Movie as self-portrait. Auto-narration and narrative identity in Neil Jordan’s „Breakfast on Pluto”

Abstract

The paper aims to analyze Neil Jordan’s famous movie Breakfast on Pluto in the context of affective “narrative identity.” Breakfast on Pluto is an adaptation of Patrick McCabe’s diary and presents the story of a man who wants to be a woman – he feels like a woman and gradually transforms into one. Patrick/Patricia is thus a transsexual (not only transgender) person who tells the story of a bodily metamorphosis. The author of the paper finds the process of storytelling extremely interesting for a number of reasons. In the paper, the author focuses especially on the process of creating a new identity for the protagonist through the movie’s narration in reference to the categories of “subjective narration” (Edward Branigan) and narrative identity, that is the creation of an identity in the process of telling one’s own story. The author shows how the tools of the movie can shape the process of storytelling (by using special frames, montage, etc.) and how three stories are incorporated in Jordan’s movie: the male and the female story as well as, finally, the subversive self-creation when Patrick/Patricia becomes one whole, one processual identity (in the context of Judith Butler’s assumption about gender). In the paper, the diegesis of the movie will also be analyzed: a number of objects – attributes of masculinity and femininity and the quasi-parodic character of the movie space and the process of storytelling. Parody in Breakfast on Pluto emphasizes the subversive and surfictional structure of the self-story in the movie. The author treats Breakfast on Pluto as a movie version of Entwicklungsroman – the process of narrativization of an identity in transition, of fictionalizing the real life of the protagonist. Therefore, the author also refers to J. M. Coetzee’s assumptions about confession, which is always an important part of self-narration.