Love in the Post: From Plato to Derrida

The Screenplay and Commentary

Martin McQuillan, Joanna Callaghan

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781783480067
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Estetica in filosofia

Love in the Post (2013) is inspired by Jacques Derrida’s book The Post Card. Like the book, the film plays with fact and fiction, weaving together the stories of a scholar of literature and a film director, alongside insights from critics and philosophers. Theo Marks works in a university department that is soon to be closed. His wife Sophie, enigmatic and distant, is in analysis. Filmmaker Joanna struggles to make a film about The Post Card. These people are set on a collision course prompted by a series of letters that will change their lives. The film features a never before seen interview with Derrida, alongside contributions from Geoff Bennington, Ellen Burt, Catherin Malabou, J. Hillis Miller and Samuel Weber. Alongside the original screenplay, Martin McQuillan provides an extended commentary on Derrida’s original text, the film and its making. Joanna Callaghan reflects on her practice as a filmmaker and her engagement with philosophy as a director. The volume concludes with interviews between McQuillan and five leading Derrida scholars.

Love in the Post

The Screenplay

Joanna Callaghan & Martin McQuillan

INT. GALLERY - DAY

SOPHIE scatters letters.

SOPHIE

‘You have always been “my” metaphysics, the metaphysics of my life, the “verso” of everything I write. My desire, speech, presence, proximity, law, my heart and soul, everything that I love and that you know before me’.

JOANNA, a member of the audience watches her.

EXT. STREET - DAY

Joanna walks through a square and onto a deserted street.

EXT. PUB - DAY

A sign outside a pub:

‘SPEED PITCHING FOR FILMMAKERS’.

A bell rings.

INT. PUB - DAY

Filmmakers pitch their ideas to each other with a ringing bell signalling the end of each pitch.

MARK

It’s a transgender, cyborg, splatter horror with a Dadaist manifesto.

THERESA

Four friends go to a wedding and one of them falls in love with an American woman who he then only meets at weddings and a funeral!

DONAL

I would have like, room tones from say like a hundred different rooms and they would all run into each other.

JUSTIN

So there is this group of friends and they travel to Texas and there is this crazy guy with a chainsaw and he starts killing them one by one!

JOANNA

I’m interested in films that make you think. I’m currently working on a film inspired by French philosopher Jacques Derrida.

ANDREA

Who?

THERESA

Dar-eeda?

JOANNA

Derrida.

JUSTIN

Is anyone dying in it?

MARK

Is it avant-garde?

JOANNA

Anyways it’s just inspired from this book. It’s actually a love story.

EXT. UNIVERSITY OF WESSEX - DAY

A stately building in the countryside.

INT. UNIVERSITY OF WESSEX / THEO’S OFFICE - DAY

Packing boxes lie strewn around in place of furniture. Sitting on the only chair is MACEY, a mature PHD student. THEO, her professor, is perched on a stool.

THEO

Have you finished ‘The Post Card’?

MACEY

Yes, I didn’t like it.

THEO

Come on, Macey, you can do better than that, why not?

MACEY

It’s just heterosexist propaganda in which a male academic is unfaithful to his wife. It’s the old clichéd story of male philosopher as seducer. It’s so 1970’s.

THEO

That’s unfair. Don’t you think the relationship between Plato and Socrates is a little more complicated than that?

MACEY

So it’s a bromance too? Boys, boys, boys. Just not interested. Why should people continue to read ‘The Post Card’?

THEO

Well, at its simplest it’s abo...