they can’t die, unlike the living things he cherished before. He has psychically adapted himself to this painful reality, and even if Orlean doesn’t learn from him, Kaufman does. Unlike Orlean, Charlie succeeds in breaking through his inability to connect with other people; he writes himself as a character who changes, who grows. Donald catalyzes this change, first by introducing Charlie to McKee’s ideas and holding onto them despite Charlie’s scoffing, so that he eventually sways Charlie with his conviction (and his success); and then, in the swamp, when he explains to Charlie that he owns his love and attachments to other people, and their judgments of him cannot make him let them go or spoil them for him. This revelation provides the final impetus for Charlie’s transformation, and he is able to connect to, and ultimately to integrate himself with, Donald, allowing him to continue after Donald is killed. Such integration commonly appears in stories of doubling, and the integrated double must then leave the story somehow. Donald’s effect on the screenplay, then, is the creation of a narrative arc and of characters who change, for better or for worse. Donald invents the relationship between Orlean and LaRoche and their illicit activities. Because of Donald, the movie also metamorphoses into the typical Hollywood film, with drugs, sex, violence, car chases, and a guy getting the girl in the end. But it is also through Donald that the action moves outside of Charlie’s head and that his solitude changes into action in the world involving other people. Thus, the process that brings the movie to that point makes it impossible for us to see it the same way as before, and it lends a significance to the ending that such a “Hollywood” copout wouldn’t otherwise have, just like the reprise of the musical number “Happy Together” in the swamp, this time a demonstration of Charlie’s affection for his brother. In order to excuse this “copout” and the complete departure from The Orchid Thief, Charlie must write himself into the screenplay, to picture his agonizing for us so we will sympathize with his choices, and he must write a double, Donald, who can make these changes, not a copout, but significant evolution. Kaufman changes himself psychically and emotionally in order to do what needs to be done: to create something that can survive through its novelty, to create a self that can survive through adaptation. References Darwin, Charles. The Origin of Species. London: John Murray, 1859. ———. On the Various Contrivances by Which British and Foreign Orchids Are Fertilized by Insects, and on the Good Effects of Intercrossing. 2nd ed. London: John Murray, 1877. Iser, Wolfgang. Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1989. McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. New York: Methuen, 1987. Orlean, Susan. The Orchid Thief. 1998. New York: Ballantine, 2000. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Bartlett, Lexey A. "Who Do I Turn (in)to for Help?: Multiple Identity as Adaptation in Adaptation." M/C Journal 10.1 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/04-bartlett.php>. APA Style Bartlett, L. (May 2007) "Who Do I Turn (in)to for Help?: Multiple Identity as Adaptation in Adaptation," M/C Journal, 10(1). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/04-bartlett.php>.

In a 1999 interview with the online magazine The AV Club, a subsidiary of satirical news website, The Onion, Bret Easton Ellis claimed: “I’ve never written a single scene that I can say took place, I’ve never written a line of dialogue that I’ve heard someone say or that I have said” (qtd. in Klein). Ten years later, in the same magazine, Ellis was reminded of this quote and asked why most of his novels have been perceived as veiled autobiographies. Ellis responded:Well, they are autobiographical in the sense that they reflect who I was at a particular moment in my life. There was talk of a memoir, and I realized why I couldn’t write a memoir, because the books are the memoir—they completely sum up how I was feeling, what I was thinking about, what my obsessions were, what I was fantasizing about, who I was, in a fictional context over the last 25 years or so (qtd. in Tobias).Despite any protestations to the contrary, Bret Easton Ellis’s novels have included various intentional and unintentional disclosures which reflect the author’s personal experiences. This pattern of self-disclosure became most overt in his most recent novel, Lunar Park (2005), in which the narrator shares a name, vocation and many aspects of his personal history with Ellis himself. After two decades and many assumptions made about Ellis’s personal life in the public media, it seems on the surface as if this novel uses disclosure as the site of closure for several rumours and relationships which have haunted his career. It is possible to see how this fictional text transgresses the boundaries between fiction and fact in an attempt to sever the feedback loop between the media’s representation of Ellis and the interpretation of his fictional texts. Yet it is important to note that with Ellis, there is always more beneath the surface. This is evident after only one chapter of Lunar Park when the novel changes form from an autobiography into a fictional ghost story, both of which are told by Bret Easton Ellis, a man who simultaneously reflects and refracts aspects of the real life author.Before analysing Lunar Park, it is helpful to consider the career trajectory which led to its creation. Bret Easton Ellis made his early fame writing semi-fictional accounts of rich, beautiful, young, yet ambitionless members of generation-X, growing up in the 1980s in America. His first novel, Less Than Zero (1985), chronicled the exploits of his protagonists as they drifted from party to party, from one meaningless sexual encounter to another; all while anesthetised on a cocktail of Valium, Prozac, Percocet and various illegal drugs. The brutal realism of his narrative, coupled with the structure—short vignettes like snapshots and short chapters told in simplistic style—led the text to be hailed as the first “MTV Novel” (Annesley 90; see also: Freese).It is not difficult to discover the many similarities that exist between the creator of Less Than Zero and his fictional creation, Clay, the novel’s narrator-protagonist. Both grew up in Los Angeles and headed east to attend a small liberal-arts college. Both Ellis’s and Clay’s parents were divorced and both young men grew up living in a house with their mother and their two sisters. Ellis’s relationship with his father was, by all accounts, as strained as what is represented in the few meetings Clay has with his own father in Less Than Zero. In these scenes, Clay describes a brief, perfunctory lunch meeting in an expensive restaurant in which Clay’s father is too preoccupied by work to acknowledge his son’s presence.Ellis’s second novel, The Rules of Attraction (1987), is set at Camden College, the same college that Clay attends in Less Than Zero. At one point, Clay even guest-narrates a chapter of The Rules of Attraction; the phrase, “people are afraid to walk across campus after midnight” (205) recalls the opening line of Less Than Zero, “people are afraid to merge on highways in Los Angeles” (5). Camden bears quite a few similarities with Bennington College, the college which Ellis himself was attending when Less Than Zero was published and Ellis was catapulted into the limelight. Even Ellis himself has admitted that the book is, “a completely fictionalized portrait of a group of people, all summations of friends I knew” (qtd. in Tobias).The authenticity of Ellis’s narrative voice was considered as an insight which came from participation (A Conversation with Bret Easton Ellis). The depiction of disenfranchised youth in the Reagan era in America was so compelling because Ellis seemed to personify and even embody the malaise and listlessness of his narrators in his public performances and interviews. In the minds of many readers and critics, Ellis’s narrators were a fictional extrapolation of Ellis himself. The association of Ellis to his fictional narrators backfired when Ellis’s third novel, American Psycho (1991), was published. The novel was criticised for its detached depiction of Patrick Bateman, who narrates in minute detail his daily routine which includes an extensive beauty regime, lunchtimes and dinnertimes spent in extravagant New York restaurants, a relationship with a fiancée and a mistress, a job on Wall Street in which he seems to do no real “work,” and his night-time hobby where brutally murders women, homeless men, gay men and even a small child. Bateman’s choice of victims can be interpreted as unconsciously aimed at anyone why may threaten his dominant position as a wealthy, white, heterosexual male. While Bateman kills as many men as he does women, his male victims are killed quickly in sudden bursts of violence. Bateman’s female victims are the subject of brutal torture, prolonged violent sexualized attacks, and in many cases inhumane post-mortem disfigurement and dismemberment.The public reception of American Psycho has been analysed as much as the text itself, (see: Murphet; Brien). Because American Psycho is narrated in the first-person voice of Bateman, there is no escape from his subjectivity. Many, including the National Organization of Women, interpreted this lack of authorial comment as Ellis’s tacit agreement and acceptance of Bateman’s behaviour. Another similar interpretation was made by Roger Rosenblatt in his pre-publication review of American Psycho in which he forthrightly encourages readers to “Snuff this Book” (Rosenblatt). Rosenblatt finds no ironic critique in Ellis’s representation of Bateman, instead finding himself at a loss to understand Ellis’s intention in writing American Psycho, saying “one only assumes, Mr. Ellis disapproves. It's a bit hard to tell what Mr. Ellis intends exactly, because he languishes so comfortably in the swamp he purports to condemn” (n.p.).In much the same way as Ellis’s previous narrators had reflected his experience and opinions, Ellis was considered as accepting and even glorifying the actions of a misogynistic serial killer. Ellis himself has commented on the popularised “misreading” of his novel: “Because I never step in anywhere and say, ‘Hey, this is all wrong,’ people get upset. That’s outrageous to me! Who’s going to say that serial killing is wrong?! Isn’t that a given? There’s no need to say that” (qtd. in. Klein)Ellis himself was treated as if he had committed the actual crimes that Patrick Bateman describes. The irony being that, as I have argued elsewhere (Phillips), there are numerous signs within the text which point to the possibility that Patrick Bateman did not commit the crimes as he claims: he can be interpreted as an unreliable narrator. Although the unreliability is Bateman’s narration doesn’t remove the effect which the reader experiences, it does indicate a distance between the author and the narrator. This distance was overlooked by many critics who interpreted Ellis as agreeing and condoning Bateman’s views and actions.When Ellis’s fourth novel, Glamorama was published, the decadent lifestyle represented in the text was again considered to be a reflection of Ellis’s personal experience. The star-studded parties and glamorous night clubs seemed to be lifted straight out of Ellis’s experience (although, no-one would ever claim that Ellis was a fashion-model-turned-international-terrorist like his narrator, Victor). One reviewer notes that “even when Bret Easton Ellis writes about killer yuppies and terrorist fashion models, a lot of people still think he's writing about himself” (Waldren).With the critical tendency to read an autobiographical confession out of Ellis’s fictional works firmly in place, it is not hard to see why Ellis decided to make the narrator of his fifth novel, Lunar Park, none other than Bret Easton Ellis himself. It is my contention that Lunar Park is the site of disclosures based on the real life of Bret Easton Ellis. I believe that Ellis chose the form of a mock-autobiography-turned-ghost-story as the site of exorcism for the many ghosts which have haunted his career, namely, his public persona and the publication of American Psycho. Ultimately, it is the exorcism of a more personal ghost, namely his father Robert Martin Ellis which provides the most private disclosure in the text and therefore the most touching, truthful and abiding site of closure for the entire novel and for Ellis himself. For ease, I will refer to the narrator of Lunar Park as Bret and the author of Lunar Park as Ellis.On the surface, it appears that Lunar Park is an autobiographical memoir. In one of the many mixed reviews of the novel (see: Murray; "Behind Bret's Mask"; Hand), Steve Almond’s title describes how Ellis masquerading as Ellis “is not a pretty sight” (Almond). The opening chapter is told in autobiographical style and charts Bret’s meteoric rise from college student to member of the literary brat pack (alongside Jay McInerney and Tama Jancowitz), to reviled author of American Psycho (1991) reaching his washed-up, drug-addled and near-death nadir during the Glamorama (1998) book tour. However, careful reading of this chapter reveals that the real-life Ellis is obscuring as much about himself as he appears to be revealing. Although it takes the form of a candid disclosure of his personal life, there are elements of the narrator’s story which do not agree with the public record of the author Ellis.The fictional Bret claims to have attended Camden College, and that his manuscript for Less Than Zero was a college project, discovered by his professor. While the plot of this story does reflect Ellis’s actual experience, he has set Bret’s story at Camden College, the fictional setting of The Rules of Attraction. By adding an element of fiction into the autobiographical account, Ellis is indicating that he is not identical to his narrating counterpart. It also signifies the Bret that exists in the fictional space whereas Ellis resides in the “real world.”In Lunar Park, Bret also talks about his relationship with Jayne Dennis. Jayne is described as a model-turned-actress, an up and coming Hollywood superstar who in the 1980s performed in films alongside Keanu Reeves. Jayne is one of the truly fictional characters in Lunar Park. She doesn’t exist outside of the text, except in two websites which were established to promote the publication of Lunar Park in 2005 (www.jaynedennis.com and www.jayne-dennis.com). While Bret and Jayne are dating, Jayne falls pregnant. Bret begs her to have an abortion. When Jayne decides to keep the child, her relationship with Bret falls apart. Bret meets his son Robby only twice from birth until the age of 10. The relationship between the fictional Bret and the fictional Jayne creates Robby, a fictional offspring who shares a name with Robert Martin Ellis (Bret and Ellis’s father).Many have been tempted to participate in Ellis’s game, to sift fact from fiction in the opening chapter of Lunar Park. Holt and Abbot published a two page point-by-point analysis of where the real-life Ellis diverged from the fictional Bret. The promotional website established by