Tom Cruise and the Seven Dwarves:

Cinematic Postmodernisms in Abre los ojos and Vanilla Sky

Barbara Simerka, Queens College / CUNY

Christopher Weimer, Oklahoma State University

American Drama Summer 05

Postmodernism is often considered – or perhaps better said,

assumed – to be antithetical to the most popular forms of

cultural production. Such assumptions hold that commercially

successful motion pictures, whether they are hits in Europe or in

the United States, are almost invariably superficial

entertainments that never engage, much less challenge, the

viewer. That lack of engagement or challenge is precisely, again

according to these assumptions, what the allegedly undiscerning

movie-going lumpenproletariat want; what they do not want, following

this logic, are the complexities – including aspects of

postmodernism – characteristic of those films often classified in

Europe as auteur productions or in the United States as

“independent” films, which R. Barton Palmer describes as “usually

‘difficult’, with narratives that are hard to follow or even

bewildering, stylizations pushed to excess, and nearly

impenetrable themes” (28). It may indeed be true that a majority

of profitable motion pictures do function within traditional and

hence non-subversive aesthetic norms. Nevertheless, to

universalize the assumption ignores the persistent and very real

presence of at least some of postmodernism’s salient features in

a significant number of widely-released feature films of recent

years. Indeed, Palmer has argued that Hollywood production since

the 1980’s has consistently included the work of filmmakers who

aim at a hybrid form that he terms “commercial/independent

film, a particular form of postmodern cinema that complexly

intersects and deconstructs the contrast between high culture and

mass culture” (30). Such filmmakers draw freely on modernist and

postmodern devices, but “only those that can be accommodated to

the tastes of a broader, more commercial audience” (31); Palmer

offers the examples of directors such as Quentin Tarantino and

Spike Lee (35), but we might also include the works of

screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, Eternal

Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) and Terry Gilliam (Time Bandits, Twelve

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Monkeys, Brazil, The Fisher King). In this study we will examine certain

postmodern elements of two popular motion pictures of the last

decade, Spanish director Alejandro Amenábar’s 1997 film Abre los

ojos (Open Your Eyes) and its 2001 Hollywood remake, Vanilla Sky,

directed by Cameron Crowe. In so doing we hope both to

demonstrate how postmodernism can manifest itself in commercially

viable motion pictures and to compare the aspects of

postmodernism most prominent in these two film versions of the

same story.

One irony inherent in casual dismissals of film audiences’

receptivity to postmodernism is that cinema, as perhaps the most

mimetic of all representational arts, has an equally great

potential to problematize and to interrogate its own

representational techniques. This potential is the very essence

of postmodernism, of course, for one of the primary tenets of

postmodern thought is the relative and slippery nature of truth,

which cannot help but radically complicate any process of

representation, much less one as complex as film. Linda Hutcheon

writes that postmodernism’s “entire formal and thematic energy is

founded in its philosophical problematizing of the nature of

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reference, of the relation of word to thing “ (Poetics 19).

Similarly, in his postmodern analysis of mimesis, Jean

Baudrillard outlines a continuum with four phases of increasingly

uncertain connection between representation and reality: 1)

“reflection of a profound reality”, 2) “mask[ing] and

denatur[ing] a profound reality”, 3) “mask[ing] the absence of a

profound reality” , and 4) representation with “no relation to

any reality whatsoever; it is its own pure simulacrum” (Simulacra

6). Baudrillard also notes that where conventional pretense

“leaves the principle of reality intact,” simulation undermines

the possibility for a clear distinction between real and

imaginary. As we will see, Abre los ojos and Vanilla Sky both

incorporate a postmodern stance toward filmic representation as

they revision the genre of the psychological thriller in order to

question the possibility of certain knowledge.

Abre los ojos and Vanilla Sky focus on the efforts of the films’

respective protagonists, haunted by the psychological after-

effects of auto accidents and accused of committing murders

neither remembers, to reconstruct their pasts and the

circumstances surrounding the murders. Each protagonist, César

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in Abre los ojos and David Ames in Vanilla Sky, was formerly a young

man supremely happy with the good fortune of being both wealthy

and handsome (César is played by Spanish heartthrob Eduardo

Noriega, David by the iconic Tom Cruise). Each, however,

misjudges the sanity of a woman with whom he has a casual sexual

relationship, and in each film the woman cajoles the protagonist

into her car, then deliberately crashes it at high speed, killing

herself and leaving him with grotesque facial disfigurement.

