IS EVERY PATH THE RIGHT PATH? A SEMIOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF THE AXIOLOGICAL CHOICES IN MR NOBODY (2009)

Authors

  • MA Mathieu Bokestael L

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.55877/cc.vol11.131

Keywords:

Semiology, Mr Nobody, Jaco Van Dormael, Christian Metz

Abstract

Jaco Van Dormael’s 2009 film Mr Nobody presents the viewer with a set of different choices and lives. The explicit moral of the film is that each of these lives is the right one, that every path is the right path. This paper proposes a semiotic analysis of the romantic interests of Nemo to investigate whether this is truly the case. Through the use of different semiological models (among others Metzian semiotics of cinema, Fontanille and Zilverberg’s tensive model and Greimas’ semiotic square), it disproves the axiological position of the film and shows that the different lives of Nemo are presented as unequal.

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Published

10.11.2022