Jacques Derrida said that 'a text cannot belong to no genre, it cannot be without... a genre. Every text participates in one or several genres, there is no genreless text'
(Derrida 1981, 61).
Derrida’s point explains why commentators on September 11th could only understand what they were seeing as ‘like a movie’. And also why Kick-Ass is thought of as ‘like a superhero’. This is perhaps what Fiske means by saying ‘we make sense of it by turning it into another text.’ Steve de Souza, the director of Die Hard says that: “[T]he image of the terrorist attacks ‘looked like a movie poster, like one of my movie posters” (119). Film experts were not the only ones to resort to cinematic examples that they remembered when confronted with the events of September 11, unable or unwilling to believe their own vision of horrific events, people do not think back to imagery of the nightmare, but compare that nightmare to films they have seen.
No comments:
Post a Comment