The title of Dickens's novel comprises the complexities that are going to be explored in

the text. On the one hand, the novel has a title which points to the future ("expectations")
whilst it is a text that looks to the past via a powerfully retrospective narrative voice at all
times dominated by nostalgia. Future and past are wrought together, and they will be
presented as inseparable. At the same time, although the first-person narrator would
imply an exclusive, personalized account, the title for the novel successfully transcends
the intimacy of the story and suggests a wider perspective. Gilmour argues, in this
connection, how "[i]n discovering the sources of his great expectations, Pip discovers the
tangled roots from which the artificial class divisions of nineteenth-century society have
grown. The social and the personal, the anatomy of society and the Bildungsroman, are
blended in the perfectly unforced symbolism of the novel" (1986, 102). On the other
hand, the word "expectations," which relates to the idea of self-improvement, has both
financial and emotional connotations, emphasizing the complexities contained within the
notion of Self-Help as discussed above. Further, the novel opens through a direct allusion
to the theme of identity, an identity which is revealed to be essentially precarious, cut off
from values of continuity and inheritance and thus in need of self-definition. Orphan Pip
tells us how "I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip" (3; ch. 1). In spite of this
apparent self definition (here is a fine example, if anything, of a self-made name), Pip's
quest for identity will be torn between two powerful presences in the shape of surrogate
parental characters: Joe and Magwitch
Cuaron's adaptation of Great Expectations (4) uses Dickens's novel as a starting point to
inflict a critical, relentless look at the 1980s North-American society, not only exploring
the extent to which this society inherits its constructions of subjectivity from the
nineteenth century, but revealing the centrality and poignancy of the debate which
informs Dickens's narrative. In this connection, the film may be interpreted as a
dialogical response to nineteenth century cultural and ideological constructions of
subjectivity.
As in Dickens's Great Expectations, Cuaron's Finn is the narrator of the story, and he is
careful to highlight that what we are going to see is not an objective account, but
exclusively "... the way I remember it." The film opens with the use of voiceover and
insists on Finn's focalization of the action by making him a painter. As such, Finn reenvisions reality much like Pip does with his first personal narrative.
Finn lives in Florida with Joe, an impoverished handyman and unsuccessful fisherman.
As an artist who draws, he has aspirations diametrically opposed to those of his foster
father: he wishes to become a successful painter, "to paint for the rich," as he tells us at an
early stage in the film. His is a dream of success and the journey will be one to New
York, presented not just as the center of the art world, but also as the contemporary center
of the capitalist milieu, replacing London as standard-bearer of the Western world in the
nineteenth century. Finn's desire to paint for the rich reveals how he sees art as a business,
and although his dream is initially presented as an artistic one, it soon transforms into a
merely financial one. When he is offered the opportunity of having a one-man show in a
gallery in New York, his artistic/financial dream seems to become true. But Finn's dream
is ironically caught in Smiles's motto that "every man's first duty is, to improve, to

educate, and elevate himself" (Kimmel 17). Individual achievement, industriousness,

