Nostalgia, Adaptation, and (Textual) Identity: Luca Guadagnino’s ‘Desire Trilogy’

Abstract

This essay focuses on the ‘desire trilogy’ by Italian director Luca Guadagnino to reveal how it embodies nostalgic longing in its discursive structure. The essay examines how the films address matters of nostalgia and adaptation, how they trace an ‘absent presence’ and refer to one another, how they configure the hypertextual, intertextual, and architextual dialogue with other texts and media and use multimodal strategies that engage in ‘nostalgic desire’ for the cultural past. The analysis pays special attention to the mediation modes of intertextual references, reconfiguring the concepts of Gérard Genette within the framework of Lars Elleström’s concept of intermediality as intermodality, based on the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce. The study proposes an intermodal approach to the issue of intertextuality and intermediality, exposing the ways in which the engagement of modal strategies in a transtextual dialogue is (or can be) related to the construction of (archi)textual ‘self’.