War film / series in the space of historical memory

Romashin Matvei Igorevich ORCID: 0000-0002-8303-2774 Senior Lecturer, Institute of Tourism and Creative Industries, Tula State Lev Tolstoy Pedagogical University 125 Lenin Avenue, Tula, Tula region, 300026, Russia matvei.romashin@mail.ru

In 1915, American film director David Griffith prophesied: "Children in public schools will be taught almost everything using moving pictures. Of course, they will never have to read history again", "you will just sit at a properly arranged window, in a scientifically prepared room, press a button and see what really happened" ^{[1, p. 1]}.

It is obvious that he was mistaken, and such a "library" cannot be the goal of even the most consistent fan of historical cinema; however, the creators of such films have never tried to "impose the hegemony of cinematic representations over historical texts" ^{[2, p. 6]}.

What was Griffith wrong about? In line with the positivist view of the role of film technologies, he perceived them as scientific tools free from human prejudice and, consequently, creating and broadcasting transparent and absolutely objective knowledge about the past. The epistemological theories of postmodernism have convincingly demonstrated that this is not the case; today, film historians consider films not as "closing debates", but as their continuation and resumption in a different context created using specific means – iconic, symbolic, visual and sound ^[3-6].

In the context of the modern "visual turn" ^{[7, 8]}, no one doubts that in addition to texts, other genres of historical representation and commemoration can exist and successfully function, suggesting other ways and forms of knowledge about the past. Already in 1981, in the collection of articles "Feature films as history" edited by L. Short, the question was raised about how the analysis of cinema can serve as a means of studying the past ^[9]. This area of research has been further actively developed. Michael Martin and David Wall noted that "historical film has an important relationship to history in three different and inextricably linked ways: first, it tries to "document" the past, as it seeks to show us the vision/version of history – events, people and places as they really were; secondly, films themselves are historical documents in the sense that they are the product of a historical and cultural moment; and, thirdly, they are the engines of history, since they perform – recognized or not - a political function that runs counter to the broad social and cultural discourse surrounding them. It is the recognition of films as historical documents that gives the clearest idea of them as ideological constructions" ^{[10, p. 448]}.

Of course, a film cannot be considered a historical source in the sense of "a set of documents and objects of material culture that directly reflected the historical process and captured individual facts and events that happened" ^{[11, p. 15]}. It is rather a "product (materially realized result) of purposeful human activity used to obtain data about a person and society", "reflecting social, psychological, ecological, geographical, communication, information, managerial and other aspects of the development of society and personality, power and law, morality, motives and stereotypes of human behavior" ^{[11, p. 15]}.

Today, the products of screen culture are becoming more and more in demand in historical research. Cinema began to compete with text not because it tells a different story of the past in terms of content, but primarily because it tells it through other means — audiovisual, metonymic, dramatic, emotional – more adequate for a person of the media era. Therefore, new ways of representing history were created as "self-reflective research, as a theater of self-awareness, as a mixed form of drama and analysis" ^{[5, p. 1183]}.

However, at the beginning of the 21st century, cinema no longer belongs to the avant-garde of historical representation, it is actively being replaced by other media tools. The last decade has been a time of significant changes in the economic and technological structure of the film industry. New video content production opportunities (IT technologies, innovative materials, engineering solutions) and the development of communication networks have created a "different way to watch": each viewer can now create their own media profile, form an almost personal video channel and receive the highest quality products at any time convenient for them and anywhere in space ^{[12, p. 18]}. All this led to an extraordinary rise in the culture of TV series ^{[13, 14]}.

Streaming companies (such as Netflix) turned out, on the one hand, to be able to generate the necessary, highly demanded content, and on the other, they themselves had an active influence not only on its volume, but also on its quality. If 10-15 years ago, masterpieces of big cinema occupied the top in the cultural hierarchy of video products, and TV series were placed one or two floors below, today the situation has changed dramatically. Home viewing (as an individual practice with a different "behavioral map"), changing technological conditions and the market situation of post-production have led to the fact that the genre, previously considered secondary, has come to the fore – both in economic terms and in terms of the attention of the public and film critics.