Ellis’s publisher was named www.twobrets.com to invite such a comparison. Although this game is invited by Ellis, he has also publicly stated that there is more to Lunar Park than the comparison between himself and his fictional counterpart:My worry is that people will want to know what’s true and what’s not […] All the things that are in the book—my quote-unquote autobiography—I just don’t want to answer any of those questions. I don’t like demystifying the text (qtd. in Wyatt n.p.)Although Ellis refuses to demystify the text, one of the purposes of inserting himself into the text is to trap readers in this very game, and to confuse fact with fiction. Although the text opens with a chapter which reads like Ellis’s autobiography, careful reading of the textual Bret against the extra-textual Ellis reveals that this chapter contains almost as much fiction as the “ghost story” which fills the remaining 400-odd pages. This ghost story could have been told by any first-person narrator. By writing himself into the text, Ellis is writing his public persona into the fictional character of Bret. One of the effects of blurring the lines between public and private, reality and fiction is that Ellis’s real-life disclosures invite the reader to read the fictional text against their extra-textual knowledge of Ellis himself. In this way, Ellis is able to address the many ghosts which have haunted his career—most importantly the public reception of American Psycho and his public persona. A more personal ghost is the ghost of Ellis’s father who has been written into the text, literally haunting Bret’s home with messages from beyond the grave. Closure occurs when these ghosts have been exorcised. The question is: is Lunar Park Ellis’s attempt to close down the public debates, or to add more fuel to the fire?One of the areas in which Ellis seeks to find closure is in the controversy surrounding American Psycho. Ellis uses his fictional voice to re-write the discourse surrounding the creation and reception of the text. There are deliberate contradictions in Bret’s version of writing American Psycho. In Lunar Park, Bret describes the writing process of American Psycho. In an oddly ornate passage for Ellis (who seldom uses adverbs), Bret describes how he would “fearfully watch my hands as the pen swept across the yellow legal pads” (19) blaming the “spirit” of Patrick Bateman for visiting and causing the book to be written. When it was finished, the “spirit” was “disgustingly satisfied” and stopped “gleefully haunting” Bret’s dreams. This shift in writing style may be an indication of a shift from reality into a fictionalised account of the writing of American Psycho. Much of the plot of Lunar Park is taken up with the consequences of American Psycho, when a madman starts replicating crimes exactly as they appear in the novel. It is almost as if Patrick Bateman is haunting Bret and his family. When informed that his fictional violence has disrupted his quiet suburban existence, Bret laments, “this was the moment that detractors of the book had warned me about: if anything happened to anyone as a result of the publication of this novel, Bret Easton Ellis was to blame” (181-2). By the end of Lunar Park Bret decides to “kill” Patrick Bateman once and for all, by writing an epilogue in which Bateman is burnt alive.On the surface, it appears that Lunar Park is the site of an apology about American Psycho. However, this is not entirely the case. Much of Bret’s description of writing American Psycho is contradictory to Ellis’s personal accounts where he consciously researched the gruesome details of Bateman’s crimes using an FBI training manual (Rose). Although Patrick Bateman is destroyed by the end of Lunar Park, extra-textually, neither Bret nor Ellis is not entirely apologetic for his creation. Bret argues that American Psycho was “about society and manners and mores, and not about cutting up women. How could anyone who read the book not see this?” (182). Extra-textually, in an interview Ellis admitted that when he re-read “the violence sequences I was incredibly upset and shocked […] I can't believe that I wrote that. Looking back, I realize, God, you really sort of stepped over a line there” (qtd. in Wyatt n.p.). However, in that same interview, Ellis admits to lying to reporters if he feels that the reporter is “out to get” him. Therefore, Ellis’s apology may not actually be an apology at all.Lunar Park presents an explanation about how and why American Psycho was written. This explanation is much akin to claiming that “the devil made me do it”, by arguing that Bret was possessed by “the spirit of this madman” (18). While it may seem that this explanation is an attempt to close the vast amount of discussion surrounding why American Psycho was written, Ellis is actually using his fictional persona to address the public outcry about his most controversial novel, providing an apology for a text, which is really no apology at all. Ultimately, the reliability of Bret’s account depends on the reader’s knowledge of Ellis’s public persona. This interplay between the fictional Bret and the real-life Ellis can be seen in Lunar Park’s account of the Glamorama publicity tour. In Lunar Park, Bret describes his own version of the Glamorama book tour. For Bret, this tour functions as his personal nadir, the point in his life where he hits rock bottom and looks to Jayne Dennis as his saviour. Throughout the tour, Bret describes taking all manner of drugs. At one point, threatened by his erratic behaviour, Bret’s publishers asked a personal minder to join the book tour, reporting back on Bret’s actions which include picking at nonexistent scabs, sobbing at his appearance in a hotel mirror and locking himself in a bookstore bathroom for over an hour before emerging and claiming that he had a snake living in his mouth (32-33).The reality of the Glamorama book tour is not anywhere near as wild as that described by Bret in Lunar Park. In reviews and articles addressing the real-life Glamorama book tour, there are no descriptions of these events. One article, from the The Observer (Macdonald), does describe a meeting over lunch where Ellis admits to drinking way too much the night before and then having to deal with phone calls from fans he can’t remember giving his phone-number to. However, as previously mentioned, in that same article a friend of Ellis’s is quoted as saying that Ellis frequently lies to reporters. Bret’s fictional actions seem to confirm Ellis’s real life “party boy” persona. For Moran, “the name of the author [him]self can become merely an image, either used to market a literary product directly or as a kind of free floating signifier within contemporary culture” (61). Lunar Park is about all of the connotations of the name Bret Easton Ellis. It is also a subversion of those expectations. The fictional Glamorama book tour shows Ellis’s media persona taken to an extreme until it becomes a self-embodying parody. In Lunar Park, Ellis is deliberately amplifying his public persona, accepting that no amount of truthful disclosure will erase the image of Bret-the-party-boy. However, the remainder of the novel turns this image on its head by removing Bret from New York and placing him in middle-American suburbia, married, and with two children in tow.Ultimately, although the novel appears as a transgression of fact and fiction, Bret may be the most fictional of all of Ellis’s narrators (with the exception of Patrick Bateman). Bret is married where Ellis is single. Bret is heterosexual whereas Ellis is homosexual, and used the site of Lunar Park to confirm his homosexuality. Bret has children whereas Ellis is childless. Bret has settled down into the heartland of American suburbia, a wife and two children in tow whereas Ellis has made it clear that this lifestyle is not one he is seeking. The novel is presented as the site of Ellis’s personal disclosure, and yet only creates more fictional fodder for the public image of Ellis, there are elements of true and personal disclosures from Ellis life, which he is using the text as the site for his own brand of closure. The most genuine and heartfelt closure is achieved through Ellis’s disclosure of his relationship with his father.The death of Ellis’s father, Robert Martin Ellis has an impact on both the textual and extra-textual levels of Lunar Park. Textually, the novel takes the form of a ghost story, and it is Robert himself who is haunting Bret. These spectral disturbances manifest themselves in Bret’s house which slowly transforms into a representation of his childhood home. Bret also receives nightly e-mails from the bank in which his father’s ashes have been stored in a safe-deposit box. These e-mails contain an attached video file showing the last few moments of Robert Martin Ellis’s life. Bret never finds out who filmed the video. Extra-textually, the death of Robert Martin Ellis is clearly signified in the fact that Lunar Park is dedicated to him as well as Michael Wade Kaplan, two men close to Ellis who have died. The trope of fathers haunting their sons is further highlighted by Ellis’s inter-textual references to Shakespeare’s Hamlet including a quote in the epigraph: “From the table of my memory / I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records, / all saws of books, all forms, all pressures past / that youth and observation copied there” (1.5.98-101). The names of various geographical locations in Bret’s neighbourhood: Bret and Jayne live on Elsinore Lane, named for Elsinore castle, Bret also visits Fortinbras Mall, Osric hotel and Ophelia Boulevard. In Hamlet, the son is called upon by the ghost of his father to avenge his death. In Lunar Park, Bret is called upon to avenge himself against the wrongs inflicted upon him by his own father.The ambiguity of the relationships between fathers and sons is summarised in the closing passage of the novel. So, if you should see my son, tell him I say hello, be good, that I am thinking of him and that I know he’s watching over me somewhere, and not to worry: that he can always find me here, whenever he wants, right here, my arms held out and waiting, in the pages, behind the covers, at the end of Lunar Park (453).Although Bret earlier signals the reader to interpret this passage as a message from Bret to his son Robby (45), it is also possible to interpret is as a message from the fictional Robert Martin Ellis to the fictional Bret. In this reading, Lunar Park is not just a novel, a game or a post-modern deconstruction of the fact and fiction binary, it instead becomes an exorcism for the author. The process of writing Lunar Park to casts the spectre of the real-life Robert Martin Ellis out of his life to a place where Bret (and Ellis) can always find him. This relationship is the site not only of disclosure – reflecting Ellis’s own personal angst with his late father – but of closure, where Ellis has channelled his relationship and indeed exorcised his father into the text.Lunar Park contains several forms of disclosures, most of which transgress the line between fiction and fact. Lunar Park does not provide a closure from the tendency to read autobiography into Ellis’s texts, instead, chapter one provides as much fiction as fact, as evident in the discussions of American Psycho and the Glamorama book tour. Although chapter one presents in an autobiographical form, the remainder of the text reveals how fictional “Bret Easton Ellis” really is. Much of Lunar Park can be interpreted as a puzzle whose answer depends on the reader’s knowledge and understanding of the public perception, persona and profile of Bret Easton Ellis himself. Although seeming to provide closure on the surface, by playing with fiction and fact, Lunar Park only opens up more ground for discussion of Ellis, his novels, his persona and his fictional worlds. These are discussions I look forward to participating in, particularly as 2010 will see the publication of Ellis’s sixth novel (and sequel to Less Than Zero), Imperial Bedrooms.Although much of Ellis’s game in Lunar Park is to tease the reader by failing to provide true disclosures or meaningful and finite closure, the ending of the Lunar Park indicates the most honest, heartfelt and abiding closure for the text and for Ellis himself. Devoid of games and extra-textual riddles, the end of the novel is a message from a father to his son. By disclosing details of his troubled relationship with his father, both Ellis and his fictional counterpart Bret are able to exorcise the ghost of Robert Martin Ellis. As the novel closes, the ghost who haunts the text has indeed been exorcised and is now standing, with “arms held out and waiting, in the pages, behind the covers, at the end of Lunar Park” (453). ReferencesAlmond, Steve. "Ellis Masquerades as Ellis, and It Is Not a Pretty Sight." Boston Globe 14 Aug. 2005.Annesley, James. Blank Fictions: Consumerism, Culture and the Contemporary American Novel. London: Pluto Press, 1998."Behind Bret's Mask." Manchester Evening News 10 Oct. 2005.Brien, Donna Lee. "The Real Filth in American Psycho: A Critical Reassessment." M/C Journal 9.5 (2006). 30 Nov. 2009 < http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0610/01-brien.php >.Ellis, Bret Easton. Less than Zero. London: Vintage, 1985.–––. The Rules of Attraction. London: Vintage, 1987.–––. American Psycho. London: Picador, 1991.–––. Glamorama. New York: Knopf, 1998.–––. Lunar Park. New York: Knopf, 2005.Freese, Peter. "Bret Easton Ellis, Less than Zero; Entropy in the 'Mtv Novel'?" Modes of Narrative: Approaches to American, Canadian and British Fiction. Eds. Reingard Nishik and Barbara Korts. Wurzburg: Konighausen and Naumann, 1990. 68–87. Hand, Elizabeth. "House of Horrors; Bret Easton Ellis, the Author of 'American Psycho,' Rips into His Most Frightening Subject Yet—Himself." The Washington Post 21 Aug. 2005.Klein, Joshua. "Interview with Bret Easton Ellis." The Onion AV Club 17 Mar.(1999). 5 Sep. 2009 < http://www.avclub.com/articles/bret-easton-ellis,13586/ >.Macdonald, Marianna. “Interview—Bret Easton Ellis—All Cut Up.” The Observer 28 June 1998.Moran, Joe. Star Authors. London: Pluto Press, 2000.Murphet, Julian. Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho: A Reader's Guide. New York: Continuum, 2002.Murray, Noel. "Lunar Park [Review]." The Onion AV Club 2 Aug. 2005. 1 Nov. 2009 < http://www.avclub.com/articles/lunar-park,4393/ >.Phillips, Jennifer. "Unreliable Narration in Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho: Interaction between Narrative Form and Thematic Content." Current Narratives 1.1 (2009): 60–68.Rose, Charlie. “A Conversation with Bret Easton Ellis”. The Charlie Rose Show. Prod. Charlie Rose and Yvette Vega. PBS. 7 Sep. 1994. Rosenblatt, Roger. "Snuff This Book! Will Bret Easton Ellis Get Away with Murder?" The New York Times 16 Dec. 1990: Arts.Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Ed. Graham Holderness and Bryan Loughrey. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992.Tobias, Scott. "Bret Easton Ellis (Interview)". The Onion AV Club 22 Apr. 2009. 31 Aug. 2009 < http://www.avclub.com/articles/bret-easton-ellis%2C26988/1/ >.Wyatt, Edward. "Bret Easton Ellis: The Man in the Mirror." The New York Times 7 Aug. 2005: Arts.

