Myth-Making Modern Cities: Paris and London in Jacques Tati’s Playtime and Penelope Lively’s City of the Mind
Myth-Making Modern Cities: Paris and London in Jacques Tati’s Playtime and Penelope Lively’s City of the Mind

Summary/Abstract: Focusing on Paris and London in Jacques Tati’s Playtime and Penelope Lively’s City of the Mind, I investigate how modern cities function as myth-makers. By drawing on urban theory and spatial analysis, this study explores how cities, as living and evolving beings, create stories and reflect the way people treat them and how they profoundly influence the lives of their inhabitants. In Playtime, Tati criticizes the dehumanizing effects of modernist architecture and rapid urbanization on cities and their inhabitants. I investigate how Tati’s Paris as a Frankenstein-like city, with its fading historical past, manipulates and distorts the lives of its residents. The film delineates how removing the historical identity and replacing it by sterile and impersonal spaces can create myth-making cities narrating their own stories. This erasure of the past not only detaches inhabitants from their collective heritage but also cultivates environments that feel inherently unstable. The research underscores that a city’s vitality and human connection are inextricably linked to its historical layers, arguing against a modernity that disregards its past and foundations. Similarly, Lively’s City of the Mind depicts how London as a city fractured between its historical past and its gentrified present embodies the duality of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. This research argues that the erasure of past and historical memory or separating past and present in urban spaces can create foreboding and uncontrollable cities mirroring the anxieties of modern life. Analyzing these texts, I explore the relationship between space and time and the importance of the integration of history and modernity in urban planning. Without this balance, cities are on the verge of becoming monstrous and alienating spaces failing to nurture human spirit.

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