French Cultural Studies

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The Death of an Icon: Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain

Elizabeth Ezra
French Cultural Studies 2004; 15; 301
DOI: 10.1177/009715580401500307

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French Cultural Studies

The Death of an Icon: Le Fabuleux Destin

d’Amélie Poulain

ELIZABETH EZRA
University of Stirling

Amid the furore surrounding Amélie’s digitally enhanced Paris, what has
been overlooked is the fact that the film self-consciously thematises
evolving technologies of vision and the modes of temporality they
deploy, using the death of Princess Diana as the pretext for a meditation
on the nature of iconicity. Amélie may be of the digital age, but it
continually points nostalgically to the indexical, privileging the
immediacy of human contact over mediatised, iconic identification. The
film emphasises contingency as a form of resistance against hyper-
rationalised, linear temporality, reflected in the tension between
singularity and systematisation, or chance and fate (le destin).

Keywords: Amélie; Diana, Princess of Wales; digital technology; Jeunet,

Jean-Pierre; icon; indexicality

W hen Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain was released in 2001, it was

immediately surrounded by controversy. Critics chastised director Jean-
Pierre Jeunet for his digitally enhanced vision of Paris, which appeared to
erase, as if by magic, all traces of grafitti, crime, pollution, and social unrest.
Serge Kaganski, editor of the arts journal Inrockuptibles, accused the film of
presenting ‘une vision de Paris, de la France et du monde (sans même parler
du cinéma) particulièrement réactionnaire et droitière, pour rester poli’,
noting that ‘le Paris de Jeunet est soigneusement ”nettoyé” de toute sa
polysémie ethnique, sociale, sexuelle et culturelle’ (‘Amélie pas jolie’,
Libération, 31 May 2001). A similar complaint was voiced by Philippe Lançon,
also writing in Libération (1 June 2001), in a piece entitled ‘Le frauduleux
destin d’Amélie Poulain’: ‘Amélie Poulain a du succès parce qu’elle
transpose Euro-disney à Montmartre: même logique, même trompe-l’oeil

French Cultural Studies, 15(3): 301–310 Copyright © SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
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302 FRENCH CULTURAL STUDIES 15(3)

enchanté, même emploi de figurines, même tristesse déguisée en joie.’

Indeed, Jeunet’s vision of Paris would not have been possible without the aid
of sophisticated digital manipulation, and it was precisely this
manipulation, and the resulting lack of realism, that critics seemed to object
to the most. However, amid the furore surrounding the film’s use of digital
technology, it is easy to overlook the fact that Jeunet’s film self-consciously
thematises issues raised by the mode of visual representation it deploys. In
particular, the film presents a genealogy of technologies of vision, using the
death of a media icon as the pretext for a meditation on the nature of
iconicity.
Like Jeunet’s earlier Delicatessen (1991), Amélie is difficult to situate
historically. On the one hand, this is a world devoid of mobile phones,
computers, graffiti, and litter; its cafés have a timeless décor; clothing and
hairstyles could all have come from the 1950s; and even the funfair at which
Nino works seems to come from another age. On the other hand, an actual
historical event intrudes into the film’s narrative, locating the action
unambiguously in the weeks surrounding the death of Diana, Princess of
Wales, on 31 August 1997. This temporal cue invites viewers to read the
aforementioned ‘retro’ features of the film as quaint anachronisms. However,
the film’s nostalgia does not lie simply in its evocation of another time, but,
more significantly, in its invocation of another temporality, one that appears
to privilege contingency over predictability, and celebrates indexical modes
of representation over the electronically reproduced simulacrum.

The Death of a Nikon

Diana’s death serves many functions in the film. First, on a narrative level, it
triggers the event that will ultimately change Amélie’s life and those of many
people around her. Seeing a news bulletin on television about the accident
leads Amélie to discover a box of childhood mementos that has lain hidden
for decades, compelling her to embark on a search for its owner. Diana’s
death also serves as a pretext for Amélie to gain entry into an apartment
building while searching for the owner of the box, by posing as a petitioner
seeking to ‘faire canoniser Lady Di’. On an ideological level, the princess’s
death provokes an exchange about the nature of fame between Amélie and a
newsvendor, who remarks, ‘Quel malheur. Pour une fois qu’une princesse
était jeune et jolie!’, to which Amélie replies, ‘Vous voulez dire que si elle
avait était vieille et moche c’était moins grave?’, prompting the newsvendor
to affirm, ‘Mais oui, quand même. Regardez Mère Thérésa.’ The nun’s death,
which occurred around the same time as Diana’s, was indeed buried in the
media by the frenzied coverage of Diana’s funeral, and the veteran charity
worker was effectively replaced in the public consciousness by the princess,
or at the very least merged with her. Finally, Diana’s iconic status as the
Patron Saint of Those in Need, which was consolidated by her untimely