Contemporary approaches to agency and film authorship, such as performativity and “techniques of the self,” (Staiger, 2003) provide an explanation for the expression of agency within the always-already-existing structure of the text, yet fail to account for, firstly, how the individual determines which agential choices to make and, then, interacts with society with causality and efficacy (Staiger, 2003). Critical Realism, in particular Archer’s 2003 theory of the internal conversation (Structure), provides an alternative theoretical framework to postmodernism by acknowledging both the existence of orders of reality that impact upon the individual’s choices, and the effects of cultural and societal structures. I would suggest that postmodernism has restricted our understanding of human agency and how individual choice is determined within the highly structured creative industries. Although interplay between agency and structure applies to all creative collaborators, in this essay I will focus on the agency of the screenwriter as author (an overlooked aspect of film authorship), as Adaptation (Spike Jonze, 2002) provides an excellent illustration of the function of the internal conversation in the development of a screenplay. Adaptation, written by highly regarded contemporary screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, also presents an interesting comment on the role of the screenwriter within the Hollywood film industry, and foregrounds the notion of creative film authorship. The film can be considered a postmodern film, in its intertextuality, deconstruction of both the subject and the filmic structure, the parodic theme and the oppositional characterisation. Charlie Kaufman even becomes his own textual creation represented in the film, and many of the other characters in the film are based on actual people. However, the film also contains representations of reality, conflicting accounts of authorial intent, and a positioning of the subject and object that realises reflexive deliberation and human agency. Thematically, the film expresses a philosophical concern with individual human identity, and societal interaction and development. I would suggest that, although the film is usually considered a fine example of the postmodern film, from a Critical Realist perspective, it can be read as providing a critique of the “postmodern condition”, in particular the repetitive, formulaic mainstream Hollywood film. Archer argues that there must of necessity be both a separation of the individual from society or culture and an acknowledged mingling of self and society. Agency is dependent upon engagement with social and cultural structures, but this could not happen unless there were other (non-social) identifiable aspects to the individual (Structure, 7). According to Archer, natural reality consists of three orders: nature, which concerns physical well-being; practice, where performative achievement is necessary for work; and the social, where the individual’s main concern is in the achievement of self-worth (Structure, 138). The sense of self, or continuity of consciousness, constitutes the natural human and is universal. Therefore the individual, although a part of society, does not exist because of society, but because of reality. Without this continuing sense of self, an individual would not be able to “appropriate social expectations and … recognise what is expected of them” (“Realism”, 13). For society to function effectively, people must have a continuity of consciousness that transcends society. Human agency “originates in people themselves, from their own concerns, forged in the space between the self and reality as a whole” (“Realism”, 12). This is a liminal space—that is, an unstructured area of imagination—in which a screenwriter who wishes to create original acts of authoring operates. The internal conversation takes the form of a dialogue conducted with oneself, not with society, but about society. The individual conducts a conversation between their subjective self, which asks a question, and their objective self, which provides the answer. The person is speaking to themselves, but occupying transitory positions in order to process information, thoughts, and possible courses of action. It is a method for arriving at self-knowledge and decisions through the process of “discernment, deliberation and dedication” (Archer, Structure, 138). Through this internal process, individuals prioritise their concerns, and how they will accommodate those other necessary aspects of reality that may impinge on what they care about most. This process develops and changes as individuals mature, and as they are affected by all aspects of reality. The internal conversation provides a conciliatory approach to the interplay between the filmic culture industry and the individual screenwriter. The screenwriter as author can be seen to negotiate personal projects within the structural constraints and enablements of the film production process, and to enact agency through personal reflexive deliberation, choice and thematic style. How socially efficacious the resulting screenplay is depends upon the screenwriter’s authorship skills, the story’s cultural resonance, societal relevance, and the freedoms and impositions encountered within the filmic industry structure. Adaptation can be read as illustrative of this process. The film opens with an inner dialogue. “Kaufman” (the character, as opposed to Charlie Kaufman, the writer) is questioning, and answering, himself regarding his concerns. He considers his current situation, and his ability as a screenwriter, then deliberates on possible strategies for improving himself. This inner conversation continues throughout the film, both as voiceover, and as a dual characterisation, that of “Kaufman” in relation to his identical twin brother, Donald. Immediately we are given an insight into “Kaufman’s” mind. He is concerned with his health, his work practices and his self-worth. The three orders of reality are then presented as themes in the film. Nature is addressed through the subject of the book: orchids and their adaptability, and how this relates to human beings and their mutability. Practice is seen in “Kaufman’s” and Donald’s opposite approaches to writing a screenplay, the effects of the accepted industry format and expectations, and the eventual resolution of the film. Finally, society itself is questioned through the contrasting self-worth of the characters. “Kaufman” compares himself to: Orlean, as a competent writer; Laroche, as possessor of self-esteem and passion; and Donald, as carefree and socially adept. That the film encompasses all orders of reality reinforces Archer’s point that individuals must conceive of projects that “establish … satisfactory practices in the three orders … [as this process is] the inescapable condition for human beings to survive or thrive” (Structure, 138). “Kaufman” entertains the project of adapting a book into a screenplay when he meets with Valerie, an attractive executive producer. However, once he has entered into the project, he must negotiate the limitations and possibilities of the cultural structures of both the film industry and the book. “Kaufman” is considered for the adaptation because of his reputation as an unusual screenwriter. However, when he states that he wants to let the movie exist, and not turn it into a typical Hollywood product with car chases, turning the orchids into poppies, cramming in sex and guns, and characters learning profound life lessons, Valerie suggests that Orlean and Laroche could fall in love. Immediately “Kaufman’s” ideas are constrained. He is subjected to the hierarchical structure of the Hollywood film industry where the producer holds power. The screenwriter is an employee, contracted to do a job: that is, write a screenplay that can be made into a high-grossing film. As well, “Kaufman” has read the book and wishes to stay true to Orlean’s story. This poses another limitation, especially given that The Orchid Thief is a non-fiction book, a factual account of a rather unique individual (John Laroche) who came to Orlean’s attention when Laroche was charged with orchid poaching from a Florida state preserve. The book has no narrative structure, but digresses among Laroche’s story, Orlean’s personal reflections, the passion orchids inspire in enthusiasts, and the history of orchids and orchid hunters. However, once “Kaufman” has accepted the project, he must begin his process of deliberation and creation, and negotiate his strategy for completing the screenplay. If we take the fictional identical twin brother Donald to be “Kaufman’s” alter-ego, the two characters can be seen as separate facets of “Kaufman’s” negotiation of The Orchid Thief project, and their conversation reflects an internal dialogue of deliberation. By juxtaposing Donald and “Kaufman” as both the subjective (or speaking) self, and the objective (or answering) self, we can follow the internal dialogue that “Kaufman” conducts during the film. This highlights “Kaufman’s” concerns and possible choices regarding the project he has undertaken. He questions the task ahead of him and weighs the options available. The easy way forward would simply be to write a repetitive generic Hollywood film, and still get paid a lot of money. But “Kaufman” has ideals, and values his writing as a craft: as creating a literary work. In contrast, Donald finds it easy to write a screenplay by following the accepted cultural order, whereas “Kaufman” has personal (authorial) concerns that he wishes to express. “Kaufman’s” specific interests take precedence in his work and can be seen as other orders of reality impinging upon the social order. In order to understand the book he is adapting (and also to fulfill his own personal concerns as agential author) “Kaufman” must attempt to encompass the natural-order theme of the book, and the social-order expectations of the film industry. He has to decide which is more important. Initially, “Kaufman’s” preference is for the reality of the book, the actuality of how the world is, and this is where his interests as both a writer and an individual lie. This focus can be seen through the themes of Charlie Kaufman’s other screenplays. In his films, his main thematic concern—as he himself states—is “issues of self and why I’m me and not that other person” (cited in Kennedy). Charlie Kaufman delves deep into the notion of subjectivity, agency and human consciousness. However “Kaufman” (and, the implication is, in real life Charlie) is constrained by the cultural order of Hollywood which, although he tries to evade it, continually imposes limitations upon the completion of this screenplay. Donald is that side of “Kaufman” which keeps reminding him that, although he has freedom as a respected screenwriter, there are some aspects of writing for film that cannot be discounted. “Kaufman” and Donald are two sides of the same coin. They represent “Kaufman’s” inner dialogue and his internal conflict. The twin screenwriting characters personify his struggle to produce a screenplay that satisfies his ultimate personal convictions as a unique and creative writer (to remain true to the thematic concerns of the book) and the need to conform to the accepted Hollywood ideal of a high-budget feature film. The film can also be read as the actual writing of the screenplay unfolding on the screen. As “Kaufman” writes it, this is what we see visually. For the first two acts of the film, “Kaufman” succeeds in portraying his thematic concerns with the progress of life, and the necessity of change, and his involvement in the process of screenwriting. In this he stays true to Orlean’s book, even including digressive “chapters” where he not only introduces the real characters (that is, the story of the book), but also investigates the history of orchids and the concept of adaptability. “Kaufman” balances these thematic interests against each other through his own process of writing the screenplay. He also addresses issues that are of concern to him personally. He deliberates on these through the juxtaposition of his character “Kaufman” with those of Orlean and Laroche. He regards Orlean as the consummate writer, shown comfortably working in her office, in contrast to “Kaufman” hunched over an old typewriter perched on a chair. Laroche is a passionate individual who becomes engrossed in projects, but can then abandon them completely. “Kaufman” finds this difficult, as he is a screenwriter who, although passionate about his craft, cannot distance himself from his project. These oppositions are further reinforced through the character of Donald, who adopts a formulaic approach to writing his own film, to finishing his thriller-screenplay, while “Kaufman” is still struggling with his own adaptation. Once Donald has completed his film, he divests himself of all interest in it except for how much money he will receive. Donald also shows passion, not for his craft, but for women, whereas “Kaufman” finds it difficult to maintain a continuing relationship and resorts to fantasy and masturbation. “Kaufman” becomes so involved in the writing of the screenplay that Orlean becomes a part of his sexual fantasies, yet he cannot bring himself to meet her face to face. The opposition and comparison of these three characters, “Kaufman”-and-Donald (as one composite character), Orlean, and Laroche, is also reflected in Donald’s screenplay, The Three. Donald’s screenplay is about a cop, trying to find a serial killer’s latest victim; she becomes his Holy Grail. However, Donald’s three characters are, in fact, all the one character, who is suffering from multiple personality disorder. In Adaptation, “Kaufman” is questioning himself about aspects of his personality and providing the answers to those queries through other characters. As the search for perfection is Laroche’s Holy Grail, and passion is Orlean’s, for “Kaufman” it is the completion of the screenplay with integrity and aplomb. What “Kaufman” questions about the filmic reality of, and complications with, Donald’s screenplay are in fact included in “Kaufman’s” own screenplay that we see unfolding on the screen. The two screenplays are questioning and answering each other, and represent an internal conversation. Through these characterisations (and in particular the dialogic interactions with Donald), “Kaufman” is diagnosing his circumstances. By the end of the second act, “Kaufman” is coming to a realisation that it would have been much easier to write something else, anything else (including The Three), than attempting to complete the project he has started, and maintain his stance regarding the truth of the book, and the reality of life. In the third act, “Kaufman” accepts that he cannot complete his project and admits he needs help. However, he cannot simply cease working, as this would reflect on his other concerns: those of his own well-being and his work ethic, as well as his social standing as a Hollywood screenwriter. He is dedicated to completing the screenplay, but has to reassess his methods, and his options. His deliberations become more conventional, in keeping with the need to accommodate the constraints of the Hollywood cultural structure, and it is here that “Kaufman” must abandon his idealistic approach and allow Donald to take over. “Kaufman” cannot sustain his original concern of staying true to Orlean’s book and also maintaining the screenplay structure. He has to negotiate the limitations and consider new possibilities. According to Archer, “Once an agential project has activated a constraint or enablement, there is no single answer about what is to be done, and therefore no one predictable outcome” (Structure, 131). This is illustrated in the film, through the variant scenic possibilities “Kaufman” imagines and attempts to coalesce into his screenplay. However, he cannot bring the screenplay to an acceptable (and therefore, satisfactory) climax and resolution. “Kaufman” becomes like the serial killer in Donald’s script, who, because he is forcing his victim to eat herself, is also eating himself to death. In the same way, the film begins to consume and kill