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Popular Culture Review
of linear perspective and in virtual reality computer systems, as both are
“attempts to achieve immediacy by ignoring or denying the presence of
the medium and the act of mediation. All of them seek to put the viewer
in the same space as the objects viewed” (11). Similarly, they point to
“[a] medieval illuminated manuscript, a seventeenth-century painting by
David Bailly, and a buttoned and windowed multimedia application” as
hypermediated “expressions of a fascination with media” (12). These
twin preoccupations are found as well in Scorsese’s The Age o f
Innocence, positioning it as a pivotal film between two present-day
traditions in representing the past on film.
Scorsese’s film is the third version of Edith Wharton’s 1920
novel. A silent version, of which all prints have been lost or destroyed,
was released in 1924. In 1934, RXO produced a second film version,
starring Irene Dunne as Ellen and John Boles as Newland, the starcrossed lovers, and Julie Hayden as May, Newland’s wife and Ellen’s
cousin. In this film, the 1870s love story is set up by a narrative frame
taking place in the 1920s, in which Newland, a widower, tells his
grandson about his past. Thus, the love story is presented entirely in
flashback, and within this flashback, the salient events of the novel’s
love story are retained. When the flashback ends, Newland’s grandson
offers to take him to Ellen, also widowed and living in New York, but
Newland declines, stating that he wants “to remember [their love] as it
was.”
In the RKO film, despite the retention of the basic story, many
narrative events from the novel have disappeared. In add ][ۋ] Hو B