Shame (2011) by Steve McQueen. Cinema in the second degree: Hypertextuality
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.24310/Fotocinema.2019.v2i19.6653Keywords:
Transtextuality, Hypertextuality, Gérard Genette, Shame, Steve McQueen, American Psycho, Mary Harron, Bret Easton EllisAbstract
The aim of this paper is to suggest the existence of a transtextual relationship of hypertextuality between Shame (2011), a film by the British director Steve McQueen, and American Psycho (2000) by Mary Harron (on the novel by Bret Easton Ellis [1991]). Firstly, this thesis is supported both by the similarity of the plots and the filmmaking elements, as well as by the artistic intention of their directors. In a subsequent second part of this essay, another series of intertextual allusions from different sources in McQueen’s film will be identified and analysed. As a result, the film becomes a meaningful transtextual palimpsest which provides its own meaning from the combination of meanings of its underlying texts. Paraphrasing Gérard Genette’s words, the French literary theorist whose methodology has been used in the present analysis, Steve McQueen’s Shame is a good example of “cinema in the second degree”.
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