the characters one by one. “Kaufman” has a problem that he must overcome. He achieves this by making the third act a fiction of reality, and the characters into caricatures. The third act, “Kaufman’s” Japanese paper ball which, when dropped into water turns into a flower, is a metaphor, where the film turns back on itself. Instead of showing the reality of the book, the book becomes a fiction of the film. Donald takes over, and the climax of the film provides all the conventions of a typical Hollywood film: much more like Donald’s generic thriller than “Kaufman’s” initial premise. All “Kaufman’s” detested conventions are included: Orlean and Laroche fall in love, the Ghost Orchid is a potent psychedelic, there are guns, car chases, and death. “Kaufman” as protagonist learns a profound life lesson, and the deus ex machina is included, not once, but twice. An unsuspecting Ranger causes an horrific car accident and Laroche gets attacked by an alligator. Orobouros has been let loose. The characters have turned on themselves and are being deconstructed to death. Charlie Kaufman’s screenplay both encompasses the postmodern and rejects it. Through his writing skill, his unique plot conventions and his character development, he lays bare the contemporary conceptions of reality, filmic reality, and the influence of Hollywood production on both the audience and the screenwriter. He addresses the oppositional: the creative voice and the clichéd utterance; reality and fiction; disappointment and fulfillment; entrapment and freedom; and creates a new totality, a unique film that provides an alternative to the tired screenwriting paradigm. That he has managed to adapt a non-fiction book, insert real people as characters within the film, and write a critically acclaimed screenplay, shows both his skill and craft as a screenwriter and his efficacious agency. He has posited that there is an alternative to the conventional Hollywood film and that film can pose the “big” questions, about life, about what it means to be human and why things don’t change. Charlie Kaufman has taken the postmodern film, turned it inside out, and managed to not only expose the fiction, but embrace the reality. Adaptation provides a visual example of both the interplay between individual agency and socio-cultural structure and the screenwriter as author. For most of the film, “Kaufman” occupies a liminal space that—although existing in reality—is separate from society and the natural world. This, it could be said, is the “in-between space” of the practice of the screenwriter. It is a creative area of communitas (in the case of the screenwriter, as singular, rather than as a group); an unstructured equality that exists between boundaries, and where meaning is found in the imagination of a writer. In this liminal space, the author lives in a world of images and words, of personal concerns and the desire to share stories, but is always mindful of the restricted, accepted, mainstream film structure. The screenwriter’s liminal space is both expressively free and creatively constricted. Yet, because of this, the screenwriter provides an excellent example of the role of the internal conversation in the mediation of agency within cultural and societal structures. A discussion of agency and authorship is not simply a matter of repetitive cultural discourses, or existing social structures, but an incorporation of all orders of reality. It is through the formulation of specific projects that agents interact with social and structural power. Adaptation presents the Critical Realist concept that human beings and society are continually changing and developing, and neither agents, nor structure, can restrict the other completely. The creative agent absorbs current shifts in culture and society, reflects topical concerns, and envisages and expresses alternative ideas, even those opposed to postmodernism. Authorial agency, and indeed all individual human agency, is an ongoing process of adapting, however, as Mahatma Ghandi stated, “Adaptability is not imitation. It means power of resistance and assimilation”. References Archer, Margaret S. “Realism and the Problem of Agency.” Journal of Critical Realism 5.1 (2002). 28 Aug. 2005 http://journalofcriticalrealism.org/archive/JCRv5n1_archer11.pdf>. ———. Structure, Agency and the Internal Conversation. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. Kaufman, Charlie and Kaufman, Donald. Adaptation 2000. 14 May 2005 http://www.beingcharliekaufman.com/adaptationnov2000.pdf>. Kennedy, L. “Charlie Kaufman: Confessions of an Original ‘Mind’”. Denver Post 26 Mar. 2004. Staiger, Janet. “Authorship Approaches.” In Authorship and Film. Eds David Gerstner and Janet Staiger. New York: Routledge, 2003. 27-59. Citation reference for this article MLA Style McMerrin, Michelle. "Agency in Adaptation." M/C Journal 10.2 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/03-mcmerrin.php>. APA Style McMerrin, M. (May 2007) "Agency in Adaptation," M/C Journal, 10(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/03-mcmerrin.php>.

Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time has achieved success as “the new Rain Man” or “the new definitive, popular account of the autistic condition” (Burks-Abbott 294). Integral to its favourable reception is the way it conflates the autistic main character, the fifteen-year-old narrator Christopher Boone, with the savant, or individual who exhibits both neurological problems and giftedness, thereby engaging with the way autism is presented in popular culture. In a variety of contemporary films and television series, autism has been transformed from a disability to a form of giftedness by relating it to abilities associated in contemporary media with a genius, in particular by invoking the metaphor of an autistic mind as a type of computer. As a result, the book engages with the current association of giftedness in mathematics and science with social awkwardness and isolation as constructed in popular culture: in idiomatic terms, the genius “nerd” figure characterised by an uncertain, adolescent approach to social contact (Kendall 353). The disablement of the character is, then, lessened so that the idea of being “special,” continually evoked throughout the text, has a transformative function that is related less to the special needs of those with a disability and more to the common element in adolescent fiction of longing for extraordinary power and control through being a special, gifted individual. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time relates the protagonist, Christopher, to Sherlock Holmes and his methods of detection, specifically through the title being taken from a story by Conan Doyle, “Silver Blaze,” in which the “curious incident” referred to is that the dog did nothing in the night. In the original story, that the dog did not bark or react to an intruder was a clue that the person was known to the animal, so allowing Holmes to solve the crime by a process of deduction. Christopher copies these traditional methods of the classical detective to solve his personal mystery, that of who killed a neighbour’s dog, Wellington. The adoption of this title allows a double irony to emerge. Christopher’s attempts to emulate Holmes in his approach to crime are predicated on his assumption of his likeness to the model of the classical detective as he states, “I think that if I were a proper detective he is the kind of detective I would be,” pointing out the similarity of their powers of observation and his ability, like Holmes, to “detach his mind at will” as well as his capacity to find patterns in events (92). Through the novel, these attributes are aligned with his autism, constructing a trope of his disability conferring extraordinary abilities that are predicated on a computer-like detachment and precision in his method of thinking. The accessible narrative of the autistic Christopher gives the reader the impression of being able to understand the perspective of an individual with a spectrum disorder. In this way, the text not only engages with, but contributes to the construction of this disability in current popular culture as merely an extension of giftedness, especially in mathematics, and an associated unwillingness to communicate. Indeed, according to Raoul Eshelman, “one of its most engaging narrative devices is to make us identify with a mentally impaired narrator who is manifestly not interested in identifying either with us or anyone else” (1). The main character’s reference to mathematical and scientific ideas exploits an interest in giftedness already established by popular literature and film, and engages with a transformation effected in popular culture of the genius as autistic, and its corollary of an autistic person as potentially a genius. Such a construction ranges from fictional characters like Sheldon in The Big Bang Theory, Charlie and his physicist colleagues in Numb3rs, and Raymond Babbitt in Rain Man, to real life characters or representative figures in reality series and feature films such as x + y, The Imitation Game, The Big Short, and the television program Beauty and the Geek. While never referring specifically to autism, all the real or fictional representations contribute to the construction of a stereotype in which behaviours on the autistic spectrum are linked to a talent in mathematics and the sciences. In addition to this, detectives in the classical crime fiction alluded to in the novel typically exhibit traits of superhuman powers of deduction, pattern making, and problem solving that engage with the popular notion of genius in general and mathematics in particular by possessing a mind like a computer. Such detectives from current television series as Saga from The Bridge and Spencer Reid from Criminal Minds exhibit distance, coldness, and lack of social awareness or empathy with others, and this is presented as the basis of their extraordinary ability to discern patterns and solve crime. Spencer Reid, for example, has three PhDs in Science disciplines and Mathematics. Charlie in the television series Numb3rs is also a genius who uses his mathematical abilities to not only find the solution to crime but also explain the maths behind it to his FBI colleagues, and, in conjunction, the audience. But the character with the clearest association to Christopher is, naturally, Sherlock Holmes, both as constructed in Conan Doyle’s original text and the current adaptations and transformations of it. The television series Sherlock and Elementary, as well as the films Sherlock Holmes and Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows all invoke a version of Holmes in which his powers of deduction are associated with symptoms to be found in a spectrum disorder.Like Christopher, the classical detective is characterised by being cold, emotionless, distant, socially inept, and isolated, but also keenly observant, analytical, and scientific; one who approaches the crime as a puzzle to be solved (Cawelti 43) with computer-like precision. In what is considered to be the original detective story, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, Poe included a “pseudo-mathematical logic in his literary scenario” (Platten 255). In Conan Doyle’s stories, Holmes, too, adopts a mathematical and scientific approach to construct patterns from clues that he alone can discern, and thereby solve the crime. The depiction of investigators in contemporary media such as Charlie in Numb3rs engages with these origins so that he is objective, dispassionate, and able to relate to real-world problems only through the filter of mathematical formulae. Christopher is presented similarly by engaging with the idea of the detective as implied savant and relying on an ability to discern patterns for successful crime solving.The book links the disabling behaviours of autism with the savant, so that the stereotype of the mystic displaying both disability and giftedness in fiction of earlier ages has been transformed in contemporary literature to a figure with extraordinary powers related both to autism and to the contemporary form of mysticism: innate mathematical ability and computer-style calculation. Allied with what Murray terms the “unknown and ambiguous nature” of autism, it is characterised as “the alien within the human, the mystical within the rational, the ultimate enigma” (25) in a way that is in keeping with the current fascination with the nature of genius and its association with being “special,” a term continually evoked and discussed throughout the book by the main character. The chapters on scientific ideas relate to Christopher’s world view, filtered through a mathematical and analytical approach to life and relationships with other people. Christopher examines beliefs such as the concept of humanity as superior to other animals, and the idea of religion and creationism, that is, the idea of humanity itself as special, with a cold and logical approach. He similarly discusses the idea of the individual person as special, linking this to a metaphor of the human mind being a computer (203, 148). Christopher’s narrow perspective as a result of his autism is not presented as disabling so much as protective, because the metaphorical connection of his viewpoint to a computer provides him with distance. Although initially Christopher fails to realise the significance of events, this allows him to be “switched off” (103) from events that he finds traumatising.The transformative metaphor of an autistic individual thinking like a computer is also invoked through Christopher’s explanation of “why people think that their brains are special, and different from computers” (147). Indeed, both in terms of his tendency to retreat or by “pressing CTRL + ALT + DEL and shutting down programs and turning the computer off and rebooting” (178) in times of stress, Christopher metaphorically views himself as a computer. Such a perspective invokes yet another popular cultural reference through the allusion to the human brain as “Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation, sitting in his captain’s seat looking at a big screen” (147). But more importantly, the explanation refers to the basic premise of the book, that the text offers access to a condition that is inherently unknowable, but able to be understood by the reader through metaphor, often based on computers or technology as a result of a popular construction of autism that “the condition is the product of a brain in which the hard drive is incorrectly formatted” (Murray 25).Throughout the novel, the notion of “special” is presented as a trope for those with a disability, but as the protagonist, Christopher, points out, everyone is special in some way, so the whole idea of a disability as disabling is problematised throughout the text, while its associations of giftedness are upheld. Christopher’s disability, never actually designated as Asperger’s Syndrome or any type of spectrum disorder, is transformed into a protective mechanism that shields him from problematic social relationships of which he is unaware, but that the less naïve reader can well discern. In this way, rather than a limitation, the main character’s disorder protects him from a harsh reality. Even Christopher’s choice of Holmes as a role model is indicative of his desire to impose an eccentric order on his world, since this engages with a character in popular fiction who is famous not simply for his abilities, but for his eccentricity bordering on a form of autism. His aloof personality and cold logic not only fail to hamper him in his investigations, but these traits actually form the basis of them. The majority of recent adaptations of Conan Doyle’s stories, especially the BBC series Sherlock, depict Holmes with symptoms associated with spectrum disorder such as lack of empathy, difficulty in communication, and limited social skills, and these are clearly shown as contributing to his problem-solving ability. The trope of Christopher as detective also allows a parodic, postmodern comment on the classical detective form, because typically this fiction has a detective that knows more than the reader, and