The Destruction of Identity in Vertigo, The Tenant, & Mulholland Drive The rudimentary form of narrative storytelling lends itself towards application to an individual subject’s life story due to the correspondence of a narrative’s finite bounds and the subject’s mortality. Vertigo (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1958), The Tenant (dir. Roman Polanski, 1976), and Mulholland Drive (dir. David Lynch, 2001) are consistent with this idea because their narratives follow an individual human subject from
The concept of ‘the Death of the Author’ was proposed by, French philosopher and literary theorist, Roland Barthes in his essay with the same title. He proposed a paradigm shift in the way that authorship should be viewed by the ‘Critic’. In opposition to the classical model of critique, Barthes proposed that the focus should be on the readers experience and interpretation; he proposed the idea of ‘readerly’ and ‘writerly’ texts. Rather than focusing on the author’s intent, his or her past building
Roland Barthes The work of Roland Barthes (1915-80), the cultural theorist and analyst, embraces a wide range of cultural phenomena, including advertising, fashion, food, and wrestling. He focused on cultural phenomena as language systems, and for this reason we might think of him as a structuralist. In these notes, I provide a short profile of this influential figure, together with a synopsis of his seminal essay, "Rhetoric of the Image," a model for semiological analysis of all kinds. * *