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Feb. 27th, 2013 12:13 amEavesdropping in literature - Frankenstein, A Christmas Carol, Faustus, Faust, what else. The Neverending Story as I recall. The Misanthrope, The School for Scandal and essentially every French farce. Plenty in Shakespeare, like Othello, Twelfth Night, Hal passim. The cyclops episode in The Odyssey. Barth's End of the Road. Rimbaud's urchins.
Tons of it in movies because of the allure of self-reference, of course, as well as the easy dovetailing into voyeurism: Rear Window and its various imitators, like that '70s highrise one, Blue Velvet, Monsieur Hire, Sliver and Disturbia; Celine and Julie Go Boating; lots of detective stories like Vertigo. Mulholland Drive fits every list.
But the wistful note, exposure to a kind of life you feel you might prefer to yours but are barred from, is usually kept out of detective stories, and tends to be eclipsed where there's a peep show element. Mamet's con movies (i.e. all his original screenplays) usually play on this yearning for the greener, and I think most involve some eavesdropping moments to intensify it - I can't remember if To Be or Not To Be, presumably his favorite film, does.
But it's amazingly moving in Shelley and Dickens - in Shakespeare it's more predatory, in most other drama merely a revelatory device. But the longing for an entire life, that's the wrenching thing. A note captured well in that late '90s Everlast video. Might Dickens may have been the model for the memory-as-eavesdropping aspect of Wild Strawberries and Auroras? Death of a Salesman is a bit of an exception because Loman interacts with his past, a blessed sort of madness. Glass Menagerie is somewhere between Strawberries and the older Mill on the Floss / Remembrance of Things Past mode, where the novel itself is a sort of remembered movie or series of them, depending on the age of the actor playing the Williams standin. The Saving Private Ryan intro would be the film equivalent of that, not an eavesdropping so much as being overtaken, a total reliving.
Must be lots of scenes more like what Scrooge and the monster experience that I'm blanking on. Wakefield? I never know how moved to be by that story.
Tons of it in movies because of the allure of self-reference, of course, as well as the easy dovetailing into voyeurism: Rear Window and its various imitators, like that '70s highrise one, Blue Velvet, Monsieur Hire, Sliver and Disturbia; Celine and Julie Go Boating; lots of detective stories like Vertigo. Mulholland Drive fits every list.
But the wistful note, exposure to a kind of life you feel you might prefer to yours but are barred from, is usually kept out of detective stories, and tends to be eclipsed where there's a peep show element. Mamet's con movies (i.e. all his original screenplays) usually play on this yearning for the greener, and I think most involve some eavesdropping moments to intensify it - I can't remember if To Be or Not To Be, presumably his favorite film, does.
But it's amazingly moving in Shelley and Dickens - in Shakespeare it's more predatory, in most other drama merely a revelatory device. But the longing for an entire life, that's the wrenching thing. A note captured well in that late '90s Everlast video. Might Dickens may have been the model for the memory-as-eavesdropping aspect of Wild Strawberries and Auroras? Death of a Salesman is a bit of an exception because Loman interacts with his past, a blessed sort of madness. Glass Menagerie is somewhere between Strawberries and the older Mill on the Floss / Remembrance of Things Past mode, where the novel itself is a sort of remembered movie or series of them, depending on the age of the actor playing the Williams standin. The Saving Private Ryan intro would be the film equivalent of that, not an eavesdropping so much as being overtaken, a total reliving.
Must be lots of scenes more like what Scrooge and the monster experience that I'm blanking on. Wakefield? I never know how moved to be by that story.