Today, the series is a very specific media work. It perfectly corresponds to the urgent human need for the individualization of "forms of time" ^{[15, p. 19]}. In the gigantic information flow, we strive to maintain stability, but at the same time, we are forced to split reality into small fragments; we reach for a given frame, but we no longer imagine reality without variations within it. The series provide both. They allow you to integrate an hour-long series into the busy schedule of everyday life of a modern person, and at the same time generate the phenomenon of binge–watching - the possibility of endless prolongation of history and "watching in one gulp", which ideally corresponds to the regulation of social time in the present conditions ^{[16, pp. 208-209]}.

As a technology of filmmaking and as a social practice, the series turned out to be a form that determined significant changes in content. The most important part of these changes was the appeal of the creators of the series to good, truly high-quality literature as the basis of the script.

How is the narrative built when the novel becomes the plot basis for the series? What advantages does this film genre provide in "storytelling"? What difficulties does it create? Is it possible to talk about using fundamentally different approaches, means, and methods of adaptation in the series compared to the movie? Does any special "serial" narrative strategy appear in this case? Are the artistic and technical techniques of shooting changing, and how?

In order to answer these research questions, a situation of (re)recreating the plot in the "line" of a novel – movie – series is necessary. One of the necessary examples is the "Catch-22".

Catch-22 is an anti-war novel by American writer Joseph Heller, published in 1961. In 1970, Mike Nichols directed a feature film of the same name, and in 2019 Paramount TV and Anonymous Content released a mini-series (directed by Grant Heslov, Ellen Kuras, George Clooney).

The action takes place in the summer of 1944. A U.S. Air Force regiment is stationed on the island of Pianosa. The main character, Captain John Yossarian, has completed the norm of combat missions and dreams of returning home, but the changing commanders of the regiment are constantly increasing the quota. Trying to survive, Yossarian finds a thousand ways to evade flight missions. He thinks everyone around him is crazy because people are continuing the war. But then the "catch-22" comes on the scene – a paragraph of the instruction according to which a person can be suspended from flying "if he is crazy," but his fear of flying proves normality, and therefore he must continue to fly. The plot contains a lot of absurdist situations and episodes, the alternation of which makes the reader / viewer both laugh and cry.

When screening a literary work of great form, the main difficulty for cinematography is the multiplicity of storylines, which actually constitutes the depth and polyphony of the novel, its main characteristic as an epic genre ^{[17, p. 44]}. In two hours of screen time, it is impossible to "work out" all the intertwining interactions and relationships of several dozen characters, which forcibly leads the filmmakers to make a tough choice, as a result, the script is limited to one or two lines and crumples or ignores the rest. If this does not happen, the narrative turns out to be fragmentary, shallow, and sometimes completely incomprehensible to the viewer. In my opinion, this is exactly what happened in Mike Nichols' film in many ways: attempts to "embrace the immensity" led to significant losses in the narrative: the viewer, unfamiliar with the literary basis, finds it very difficult to perceive and understand the plot moves proposed by the director.

In Heller's novel, each chapter introduces the reader to a new situation, introducing him to a new minor character. The figure of the main character unites the entire narrative, is viewed and recognized absolutely clearly. In Nichols' film, the main character "drowns" – the viewer does not understand for a long time which image is the central one: a lot of incoherent episodes make it difficult to consider the protagonist. In addition, with an abundance of characters, they are not sufficiently "prescribed" – there is simply no time for them. The film retained almost all the storylines of the book: Milo Minderbinder's trade syndicate (Jon Voight), the promotion and worthless activities of a major named Major Major (Bob Newhart), the deceased living Dr. Danica (Jack Guilford), the sermons of a chaplain (Anthony Perkins), the philosophical keeper of an officer's brothel in Rome (Marcel Dalio) etc. As a result, the actions of the heroes seem to us to be a disjointed tape – we often do not understand their motives. Of course, this partly increases the effect of the tragicomedy of the absurd, but in general it rather irritates the viewer.

However, what was and still is a difficulty for cinema (and is overcome in it through ingenious single finds or through turning a film into a story "based on motives") does not pose the slightest problem in the series – the "long" narrative format allows the screenwriter and director to enter into any details, literally "verbatim" visualize the literary the idea. The concept of "narrative mode", introduced by film critic David Bordwell ^[18], allows us to talk about a fundamentally different narrative strategy, characteristic of a modern TV series and constituting its essential difference from cinema. This is a combination of a "horizontal" (episodic) and a "vertical" structure: The series turn out to be incomplete and closed units (as in a traditional television series), but they give support to an end-to-end plot, which neither the filmmakers nor the audience forget about.