mobility and wealth will shape Finn's life, and money and success become the measure of
all things when, via a powerful marketing strategy, he becomes a celebrity even before
his exhibition has taken place.
Both Finn and his art become commodities unable to escape the capitalist market; art is
something to be bought and sold and so is Finn's dream of success and economic
prosperity, of getting to know the "ways of the rich." Cuaron offers the spectator a
glimpse of contemporary American society, a world where the market successfully
permeates all social spheres, in a manner following Kimmel's arguments in relation to the
construction of masculinity as seen before. Thus Finn's dream of personal progress
reveals the extent to which marketplace success has become a source from where
individual identity may be constructed, and the film tackles the extent to which
economics subtly infiltrate the construction of the self. (11) Coherently, in his newly
acquired identity as a fashionable celebrity, he invents a new past for himself. Identity,
therefore, is not presented as solid, unique and coherent, but as multiple, fragile and
inconsistent, ready to be re-defined once the appropriate change of location has taken
place.
Lustig, like Magwitch, is a parody of the successful businessman, of the self-made man,
virile and masculine. The politics of gender at work are once more very effective, and
Lustig successfully responds to contemporary dominant notions of masculinity. Indeed,
de Niro is perfect for the role not only because of his physical appearance, but more so
because as an actor he has come to represent conventional masculinity in its purest form.
Although, like Pip, Finn does not want to acknowledge Lustig's existence, Cuaron
cleverly draws relations between the respectable world and the social underworld,
bringing to the surface their interrelations and interdependence and ironically portraying
how similar North-American contemporary society is to the Victorian Dickensian world
when we discover that the money that makes Finn's life of glamor and success in New
York possible is Lustig's. Finally, if Magwitch is going to be sent to Australia as a
punishment for his past offense, Lustig is sentenced to death by lethal injection. The
severity of the penal system is highlighted by both Cuaron and Dickens, whereby once
more we have a sense of the contemporary world being informed by the dichotomies that
shaped nineteenth century Victorian society. Cuaron's Joe, on the other hand, will remain
locked in a feminized domestic realm, associated with love and tenderness and
consequently lacking what is necessary to progress in what is presented as 'a man's world'
in the purest James Brown fashion. His weakness and lack of masculine drive is
emphasized from the start, with his wife openly sleeping with other men. Johnson (10)
highlights the gallery show scene, where Joe is definitely clumsy, when he makes the
point that "[a]fter the fiasco at the opening, Finn's elevated social status ... is
demonstrated by his height (on the steps), by the placement of the camera (which looks
down on Joe), and by the shot/reverse shot editing." Joe, therefore, is associated not just
with origins, but with a simple life which has to be rejected by Finn in order to embrace
the glamor and sophistication of his new world of chic bohemia: "I had cut myself loose
from Joe, from poverty. I had invented myself. I was free. I'm a wild success."

Still, Cuaron seems to be particularly keen on concentrating on the limitations of the

forces of production that Finn so decisively embraces to construct his new identity as a
wild success. Drawing attention to the alienating power of money, the film questions the
extent to which financial success will bring along with it moral and personal growth. The
need to integrate production and reproduction, home and market, to construct himself
successfully as an individual, will irremediably take Finn back home, to Paradiso
Perduto, Cuaron's rendering of Dickens's Satis House, in an ironic reference to the lost
innocence and the coming of age which he has undergone. The Bildungsroman qualities
of the story are emphasized here by Cuaron, who choses a "safe" Victorian closure for his
story in so far as unity and coherence are what the text ultimately pulls towards.
Estella's story also doubles Pip's. Like Pip, she is an orphan, the forces that will shape her
identity are external, so that once more attention is drawn to identity as a social construct,
where economics play the dominant part. Although she seems to manipulate Pip, hers is a
perverted fantasy of female power: she is not only a puppet in Miss Havisham's hands
but, silenced by narrative economics, she is reduced to a position of (textual)
powerlessness.
Finn's dream of success is also wrapped up in sexual aspirations, with Nora Dinsmoor as
Cuaron's version of the jilted bride, Miss Havisham. Extravagant gothic images and
pictorial exaggeration inform her depiction, so that she becomes essentially an object for
the audience to gaze at. (14) Passing on to Estella her hatred of men, Miss Dinsmoor's
relation with her surrogate daughter redoubles Lustig's relation with Finn. Identity and
economics are inseparable in Finn as they are in Estella, both struggling between
consuming and being consumed.
Estella will be the object of Finn's desire from Finn's first meeting of her. Johnson (6)
states that "Estella's position as the object of Finn's gaze initiates the desire that alters
Finn's relationship to the act of drawing ... the desire that results from his looking can
only be released in the imaginative form of the finished painting." Throughout the film,
Estella is always dressed in green. In Celtic myths the Green man was the God of fertility.
Later, in the millennium, early Christians banned green because it had been used in pagan
ceremonies. However, in the fifteenth century, the color green seems to have been
considered the best choice for a bride's gown precisely because of its earlier symbolism.
Green has been reinterpreted by late twentieth century American culture to signify a state
of heightened sexuality in specific situations, and is a color often associated with
expectations/hope in Western cultures. Green is also the color of money in the U. S., the
word green being even used in slang to replace dollar. Finn's expectations being pictured
in green, his sexual desires are also wrapped up in his financial aspirations so that they
are inseparable from his dream of personal success. Furthermore, though Estella is not
narrated but visibly accessible for the audience, the camera insistently watches her all the
time, framing her into an objet d'art. In drawing her, Finn inscribes Estella into a text, in
postmodern fashion, as she is represented the way he wants her to be.
The postmodern game between reality and its representation is central to the politics
expressed here. Camera work plays heavily with Estella's body, transforming her into the

