love song of j alfred prufrock allusions

This aspect of the film together with Eliot’s verse suggests a binary between youth and advanced age, and a child’s realization of the physical effects of age. A person of advanced age will typically move slower than a person who is young. A physical attribute about the follower that never changes, however, is the speed at which it moves. One aspect of the follower is that it can alter its appearance, and does so throughout the film. Young and old in It Follows, 2014.įiguratively, it is perhaps significant that the follower first appears clearly to Jay as an elderly woman, the figure signifying what all young women inevitably become. At this point in the film, however, Jay does not necessarily now that the follower intends to kill her. Narratively, the purpose of the scene in It Follows is to show the moment that Jay realizes that the curse is real and that it is following her. The poem is written from the point of view of an adult man who reflects on his life, describing, among other things, an awareness of his advanced age. I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,Īnd I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker, I am no prophet – and here’s no great matter Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter, Scuttling across the floors of silent seas

“I should have been a pair of ragged claws

Lines from the poem appear in other media, the best-known perhaps being those spoken by Dennis Hopper in Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. When Jay sees the figure approach, the following stanzas are heard: When the character of Jay first sees the follower walking toward her, she is sitting in a classroom listening to a lecturer reading from T.S. These themes are often bolstered by the film’s aesthetic choices, such as the absence of adult characters in the film, anachronistic props, and occasionally the physical appearance of the follower. The film contains two literary allusions to the awareness of mortality -the awareness being either the transition from adolescence to adulthood or the realization of the aging process and of the inevitability of death.

A modern, similar narrative would be Antonius’ efforts to elude Death in Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. Iconographically, one can interpret the follower as a personification of the characters’ mortality, which has existed in literary history since antiquity in the figures of Thanatos, Abaddon, Samael, and others. In David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows, various characters are cursed with a wraithlike ‘follower’ that brings certain death to whoever it captures.

Love song of j alfred prufrock allusions