Celebrating Theatre’s Medial Mobillity in the Age of Digitization : Media, Liveness, and Hypermediacy in Annie Baker’s The Flick

Abstract

This essay seeks to unpack the complex layers of intermedial dynamics in Annie Baker’s 2014 Pulitzer Prize winner The Flick to explain how the play’s incorporation of various media demonstrates theatre’s significant socio-cultural function as a hypermedium in postmodernity. While most reviews of the play focus on the impact of technological change on the human employees or on their human relationship, an important theme that has been overlooked is the intermedial relationship between live theatre and electronic media including film. Despite its absence within the play, theatre is not only constantly evoked in contraposition to the electronic media but also serves as the meta-medium that frames the entire action while integrating all the other media subsumed in it. In terms of theatre’s plurimediality, technological development does not pose a threat to theatre’s distinct mediality but implies an increase in the number of media at its disposal for the diversification of its aesthetics. Understood in intermedial terms, The Flick is a celebration of theatre’s unchanged capability of relating to and utilizing other media, including new ones, as a cultural form of resistance to digitization that blurs media boundaries and the distinction between the real and the virtual.