ABSTRACT

Several critics have described Xavier Dolan as a gifted yet self-indulgent filmmaker. From the stylish costume design to the carefully composed arrangement of colors and objects within the mise en scène, Dolan’s films would seem to be guilty of an over-investment in the image. This essay interrogates the aesthetic and affective possibilities that the ostensibly intolerable textuality of Dolan’s films allows by focusing on their distinctive deployment of the musical parenthesis. What may one gain by indulging in the pleasures of the parenthetical mode? The expectation according to which such pleasures should be dispensed with moderation betrays suspicion towards a filmic mode of stylistic and emotional excess that oversteps certain boundaries and, in so doing, undermines hierarchies of value and taste. This essay questions the authoritative appeal of these hierarchies, arguing that there may be something valuable – and queer – about their displacement.

摘要

一些评论家将泽维尔·多兰描述为一位才华横溢但自我放纵的电影制片人。从时尚的服装设计到场景调度中色彩和物体的精心布置，多兰的电影似乎对图像的过度投资感到愧疚。本文通过关注多兰电影对音乐括号的独特部署，质疑了多兰电影表面上令人难以忍受的文本性所带来的美学和情感可能性。沉迷于插入模式的乐趣中可以获得什么？根据这种期望，这种快乐应该适度地免除，这暴露了对风格和情感过度的电影模式的怀疑，这种模式超越了某些界限，从而破坏了价值和品味的等级制度。