Some argue that Fearless Girl is not a “legitimate” work of art because its meaning is dependent on Charging Bull, but works of art often appropriate parts (or even all) of other works in order to synthesize new meaning.
Mad Men was known for its liberal usage of literary allusions, most of which were exactly what you’d expect. But only one allusion lasted the entirety of a season: Dante’s Inferno.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which just celebrated its twentieth anniversary, is remembered for its campy, sometimes silly, iconic vampire lore. And yet, while watching it as it aired, it never occurred to me that the classic Prince of Darkness—Dracula—might appear.
In the third season of The Affair, one of the Solloway children comes home excited to tell his mother that he’s participating in a musical version of Jane Eyre.
As bookish ’90s teenage role models go, Joey Potter of Dawson’s Creek never quite reached the “girl-power” heights of Rory Gilmore, Willow Rosenberg, or Daria.
When I first started watching BBC’s serial killer drama The Fall, I was excited to discover that the episode titles were all famous lines from Paradise Lost. But the title is also a reference to another, very different classic poem: “The Hollow Men” by T.S. Eliot.
Emma Cline’s debut novel, The Girls, is an unabashedly feminist novel that freely acknowledges the presence of patriarchal forces in our society.
ARRIVAL has been hailed for carving a space for the “literary science fiction movie,” and rightly so. Director Denis Villeneuve achieved the nearly impossible feat of making a compelling, relatively crowd-pleasing movie about linguistics, complete with a new alien language composed of 100 logograms, while also weaving in themes of international cooperation, humanism, and empathy.
HBO’s Westworld is rife with literary references that, like the androids populating the titular park, have started to take on a life of their own.
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