These tragedies radically alter the protagonists’ lives and

create the conditions in which the supposed murders might – or

might not – have taken place. Both films thus devote most of

their remaining time to César’s and David’s memories and to their

lengthy interviews with the psychiatrists, Antonio and McCabe,

who are trying to evaluate their mental states for the purposes

of their criminal trials. Were any murders actually committed?

If so, who were the victims? Who might César and David have

believed to be the victims? Most important, which – if any – of

César or David’s memories are true, and which are hallucinations

or protective delusions or even lies?

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Not only does the subject matter of the two films lend

itself to the postmodern subversion of traditional cinema’s

promise of omniscient storytelling, both employ a non-linear

narrative which sets up a Baudrillardian continuum of realities.

Each film opens (apparently) at the first level of profound,

albeit mundane reality as we watch the protagonist awaken to an

alarm clock and go into the bathroom for his morning ablutions.

These banal activities are contrasted with the décor and

appointments of the protagonists’ homes, which suggest a very

comfortable standard of living; even their alarm clocks are

luxurious, with recordings of female voices that purr, “Open your

eyes,” while the very fact that they can rise casually in mid-

morning on a weekday and play racquetball with their best friends

reveals that neither holds a conventional job. This is further

emphasized in Vanilla Sky, which initially uses exterior shots to

reveal that David lives in an extremely expensive building on

Manhattan’s Upper West Side and soon makes it clear that he has

in fact inherited controlling interest in a vast media empire

employing countless workers, while César merely lives the

comfortable but not Donald Trump-like life of the heir to a

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restaurant chain. As César and David pull out of their

respective parking garages and drive off, the camera presents the

streets of Madrid and New York from a realistic perspective— but

with the twist that there are no pedestrians or vehicles. It is

supremely ironic that, at the point when the plot shifts from the

realistic and prosaic to a different mode – the films flirt with

the generic possibilities of post-apocalyptic science fiction –

the traumatic event is the absence of the nightmarish traffic

typical of both cities. Then, when the alarm clocks once again

intone “Open your eyes” and the protagonists are again shown in

their beds, the spectators realize that these opening sequences,

though presented as first level mimesis, the imitation of

profound reality, are in fact dreams, or more precisely,

nightmares. The initial scenes thus correspond instead to the

second level of mimesis, where reality is masked or denatured. 

In addition, from the very opening sequences, the films highlight

the difficulty in distinguishing between real life and dream, and

between levels of mimesis —not only by presenting a confused

character, but by causing viewers to experience their own

confusion. These opening sequences present the space on the

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reality continuum (best pictured as a Möbius Strip) where the two

opposing poles meet and merge.

After each protagonist repeats the morning rituals seen in

his nightmare, both films then move through some realistic scenes

which demonstrate César and David’s successes with women,

establish their relationships with their best (but nevertheless

envious) friends Pelayo and Brian, and introduce the theme of

their business conflicts: César’s difficulties with his partners

in the restaurant chain left to him by his father and David’s

struggles with the directors, whom he mockingly calls “the seven

dwarves,” on the board of the media company he inherited. In

both films the scene shifts suddenly to visitation rooms, in Abre

Los Ojos a room in a “psychiatric penitentiary” and in Vanilla Sky a

room in a prison. Here, César wears the baggy clothes of a

mental patient and David sports standard prison garb; both wear

close-fitting rubber masks and speak to psychologists about the

murders they swear they did not commit. At this point, the films

veer suddenly into the genre of psychological thriller, with a

familiar epistemological quandary: is the protagonist a criminal

whose insanity caused him to commit murder and then impedes

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recollection, or is he the victim of malevolent others who seek

to make him appear crazy in order to achieve their own nefarious

end? In addition to concrete reality and dream, the film now

offers deception and derangement as aspects of third level

reality. The standard thriller is of course the opposite of a

postmodern narrative, for although film noir versions of this

genre may produce an unjust ending in which the victim is

punished or the true criminal does not pay, the traditional

dénouement does produce the decisive knowledge and closure of

profound reality. Vanilla Sky and Abre los ojos present the

epistemology of psychodrama in a more complex context, through

the initial juxtapostion of reality and dream.