So, Nichols' film includes a plot that looks like this to the viewer: pilots are relaxing on the beach, suddenly an airplane appears in the air, which performs aerobatics and accidentally knocks one of the friends off the pier on one of the turns. A man dies, the pilot directs the car to a steep cliff, followed by an explosion. Who is it? What happened? Why? What are the consequences of this act? The viewer does not receive an answer to any of these questions.

In the series, there is actually an entire episode dedicated to this episode. Pilot Mcvot (John Rudnitsky) professes a simple philosophy: "I am: glad, satisfied, cheerful, dead. You [Yossarian]: gloomy, blacker than a cloud, dead," i.e., everyone will die anyway, you shouldn't spoil your mood. After the combat flight, the squadron commander accuses the Makvot crew of cowardice, publicly shames and insults in front of the officers of the regiment. The pilot is very acutely aware of this situation and intends to publicly demonstrate his fearlessness as well. The failed game with death in battle is replaced and replenished by playing behavior during a period of peaceful respite: the plane repeatedly performs dashing pirouettes dangerously close to the surface of the sea and people on the pier. Comrades cheer Makvot with shouts and encourage him to new feats. The youngest and most inexperienced – Baby Sampson gets involved in a dangerous game. He arms himself with a stick like a pike and arranges a matador dance in front of a diving plane. At the last moment, some kind of control malfunction occurs, and the nose of the plane knocks down a small man. The game instantly turns into a tragedy. The marina, the sea, the people around are stained with blood. Mcvot is shocked by what happened, he repeats his phrase "Joyful, cheerful, dead" and directs the plane to a steep cliff. In the following frames, the viewer "finds himself" in the cockpit, and we see how the pilot's face changes: there was bravado just now – but the fear of death comes. In an existential situation, a person learns something about himself that he did not suspect before. A deep animal fear comes out of the subconscious. Mcvot is sure that he is ready for death and is able to meet it cheerfully at any moment. But in the last seconds of his life, he discovers that he is still afraid, although he cannot live by accidentally killing a friend. The next episode begins with the identification of the remains and the proceedings in the regiment…

More recently, film critics accused the series of "mindlessly circling" along the "bohemian paths" of the plot, their narration was called "supervised walks" and "on a leash" – hinting at the pattern and predictability of plot moves ^{[16, p. 201]}. Today, these accusations can hardly be considered justified and relevant. The series has overcome the melodramatic nature of "soap operas" and quite often now represents a full-fledged psychological drama, with a high degree of reflection and a deep study of individual characters and social types. It reflects both the syntagmatic and paradigmatic connections of the whole system of characters, storylines, etc. – what forms the basis of the novel and which is extremely rarely realized in a "short" movie.

Serial films have generated "narrative complexity" not only in the content, but also in the implementation of the form ^{[15, pp. 15-16]}. Like in a novel, they may well contain "temporal ellipses", reversible plots, alternating "failures", repetitions, returns, zigzags, etc., etc. In this case, the single narrative of the series becomes a discourse – a "supra–episode" narrative that builds spatio–temporal, causal-investigative and psychological connections ^[19]. Perhaps the series can be considered as a kind of fractal – a set of individual elements, each of which is a semblance of the whole.

Of course, traditional cinema also makes extensive use of non-linear storytelling. However, in the case of a dense event "schedule", reversals and repetitions may look like fuss or unreasonable complexity. That's exactly how, in my opinion, it turned out in the Mike Nichols film: four times we see the scene of the injury and death of a novice machine gunner, each time it acquires more and more terrifying and naturalistic details. In the book, this plot is the climax – it is he who forces Yossarian to take off his uniform, drenched in the blood of a comrade, and never put it on again. But in the movie, the hero gets into line naked and receives a medal BEFORE this episode, almost at the very beginning of the film. And we only understand the essence of this action in the final. Of course, the point is not that the narrative must necessarily be linear and causal, but that in this case the meaning and sharpness of perception are lost: we see the hero without clothes (for some reason), we perceive this as his kind of another oddity, in the next scene he is already dressed in uniform again, etc. The finale takes us back to the beginning, but it is perceived not as a revelation, understanding and catharsis, but rather as recognition - I have already seen this somewhere…

In the series, this plot is the focus of the entire narrative. The absurdity of the situation is growing, tragic episodes alternate with funny ones, the scene is "cleared": minor characters disappear from the viewer's field of view – who is killed, who flew to neutral Sweden, who went headlong into business… We focus on the main character and his experiences of the death of his comrades; finally, the climax comes – an unusual, shocking, unthinkable in its absurdity: from the hands of the general, the officer receives a combat medal in the clothes of his mother. We go to this outburst of emotions for a long time – we live episode after episode, episode after episode, almost in real time, and the finale becomes the peak of our attention and empathy.

