Mirror in Disguise: An Exploration of Conflicts Between Desire and Performance and the Abstract and Reality Through Encounters With Simone de Beauvoir, Hannah Arendt, Jacques Lacan, and Michel Foucault

This satirical screenplay focuses on the conflict between intellectualism and personal disposition, between fetishizing the foreign and savoring reality. These contrasts are highlighted by parallel plots set in present-day New York and 1949 Paris as well as the main character Jean’s mirrored relationships with his girlfriend Sophie and his lover Beauvoir. The ideas of fetishizing the unfamiliar and the intellectual abstract are developed by examination of several renowned political and critical theorists including Simone de Beauvoir, Hannah Arendt, Jacques Lacan, and Michel Foucault. The theorists’ ideas and personalities are portrayed both through Jean’s present-day obsessive studying and through his first-hand encounters with them in past Paris. Throughout the screenplay, Beauvoir opens up to Jean about her existentialist views on life and her disappointment over the loss of her lovers after their realization that they are unable to domesticate her. In the end, Jean realizes he cannot share Beauvoir with others, and thus detaches himself both from the past and from his intellectual obsessions. This screenplay is not meant to side with any character or support any view, but rather to portray how oftentimes desire and performance and the abstract and reality cannot coexist and how our own personal disposition gets in the way of who we envision ourselves to be.