Non-linear plot development, a common feature of postmodern

film, is used for the next several sequences, interspersing

scenes at the prisons with those which provide a conventional

narration of the events leading to the deliberate car crash which

damaged the protagonists’ face so badly that they refuse to take

off their rubber masks, even when asked to do so by the doctors.

Indeed, prior to our first sight of David wearing his mask,

Vanilla Sky briefly taunts viewers who have seen commercials for the

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film with a scene in which David barely escapes being mowed down

by a huge tractor trailer – we expect to see a horrendous crash

because we have been waiting for an explanation of the mask shown

in the commercials, but are left hanging. The scenes that then

follow the actual car crash return to exploration of dreams and

reality. Presented in the splendid settings of Madrid’s Parque

del Retiro and New York’s Central Park, César and David meet the

women with whom each thinks he might actually have fallen in

love: Sofía, whose name is the same in both films (and who is

played by Penélope Cruz in both, adding an odd note of postmodern

intertextuality to the experience of watching Vanilla Sky after

watching Abre Los Ojos). César and David tell Sofía of a nightmare

each had: the car crash we have just witnessed. The surreal

beauty of the settings incites wariness, as does the fact in

Vanilla Sky that the car crash took place in spring or summer, while

the scene we now see is in fall. For a second time, the viewers

realize that they are watching the protagonists’ dreams — or

rather, their recollections of their dreams. Voice-overs silence

the conversation with Sofía, as the protagonists state their

loathing of their dreams, and the visual settings shift back to

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the prisons, where César and David begin to confide in their

psychologists Antonio and McCabe.

The possibility of psychological impairment begins to seem

logical in the aftermath of the car accident in both films,

because of the difficulties any human being encounters in trying

to accept drastic physical damage, much less those faced by an

exceptionally attractive person who has now become repulsive.

Vanilla Sky also clearly establishes that David suffers from

blinding head-aches caused by the surgical pins in his face,

pains so severe that they impair his ability to think, which in

turn increases the danger that his antagonistic board of

directors, the “seven dwarves,” will use his physical condition

as a pretext for stripping him of control of his corporation.

César and David, who had both previously behaved in a nonchalant,

easy-going manner in all situations, now react with excessive and

almost violent anger toward their plastic surgeons, a bartender,

strangers in a club, and even toward Sofía and toward Pelayo and

Brian. At his point, it becomes much more plausible that César

and David could commit murder, as they deal with lives that have

become nightmares. However, their ongoing struggles with their

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respective business associates, present in Abre Los Ojos and

emphasized in Vanilla Sky, make conspiracy theory a plausible

alternate explanation. The films exploit the problematic nature

of grasping reality through narratives that alternate between two

different, but equally compelling, modes of epistemological

confusion and also repeatedly blur the boundary between reality

and dream.

In scenes with César’s and David’s teams of plastic

surgeons, the elusive nature of reality is explored from yet

another postmodern angle, as doctors and patients discuss the

customized rubber, face-covering item that has been made for them

to ease their adjustment periods. The doctors describe the item

in medical terms, as a protective, aesthetic, or prosthetic

device. César and David explode with all the wrath of wealthy

young men confronted for the first time with problems that their

money cannot solve, both declaring the masks to be nothing more

than masquerades or Halloween disguises. The lead doctors

soothingly reply that this is a matter of the wearer’s

perspective, recalling the episode in Don Quixote where characters

argue about whether an item is a magical helmet or a barber’s

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basin. This scene initially exposes and ridicules philosophical

relativism as a valid epistemological stance; however, when César

and David venture into a nightclub for the first time after their

accident, they do indeed use the mask as the sort of

psychological crutch the doctors had suggested, rather than as a

costume. Thus, this sequence affirms the postmodern tenet that

there is no direct access to an unmediated reality, and that

reality is thereby constructed rather than perceived.