therefore the goal for the reader is to find the solution to the crime before it is revealed by the investigator in the final stages of the text (Rzepka 14). But the narrative works ironically in the novel since the non-autistic reader knows more than a narrator who is hampered by a limited worldview. From the beginning of the book, the narrative as focalised through Christopher’s narrow perspective allows a more profound view of events to be adopted by the reader, who is able to read clues that elude the protagonist. Christopher is well aware of this as he explains his attraction to the murder mystery novel, even though he has earlier stated he does not like novels since his inability to imagine or empathise means he is unable to relate to their fiction. For him, the genre of murder mystery is more akin to the books on maths and science that he finds comprehensible, because, like the classical detective, he views the crime as primarily a puzzle to be solved: as he states, “In a murder mystery novel someone has to work out who the murderer is and then catch them. It is a puzzle. If it is a good puzzle you can sometimes work out the answer before the end of the book” (5). But unlike Christopher, Holmes invariably knows more about the crime, can interpret the clues, and find the pattern, before other characters such as Watson, and especially the reader. In contrast, in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, the reader has more awareness of the probable context and significance of events than Christopher because, like a computer, he can calculate but not imagine. The reader can interpret clues within the plot of the story, such as the synchronous timing of the “death” of Christopher’s mother with the breakdown of the marriage of a neighbour, Mrs Shears. The astute reader is able to connect these events and realise that his mother has not died, but is living in a relationship with the neighbour’s husband. The construction of this pattern is denied Christopher, since he fails to determine their significance due to his limited imagination. Such a failure is related to Simon Baron-Cohen’s Theory of Mind, in which he proposes that autistic individuals have difficulty with social behaviour because they lack the capacity to comprehend that other people have individual mental states, or as Christopher terms it, “when I was little I didn’t understand about other people having minds” (145). Haddon utilises fictional licence when he allows Christopher to overcome such a limitation by a conscious shift in perspective, despite the specialist teacher within the text claiming that he would “always find this very difficult” (145). Christopher has here altered his view of events through his modelling both on the detective genre and on his affinity with mathematics, since he states, “I don’t find this difficult now. Because I decided that it was a kind of puzzle, and if something is a puzzle there is always a way of solving it” (145). In this way, the main character is shown as transcending symptoms of autism through the power of his giftedness in mathematics to ultimately discern a pattern in human relationships thereby adopting a computational approach to social problems.Haddon similarly explains the perspective of an individual with autism through a metaphor of Christopher’s memory being like a DVD recording. He is able to distance himself from his memories, choosing “Rewind” and then “Fast Forward” (96) to retrieve his recollection of events. This aspect of the precision of his memory relates to his machine-like coldness and lack of empathy for the feelings of others. But it also refers to the stereotype of the nerd figure in popular culture, where the nerd is able to relate more to a computer than to other people, exemplified in Sheldon from the television series The Big Bang Theory. Thus the presentation of Christopher’s autism relates to his giftedness in maths and science more than to areas that relate to his body. In general, descriptions of inappropriate or distressing bodily functions associated with disorders are mainly confined to other students at Christopher’s school. His references to his fellow students, such as Joseph eating his poo and playing in it (129) and his unsympathetic evaluation of Steve as not as clever or interesting as a dog because he “needs help to eat his food and could not even fetch a stick” (6), make a clear distinction between him and the other children, who despite being termed “special needs” are “special” in a different way from Christopher, because, according to him, “All the other children at my school are stupid” (56). While some reference is made to Christopher’s inappropriate behaviour in times of stress, such as punching a fellow student, wetting himself while on the train, and vomiting outside the school, in the main the emphasis is on his giftedness as a result of his autism, as displayed in the many chapters where he explains scientific and mathematical concepts. This is extrapolated into a further mathematical metaphor underlying the book, that he is like one of the prime numbers he finds so fascinating, because prime numbers do not fit neatly into the pattern of the number system, but they are essential and special nevertheless. Moreover, as James Berger suggests, prime numbers can “serve as figures for the autistic subject,” because like autistic individuals “they do not mix; they are singular, indivisible, unfactorable” yet “Mathematics could not exist without these singular entities that [. . .] are only apparent anomalies” (271).Haddon therefore offers a transformation by confounding autism with a computer-like ability to solve mathematical problems, so that the text is, as Haddon concedes, “as much about a gifted boy with behavior problems as it is about anyone on the autism spectrum” (qtd. in Burks-Abbott 291). Indeed, the word “autism” does not even appear in the book, while the terms “genius,” (140) “clever,” (32, 65, 252) and the like are continually being invoked in descriptions of Christopher, even if ironically. More importantly, the reader is constantly being shown his giftedness through the reiteration of his study of A Level Mathematics, and his explanation of scientific concepts. Throughout, Christopher explains aspects of mathematics, astrophysics, and other sciences, referring to such well-known puzzles in popular culture as the Monty Hall problem, as well as more obscure formulae and their proofs. They function to establish Christopher’s intuitive grasp of complex mathematical and scientific principles, as well as providing the reader with insight into both his perspective and the paradoxical nature of an individual who is at once able to solve quadratic equations in his head, yet is incapable of understanding the simple instruction, “Take the tube to Willesden Junction” (211).The presentation of Christopher is that of an individual who displays an extension of the social problems established in popular literature as connected to a talent for mathematics, therefore engaging with a depiction already existing in popular mythology: the isolated and analytical nerd or genius social introvert. Indeed, much of Christopher’s autistic behaviour functions to protect him from unsettling or traumatic information, since he fails to realise the significance of the information he collects or the clues he is given. His disability is therefore presented as not limiting so much as protective, and so the notion of disability is subsumed by the idea of the savant. The book, then, engages with a contemporary representation within popular culture that has transformed spectrum disability into mathematical giftedness, thereby metaphorically associating the autistic mind with the computer. ReferencesBaron-Cohen, Simon. Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and Theory of Mind. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1995. Berger, James. “Alterity and Autism: Mark Haddon’s Curious Incident in the Neurological Spectrum.” Autism and Representation. Ed. Mark Osteen. Hoboken: Routledge, 2007. 271–88. Burks-Abbott, Gyasi. “Mark Haddon’s Popularity and Other Curious Incidents in My Life as an Autistic.” Autism and Representation. Ed. Mark Osteen. Hoboken: Routledge, 2007. 289–96. Cawelti, John G. Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1976. Eshelman, Raoul. “Transcendence and the Aesthetics of Disability: The Case of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.” Anthropoetics: The Journal of Generative Anthropology 15.1 (2009). Haddon, Mark. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. London: Random House Children’s Books, 2004. Kendall, Lori. “The Nerd Within: Mass Media and the Negotiation of Identity among Computer-Using Men.” Journal of Men’s Studies 3 (1999): 353–67. Murray, Stuart. “Autism and the Contemporary Sentimental: Fiction and the Narrative Fascination of the Present.” Literature and Medicine 25.1 (2006): 24–46. Platten, David. “Reading Glasses, Guns and Robots: A History of Science in French Crime Fiction.” French Cultural Studies 12 (2001): 253–70. Rzepka, Charles J. Detective Fiction. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2005.

I. Happy Endings Chaplin’s Modern Times features one of the most subtly strange endings in Hollywood history. It concludes with the Tramp (Chaplin) and the Gamin (Paulette Goddard) walking away from the camera, down the road, toward the sunrise. (Figure 1.) They leave behind the city, their hopes for employment, and, it seems, civilization itself. The iconography deployed is clear: it is 1936, millions are unemployed, and to walk penniless into the Great Depression means destitution if not death. Chaplin invokes a familiar trope of 1930s texts, the “marginal men,” for whom “life on the road is not romanticized” and who “do not participate in any culture,” as Warren Susman puts it (171). The Tramp and the Gamin seem destined for this non-existence. For the duration of the film they have tried to live and work within society, but now they are outcasts. This is supposed to be a happy ending, though. Before marching off into poverty, the Tramp whistles a tune and tells the Gamin to “buck up” and smile; the string section swells around them. (Little-known [or discussed] fact: Chaplin later added lyrics to this music, resulting in the song “Smile,” now part of the repertoire of countless torch singers and jazz musicians. Standout recordings include those by Nat King Cole and Elvis Costello.) It seems like a great day to be alive. Why is that? In this narrative of despair, what is there to “buck up” about? The answer lies outside of the narrative. There is another iconography at work here: the rear-view silhouette of the Tramp strolling down the road, foregrounded against a wide vista, complete with bowler hat, baggy pants, and pigeon-toed walk, recalls previous Chaplin films. By invoking similar moments in his oeuvre, Chaplin signals that the Tramp, more than a mere movie character, is the mass-reproduced trademark image of Charlie Chaplin, multimillionaire entertainer and worldwide celebrity. The film doubles Chaplin with the Tramp. This double exposure, figuratively speaking, reconciles the contradictions between the cheerful atmosphere and the grim story. The celebrity’s presence alleviates the suspicion that the protagonists are doomed. Rather than being reduced to one of the “marginal men,” the Tramp is heading for the Hollywood hills, where Chaplin participates in quite a bit of culture, making hit movies for huge audiences. Nice work if you can get it, indeed. Chaplin resolves the plot by supplanting narrative logic with celebrity logic. Chaplin’s celebrity diverges somewhat from the way Hollywood celebrity functions generally. Miriam Hansen provides a popular understanding of celebrity: “The star’s presence in a particular film blurs the boundary between diegesis and discourse, between an address relying on the identification with fictional characters and an activation of the viewer’s familiarity with the star on the basis of production and publicity” (246). That is, celebrity images alter films by enlisting what Hansen terms “intertexts,” which include journalism and studio publicity. According to Hansen, celebrity invites these intertexts to inform and multiply the meaning of the narrative. By contrast, Modern Times disregards the diegesis altogether, switching focus to the celebrity. Meaning is not multiplied. It is replaced. Filmic resolution depends not only on recognizing Chaplin’s image, but also on abandoning plot and leaving the Tramp and the Gamin to their fates. This explicit use of celebrity culminates Chaplin’s reworking of early twentieth-century celebrity, his negotiations with fame that continue to reverberate today. In what follows, I will argue that Chaplin weds visual celebrity with strategies of author-production often attributed to modernist literature, strategies that parallel Michel Foucault’s theory of the “author function.” Like his modernist contemporaries, Chaplin deploys narrative techniques that gesture toward the text’s creator, not as a person who is visible in a so-called real world, but as an idealized consciousness who resides in the film and controls its meaning. While Chaplin’s Hollywood counterparts rely on images to connote individual personalities, Chaplin resists locating his self within a body, instead using the Tramp as a sign, rather than an embodiment, of his celebrity, and turning his filmmaking into an aesthetic space to contain his subjectivity. Creating himself as author, Chaplin reckons with the fact that his image remains on display. Chaplin recuperates the Tramp image, mobilizing it as a signifier of his mass audience. The Tramp’s universal recognizability, Chaplin suggests, authorizes the image to represent an entire historical moment. II. An Author Is Born Chaplin produces himself as an author residing in his texts, rather than a celebrity on display. He injects himself into Modern Times to resolve the narrative (and by extension assuage the social unrest the film portrays). This gesture insists that the presence of the author generates and controls signification. Chaplin thus echoes Foucault’s account of the author function: “The author is . . . the principle of a certain unity of writing – all differences having to be resolved” by reference to the author’s subjectivity (215). By reconciling narrative contradictions through the author, Chaplin proposes himself as the key to his films’ coherence of meaning. Foucault reminds us, however, that such positioning of the author is illusory: “We are used to thinking that the author is so different from all other men, and so transcendent . . . that, as soon as he speaks, meaning begins to proliferate, to proliferate indefinitely. The truth is quite the contrary: the author does not precede the works. The text contains a number of signs referring to the author” (221). In this formulation, authors do not create meaning. Rather, texts exercise formal attributes to produce their authors. So Modern Times, by enlisting Chaplin’s celebrity to provide closure, produces a controlling consciousness, a special class of being who “proliferates” meaning. Chaplin’s films in general contain signs of the author such as displays of cinematic tricks. These strategies, claiming affinity with objects of high culture, inevitably evoke the author. Chaplin’s author is not a physical entity. Authorship, Foucault writes, “does not refer purely and simply to a real individual,” meaning that the author is composed of text, not flesh and blood (216). Chaplin resists imbuing the image of the Tramp with the sort of subjectivity reserved for the author. In this way Chaplin again departs from usual accounts of Hollywood stars. In Chaplin’s time, according to Richard Dyer, “The roles and/or the performance of a star in a film were taken as revealing the personality of the star” (20). (Moreover, Chaplin achieves all that fame without relying on close-ups. Critics typically cite the close-up as the device most instrumental to Hollywood celebrity. Scott J. Juengel writes of the close-up as “a fetishization of the face” that creates “an intense manifestation of subjectivity” [353; also