Film as the origin of transformation

Myra Breckinridge, its film adaptation and Gore Vidal´´´ s Myron

Abstract

The novel Myra Breckinridge was a new scandal in the literary career of the controversial Gore Vidal, in which he developed the archetypal themes of his literature: non-normative sexuality and the contamination of the cinematic imaginary in all cultural spheres and especially in literature. Myra Breckinridge constructed her mental universe and her model of behavior by recreating the cinematic forms of Golden Age Hollywood in a period when television had annihilated this representational archetype. The novel's success led to a no less controversial film adaptation considered one of the most resounding failures in the history of cinema, as well as to the literary sequel Myron, published six years later. Myra Breckinridge was a revindication in the era of the sexual revolution that challenged the marked conservatism that would initiate the Nixon presidency and in which the most unbridled Vidal proselytized relational models hitherto rendered invisible through the metaphorical world of the image as a behavioral pattern. The American writer and activist demonstrated the influence of cinema on literature, premeditatedly confusing reality and fiction, and in which the literary philias and phobias of the American writer –Henry James, Tennessee Williams and Norman Mailer among others– appeared in the books and in their adaptation to the big screen. The Breckinridge novels would relate, through the cinematographic imaginary, the liberalizing trend of sexual normativity that began in North America at the end of the 1960s.