The next sequence of scenes returns to exploration of the

border between reality and dreams. Sofía’s unexpected acceptance

of César and David’s disabilities begins in each film when she

finds the protagonist passed out on the sidewalk and awakens him

with the very words, “open your eyes,” that had previously served

to show spectators how difficult it is to distinguish an actual

experience from a dream (in Vanilla Sky the first alarm clock voice

appears to be Cruz’s as well). Then, as the happy couples snuggle

in bed after a new round of reconstructive surgery has restored

César and David to their former perfection, Sofía muses, “Is this

a dream”? That very night, the protagonists have nightmare in

which their new faces have reverted back to their disfigurement,

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then wake up and checks their appearance in the bathroom mirror

to be reassured. However, when each returns to bed the women

awaiting them now have the features of the psychotic lovers who

killed themselves in the automobile accidents, Nuria and Julie,

rather than those of Sofía, even though both claim the name

Sofía. The confusion is heightened, for the characters and the

film viewer alike, when a visit to Sofía’s apartment reveals that

Nuria and Julie’s faces appear in all the photos that had

previously held Sofía’s image. For both protagonists and

spectators, certainty is an increasingly elusive state, as the

film provides no clues as to whether César and David are

immersed in a hallucination or whether, instead, their corporate

foes – César’s business partners and David’s “seven dwarves” –

have faked Nuria and Julie’s deaths and are now using the women

to make the protagonists appear delusional.

The “contamination of genres”, including juxtaposition of

elite and popular filmic genres is a common aspect of postmodern

film (Degli Esposti 8). As we have seen, these two films shift

between a standard Hollywood mode, the thriller, and a more

sophisticated exploration of the nature of reality and

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perception. In addition, in Vanilla Sky there are two scenes that

appear to flirt with the generic norms of pornography. Early in

the film, Julie rhapsodizes about the previous evening’s sexual

romp with David, emphasizing the importance that they made love

“four times.” Even though no actual activity was shown, and both

characters are presented in the aftermath as semi-nude but with

all significant body parts covered, this graphic conversation

appears gratuitous, and thus porn-like. Julie repeats the

reference to four orgasms, and also bluntly declares, “you came

in my mouth.” However, it becomes clear as Julie prepares to

drive off the bridge that these lines are not Hollywood

sensationalism, pushing the boundaries of the R-rated genre. She

reveals that in her mind, these sexual acts are sacred rather

than degraded, and constitute a promise that David’s body has

made to her. Thus, the film moves standard porn dialogue into

the psychological and even moral realms as Julie links crude

sexual dialogue with commitment, betrayal, and eventually suicide

and attempted murder. Similarly, the post-coitus scene in which

David explores a mole on Sofía’s breast initially appears as a

mere pretext to provide the viewer with a titillating view of the

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character’s nipples. However, this mole eventually becomes an

important conveyor of meaning. As David suffocates a woman

during intercourse, he becomes confused because of the rapid

shifting from one face and flesh tone to another, and back. He

had begun making love to Sofía, then when the face shifted, he

placed a pillow over the face and upper body of Julie, but at

the last moment the arms and hands that struggle against him

changed again to those of Sofía. In order to acertain whose

corpse lies next to him, David does not move the pillow away from

the face, but instead seeks — and reveals to the camera and

spectators — the mole on the breast. Thus, this mole comes to

play the role of recognition token common to theatrical

anagnorisis. The generic presence of the snuff film is also

evident in this death scene; however, it is greatly overshadowed

by the epistemological confusion of the protagonist and the

spectator. The differing interpellations of graphic sexual

elements within scenes that feature “high brow” concepts are

markedly postmodern, in that they lay bare the porous nature of

the boundary between mere pornography and explicit but artistic

eroticism.

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The early flirtation with the genre of science fiction comes

to the foreground in the final sequence of scenes of both films.

When César and David learned that the plastic surgeons have

invented a new surgical technique that will allow for complete

regeneration of the damaged skin, they had declared that such a

medical break-through seemed like science fiction. Then, just as

the psychiatrists give up and abandon César and David to their

fates, seemingly bringing the psychodramas to a close, each

glimpses on a prison television a reference to a cryogenics

company called Life Extension (LE). This is not the first time

that LE has appeared in either film; in both cases their

appearances on late-night television had been commented on

previously by the characters, while in Vanilla Sky David and others

who had seen the story of a dog resuscitated after being trapped

in a frozen lake for three months had treated LE as a joke.

This time, however, the author of the book appears on a talk

show, claiming that the technique has been perfected for people

as well, so that those with terminal illness can be frozen until

a cure is found for their disease. When César and David insist

that their psychiatrists help them to visit the LE office, the

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spectator has no clear idea of why this could be important.