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EZRA: THE DEATH OF AN ICON 303

death, provides a point of identification for Amélie, whose selfless devotion

to others prevents her from attending to her own happiness.
Perhaps most important, though, is Diana’s status as a true icon, a vera
icon or Veronica figure. Her presence (if only as absence) anchors the film’s
relation to reality, like the indexical function that André Bazin ascribes to
cinema itself, which bears the indelible imprint of that with which it has
come into contact, like the ‘veil of Veronica pressed to the face of human
suffering’, to which Bazin compared the camera (Bazin 1967: 162). This
slippage between icon (quasi-mythical, larger-than-life) and index (guarantor
of ‘you-are-there’ historical contingency), informs the film’s ambivalent
thematisation of technologies of visual representation.
In the Peircean sense, an icon is a sign that bears a resemblance to the
thing represented. So, ‘iconicity’ in this context is synonymous with
mimesis, or representation based on imitation. Virtual reality, like painting,
would be an iconic rather than an indexical art, in that it does not
presuppose the presence of the thing being represented. Amélie rejects this
mode of representation – representation by proxy, as it were – in favour of
direct contact, associated with singularity and the unsystematic. As a child,
Amélie experiences so little physical contact with her physician father that
her heart palpitates wildly when he examines her, leading him to believe
that she has a life-threatening heart condition. Because of this mistaken
diagnosis, Amélie is kept away from other children, and generally deprived
of contact with others. Her problem, the film strongly suggests, is a lack of
intimacy. She brings those around her into contact with others, but suffers
from loneliness herself.
Another lonely figure in the film is Amélie’s neighbour Dufayel, who is
confined to his home with a rare brittle bone condition, occasioning his
nickname ‘L’homme de verre’ (‘The Glass Man’), and who spends his life
attempting to paint a perfect replica of the Renoir painting Le Déjeuner des
canotiers. As Dufayel says of the fille d’eau in the painting, also referring
knowingly to Amélie’s not-so-secret crush on Nino, a mysterious man she
has never actually met, she is imagining links with an absent person instead
of forging them with those around her. This is precisely the function of a
media icon, with whom an imaginary relationship serves as a substitute for
relations with real people (not unlike the pornographic videos sold in the
shop where Nino works, whose mechanically reproduced sex also acts as a
phantasmagorical substitute for relations with real people).
The film’s play of presence and absence recalls the distinction articulated
by Walter Benjamin between the trace, sign of indexical presence, and the
aura, or mystique of the iconic. According to Benjamin, ‘The trace is the
appearance of a nearness, however far removed the thing that left it behind
may be. The aura is the appearance of a distance, however close the thing
that calls it forth. In the trace, we gain possession of the thing; in the aura, it
takes possession of us’ (cited in Rosen 2001: 89). Media icons are adept at

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304 FRENCH CULTURAL STUDIES 15(3)

providing us with occasional traces of their ‘real’ life, which excites us

because, at the same time, their general inaccessibility keeps us from gettting
too close: it is this combination of proximity and distance, of indexicality
and aura, that keeps us coming back for more. Too much aura, and you end
up with the Queen, completely inaccessible and therefore not terribly
interesting; too much indexicality, and you end up with your sister or your
next-door neighbour, completely accessible, and therefore not terribly
interesting. Combine index and aura – say, pictures of the Queen in Burger
King, or your sister on Big Brother – and you have the distant proximity that
is an adman’s dream.
Amélie’s own identification with media icons is evident when she sees
herself on screen, taking to its logical conclusion the customised viewing
afforded, for example, by the TIVO digital recording system, which
automatically records your favourite television shows and suggests others
you might like. Amélie’s televisual hallucinations epitomise the ‘person-
nalisation’ that Gilles Lipovetsky identifies as a new form of social control
(Lipovetsky 1993: 35). It is such personnalisation that enables people to
insert a media icon into their own fantasies, and to insert themselves into
the mythology created around the icon, or at the very least into film footage
of the icon. It is digital technology that makes the representation of this
insertion possible, from Zelig to Forrest Gump to Amélie. Lipovetsky
describes ‘les confidences intimes, la proximité, l’authenticité’ (1993: 37) as
tools of mass consumerism. Indeed, it is but a short step from the
enumeration of each character’s idiosyncratic little sensual pleasures – the
sound crème brûlée makes when its skin is pierced with a spoon, the intense
satisfaction derived from polishing the floor with one’s feet or skipping
stones on the surface of the Canal St. Martin – to Amazon’s recommendation
of products just for ‘you’, based on your customer history.

