Hermeneutics of the Cinematic Autobiopic: The Charlie Kaufman Case

Abstract

Cinema and contemporary TV series seem to have firmly embraced a new “genre”, the biopic, as an audiovisual story of individual lives that extends more and more towards subjects once outside the criteria of common “biographability”. If until a few decades ago the audiovisual biography was in fact reserved to characters whose noteworthiness was considered consolidated on the basis of specific socially shared assumptions (politicians, kings, leaders), today almost anyone seems potentially deserving of a biopic. This spasmodic attention towards audiovisual biographies is also manifested in the evident and growing production of “autobiopics”, which foresee a more or less marked intersection between the enunciating and the enunciated instance. The categories of analysis related to the traditional biopic therefore require reviewing, because they are only partially able to detect the specificities of the cinematic-autobiographical tale. At the same time, the formulation of a hermeneutics of the autobiopic can provide updates on the functioning of the cinematic narrative of the self. The case of Charlie Kaufman, screenwriter and director whose complete work appears as a gigantic and at times convoluted self-description, is the ideal laboratory for testing this new analytical system.