Raymond Carver vai ao teatro: adaptação do conto Do que estamos falando quando falamos de amor no filme metaficcional Birdman (Ou A Inesperada Virtude da Ignorância).

Abstract

The short story What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, by American writer Raymond Carver is adapted into a play within the film Birdman (Or The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), created by Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu. The story shows a group of friends drinking gin while talking about love on a sunny afternoon; the film shows an actor, famous for playing a superhero in the past, trying to gain recognition as an artist through the production of a play. The play is precisely Carver’s short story, adapted. The three works, the short story and the play, and the movie that encompasses them both, are deeply intertwined, thematically and stylistically. And, as the movie is self-reflexive, its metafictional status alters the other two works, influencing our perception of them. This research intends to analyze Carver’s short story as an adaptation inside Iñárritu’s metaficcional film, trying to understand the implications this dialogue between the three works of art have on our act of reading them all. In order to proceed to this analysis we will refer to the studies regarding the theories of metafiction, notably the ones carried out by Linda Hutcheon (1980), Gustavo Bernardo (2010) e Patricia Waugh (1984), and also the studies regarding the theories of adaptation, especially the works written by also Linda Hutcheon (2011) e de James Naremore (2000).