ABSTRACT
This essay examines director Alfonso Cuaron’s 1998 film Great Expecta tions as a cinematic ‘ ‘reading ’ ’ that dramatizes previously unrecognized interpretive potentials o f its literary source. Radically re-envisioning Charles Dickens’s novel fo r a late-twentieth-century American audi ence, Cuaron’s adaptation demonstrates the particular relevance o f Dickens’s Victorian narrative fo r postmodern generations. I introduce the film ’s postmodern aesthetics by discussing the m ovie’s startling contemporary transformations o f Dickens’s p lo t and characters, as well as the film ’s bizarre pastiche of production projects (including the cre ation o f two stylistically eclectic soundtrack CDs based on both the movie and Dickens’s novel). The essay then illuminates the postmodern potential o f Dickens’s text that makes such a cinematic interpretation viable by detailing the similarities between P ip ’s narrative o f disillu sionment and the cultural experience of the first truly postmodern gener ation, ‘ ‘Generation X, ’ ’ the audience at which Cuaron targeted his film. The film ’s transformation o f Dickens’s protagonist into the aspiring Gen X artist Finnegan Bell astutely reconfigures the novel’s theme of the quest fo r identity in terms o f the postmodern crisis o f representation and transmutes Dickens’s critique o f the Victorian gentleman into a comment on the postmodern cult o f celebrity. The essay concludes that the parallels Cuaron’s film evokes between Pip and Generation X allow
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us to reinterpret Dickens’s narrative from a new and uniquely contem porary perspective.
