Intertextuality Is The Highest Form Of Flattery

Even the cover of the Collector's Edition DVD box set has intertextual links, is designed in the style of Drew Struzan's Star wars Posters.

Intertextuality isn't something new to Film and Television. I think it's just played out a lot more honestly and in some respects obviously nowadays, specifically in Edgar Wright's stuff like Spaced, Shaun of The Dead and Hot Fuzz.

For film fanatics it's easy to spot the references back to culturally significant films, from the scene with Daisy's return at the start of the second season episode "Back", where she comes back to an empty flat to find a machine pistol in the kitchen as Mike comes out of the toilet is a pretty close recreation of the scene from Pulp Fiction, Daisy in Bruce Willis' place and Mike in Travolta's. The makers of the series even acknowledge this in the special edition DVD where you have a setting that will pop up with the intertextual/cultural references in the series as they happen, as we saw in our seminar this week.

Quentin Tarantino does much the same but with more obscure references to spaghetti westerns and old kung-fu movies. He is clearly influenced by these and he doesn't spoof them but rather re-imagines them for a modern era.

Another good example of this of re-imaging a genre for the 21st century, I think, would be Brick (2005) by Rian Johnson and starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Here we have a film set in the 21st century about high school aged kids but with a distinctly detective noir leaning. It centres around Levitt's character Brenden Frye investigating the death of his girlfriend. You get a very noir feel with the whole set-up of the film from the cinematography to the writing and characterization. Levitt's character feels like a teenage Sam Spade or Holly Martins. His character fits the private eye conventions but with the limitations of being a high school student. Instead of the police detective that obscures the P.I.'s investigation you have the Vice-Principal of the school whose job description apparently now includes law-enforcement?!? It's great to watch having seen a lot of old noir films like the Maltese Falcon and Third Man, but it's a film that has clearly been limited by the high school setting.

Going back further however we can see intertextual links in Kubrick's The Shining. Like Edgar Wright, Kubrick is said to have had a geek-like knowledge of many varied fields. In The Shining he references a Photograph by Diane Arbus.

Today it seems that you can find intertextual links in anything created from film and television to art and writing. Which leads me to one question: Is any idea truly original? As much as there are an infinite combinations of words, numbers and elements that can merge together to form an idea, it seems there will always be some hint of intertextuality to the constructs. What we like and enjoy drives what we create.

For Tarantino it's old spaghetti westerns and kung-fu movies and other niche genre films. For Edgar Wright it's the films he loved growing up, most notably the original Star Wars Trilogy.

Personally I love this. I love watching spaced again and again noting the references. I love watching the fence scene in Hot Fuzz whilst thinking about the scene in Point Break which it is parodying.