Persepolis

Rebekah Murphy     

KVC 

Women's Literature 

11.20.2008 

The Shifting Corporeality in Film and Textual Versions of Persepolis 

    Alothough Marjane Satrapi wrote both the comic book and screenplay of 

Persepolis there exist some discrepancies between the two scripts, most of which are present due to time limitations that accompany the medium of film. Yet the discrepancies whose significances are not so easily qualified must be examined further, and one of these scenes involves Marji's depression and loss of identity which led to her attempted suicide. Satrapi depicts the loss of Marji's identity in differing manners within the textual and film versions of Persepolis. In the comic Satrapi can physically erase Marji, leaving only her outline within the panel to depict her loss of identity, yet within the film she uses a far more subtle visual queue. Marji's beauty mark which is linked to her identity as an adult becomes less and less prominent throughout this sequence of her narrative, mirroring her less and less prominent sense of self. Satrapi also uses this disappearing beauty mark within the comic, but it is the complete lack of form which completely illustrates Marji's disappearance. 

     Satrapi's first portrayal of this scene within her textual comic pictures Marji's face in her left profile, omitting her beauty mark that appeared as she went through a violent puberty, one that resembles her grandmother's and links the two characters within the comic. Her grandmother is coupled with her identity within the comic, She provides the voice of her conscious when she lies about her nationality to Marc while at a party at school (Satrapi 41). Her grandmother also reprimands her for falsely accusing a man on the street of harassing her in order to get out of being arrested herself (Satrapi 137). Her grandmother is her voice of reason, of family, and of identity, and her beauty mark, resembling her grandmother's corporeally, is representative of these virtues.  

    And these virtues are what Marji is lacking as she goes through her depression, as she takes anti-depressants and loses herself in the process. This    loss is illustrated in the comic by a physical absence of her form within the panel accompanied by the text: "But as soon as the affect of the pills wore off, I once again became conscious. My calamity could be summarized in one sentence: I was nothing. I was a Westerner in Iran, an Iranian in the West. I had no identitiy..."(Satrapi 118). 

    This scene does not occur in the film version of  Persepolis so this loss of identity must be conveyed through a subtler more fluid visual queue. From the time that Marji speaks to the psychiatrist, who diagnoses her condition as "Clinical Depression" and prescibes a "treatment" for her (Persepolis), her left profile is shown more prominently, omitting our view of the beauty mark on the right side of her face. We then see a cascade of pills and her disinterest in her surroundings. Our senses, too are muffled, as the sound becomes hazy and far away and our focus is brought to the bottle of pills upon her table. Instead of seeing Marji lost, we lose ourselves with her, And at the moment she awakens her beauty mark is completely prominent once more as we see a full shot of her face, and not a profile (Persepolis). Marji has regained her sense of identity,  and has a new mandate from God and Karl Marx to live out the remainder of her life, for "The struggle must continue..."(Persepolis). 

    The comic book version of Persepolis is able to completely illustrate Marji's sense of nothingness and lack of identity with the absence of her presence, but at this stage of the film, this same scene would have provided an interruption in the progression of the images of the movies, and the background narration it would have taken to completely explain her feelings would have detracted from the connection the audience was compelled to feel as we drifted away from the world and ourselves with Marji.