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(Like the problem of unconscious bias but in a good way. Or at least that's how his sagacity presents it) Influenced by Dune and Gladiator, accused of imitating Star Wars, what journey through intertextuality can be constructed and what questions posed of Hirokin: The last samurai. In order to add a little more content for people genuinely interested in study rather than the opinion pieces of a thirty-four-year-old man, I’m going to throw in some information when I start doing these informal hermeneutic reviews. I heard one of the characters say that quote I’ve prefaced at the start of the post and it struck an intertextual nerve within me, so given my complete and unconditional love of Serendipity I went with that. – For context, I called my daughter Serendipity, because I got lucky - bwahaha. My willingness to be clandestine with language for amusement is core to my being. But seriously, I do really like the word on its own merits and it resonates with my subjective interpretation of creation and my role within it. I also called my dog Clover. If you read my dissertation you’d notice I have a strong affinity to Dandyism in my approach to play on the principle that I value luck as a transcendent quality of a person. But I digress, or do I? Intertextuality bitches! Today’s topic is intertextuality, which first got formalised around the 1960s by Julia Kristeva. It fits in with the whole postmodern development of modernism’s loosening of objective reasoning. In so much that it posits a text as more than just itself, but also intrinsically its interconnectivity with other texts. Like rhizomes, another of the postmodern haute couture (though some 20 years later), texts form a collective and develop one another independent of time and place. The traditions of occidental philosophies, aesthetics religions, politics everything that forms what can be described as the ‘memory of literature’ builds this intertextuality. Joseph Campbell’s book The Hero with a Thousand Faces gives a great example of the sort of intertextuality we can see in Hirokin. While this form of looking at literature has fallen a bit out of fashion because it’s kind of obvious when you think about it, especially as a literary critic. Personally, since the word text itself is derived from the Latin texere which means; to weave, interweave, construct, fabricate, build adding the prefix inter as between two woven things only implies that it is just one larger woven thing and hence it’s still just ‘text’. Yet that’s being picky. One thing I cannot get across enough though is that English professors, students, writers and about everyone else is always a big fan of these little etymological alludes. If you are a student make sure to use them whenever you’re trying to get your word count up, it never hurts to define an esoteric word (https://www.etymonline.com/). Essentially, etymology and intertextuality are two similar principles on different scales. Something I love is being weirdly interconnected in my writing. Some characters mentioned in Paradoxia are from short stories or inspired by short stories. Breadcrumbs to transcendence is so intertextual even I would have a hard time recounting all the Easter eggs scattered around it. The list goes on. From one medium, one world to another, the same kinds of characters in different situations. These are my archetypes and rather than keep reinventing the wheel, I build on them metafictionally. Each of these creations is founded on earlier incarnations not even created by me, I would think. I’d largely be influenced by Oscar Wilde (intoxicated by the exuberance of his own verbosity), Dr John Watson (more specifically than Conan Doyle generally), Shakespeare but most of all, my own family’s love of douchebaggery. Almost all my characters take no greater pleasure than being dicks to one another, or feeling superior, or deliberately acting in ways that innocently frustrate others – magniloquent trolling. That’s my intertextual heritage, I never sit and watch something like Dune, Star Wars or any other film and say “Hey, that’s what I want to do”. Intertextuality therefore resides with a questionable connection to the intentional fallacy, the author’s direct inclination of their narrative in a form of mimicry or homage – I don’t think it matters if this is unconsciously or not. I think Umberto Eco argued against this suggesting that the text gains its meaning only from its contexts as a work among other works, like words in a dictionary are only ever described by other words which rely on other words for their meaning and so on…(This is why the postmodernists have such a hard notion with objective truth, there is no start nor end to interpretation). But, fortunately I’m not doing an essay, so I don’t really care too much. Let’s just for this instance take the view that the author is responsible or at least partly responsible for the meaning, if not at least the creation, of a text. Are they seeking to better it by entering themselves into competition with their antecedents? Or do they build and develop the archetypal characters that span across culture to new heights? There is of course the third and more likely route in contemporary capitalism, because it sells. I’ll try to give Hirokin the benefit of the doubt in this instance and ponder if he adds to the foundations from which we may tentatively draw his ancestry (Amazon trivialises this process. By which I mean it’s in the trivia sections – literally trivialising it).
The mentor who teaches Hirokin about “The Wei” is ambiguous enough to take that same role as Yoda, the Wei itself is almost identical to the force even on a cellular level apparently. Thinking about it; Hirokin is within its text an epitome of intertextuality. Don’t get me wrong, intertextuality is a little more complex than texts being in other texts, or that meaning of those texts is found only in other texts. Bakhtin used the term heteroglossia or polyphony to talk about how texts can have multiple voices and that is probably a closer representation to the traditional conception of intertextuality. By that way of looking at things, Hirokin would give me one message of hope if I was a downtrodden slave looking for freedom or could act as a warning if I was the dictator of a rebellious population. These are the different voices a text can have depending on your social stratification or place within a society. That’s the sort of difference Bakhtin was talking about.
Again, it’s difficult to review a film that doesn’t do anything particularly new, it just rehashes the old by hitting it with other old things. It’s not a bad film if you’re wanting a mindless watch. If you’re looking for something with a bit of a deeper meaning or something that challenges convention, then Hirokin isn’t for you. It’s certainly worth more time than Night Zero though.
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