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Dienstag, 19. Februar 2019

A Star Is Born: Meta-Critique or Repetition of a Tired Cycle? / Ben Rybeck. In: Lit Hub February 19, 2019

Because all good movies basically come from books, Benjamin Rybeck will be looking at this year’s Oscar-nominated adapted screenplays. First up, A Star Is Born, which, ok, was adapted from the original 1937 screenplay (which included Dorothy Parker as a writer!).
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Toward the end of Bradley Cooper’s remake of A Star Is Born, a man named Bobby gives a grizzled, poetic speech to a woman named Ally. The narrative purpose of the speech is to push Ally, a recent widow who has given up her art (i.e., “Popular Singing”), back into the limelight; the actual purpose is to eulogize his brother, who also happens to be Ally’s deceased husband (and a musician in the competing artistic camp of “Heartfelt Singing”):
Jack talked about how music is essentially twelve notes between any octave. Twelve notes and the octave repeats. It’s the same story told over and over again, forever. All any artist can offer the world is how they see those twelve notes. That’s it.
As a moment of metatext, this would shame even freshmen creative writing students if it found its way into their stories. Yet it’s also key to the film, a moment designed to undercut the complainers (like me): everybody knows that Cooper’s movie is the fourth iteration of a story that maybe never warranted a first. But it also seems key to the whole damn process of adaptation—of taking other people’s stories and repeating them across media. Put aside notions of incommensurability for a moment: if music uses twelve octaves, then a film may use ten, a play eight, a novel six, a short story four, but across all narrative arts the tune stays somehow the same—in some way, repeats. (Or I dunno—I probably just don’t know enough about music.)
Even writing this, I feel engaged with repetition. Many people have written about the similarities and differences between the four versions of A Star Is Born since the new one came out in October. The same article, told over and over again. Or, to quote another fictional character in a work of narrative art that has suddenly—weirdly—become relevant again as a monument to repetition: “Time is a flat circle.” ... [mehr] https://lithub.com/a-star-is-born-meta-critique-or-repetition-of-a-tired-cycle/

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