*
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/
Keine Kommentare:
Kommentar veröffentlichen