At the same time, we note that, unlike a movie, the series naturally requires several climaxes – each episode must have compositional certainty and completeness of form. In this sense, Heller's novel is an ideal material – the "patchwork" construction of the book is perfect for solving this problem. Representatives of the structural and typological approach to text analysis (V. Y. Propp, V. Schmit, etc.) identified the main plot functions or "moves" that support any narrative and are repeated many times in it: summary – orientation – complication – assessment – solution – outcome ^{[20, 21]}. This is quite a "working" scheme for the series, including for the "Trick": in each episode, Yossarian comes up with a way not to fly (phantom liver pain, disconnection in the cockpit, washing powder poured into tomato soup, etc.), but each time he goes on a mission, the situation exhausts itself, in A new one appears in the next series. A common narrative chain is formed from the same type of "links".

What else distinguishes a series with a literary basis? From the point of view of the narrative, there are boundaries, temporal and spatial: the plot has a beginning and an end, the producer, screenwriter, director cannot think in "seasons" and infinitely multiply characters and episodes. TV series are sometimes called "branches without a trunk", but this is not true for a "literary" series – it always has a "trunk", the branches of the series cannot move away from it endlessly and haphazardly. The plot consistently moves to a specific point, and it is set for all participants – both for the creators of the film and its viewers. Another thing is that the authors of the series (as well as the movie) may not follow the writer's plan in everything. In "The Trick", this is the case in both cases of the film adaptation. For example, instead of the open and indefinite ending of the book – "jumped, rushed – and was like that", in the film by Mac Nichols we see Yossarian leaving the airbase consistently and "naturalistically" – running across the runway, getting into a boat, etc. In the series, the finale is even further from the original: Yossarian is shown naked in the cockpit of an airplane, making another – countless and endless – combat flight. This is a stronger anti-war message: the global carnage cripples and does not let go of a person, a squadron of heavy bombers "goes into the sunset", and such an intertext refers the viewer to many other war films…

It should be noted that earlier the "big cinema" often played the role of a chronicle of mankind, telling about the uprising of Spartacus, the Second World War or the Vietnam War; now this function has largely passed to TV series ^{[12, p. 214]}. In detail, in detail and slowly, they tell stories that form people's ideas about the near and distant past. However, let's not forget that this is always a mythologized picture, and sophistication and genuine drama add credibility to it, but do not guarantee truthfulness. It is no coincidence that TV series are compared to chronicles – both handwritten and documentary films: their consistent narrative creates a powerful effect of involvement in real events. It is not necessary that the creators of the series consciously and intentionally seek to mislead the viewer – here everyone is "happy to be deceived himself." However, the "Trick" – both the book, the film, and the TV series – although they have a plot based on genuine historical events, they do not try to pass off the narrative as "truth". Here, of course, the fact that Heller's novel is a tragicomedy of the absurd plays a role, and the creators of visual works preserve the genre. However, there is another point, in my opinion, that fundamentally distinguishes the series and clearly marks the fictionality of the whole story for the viewer. This is the choice of the main character.

The researchers note that, as a rule, the hero of the series turns out to be an ordinary person "reacting to the events and challenges of his time, striving to find and realize himself within the framework of his daily routine" ^{[22, p. 33]}. Often this is a very ambiguous character who implements not a categorical, but a situational and hypothetical moral imperative. It is much more interesting for the viewer to watch his fate, and it is easier to feel sympathy and identify with him than with an impeccable hero. This is absolutely true for Catch-22. We sympathize with Captain Yossarian, who does not want to fight, understand his desire to avoid death, empathize with courage despite natural fear, and hope that he will remain alive. In addition, "in the presence of black, gray is considered white" – the people around the bombardier are no better than him: one cashes in on military supplies, another dreams only of personal glory, the third kills for pleasure, etc. In this situation, an honest person saying "I'm afraid and I don't want to" does not cause condemnation. This "documentary" of the series, combined with the ordinariness of the main character and the absence of genuine historical figures, openly "signals" to the viewer: this is fiction, this did not happen. But it could have been…

