Abstract

This essay considers a form of relation that is neither sameness nor difference but correspondence. It does so by analyzing the palindromes in two films, John Greyson's Fig Trees and Miranda July's Me and You and Everyone We Know. Within a palindrome, letters here and there are neither the same nor different. Instead, they correspond in a particular arrangement. I argue that palindromes' spatiality resonates with the spatiality of anal eroticism as described by Sigmund Freud; I show how the films use palindromes to figure particular relations between people and places; and I conclude that such relations seem difficult, and sometimes undesirable, to sustain. Ultimately, in thinking through relations of correspondence, the essay examines identity's impossible suspense.

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