see Dyer, 14-15, and Susman, 282]. The one true close-up I have found in Chaplin’s early films occurs in “A Woman” [1915], when Chaplin goes in drag. It shows Chaplin’s face minus the trademark fake mustache, as if to de-familiarize his recognizability.) Dyer represents the standard view: Hollywood movies propose that stars’ public images directly reflect their private personalities. Chaplin’s celebrity contradicts that model. Chaplin’s initial fame stems from his 1914 performances in Mack Sennett’s Keystone productions, consummate examples of the slapstick genre, in which the Tramp and his trademark regalia first become recognizable trademarks. Far from offering roles that reveal “personality,” slapstick treats both people and things as objects, equally at the mercy of apparently unpredictable physical laws. Within this genre the Tramp remains an object, subject to the chaos of slapstick just like the other bodies on the screen. Chaplin’s celebrity emerges without the suggestion that his image contains a unique subject or stands out among other slapstick objects. The disinclination to treat the image as container of the subject – shared with literary modernism – sets up the Tramp as a sign that connotes Chaplin’s presence elsewhere. Gradually, Chaplin turns his image into an emblem that metonymically refers to the author. When he begins to direct, Chaplin manipulates the generic features of slapstick to reconstruct his image, establishing the Tramp in a central position. For example, in “The Vagabond” (1916), the Tramp becomes embroiled in a barroom brawl and runs toward the saloon’s swinging doors, neatly sidestepping before reaching them. The pursuer’s momentum, naturally, carries him through the doorway. Other characters exist in a slapstick dimension that turns bodies into objects, but not the Tramp. He exploits his liberation from slapstick by exacerbating the other characters’ lack of control. Such moments grant the Tramp a degree of physical control that enhances his value in relation to the other images. The Tramp, bearing the celebrity image and referring to authorial control, becomes a signifier of Chaplin’s combination of authorship and celebrity. Chaplin devises a metonymic relationship between author and image; the Tramp cannot encompass the author, only refer to him. Maintaining his subjectivity separate from the image, Chaplin imagines his films as an aesthetic space where signification is contingent on the author. He attempts to delimit what he, his name and image, signify – in opposition to intertexts that might mobilize meanings drawn from outside the text. Writing of celebrity intertexts, P. David Marshall notes that “the descriptions of the connections between celebrities’ ‘real’ lives and their working lives . . . are what configure the celebrity status” (58). For Chaplin, to situate the subject in a celebrity body would be to allow other influences – uses of his name or image in other texts – to determine the meaning of the celebrity sign. His separation of image and author reveals an anxiety about identifying one specific body or image as location of the subject, about putting the actual subject on display and in circulation. The opening moment of “Shoulder Arms” (1920) illustrates Chaplin’s uneasy alliance of celebrity, author, and image. The title card displays a cartoon sketch of the Tramp in doughboy garb. Alongside, print lettering conveys the film title and the words, “written and produced by” above a blank area. A real hand appears, points to the drawing, and elaborately signs “Charles Chaplin” in the blank space. It then pantomimes shooting a gun at the Tramp. The film announces itself as a product of one author, represented by a giant, disembodied hand. The hand provides an inimitable signature of the author, while the Tramp, disfigured by the uniform but still identifiable, provides an inimitable signature of the celebrity. The relationship between the image and the “writer” is co-dependent but antagonistic; the same hand signs Chaplin’s name and mimes shooting the Tramp. Author-production merges with resistance to the image as representation of the subject. III. The Image Is History “Shoulder Arms” reminds us that despite Chaplin’s conception of himself as an incorporeal author, the Tramp remains present, and not quite accounted for. Here Foucault’s author function finds its limitations, failing to explain author-production that relies on the image even as it situates the author in the text. The Tramp remains visible in Modern Times while the film has made it clear that the author is present to engender significance. To Slavoj Zizek the Tramp is “the remainder” of the text, existing on a separate plane from the diegesis (6). Zizek watches City Lights (1931) and finds that the Tramp, who is continually shifting between classes and characters, acts as “an intercessor, middleman, purveyor.” He is continually mistaken for something he is not, and when the mistake is recognized, “he turns into a disturbing stain one tries to get rid of as quickly as possible” (4). Zizek points out that the Tramp is often positioned outside of social institutions, set slightly apart from the diegesis. Modern Times follows this pattern as well. For example, throughout the film the Tramp continually shifts from one side of the law to the other. He endures two prison sentences, prevents a jailbreak, and becomes a security guard. The film doesn’t quite know what to do with him. Chaplin takes up this remainder and transforms it into an emblem of his mass popularity. The Tramp has always floated somewhat above the narrative; in Modern Times that narrative occurs against a backdrop of historical turmoil. Chaplin, therefore, superimposes the Tramp on to scenes of historical change. The film actually withholds the tramp image during the first section of the movie, as the character is working in a factory and does not appear in his trademark regalia until he emerges from a stay in the “hospital.” His appearance engenders a montage of filmmaking techniques: abrupt cross-cutting between shots at tilted angles, superimpositions, and crowds of people and cars moving rapidly through the city, all set to (Chaplin’s) jarring, brass-wind music. The Tramp passes before a closed factory and accidentally marches at the head of a left-wing demonstration. The sequence combines signs of social upheaval, technological advancement, and Chaplin’s own technical achievements, to indicate that the film has entered “modern times” – all spurred by the appearance of the Tramp in his trademark attire, thus implicating the Tramp in the narration of historical change. By casting his image as a universally identifiable sign of Chaplin’s mass popularity, Chaplin authorizes it to function as a sign of the historical moment. The logic behind Chaplin’s treating the Tramp as an emblem of history is articulated by Walter Benjamin’s concept of the dialectical image. Benjamin explains how culture identifies itself through images, writing that “Every present day is determined by the images that are synchronic with it: each “now” is of a particular recognizability”(462-3). Benjamin proposes that the image, achieving a “particular recognizability,” puts temporality in stasis. This illuminates the dynamic by which Chaplin elevates the mass-reproduced icon to transcendent historical symbol. The Tramp image crystallizes that passing of time into a static unit. Indeed, Chaplin instigates the way the twentieth century, according to Richard Schickel, registers its history. Schickel writes that “In the 1920s, the media, newly abustle, had discovered techniques whereby anyone could be wrested out of whatever context had originally nurtured him and turned into images . . . for no previous era is it possible to make a history out of images . . . for no subsequent era is it possible to avoid doing so. For most of us, now, this is history” (70-1). From Schickel, Benjamin, and Chaplin, a picture of the far-reaching implications of Chaplin’s celebrity emerges. By gesturing beyond the boundary of the text, toward Chaplin’s audience, the Tramp image makes legible that significant portion of the masses unified in recognition of Chaplin’s celebrity, affirming that the celebrity sign depends on its wide circulation to attain significance. As Marshall writes, “The celebrity’s power is derived from the collective configuration of its meaning.” The image’s connotative function requires collaboration with the audience. The collective configuration Chaplin mobilizes is the Tramp’s recognizability as it moves through scenes of historical change, whatever other discourses may attach to it. Chaplin thrusts the image into this role because of its status as remainder, which stems from Chaplin’s rejection of the body as a location of the subject. Chaplin has incorporated the modernist desire to situate subjectivity in the text rather than the body. Paradoxically, this impulse expands the role of visuality, turning the celebrity image into a principal figure by which our culture understands itself. References Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1999. Chaplin, Charles, dir. City Lights. RBC Films, 1931. –––. Modern Times. Perf. Chaplin and Paulette Goddard, United Artists, 1936. –––. “Shoulder Arms.” First National, 1918. –––. “The Vagabond.” Mutual, 1916. Dyer, Richard. Stars. London: BFI, 1998. Foucault, Michel. Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology. Ed. James D. Faubion. New York: The New Press, 1998. Hansen, Miriam. Babel and Babylon. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1991. Marshall, P. David. Celebrity and Power. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1998. Juengel, Scott J. “Face, Figure and Physiognomics: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and the Moving Image.” Novel 33.3 (Summer 2000): 353-67. Schickel. Intimate Strangers. New York: Fromm International Publishing Company, 1986. Susman, Warren I. Culture as History. New York: Pantheon Books, 1973. Zizek, Slavoj. Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out. New York: Routledge, 1992. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Goldman, Jonathan. "Double Exposure: Charlie Chaplin as Author and Celebrity." M/C Journal 7.5 (2004). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/05-goldman.php>. APA Style Goldman, J. (Nov. 2004) "Double Exposure: Charlie Chaplin as Author and Celebrity," M/C Journal, 7(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/05-goldman.php>.

The brand began, quite literally, as a method for ranchers to identify their cattle. By burning a distinct symbol into the hide of a baby calf, the owner could insure that if it one day wandered off his property or was stolen by a competitor, he’d be able to point to that logo and claim the animal as his rightful property. When the manufacturers of products adopted the brand as a way of guaranteeing the quality of their goods, its function remained pretty much the same. Buying a package of oats with the Quaker label meant the customer could trace back these otherwise generic oats to their source. If there was a problem, he knew where he could turn. More important, if the oats were of satisfactory or superior quality, he knew where he could get them again. Trademarking a brand meant that no one else could call his oats Quaker. Advertising in this innocent age simply meant publicizing the existence of one’s brand. The sole objective was to increase consumers awareness of the product or company that made it. Those who even thought to employ specialists for the exclusive purpose of writing ad copy hired newspaper reporters and travelling salesmen, who knew how to explain the attributes of an item in words that people tended to remember. It wasn’t until 1922 that a preacher and travelling “medicine show” salesman-turned-copywriter named Claude Hopkins decided that advertising should be systematized into a science. His short but groundbreaking book Scientific Advertising proposed that the advertisement is merely a printed extension of the salesman¹s pitch and should follow the same rules. Hopkins believed in using hard descriptions over hype, and text over image: “The more you tell, the more you sell” and “White space is wasted space” were his mantras. Hopkins believed that any illustrations used in an ad should be directly relevant to the product itself, not just a loose or emotional association. He insisted on avoiding “frivolity” at all costs, arguing that “no one ever bought from a clown.” Although some images did appear in advertisements and on packaging as early as the 1800s - the Quaker Oats man showed up in 1877 - these weren¹t consciously crafted to induce psychological states in customers. They were meant just to help people remember one brand over another. How better to recall the brand Quaker than to see a picture of one? It wasn’t until the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, as Americans turned toward movies and television and away from newspapers and radio, that advertisers’ focus shifted away from describing their brands and to creating images for them. During these decades, Midwestern adman Leo Burnett concocted what is often called the Chicago school of advertising, in which lovable characters are used to represent products. Green Giant, which was originally just the Minnesota Valley Canning Company’s code name for an experimental pea, became the Jolly Green Giant in young Burnett’s world of animated characters. He understood that the figure would make a perfect and enticing brand image for an otherwise boring product and could also serve as a mnemonic device for consumers. As he watched his character grow in popularity, Burnett discovered that the mythical figure of a green giant had resonance in many different cultures around the world. It became a kind of archetype and managed to penetrate the psyche in more ways than one. Burnett was responsible for dozens of character-based brand images, including Tony the Tiger, Charlie the Tuna, Morris the Cat, and the Marlboro Man. In each case, the character creates a sense of drama, which engages the audience in the pitch. This was Burnett’s great insight. He still wanted to sell a product based on its attributes, but he knew he had to draw in his audience using characters. Brand images were also based on places, like Hidden Valley Ranch salad dressing, or on recognizable situations, such as the significant childhood memories labelled “Kodak moments” or a mother nurturing her son on a cold day, a defining image for Campbell’s soup. In all these cases, however, the moment, location, or character went only so far as to draw the audience into the ad, after which they would be subjected to a standard pitch: ‘Soup is good food’, or ‘Sorry, Charlie, only the best tuna get to be Starkist’. Burnett saw himself as a homespun Midwesterner who was contributing to American folklore while speaking in the plain language of the people. He took pride in the fact that his ads used words like “ain’t”; not because they had some calculated psychological effect on the audience, but because they communicated in a natural, plainspoken style. As these methods found their way to Madison Avenue and came to be practiced much more self-consciously, Burnett¹s love for American values and his focus on brand attributes were left behind. Branding became much more ethereal and image-based, and ads only occasionally nodded to a product’s attributes. In the 1960s, advertising gurus like David Ogilvy came up with rules about television advertising that would have made Claude Hopkins shudder. “Food in motion” dictated that food should always be shot by a moving camera. “Open with fire” meant that ads should start in a very exciting and captivating way. Ogilvy told his creatives to use supers - text superimposed on the screen to emphasize important phrases and taglines. All these techniques were devised to promote brand image, not the product. Ogilvy didn’t believe consumers could distinguish between products were it not for their images. In Ogilvy on Advertising, he explains that most people cannot tell the difference between their own “favourite” whiskey and the closest two competitors’: ‘Have they tried all three and compared the taste? Don¹t make me laugh. The reality is that these three brands have different images which appeal to different kinds of people. It isn¹t the whiskey they choose, it’s the image. The brand image is ninety percent of what the distiller has to sell.’ (Ogilvy, 1993). Thus, we learned to “trust our car to the man who wears the star” not because Texaco had better gasoline than Shell, but because the company’s advertisers had created a better brand image. While Burnett and his disciples were building brand myths, another school of advertisers was busy learning about its audience. Back in the 1920s, Raymond Rubicam, who eventually founded the agency Young and Rubicam, thought it might be interesting to hire a pollster named Dr. Gallup from Northwestern University to see what could be gleaned about consumers from a little market research. The advertising industry’s version of cultural anthropology, or demographics, was born. Like the public-relations experts who study their target populations in order to manipulate them later, marketers began conducting polls, market surveys, and focus groups on the segments of the population they hoped to influence. And to draw clear, clean lines between demographic groups, researchers must almost always base distinctions on four factors: race, age, sex, and wages. Demographic research is reductionist by design. I once consulted to an FM radio station whose station manager wanted to know, “Who is our listener?” Asking such a question reduces an entire listenership down to one fictional person. It’s possible that no single individual will ever match the “customer profile” meant to apply to all customers, which is why so much targeted marketing often borders on classist, racist, and sexist pandering. Billboards for most menthol cigarettes, for example, picture African-Americans because, according to demographic research, black people prefer them to regular cigarettes. Microsoft chose Rolling Stones songs to launch Windows 95, a product targeted at wealthy baby boomers. “The Women’s Global Challenge” was an advertising-industry-created Olympics for women, with no purpose other than to market to active females. By the 1970s, the two strands of advertising theory - demographic research and brand image - were combined to develop campaigns that work on both levels. To this day, we know to associate Volvos with safety, Dr. Pepper with individuality, and Harley-Davidson with American heritage. Each of these brand images is crafted to appeal to the target consumer’s underlying psychological needs: Volvo ads are aimed at upper-middle-class white parents who fear for their children’s health and security, Dr. Pepper is directed to young nonconformists, and the Harley-Davidson image supports its riders’ self-perception as renegades. Today’s modern (or perhaps postmodern) brands don’t invent a corporate image on their own; they appropriate one from the media itself, such as MetLife did with Snoopy, Butterfinger did with Bart Simpson, or Kmart did by hiring Penny Marshall and Rosie O’Donnell. These mascots were selected because their perceived characteristics match the values of their target consumers - not the products themselves. In the language of today’s marketers, brand images do not reflect on products but on advertisers’ perceptions of their audiences’ psychology. This focus on audience composition and values has become the standard operating procedure in all of broadcasting. When Fox TV executives learned that their animated series “King of the Hill”, about a Texan propane distributor, was not faring well with certain demographics, for example, they took a targeted approach to their character’s rehabilitation. The Brandweek piece on Fox’s ethnic campaign uncomfortably dances around the issue. Hank Hill is the proverbial everyman, and Fox wants viewers to get comfortable with him; especially viewers in New York, where “King of the Hill”’s homespun humor hasn’t quite caught on with the young urbanites. So far this season, the show has pulled in a 10.1 rating/15 share in households nationally, while garnering a 7.9 rating/12 share in New York (Brandweek, 1997) As far as Fox was concerned, while regular people could identify with the network’s new “everyman” character, New Yorkers weren’t buying his middle-American patter. The television show’s ratings proved what TV executives had known all along: that New York City’s Jewish demographic doesn’t see itself as part of the rest of America. Fox’s strategy for “humanizing” the character to those irascible urbanites was to target the group’s ethnographic self-image. Fox put ads for the show on the panels of sidewalk coffee wagons throughout Manhattan, with the tagline “Have a bagel with Hank”. In an appeal to the target market’s well-developed (and well-researched) cynicism, Hank himself is shown saying, “May I suggest you have that with a schmear”. The disarmingly ethnic humor here is meant to underscore the absurdity of a Texas propane salesman using a Jewish insider’s word like “schmear.” In another Upper West Side billboard, Hank’s son appeals to the passing traffic: “Hey yo! Somebody toss me up a knish!” As far as the New York demographic is concerned, these jokes transform the characters from potentially threatening Southern rednecks into loveable hicks bending over backward to appeal to Jewish sensibilities, and doing so with a comic and, most important, nonthreatening inadequacy. Today, the most intensely targeted demographic is the baby - the future consumer. Before an average American child is twenty months old, he can recognize the McDonald’s logo and many other branded icons. Nearly everything a toddler encounters - from Band-Aids to underpants - features the trademarked characters of Disney or other marketing empires. Although this target market may not be in a position to exercise its preferences for many years, it pays for marketers to imprint their brands early. General Motors bought a two-page ad in Sports Illustrated for Kids for its Chevy Venture minivan. Their brand manager rationalized that the eight-to-fourteen-year-old demographic consists of “back-seat consumers” (Leonhardt, 1997). The real intention of target marketing to children and babies, however, goes deeper. The fresh neurons of young brains are valuable mental real estate to admen. By seeding their products and images early, the marketers can do more than just develop brand recognition; they can literally cultivate a demographic’s sensibilities as they are formed. A nine-year-old child who can recognize the Budweiser frogs and recite their slogan (Bud-weis-er) is more likely to start drinking beer than one who can remember only Tony the Tiger yelling, “They¹re great!” (Currently, more children recognize the frogs than Tony.) This indicates a long-term coercive strategy. The abstraction of brand images from the products they represent, combined with an increasing assault on our demographically targeted psychological profiles, led to some justifiable consumer paranoia by the 1970s. Advertising was working on us in ways we couldn’t fully understand, and people began to look for an explanation. In 1973, Wilson Bryan Key, a communications researcher, wrote the first of four books about “subliminal advertising,” in which he accused advertisers of hiding sexual imagery in ice cubes, and psychoactive words like “sex” onto the airbrushed surfaces of fashion photographs. Having worked on many advertising campaigns from start to finish, in close proximity to everyone from copywriters and art directors to printers, I can comfortably put to rest any rumours that major advertising agencies are engaging in subliminal campaigns. How do images that could be interpreted as “sexual” show up in ice cubes or elbows? The final photographs chosen for ads are selected by committee out of hundreds that are actually shot. After hours or days of consideration, the group eventually feels drawn to one or two photos out of the batch. Not surprising, these photos tend to have more evocative compositions and details, but no penises, breasts, or skulls are ever superimposed onto the images. In fact, the man who claims to have developed subliminal persuasion, James Vicary, admitted to Advertising Age in 1984 that he had fabricated his evidence that the technique worked in order to drum up business for his failing research company. But this confession has not assuaged Key and others who relentlessly, perhaps obsessively, continue to pursue those they feel are planting secret visual messages in advertisements. To be fair to Key, advertisers have left themselves open to suspicion by relegating their work to the abstract world of the image and then targeting consumer psychology so deliberately. According to research by the Roper Organization in 1992, fifty-seven percent of American consumers still believe that subliminal advertising is practiced on a regular basis, and only one in twelve think it “almost never” happens. To protect themselves from the techniques they believe are being used against them, the advertising audience has adopted a stance of cynical suspicion. To combat our increasing awareness and suspicion of demographic targeting, marketers have developed a more camouflaged form of categorization based on psychological profiles instead of race and age. Jim Schroer, the executive director of new marketing strategy at Ford explains his abandonment of broad-demographic targeting: ‘It’s smarter to think about emotions and attitudes, which all go under the term: psychographics - those things that can transcend demographic groups.’ (Schroer, 1997) Instead, he now appeals to what he calls “consumers’ images of themselves.” Unlike broad demographics, the psychographic is developed using more narrowly structured qualitative-analysis techniques, like focus groups, in-depth interviews, and even home surveillance. Marketing analysts observe the behaviors of volunteer subjects, ask questions, and try to draw causal links between feelings, self-image, and purchases. A company called Strategic Directions Group provides just such analysis of the human psyche. In their study of the car-buying habits of the forty-plus baby boomers and their elders, they sought to define the main psychological predilections that human beings in this age group have regarding car purchases. Although they began with a demographic subset of the overall population, their analysis led them to segment the group into psychographic types. For example, members of one psychographic segment, called the ³Reliables,² think of driving as a way to get from point A to point B. The “Everyday People” campaign for Toyota is aimed at this group and features people depending on their reliable and efficient little Toyotas. A convertible Saab, on the other hand, appeals to the ³Stylish Fun² category, who like trendy and fun-to-drive imports. One of the company’s commercials shows a woman at a boring party fantasizing herself into an oil painting, where she drives along the canvas in a sporty yellow Saab. Psychographic targeting is more effective than demographic targeting because it reaches for an individual customer more directly - like a fly fisherman who sets bait and jiggles his rod in a prescribed pattern for a particular kind of fish. It’s as if a marketing campaign has singled you out and recognizes your core values and aspirations, without having lumped you into a racial or economic stereotype. It amounts to a game of cat-and-mouse between advertisers and their target psychographic groups. The more effort we expend to escape categorization, the more ruthlessly the marketers pursue us. In some cases, in fact, our psychographic profiles are based more on the extent to which we try to avoid marketers than on our fundamental goals or values. The so-called “Generation X” adopted the anti-chic aesthetic of thrift-store grunge in an effort to find a style that could not be so easily identified and exploited. Grunge was so self-consciously lowbrow and nonaspirational that it seemed, at first, impervious to the hype and glamour normally applied swiftly to any emerging trend. But sure enough, grunge anthems found their way onto the soundtracks of television commercials, and Dodge Neons were hawked by kids in flannel shirts saying “Whatever.” The members of Generation X are putting up a good fight. Having already developed an awareness of how marketers attempt to target their hearts and wallets, they use their insight into programming to resist these attacks. Unlike the adult marketers pursuing them, young people have grown up immersed in the language of advertising and public relations. They speak it like natives. As a result, they are more than aware when a commercial or billboard is targeting them. In conscious defiance of demographic-based pandering, they adopt a stance of self-protective irony‹distancing themselves from the emotional ploys of the advertisers. Lorraine Ketch, the director of planning in charge of Levi¹s trendy Silvertab line, explained, “This audience hates marketing that’s in your face. It eyeballs it a mile away, chews it up and spits it out” (On Advertising, 1998). Chiat/Day, one of the world’s best-known and experimental advertising agencies, found the answer to the crisis was simply to break up the Gen-X demographic into separate “tribes” or subdemographics - and include subtle visual references to each one of them in the ads they produce for the brand. According to Levi’s director of consumer marketing, the campaign meant to communicate, “We really understand them, but we are not trying too hard” (On Advertising, 1998). Probably unintentionally, Ms. Ketch has revealed the new, even more highly abstract plane on which advertising is now being communicated. Instead of creating and marketing a brand image, advertisers are creating marketing campaigns about the advertising itself. Silvertab’s target market is supposed to feel good about being understood, but even better about understanding the way they are being marketed to. The “drama” invented by Leo Burnett and refined by David Ogilvy and others has become a play within a play. The scene itself has shifted. The dramatic action no longer occurs between the audience and the product, the brand, or the brand image, but between the audience and the brand marketers. As audiences gain even more control over the media in which these interactive stories unfold, advertising evolves ever closer to a theatre of the absurd. excerpted from Coercion: Why We Listen to What "They" Say)? Works Cited Ogilvy, David. Ogilvy on Advertising. New York: Vintage, 1983. Brandweek Staff, "Number Crunching, Hollywood Style," Brandweek. October 6, 1997. Leonhardt, David, and Kathleen Kerwin, "Hey Kid, Buy This!" Business Week. June 30, 1997 Schroer, Jim. Quoted in "Why We Kick Tires," by Carol Morgan and Doron Levy. Brandweek. Sept 29, 1997. "On Advertising," The New York Times. August 14, 1998 Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Rushkoff, Douglas. "Coercion " M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0306/06-coercion.php>. APA Style Rushkoff, D. (2003, Jun 19). Coercion . M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0306/06-coercion.php>

