14 - Kafka and popular culture

Summary

Kafka has inspired numerous artists in their creative work: in poetry, fiction, drama, film, painting, even music. Susan Sontag aptly observed that he has 'attracted interpreters like leeches'. Out of the vast material available, I have selected a few texts from three genres: comic book, science fiction, and film. By referring to Kafka as an 'inspiration' for these artists, I do not mean to suggest that they were merely 'influenced' by him. On the contrary, reading Kafka through them will show how they have left their mark on Kafka, inasmuch as their readings contribute to the ways in which we read his texts. In his famous essay, 'Kafka and His Precursors', Jorge Luis Borges stated: '[Every writer's] work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.' A similar relationship can be said to exist between Kafka and the artists who followed him.

‘The Metamorphosis’ clearly serves as an intertext for Woody Allen’s comic film Zelig (1983). After a round of medical experiments Zelig ends up walking on the walls of his room. The film is set in America (and Europe) in the interwar period. Leonard Zelig, the central character, is a ‘human chameleon’, who takes on the personal and physical characteristics of individuals whom he encounters. Thus he is found in Chinatown as a ‘strange looking Oriental’ and arrested, but when he emerges ‘incredibly, he is no longer hinese but Caucasian’. Zelig becomes a great celebrity, a freak, and a performer – a movie is even made of him, called The Changing Man. The public goes Zelig-crazy, they make him perform with ‘a midget and a chicken’, put him into a room with two overweight men and wait for Zelig to puff himself up, or show how ‘in the . . . presence of two Negro men, Zelig rapidly becomes one himself’.6 Even the reporter seems to suggest that this is a little too much: ‘What will they think of next?’