However, at the office, protagonists and spectators come to

realize that César and David allowed their bodies to be frozen

until surgical technology could repair their faces. In addition,

it is revealed that that both chose an option that permitted them

to live in the dream world of their choosing during stasis. The

spectator is suddenly informed that the fantasy-like moments when

Sofía had taken César and David off the sidewalk and into her

heart had been the beginning of the “splice” joining the

protagonists’ actual lives with their dream lives. These

sequences approach the Baudrillardian simulacra, for both the

protagonists and the spectators had believed virtual realities to

be “the real thing.” This moment’s postmodernism is heightened

by the fact that it reveals the highly sentimental moments of

Sofía’s surrender to love, typical of cinematic happy endings, to

be simulacra. The spectator is forced to re-evaluate a

significant portion of the film in order to re-categorize the

events portrayed and to acknowledge once again that access to

reality is not transparent. However, this development also tames

a significant epistemological issue, for it resolves the

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protagonists’ and the viewers’ confusion concerning the

“murders.” In a dream state, illogical events are normal, and

dreamed irrationality does not put in doubt the possibility of

certainty concerning waking life. This sequence takes

postmodernism to its extreme by both confirming and undermining

philosophical relativism.

The final scenes of the two films raise additional

postmodern confusions, for the psychiatrist and the LE

representatives offer conflicting resolutions to César and

David’s problems. The representatives’ answers are grounded in

science fiction conventions, claiming that the protagonists are

still in the dream state, but that new technology will allow them

to wake up and live again in the 22nd century, in perfect health

and physical form. The catch is that they can awaken only by

“committing suicide” in their dream lives, jumping from the top

of a skyscraper. Antonio and McCabe reintroduce the thriller

genre when they assert that the protagonists’ corporate enemies

have arranged this whole scenario so that César and David will

commit actual suicide. However, the Spanish and American films

resolve this final quandary in very different ways. In Abre Los

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Ojos, César is confronted only with this simple choice: to

believe the LE representative’s claim that he is currently living

a dream that he can end by a “virtual” suicide, or to believe

Antonio’s warning that he would actually be ending his corporeal

existence once and for all. Faced with these two options, unable

to verify either by any means, César chooses to make a quite

literal “leap of faith” from the skyscraper rooftop – in other

words, he chooses to try to live in the real world again, rather

than the world of his nightmares. In contrast, the LE technician

in Vanilla Sky challenges McCabe’s very reality: he demands that

McCabe name the two daughters he has so often referred to when

taking his leave of David. McCabe’s hesitation removes all

doubt, and confirms that the psychiatrist is indeed a creation of

David’s LE lucid dreams rather than a corporeal being. When

David leaps from the rooftop, then, he does so secure in the

knowledge that he will reawaken in the real world. Thus, Vanilla Sky

tames – or at least appears to tame – the Spanish film’s ending

by confining its own ending to a single genre, science fiction,

and giving the viewer a stronger sense of certainty and closure.

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However, in Vanilla Sky the LE technician who offered David a

new life in the 22nd century informs him that in his Lucid Dream,

David “sculpted” an existence that incorporated not only

idealized moments of his own past, such as the brief encounter

with Sofía, but also patterns of wish fulfillment that have their

roots in film images and paintings — the visual modalities of

popular culture. The technician here echoes the postmodern tenet

that perceptions of reality are never transparent, that

perception never achieves the unmediated connection marked by the

first stage on Baudrillard’s continuum. Thus, even as the film

seems to turn its back on one form of postmodernity, the open

ending, it proffers another that the Spanish film does not.

César’s leap from the building shows only his plunge to the

ground, but as David falls, the images that flash before his eyes

include both black and white photos that appear to represent his

childhood, juxtaposed with images from classic films and

television shows like “Leave it to Beaver.” This juxtaposition

of a “real” life and media fantasies lays bare and problematizes

the Hollywood convention of representing family life and gender

relations in a highly idealized fashion, reinforcing the previous

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skeptical moment when David and Sofía’s perfect relationship was

revealed to be have been a lucid dream or simulacrum rather than

a representation of profound reality.