object of display which Finn's gaze identifies her with: she is fair, beautiful and desirable.
This promotes a dynamics not unlike those present in Dickens's text, audiences are forced
to occupy Finn's position, identifying themselves with the male protagonist who gazes at
the beautiful object. Victorian narrative politics are translated into contemporary
cinematic effect, in which the camera work substitutes the first-person narrative. This is
further intensified by Finn's aspirations as a painter, in so far as much of the film is spent
in his drawing Estella. Several scenes show Finn mapping Estella's female body, thus
insistently objectifying it through fragmentation. In fracturing her body and inscribing it
into the artistic text, she becomes dehumanized and disappears from the narrative, reemerging as inspiration, muse, the Other upon which the authorial/artistic 'I' can project
his coherence. In this way, in drawing her, Finn constructs himself as narrating subject of
his painted object. In this connection, it is worth recalling the scene in the film when
Walter comes to see Finn's paintings. As the two men stand in Finn's room surrounded by
the fragmentary representations of the female body, they more than ever share a discourse
of masculinity which objectifies Estella, pushed now to the periphery of the male center
which she is not invited to share. As Walter comes into Finn's room, surrounded by the
fragmented versions of Estella, he reminds Finn that she is actually his, thus depriving
him of his possession and claiming it for himself. The colonization of Estella is complete.
She will be Walter's wife.
How fine the line which separates success from loss is, or how success and loss ironically
go hand in hand, becoming complements: the night of the gallery show, Finn sells all the
paintings, yet he loses Joe, Estella, and even Lustig, once he discovers that he has bought
all the paintings through love of his child. His desperate definition of himself as a "wild
success" encapsulates the tale he did not learn from the haunting Nora Dinsmoor: the
moment of great expectations might easily, swiftly, become a moment of great
frustrations.
Moya, Ana; Lpez, Gemma
PUB. DATE
September 2008
SOURCE
Dickens Quarterly;Sep2008, Vol. 25 Issue 3, p172
In the opening voice over, he declares: "I'm not going to tell the story the way that it
happened. I'm going to tell it the way I remember it." That he is a visual artist and we see
a lot of his work also clues us in on the workings of his mind. The first time that Finn
sketches the young Estella, the camera leads us to see Estella in parts--eyes, lips, nose,
mouth. This is later echoed in the New York apartment when the grownup Estella poses
for him. She takes off her clothes and asks, "Do you want me to sit or stand?" He replies
with a "whatever." He doesn't care, what he sees is the ideal Estella, the curve of her
neck, the swell of her breasts, the strands of her pubic hair.
Alfonso Cuarons 1998 Great Expectations, based loosely on the 1861 novel by Charles
Dickens, hovers between an adaptation and a transformation. On the one hand, Cuarons