In this context, we will answer the question of why the series looks more attractive today than the Mike Nichols film. The new version of the "Trick" talks to the viewer in an understandable, modern textual and visual language. The series was shot using the latest technologies and expressive means, it is brighter, more convincing and more attractive than the film created more than fifty years ago. This is not a conversation about history as it "really was", but a way to look at it and evaluate it from the perspective of current ideas about a man in war, this is the story as we want to see it today.

What specific artistic means work for this result?

Film critics often accused the series of "deep aesthetic secondary nature" and "pictorial banality", explaining this by the primacy of producers and the subordinate position of screenwriters and directors ^{[17, p. 45]}. Perhaps such a reproach could be addressed to series 10-15 years ago, but not modern ones (it is clear that the margin of inertia is large: on the online synonyms service, I found that the most frequent replacement for the concept of "TV series" is "film", and in the second position is "soap"). Whether the series offer a "fundamentally new aesthetic" ^[17] is difficult to say, but in any case, their world has ceased to be monotonous and economical, hardly anyone today associates it with "medium tones and grayish clarity" ^{[16, p. 206]}.

In the "Trick" series, the visual style is maintained as a whole – despite the fact that three directors independently shot two episodes of the film. A very "warm" color scheme is observed – soft paints and semitones of yellow shades. A "retro" feeling has been created: the viewer looks at faded photographs from the middle of the last century. Such stylization does not look deliberate, it is not perceived as an artificial filter, but it turns out to be a "signal" – we will talk about the past, this story is detached from us today.

Sometimes film critics reproach the series with the lack of landscape scenes and the "human dimension" of each frame ^[16]. This is true in the "Trick", but it seems to me that this is just the strong side of the picture. The full-scale scenes are extremely spectacular: in each episode, after a combat flight, Yossarian goes to the sea. He dives from a steep cliff, goes deep under the water, and then rises to the light in a cloud of bubbles – performing a symbolic ablution and coming out of the water renewed, the first person on earth. The camera does not really show us the beautiful Mediterranean landscape, but we see a close-up of the hero, his reunion with nature and the basic principle of life. In underwater filming, the frame of the frame is outlined very sparingly – but nothing distracts us from the Person and his inner world.

Mac Nichols' film, on the contrary, gives examples of "deserted scenes": sunrise, a panorama of the sea surface, a spectacular take-off of a squadron on a wet strip, etc. But, in my opinion, these general plans do not "work" too well for the general idea – it's just a "background" of events, nothing more. There are no thoughts about the contrast of peace and war, about the "little man" inside the "big universe", etc. – we just marked the place of action, that's all.

Let's compare another visual solution – a scene repeated many times in both the film and the series. This is an anti-aircraft bombardment of bombers entering the target. Of course, the technical capabilities of the creators of the series are incomparable with the film production of the 1970s. Nevertheless, we note a few points. Mike Nichols and his cameraman David Watkin sought to create a sense of presence in the cockpit of the aircraft for the viewer – as much as possible with the help of the means available to them. In the series, these scenes are visually solved more interestingly. The volleys of anti-aircraft guns and the crosshair of the nose of the bomber cabin create a kind of graphically ornamental picture – everything looks "painted", unreal, but a sense of danger, horror, and extreme human vulnerability arise over and over again. They are emphasized by the contrast of the musical series – the frivolous Yankee Doodle song from the time of the American Revolutionary War sounds grotesque, but at the same time hints at the finale of the film:

It scared me so, I hooked it off,

Nor stopped, as I remember,

Nor turned about till I got home,

Locked up in mother’s chamber.

It scared me so much that I started running,

And, as far as I remember, I didn't stop

And he didn't turn around until he was home.,

Locked up in my mother's room. (Translated by the author)

Speaking of music in paintings, we note that its almost complete absence in the 1970 film is unusual for a modern viewer. The only sounding theme is a fragment of "Sunrise" from Richard Strauss's symphonic poem "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" (written by the composer in 1896 under the impression of the book of the same name by F. Nietzsche). In the film, she accompanies the scene of Yosarian's "pursuit" of a beautiful Italian woman. This is probably a parody reference to Stanley Kubrick's "Space Odyssey" (1968), where the same melody sounds at the moment of God's appearance to people.

