Anxiety (of influence) and (absent) fathers in Sorrentino’s English-language narratives

Abstract

This article examines the role of damaged or absent fathers – actual, metaphoric and artistic – as represented in Sorrentino’s works that are filmed in English: This Must Be the Place (2011), Youth (2015) and The Young Pope (2016). The (non-biological) father figures that appear in these films and television episodes function sometimes as extensions of a failed father, and at other times as correctives to a failed father. The psychoanalytic thesis of the anal father as developed by Žižek (via Freud and Lacan) as a postmodern response to Lacan’s symbolic father paired with Bloom’s theory of the anxiety of artistic influence serve as my theoretical structure. Any deficiencies, failures or crises depicted by father figures on-screen is countered by the success of Sorrentino himself off-screen, as extradiegetic elements make their way into the diegesis, complicating the relationship between the filmmaker and his creations, but also with his cinematic forebears with whom he is frequently judged.