The curtain rose. The howling of desert wind filled the performance hall in the Shanghai Grand Theatre. Into the center stage, where a scenic construction of a mountain cliff and a desert landscape was dimly lit, entered the character of the Daoist priest Wang Yuanlu (1849–1931), performed by Chen Yizong. Dressed in a worn and dusty outfit of dark blue cotton, characteristic of Daoist priests, Wang began to sweep the floor. After a few moments, he discovered a hidden chambre sealed inside one of the rock sanctuaries carved into the cliff.Signaled by the quick, crystalline, stirring wave of sound from the chimes, a melodious Chinese ocarina solo joined in slowly from the background. Astonished by thousands of Buddhist sūtra scrolls, wall paintings, and sculptures he had just accidentally discovered in the caves, Priest Wang set his broom aside and began to examine these treasures. Dawn had not yet arrived, and the desert sky was pitch-black. Priest Wang held his oil lamp high, strode rhythmically in excitement, sat crossed-legged in a meditative pose, and unfolded a scroll. The sound of the ocarina became fuller and richer and the texture of the music more complex, as several other instruments joined in.Below is the opening scene of the award-winning, theatrical dance-drama Dunhuang, My Dreamland, created by China’s state-sponsored Lanzhou Song and Dance Theatre in 2000. Figure 1a: Poster Side A of Dunhuang, My Dreamland Figure 1b: Poster Side B of Dunhuang, My DreamlandThe scene locates the dance-drama in the rock sanctuaries that today are known as the Dunhuang Mogao Caves, housing Buddhist art accumulated over a period of a thousand years, one of the best well-known UNESCO heritages on the Silk Road. Historically a frontier metropolis, Dunhuang was a strategic site along the Silk Road in northwestern China, a crossroads of trade, and a locus for religious, cultural, and intellectual influences since the Han dynasty (206 B.C.E.–220 C.E.). Travellers, especially Buddhist monks from India and central Asia, passing through Dunhuang on their way to Chang’an (present day Xi’an), China’s ancient capital, would stop to meditate in the Mogao Caves and consult manuscripts in the monastery's library. At the same time, Chinese pilgrims would travel by foot from China through central Asia to Pakistan, India, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka, playing a key role in the exchanges between ancient China and the outside world. Travellers from China would stop to acquire provisions at Dunhuang before crossing the Gobi Desert to continue on their long journey abroad. Figure 2: Dunhuang Mogao CavesThis article approaches the idea of “abroad” by examining the present-day imagination of journeys along the Silk Road—specifically, staged performances of the various Silk Road journey-themed dance-dramas sponsored by the Chinese state for enhancing its cultural and foreign policies since the 1970s (Kuang).As ethnomusicologists have demonstrated, musicians, choreographers, and playwrights often utilise historical materials in their performances to construct connections between the past and the present (Bohlman; Herzfeld; Lam; Rees; Shelemay; Tuohy; Wade; Yung: Rawski; Watson). The ancient Silk Road, which linked the Mediterranean coast with central China and beyond, via oasis towns such as Samarkand, has long been associated with the concept of “journeying abroad.” Journeys to distant, foreign lands and encounters of unknown, mysterious cultures along the Silk Road have been documented in historical records, such as A Record of Buddhist Kingdoms (Faxian) and The Great Tang Records on the Western Regions (Xuanzang), and illustrated in classical literature, such as The Travels of Marco Polo (Polo) and the 16th century Chinese novel Journey to the West (Wu). These journeys—coming and going from multiple directions and to different destinations—have inspired contemporary staged performance for audiences around the globe.Home and Abroad: Dunhuang and the Silk RoadDunhuang, My Dreamland (2000), the contemporary dance-drama, staged the journey of a young pilgrim painter travelling from Chang’an to a land of the unfamiliar and beyond borders, in search for the arts that have inspired him. Figure 3: A scene from Dunhuang, My Dreamland showing the young pilgrim painter in the Gobi Desert on the ancient Silk RoadFar from his home, he ended his journey in Dunhuang, historically considered the northwestern periphery of China, well beyond Yangguan and Yumenguan, the bordering passes that separate China and foreign lands. Later scenes in Dunhuang, My Dreamland, portrayed through multiethnic music and dances, the dynamic interactions among merchants, cultural and religious envoys, warriors, and politicians that were making their own journey from abroad to China. The theatrical dance-drama presents a historically inspired, re-imagined vision of both “home” and “abroad” to its audiences as they watch the young painter travel along the Silk Road, across the Gobi Desert, arriving at his own ideal, artistic “homeland”, the Dunhuang Mogao Caves. Since his journey is ultimately a spiritual one, the conceptualisation of travelling “abroad” could also be perceived as “a journey home.”Staged more than four hundred times since it premiered in Beijing in April 2000, Dunhuang, My Dreamland is one of the top ten titles in China’s National Stage Project and one of the most successful theatrical dance-dramas ever produced in China. With revenue of more than thirty million renminbi (RMB), it ranks as the most profitable theatrical dance-drama ever produced in China, with a preproduction cost of six million RMB. The production team receives financial support from China’s Ministry of Culture for its “distinctive ethnic features,” and its “aim to promote traditional Chinese culture,” according to Xu Rong, an official in the Cultural Industry Department of the Ministry. Labeled an outstanding dance-drama of the Chinese nation, it aims to present domestic and international audiences with a vision of China as a historically multifaceted and cosmopolitan nation that has been in close contact with the outside world through the ancient Silk Road. Its production company has been on tour in selected cities throughout China and in countries abroad, including Austria, Spain, and France, literarily making the young pilgrim painter’s “journey along the Silk Road” a new journey abroad, off stage and in reality.Dunhuang, My Dreamland was not the first, nor is it the last, staged performances that portrays the Chinese re-imagination of “journeying abroad” along the ancient Silk Road. It was created as one of many versions of Dunhuang bihua yuewu, a genre of music, dance, and dramatic performances created in the early twentieth century and based primarily on artifacts excavated from the Mogao Caves (Kuang). “The Mogao Caves are the greatest repository of early Chinese art,” states Mimi Gates, who works to increase public awareness of the UNESCO site and raise funds toward its conservation. “Located on the Chinese end of the Silk Road, it also is the place where many cultures of the world intersected with one another, so you have Greek and Roman, Persian and Middle Eastern, Indian and Chinese cultures, all interacting. Given the nature of our world today, it is all very relevant” (Pollack). As an expressive art form, this genre has been thriving since the late 1970s contributing to the global imagination of China’s “Silk Road journeys abroad” long before Dunhuang, My Dreamland achieved its domestic and international fame. For instance, in 2004, The Thousand-Handed and Thousand-Eyed Avalokiteśvara—one of the most representative (and well-known) Dunhuang bihua yuewu programs—was staged as a part of the cultural program during the Paralympic Games in Athens, Greece. This performance, as well as other Dunhuang bihua yuewu dance programs was the perfect embodiment of a foreign religion that arrived in China from abroad and became Sinicized (Kuang). Figure 4: Mural from Dunhuang Mogao Cave No. 45A Brief History of Staging the Silk Road JourneysThe staging of the Silk Road journeys abroad began in the late 1970s. Historically, the Silk Road signifies a multiethnic, cosmopolitan frontier, which underwent incessant conflicts between Chinese sovereigns and nomadic peoples (as well as between other groups), but was strongly imbued with the customs and institutions of central China (Duan, Mair, Shi, Sima). In the twentieth century, when China was no longer an empire, but had become what the early 20th-century reformer Liang Qichao (1873–1929) called “a nation among nations,” the long history of the Silk Road and the colourful, legendary journeys abroad became instrumental in the formation of a modern Chinese nation of unified diversity rooted in an ancient cosmopolitan past. The staged Silk Road theme dance-dramas thus participate in this formation of the Chinese imagination of “nation” and “abroad,” as they aestheticise Chinese history and geography. History and geography—aspects commonly considered constituents of a nation as well as our conceptualisations of “abroad”—are “invariably aestheticized to a certain degree” (Bakhtin 208). Diverse historical and cultural elements from along the Silk Road come together in this performance genre, which can be considered the most representative of various possible stagings of the history and culture of the Silk Road journeys.In 1979, the Chinese state officials in Gansu Province commissioned the benchmark dance-drama Rain of Flowers along the Silk Road, a spectacular theatrical dance-drama praising the pure and noble friendship which existed between the peoples of China and other countries in the Tang dynasty (618-907 C.E.). While its plot also revolves around the Dunhuang Caves and the life of a painter, staged at one of the most critical turning points in modern Chinese history, the work as a whole aims to present the state’s intention of re-establishing diplomatic ties with the outside world after the Cultural Revolution. Unlike Dunhuang, My Dreamland, it presents a nation’s journey abroad and home. To accomplish this goal, Rain of Flowers along the Silk Road introduces the fictional character Yunus, a wealthy Persian merchant who provides the audiences a vision of the historical figure of Peroz III, the last Sassanian prince, who after the Arab conquest of Iran in 651 C.E., found refuge in China. By incorporating scenes of ethnic and folk dances, the drama then stages the journey of painter Zhang’s daughter Yingniang to Persia (present-day Iran) and later, Yunus’s journey abroad to the Tang dynasty imperial court as the Persian Empire’s envoy.Rain of Flowers along the Silk Road, since its debut at Beijing’s Great Hall of the People on the first of October 1979 and shortly after at the Theatre La Scala in Milan, has been staged in more than twenty countries and districts, including France, Italy, Japan, Thailand, Russia, Latvia, Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan, and recently, in 2013, at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York.“The Road”: Staging the Journey TodayWithin the contemporary context of global interdependencies, performing arts have been used as strategic devices for social mobilisation and as a means to represent and perform modern national histories and foreign policies (Davis, Rees, Tian, Tuohy, Wong, David Y. H. Wu). The Silk Road has been chosen as the basis for these state-sponsored, extravagantly produced, and internationally staged contemporary dance programs. In 2008, the welcoming ceremony and artistic presentation at the Olympic Games in Beijing featured twenty apsara dancers and a Dunhuang bihua yuewu dancer with long ribbons, whose body was suspended in mid-air on a rectangular LED extension held by hundreds of performers; on the giant LED screen was a depiction of the ancient Silk Road.In March 2013, Chinese president Xi Jinping introduced the initiatives “Silk Road Economic Belt” and “21st Century Maritime Silk Road” during his journeys abroad in Kazakhstan and Indonesia. These initiatives are now referred to as “One Belt, One Road.” The State Council lists in details the policies and implementation plans for this initiative on its official web page, www.gov.cn. In April 2013, the China Institute in New York launched a yearlong celebration, starting with "Dunhuang: Buddhist Art and the Gateway of the Silk Road" with a re-creation of one of the caves and a selection of artifacts from the site. In March 2015, the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), China’s top economic planning agency, released a new action plan outlining key details of the “One Belt, One Road” initiative. Xi Jinping has made the program a centrepiece of both his foreign and domestic economic policies. One of the central economic strategies is to promote cultural industry that could enhance trades along the Silk Road.Encouraged by the “One Belt, One Road” policies, in March 2016, The Silk Princess premiered in Xi’an and was staged at the National Centre for the Performing Arts in Beijing the following July. While Dunhuang, My Dreamland and Rain of Flowers along the Silk Road were inspired by the Buddhist art found in Dunhuang, The Silk Princess, based on a story about a princess bringing silk and silkworm-breeding skills to the western regions of China in the Tang Dynasty (618-907) has a different historical origin. The princess's story was portrayed in a woodblock from the Tang Dynasty discovered by Sir Marc Aurel Stein, a British archaeologist during his expedition to Xinjiang (now Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region) in the early 19th century, and in a temple mural discovered during a 2002 Chinese-Japanese expedition in the Dandanwulike region. Figure 5: Poster of The Silk PrincessIn January 2016, the Shannxi Provincial Song and Dance Troupe staged The Silk Road, a new theatrical dance-drama. Unlike Dunhuang, My Dreamland, the newly staged dance-drama “centers around the ‘road’ and the deepening relationship merchants and travellers developed with it as they traveled along its course,” said Director Yang Wei during an interview with the author. According to her, the show uses seven archetypes—a traveler, a guard, a messenger, and so on—to present the stories that took place along this historic route. Unbounded by specific space or time, each of these archetypes embodies the foreign-travel experience of a different group of individuals, in a manner that may well be related to the social actors of globalised culture and of transnationalism today. Figure 6: Poster of The Silk RoadConclusionAs seen in Rain of Flowers along the Silk Road and Dunhuang, My Dreamland, staging the processes of Silk Road journeys has become a way of connecting the Chinese imagination of “home” with the Chinese imagination of “abroad.” Staging a nation’s heritage abroad on contemporary stages invites a new imagination of homeland, borders, and transnationalism. Once aestheticised through staged performances, such as that of the Dunhuang bihua yuewu, the historical and topological landscape of Dunhuang becomes a performed narrative, embodying the national heritage.The staging of Silk Road journeys continues, and is being developed into various forms, from theatrical dance-drama to digital exhibitions such as the Smithsonian’s Pure Land: Inside the Mogao Grottes at Dunhuang (Stromberg) and the Getty’s Cave Temples of Dunhuang: Buddhist Art on China's Silk Road (Sivak and Hood). 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Chapter six discusses the effects produced by Pasolini’s vocal performance in his films. Pasolini’s voice changes according to the function attributed to his authorial presence. It is his real voice when he presents himself as the author, as in film experiments such as Appunti per un’Orestiade Africana (Notes Toward an African Orestes, 1970) and Comizi d’amore (Love Meetings, 1963). However, when he plays a character in a fictional narrative, as in the case of The Trilogy of Life, his voice is dubbed. In this chapter I examine the difference between these two kinds of voice, showing that also dubbing and voiceover are elements of the performance of Pasolini’s authorship. I focus particularly on dubbing in Edipo re (Oedipus Rex, 1967), where Pasolini played the apparently marginal role of the High Priest. Pasolini’s use of his actual voice, as in the case of the voiceover in La sequenza del fiore di carta (The Sequence of the Paper Flower, 1969) and La Ricotta shows the author’s epistemic authority and control over the interpretation of his work. He particularly emphasizes the importance of his vocal performance in Love Meetings, a cinéma vérité experiment in which he interviews Italian people of all kind on issues concerning sexuality. However, when the questions turn to homosexuality, Pasolini silences his own voice (and authority), in order to reveal the homophobic violence of 1960s Italian society, unfiltered. Pasolini’s silence thus produces a subtle and subversive homopolitical intervention, which anticipates the more militant and strategic use of homosexual desire in The Trilogy of Life.