movie is directly based on the plot and the characters of Dickenss novel and thus aligns
itself with the many movie and television adaptations that have been made over the years.
1. On the other hand, Cuaron and his scriptwriter Mitch Glazer chose to deviate from the
novel sufficiently for the movie to transcend adaptation. Not only does Cuaron relocate
the plot, the language and the environment from the 1820s and 1830s in England to the
Florida and New York City of the 1980s and 1990s; he also uses his version of the story
to draw our attention almost exclusively to the erotic tension between the main character,
Finn ( Pip in the novel ), and the woman he has loved since childhood, Estella ( whose
name remains unchanged from the original ). Admittedly, the heros obsession with
Estella is already powerfully present in Dickenss novel- even though the explicitly
sexual element is new.
Cuaron, like Dickens, features a main character whom we first meet as a child and
see transformed into a young adult in the course of the movie. Secondly, again like
Dickens, Cuaron presents this character as someone with a specific but also somewhat
difficult-to-define ambition: whereas Pip wants to become a gentleman-he wants to
move up into the British upper-middle or upper classes Finn wants to become a
successful artist and to succeed in New York Citys elite art scene. In each case, the move
from the provinces ( Rochester in the southern marsh country near the English channel in
Dickenss novel, the Florida Gulf coast in Cuarons movie ) to the big city ( London, New
York ) signals simultaneously that the main character is moving up in society and that he
is growing into an adult. Most importantly, however, in both versions of the story, the
main characters social ambitions are directly connected to his fascination with a woman
from the upper classes who represents his social aspirations and is socially and
symbolically forever placed out of his reach.
Estella means star in Latin, and her name alone implies that she is a beautiful
and desired but impossibly distant object. Given that she has been raised, in both the
novel and the film, as her adoptive mothers instrument of revenge ( to be a cold and
distant beauty who attracts men and cannot return their feelings ) her association with an
ever-elusive object is very fitting. In both Dickenss novel and Cuarons movie, Estella
moves out of the main characters reach again and again, up to the very end of each story.
Dickenss Estella, consistently associated with light sources such as candles, moves away
from Pip bearing a candle in her hand, and is once referred to as a candle that attracts
men like moths. Cuaron adds to the motif by linking Estella not only with stars, but also
with birds in flight while Finn himself is associated both verbally and visually with fish
( and he is a fish out of water when he tries to reach up to Estella and her sphere ).
Cuaron presents Finns obsession with Estella as an unchanging, ever-present element of
Finns life through scenes that are staged as a series of repetitions of the same narrative
pattern a close, intimate encounter between the two, followed by Estellas retreat into
the distance, away from Finn.
As the movie begins, we see Finn as a boy spending the day on his own in and out
of his boat in the shallow waters of the Gulf coast of Florida, drawing what he sees in a
sketchbook. The quiet of these lyrical establishing shots is dramatically interrupted when
Finn is suddenly threatened by the escaped convict Arthur Lustig in a suspenseful scene
that rivals the frightening and equally sudden appearance of Abel Magwitch in the first
chapter of Dickenss novel. Prior to this violent disruption, the dreamy, peaceful
atmosphere in which Finn sketches a fish that swims around his feet seems to indicate

Finns self-sufficiency, his innocence, and his bond with nature. Coming as it does before
the violent intrusion of the brutal adult world in the form of the escaped convict, the
opening scene creates the image of a childhood paradise. Finns name actually implies his
connection with untouched nature; in evoking a fishs fins, it refers us back to the very
first object we see him draw.
Furthermore, as Finn stands in the water, focusing on water animals, he is surrounded by
a flock of coastal birds in flight, which anticipate the birds in Finns art that are
consistently associated with Estella and her constant move away from him. Seemingly
oblivious of their presence, he draws a fish himself, not Estella. However, the fish in his
sketch is surrounded by stars that Finn has already drawn; when we first see a shot of the
sketchbook page, the stars are already in place, as he slowly pencils in the fish in the
center. And while the fish in naturalistically sketched shots of Finns drawing are
intercut with shots of the fish in the water to imply that he is drawing from nature the
stars in his sketch are not realistically drawn but abstract five-pointed stars. This
foreshadows Finns obsession with Estella, his own creation of her as an object of desire
in his portraits, in figure drawings, and in his many symbolic drawings of birds, stars and
airplanes.
Estella is first introduces as a girl, in a setting that associates childhood with a
natural environment that is Ms. Dinsmoors unkempt and neglected garden, complete
with fountains and ponds. The garden is named Lost Paradise ( Paradiso Perduto is
inscribed on the arch over the garden gate ) in a rather heavy-handed allusion to the
theme of innocence and its loss; however, the loss of innocence seems to refer to Ms.
Dinsmoor, whose abandonment by her lover many years ago is clearly associated with
this site. Finn first catches glimpse of the child Estella through the overgrown vegetation,
an environment that seems like a paradise already lost than like a vast playground for
playing hide-and-seek. Estella blends into the brightly lit jungle-like environment with
her blonde hair and bright green eyes. Later encounters between the two also take place
outdoors ( several of them in Central Park ), evoking again the linking of both characters
with nature. These scenes frequently involve water another allusion to the ocean
beginning of the movie in a highly eroticized way; for example, Estella kisses Finn
twice under running water. In the sequence that introduces her as a child, they French kiss
as they drink together from a fountain in Ms. Dinsmoors house. The scene is repeated as
Estella kisses Finn as he takes a drink at a water fountain in Central Park. Another
important scene later on features a somewhat hackneyed kiss in the pouring rain, leading
up to the movies even more hackneyed bedroom scene.
These scenes all reiterate the dynamic relationship between Finn and Estella that
is first hinted at when the birds scatter up and away from Finn in the opening scene.
Estellas moving out of reach again and again takes the form of her being placed
physically above Finn, looking down at him, or stooping to reach down to him or objects
associated with him- only to vanish from sight just as Finn reaches her or touches her,
literally or symbolically. Most striking is their last encounter as teenagers, just before
Estella leaves for her schooling abroad. Finn is seated on his bed, looking up at her and
fondling her legs and crotch as she stands in front of him. She is rendered imposing and
powerful through several low-angle shots that align us with Finns powerless position. At
the end of this very close encounter, Estella again moves away from Finn, disappearing
through receding doorways out of his reach.