Unlike the movie, in the series, music is a full–fledged hero. The soundtrack was created by famous Hollywood composers Harry and Rupert Gregson-Williams. His main theme is jazz variations. The arrangement is modern, however, the compositions are perceived as belonging to the era. The series mainly uses a non–aesthetic version of the musical accompaniment - the audience hears the melody, but not the characters. However, the hero often moves to the beat of music he cannot hear: this "dance" looks especially impressive in the scene of Yossarian's triumph over the system – he announces to everyone that he has won and goes home. Harry Warren's composition "Chattanooga Choo Choo" (1941) is performed by the Glenn Miller Orchestra. The director's choice of a theme seems not just justified, but the only possible one. The orchestra, created by Glenn Miller, performed in the European theater of operations during the war, including at US Air Force bases, and gave a huge number of concerts from a radio studio in London. The characters of the series knew and listened to "Chattanooga" for sure. Let's note another interesting variant of "mutual masking": all the music of the painting is perceived as a single canvas – a popular song of the 1940s marks the plot and gives it historical authenticity, and "new" jazz compositions return the focus of perception to modernity.

And finally, let's talk about acting in a movie and a TV series.

The film by Mike Nichols contains stars of the first magnitude: Martin Balsam, Alan Arkin, Anthony Perkins, Jon Voight, Martin Sheen and Orson Welles. However, perhaps, no bright roles have been played. In my opinion, this is due to the feature mentioned earlier: the script includes an excessive number of storylines, the characters are "cramped" in the structure of the film, and the actors simply "do not have time" to play their characters in detail. Therefore, there were no memorable and multidimensional images in the picture.

The series features several absolutely brilliant acting works: Kyle Chandler (Colonel Koshkart), Hugh Laurie (Major de Coverly), George Clooney (General Scheisskopf). I emphasize that all these are supporting characters, and not the closest friendly environment of the main character played by Christopher Abbott, but rather his antagonists – senior officers of the regiment, personifying the insane "system". But Yossarian's crew members are not too bright.: we get to know them in the first frames of the film – as with cadets on the training ground, in many ways they remain the same figures in the line for us, with indistinguishable faces and character traits. This approach of directors to the selection of actors and the development of roles is understandable: the comedy of the absurd rests on confrontation – live grotesque situations are played out by Abbott's hero in consistent partnership with those who repeatedly send him to die. The tragedyness of the picture is focused on the main character – his fears, worries about his neighbor and the desire to save his life among the many deaths.

After comparing the film and the series created within the same plot, we will summarize some results and list the characteristics that determine the features of the functioning of military cinema in the space of historical memory and in this context we will determine the differences between the film and the series. So:

in the social space, military cinema occupies a place between the factual nature of history, mythological ideas about it, the author's idea and the intention of the audience's perception;

such a movie is a message that defines the interrelationships in the author(s) – kinotext – interpreter (viewer) system, in this capacity, feature films are one of the actors in the processes of preservation, transformation, and reconfiguration of ideas about the military past;

the series is an innovative technical and economic solution in the field of the film industry, actively forming a new way to watch and see, it is a new social practice that successfully configures the "behavioral map" of a person in the information society and therefore its influence in the processes of commemoration is increasing today;

the series implements the commemorative function through the following filmic solutions: a specific narrative strategy combining the horizontal and vertical construction of a system of episodes, preserving many storylines of the literary basis and building complex spatial and temporal connections between them ^[23]; a well-developed psychological drama; a sympathetic main character, inscribed in "everyday life", possessing situational behavior and a hypothetical moral imperative; a diverse list of artistic means, as a rule, focused on the presence of a person in the frame ^[24].

Historical memory is an abstract theoretical concept; in order to gain functionality, it must be concretized and transformed with the help of cultural artifacts and memorial actions. The processes of preserving and transforming ideas about the past (commemorative practices) are diverse, the ideas they form largely depend on the "genre specificity of discourse" ^{[25, p. 129]}. Such a practice as cinema is gaining more and more weight today due to its media nature and intertextuality.