Religion, Blasphemy and the Hollywood Institution: The Last Temptation of Christ

Abstract

‘Mirror, Mirror’ is a 24-minute episode of the first series of the Amazing Stories anthology television programme that, directed by Martin Scorsese, was broadcast by NBC on 9 March 1986.¹ The episode was written by Joseph Minion from a story by Steven Spielberg. With Amazing Stories also being produced by Amblin Entertainment, ‘Mirror, Mirror’ thus looks forward to Scorsese and Spielberg’s later collaboration on Cape Fear. That noted, in terms of authorship, the episode presents a compendium of elements reflective and evocative of Scorsese’s antecedent and subsequent output. For example, as horror writer Jordan Manmouth (Sam Waterston) recalls in his uptight irascibility Jerry Langford in The King of Comedy, so the young fan (Glenn Scarpelli) Manmouth finds sleeping outside the front door of his house recalls Rupert Pupkin: he claims he is Manmouth’s ‘biggest fan’, and as Pupkin wants Langford to listen to his act, so he carries some writing he wants Manmouth to read. Similarly, as Kiki Bridges’s sculpture in After Hours suggests Edvard Munch’s The Scream, so does the cover of Manmouth’s book ‘Scream Dreams’, while the montages of Manmouth shutting and locking doors and windows and closing some Venetian blinds and Manmouth’s girlfriend, Karen (Helen Shaver), drawing curtains, covering a painting and protectively tidying and cleaning Manmouth’s house foreshadow those of Sam closing and locking shutters, doors and windows and drawing curtains in Cape Fear (Sangster 2002: 215).