Estella keeps eluding Finn, and his success as an artist turns out to be an illusion:
not only was his show bankrolled by his secret benefactor, Arthur Lustig, but Lustig
bought every painting in the exhibit, making him the manufacturer of Finns career in art.
Finn has not made it despite the buzz his show has created, just as eventually having
sex with Estella does not bring her into his reach; she vanishes after a night spent with
him just as she has after each previous encounter.
Finns sketches are intermittently visible throughout the movie in his
sketchbook, in his home in Florida, in his ratty hotel room and later in his snazzy
warehouse-loft studio in New York, as well as in the gallery where his work is exhibited.
The opening and closing credits also feature Finns drawings, so that symbolic images of
the relationship between Estella and Finn frame the entire story. The meaning of these
symbolic sketches may be that Finn and Estella are creatures of different elements, and
they meet only with difficulty, with Finn symbolically reaching up while Estella stoops
down or swoops out of his reach.
The years pass by just like Finn says The years went by. And then one day, I
went home. A bridging shot of him entering his childhood home to visit Joe leads to the
last scene of the movie a return to Ms. Dinsmoors estate. The even more advanced
decay of the garden ( now that the owner had died and the house is about to be torn
down ) seems to indicate not so much that time has passed, but that everything has
returned even more closely to its natural state since Finn first entered Paradiso Perduto.
Finn seems to become his child self again as he cathches sight of a little girl who looks
like the young Estella flitting through the overgrown vegetation.
Cuarons movie wraps up with the lovers uniting as they hold hands and look out
onto the ocean and into the sun. But it is an ending that challenges the importance of
change, it effectively erases the story that has led up to this finale because Cuaron insists
so aggressively on closing the circle by visually evoking the films opening shots.
Finns answer to Estellas question: Can you ever forgive me? is vague:
Dont you know me at all?. This answer seems to say that Finn forgives her but the
following voice-over implies that instead of forgiving, Finn simply wants to forget and
thus erase all that has happened: She did know me. And I knew her. I always had, from
the first instant. And the rest of it didn't matter. It was the past. It was as if it had never
been, and it was just my memory of it.
And not only does Finns statement ( the last words from the movie ) imply
erasure or obliteration; so does the shot sequence that underlies it. Although we see the
silhouettes of the two lovers coming close together until they stand hand in hand, the way
the camera catches the refraction of the sunlight off the water results in an overexposure
that keeps the two main characters visually separated by overly bright light in the center
of the composition, even as they appear in the same frame. Cuaron uses overexposed and
brightly lit exterior shots several time in the course of the movie, but here, in the last
frame, the brightness is extreme. The final shot overpowers the two characters visually, as
if the very sunshine of their love made the lovers vanish along with their own past.
The color green, which is used with disproportionate frequency for clothing, room dcor,
and other visual effects, so that it virtually drenches the film, always hearkens back to the

pale greens of the shallow water and to Finns clothing in the opening shots of the movie
and reinforces the link of the characters and their relationship to the natural world.
Frus, Phyllis. Beyond adaptation: Essays on Radical Tranformations of Original Works.
North Carolina: McFarland&Co. Publishers, 2010.