At the moments when César and David are about to land, both

films present a blank screen and audio rather than showing the

men’s bodies hitting (or not hitting) the ground. What

spectators hear against the black screen after a short silence is

unexpected, if not startling: in each film a female voice speaks

in much the same intonation as the alarm clocks in the opening

scenes, saying, “Open your eyes.” However, these female voices

do not merely echo the voice alarms of earlier scenes, in both

instances they tell César and David to calm themselves before

telling them to open their eyes, something the earlier recordings

did not say. Moreover, in both films the voices appear to be

those of the psychotic ex-lovers, Nuria in Abre Los Ojos and Julie

in Vanilla Sky, who had recorded wake-up greetings on the

protagonists’ alarm clocks. This immediately problematizes the

endings yet again, for the LE representative’s assertion that

César and David will awaken over a century after they were put

into cryogenic stasis cannot be true if either if César and David

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are awakening in their own beds or if Nuria and Julie – who would

(barring still more plot twists) be dead from old age even if

their deaths in the auto accidents had been faked – are sharing

those beds or are even at their bedsides in some medical

facility. If the LE representative’s explanation was false, then

Antonio and McCabe might have been right; the corporate intrigue

plot has not necessarily been discredited. Moreover, the

spectators cannot help but wonder if César and David are

awakening from dreams which included some or all of the films’

earlier events, including what was presented as the protagonists’

dreams, or if perhaps Nuria and Julie might have survived the

auto accidents and are at the protagonists’ bedsides as they

awaken from their post-accident comas. This possibility seems

particularly plausible in the case of Vanilla Sky, the final image

of which shows a close-up of David’s one eye, opening in response

to the voice awakening him; this extreme close-up cannot convey

with certainty a specific emotion, but it is easy to read fear or

panic into the sudden widening of David’s eye. Again the viewers

are forced to re-evaluate their previous understanding of the

cinematic narratives, especially in the case of Vanilla Sky, which

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deceptively seemed to offer a knowable closure with its

“revelation” that McCabe is only an invention of David’s mind.

It is a cliché that American remakes of European films often

“tame” elements that do not conform to commercial Hollywood

norms; in earlier eras, issues of sexuality and morality were

often sanitized for US consumption. It is tempting to assume

that Vanilla Sky will do just that: by initially appearing to

resolve nearly all aspects of the film’s conclusion, including

those left open in Abre Los Ojos, this motion picture appears to

reject the postmodern aesthetic of undecidability and the related

tenet of drastic epistemological relativism – until the final few

seconds. At first glance, Vanilla Sky might not seem a likely

candidate for a postmodern film; rather, it was produced and

advertised as a star vehicle for Tom Cruise, perhaps one intended

to capitalize on the fact that enactments of characters who

endure physical deformity, masks, or insanity have garnered

several actors Academy Awards in recent years. Nonetheless, it

must be admitted that the film in no way provides a typical

Hollywood happy ending, or indeed any ending at all. Not only do

the film’s final seconds preclude any possibility of traditional

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narrative closure, the juxtaposition of multiple filmic genres

reinforces that subversion: it is highly unconventional for a

film even to apparently resolve the reality quandary of a

psychological thriller by offering, however deceptively, a form

of certainty that derives from a totally different filmic genre,

science fiction. It is also problematic for a film that has

presented itself as a thriller to resolve the mystery via a genre

that is introduced only in the final sequence, for this approach

is dangerously close to a prohibited form of plot resolution in

which the character or event that resolves a mystery is introduced at

the very last moment. Dependence upon the fleeting presentations

of Life Extension earlier in the film as adequate preparation for

the denouement may be seen as “cheating” cinematic convention and

thus undermining still further the reliability of the closure.

Thus, even as Vanilla Sky appears to aim at erasing one aspect of

Abre Los Ojos’s postmodern uncertainty in order to create a

commercially viable star vehicle, the film’s ending ultimately

matches the postmodernity of its European source.

WORKS CITED

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Amenábar, Alejandro (director and co-screenwriter). Abre los ojos.

117 minutes, color. 1997.

Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. (Originally published

as Simulacres et simulacion. Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1981.)

Trans. Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: U. of Michigan P,

1994.

Crowe, Cameron (director and co-screenwriter). Vanilla Sky. 135

minutes, color. 2001.

Degli Esposti, Cristina. Ed. Postmodernism and the Cinema. New York:

Berghahn Books, 1998.

Hutcheon, Linda. The Poetics of Postmodernism. New York, Routledge,

1988.

Palmer, R. Barton. Joel and Ethan Coen. Urbana: U. of Illinois P,

2004.

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