Introduction [Mimetic Theory and Film]

For a set of cultural hypotheses whose scope is said to encompass human culture in its most variegated forms, it is both astonishing and somewhat lamentable that only a comparatively small amount of work has been done on Girard’s mimetic theory in relation to film. This is not to say, of course, that it has not been done. From the 1980s on, philosophers and literary theorists such as Andrew McKenna and Paisley Livingston have used Girardian hermeneutics to analyze contemporary cinema. Even so, the volume of this kind of analysis—at least in comparison to literary analysis—has been very small. This may be attributable to a couple of factors. The first is the fact that Girard himself spent so little time analyzing film—and true to what mimetic theory itself would predict, those thinkers who followed have imitated him in this respect. The second possible reason is that film—and especially television—has often been thought to be too marked by the mindless stain of popular culture, with popular culture itself beneath serious analysis.