ABSTRACT
I borrow the term “fourth world” from a recent film, Heavenly Creatures (1994), that prominently features Mario Lanza’s movie image and his operatic and ballad singing. His star persona is central to the film’s exploration of the problematic connections between everyday life and fantasy. The two young women in the film, Juliet Hulme (Kate Winslet) and Pauline Parker (Melanie Lynskey), brutally murder Pauline’s mother and are forever separated from each other as a consequence. For them, Mario Lanza’s music is associated with romance, creativity, and freedom from the restraints of education, familial discipline, and sexual repression associated with the materialism, pragmatism, and snobbery of Anglophile New Zealand culture. The film plays with movie stars as fetishes (e.g., Mario Lanza, James Mason, and Orson Welles) configured in the clay figures created by the young women’s imagination. These life-sized effigies of the stars and the young women occupy the fourth world where they engage in a frightening drama expressive of the double-edged character of fantasy.
