SOURCE: Wills, David and Alec McHoul. “Zoo-logics: Questions of Analysis in a Film by Peter Greenaway.” Textual Practice 5, no. 1 (spring 1991): 8–24.

In the following essay, Wills and McHoul examine how A Zed and Two Noughts functions as an “intellectual exercise,” arguing that the film's more traditional elements—plot, character, themes—come across as contrived.

A

The forms of texts that we might call, for want of a better word, postmodern, are not unfamiliar to us. We can immediately call to mind Joyce, the nouveau roman, so-called metafiction, Pynchon, DeLillo and so on. And we can argue about the applicability of those examples with respect to a category that means little for us anyway. Then we can imagine or invoke forms of analysis that have been applied inter alia to those texts; for example, the Barthesian, the Genettian, the Derridean, etc. They are not mysteries. But such analyses, more and...