Indicating Icons
The mediatisation of everyday life thematised in Amélie is made possible by
the various technologies of representation showcased in the film. As a child,
Amélie is shown using a still camera to take photos of clouds that, seen
through her fanciful imagination, appear as animal shapes. When a car
crashes in the street in front of her, the driver angrily accuses the little girl of
having caused the accident with her camera – thus prefiguring Diana’s crash,
said to have been prompted by camera hounds. (The crash is evoked again
when, at the cinema, Amélie informs us that she ‘n’aime pas dans les vieux
films américains quand les conducteurs ne regardent pas la route’.)
Photography then resurfaces in the photo booths, and in the Polaroid photos
of the itinerant garden gnome that Amélie has kidnapped from her father’s
house and sent to exotic locales around the world. Even the revenge that the
child Amélie takes on the driver when she discovers he’s lied to her involves

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EZRA: THE DEATH OF AN ICON 305

the deployment of a representational technology, as Amélie fiddles with the

man’s TV aerial so that he misses crucial moments of a football match. The
intermittent nature of this goalus interruptus or disrupted broadcast evokes
the discontinuous nature of film recording itself, and the myth of the
persistence of vision.
The modern representational technology par excellence, cinema, is
alluded to in the name of the glass man, Dufayel, which evokes the famous
department store in Paris at the turn of the twentieth century that housed the
largest cinema in the city. The Dufayel store became part of film legend
when a significant stash of old Méliès films was discovered there in the late
1920s. The association is further reinforced when Lucien, the grocer’s
assistant who brings Dufayel expensive delicacies hidden in ordinary
groceries (and whose name, etymologically, means ‘Lumière’), is referred to
by Dufayel as ‘le roi des magiciens’, a title claimed by Méliès himself. This
allusion to film history points not only to the preservation of films as a form
of cultural memory, but also to the archival or preservationist function of
cinema itself. André Bazin famously described cinema’s drive for realism as
a ‘defense against the passage of time’ (1967: 9). Bazin felt that film, as an
extension of the photograph, preserves a trace of the subject for posterity:
‘The photograph as such and the object in itself share a common being, after
the fashion of a fingerprint’ (1967: 15). In this way, film functions as an
archive of presence, of lived moments captured in their duration.
In Amélie, cinema’s archival function is evoked primarily in the figure of
Nino, the man to whom Amélie is attracted largely because he collects things
somewhat manically, things that have no significance for anyone but him.
These found objects – discarded photographs taken at photo booths, the
laughter of strangers recorded on audiotape, and snapshots of footprints on
wet cement – are indexical artifacts par excellence. Nino is an archivist,
attempting to preserve indexical traces of presence. Like Agnès Varda’s
glaneuse in Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse, and like Amélie herself when she
returns the box of childhood mementos she finds under her floorboards to its
original owner, Nino saves things from oblivion. The archival impulse stems
from a fear of degradation of the object, the fear of finitude, in sum, the fear
of death. When Amélie suggests that the man whose photographs appear in
Nino’s album might be ‘un mort qui a peur de basculer dans l’oubli . . . [qui]
se sert des photomatons pour rappeler son visage aux vivants, un peu
comme s’il faxait son image depuis l’au-delà’, Dufayel points to the revellers
in the Renoir painting and remarks, ‘Un mort qui a peur de basculer dans
l’oubli. Et bien, pour eux en tout cas, c’est gagné. Ils sont morts depuis
longemps, mais ils ne basculeront jamais dans l’oubli.’ This exchange
underscores the role in both painting and film of what Bazin called the
‘mummy complex’ (Bazin 1967: 9), or art’s promise of posterity.
Yet the things that Nino archives, or preserves for posterity, can be
characterised as ‘noise’, that which was not intended for archival

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306 FRENCH CULTURAL STUDIES 15(3)

preservation. But in preserving it, he turns the refuse of daily life into
something worth preserving. As Derrida notes,
l’archive, comme impression, écriture, prothèse ou technique
hypomnésique en général, ce n’est pas seulement le lieu de stockage et de
conservation d’un contenu archivable passé qui existerait de toute façon,
tel que, sans elle, on croit encore qu’il fut ou qu’il aura été. Non, la
structure technique de l’archive archivante détermine aussi la structure
du contenu archivable dans son surgissement même et dans son rapport à
l’avenir. L’archivation produit autant qu’elle enregistre l’événement.
(1995: 34)
The same could be said for celebrity, which is not just recorded, but
produced by the media: it is worth noting in this regard that the clock in the
café where Amélie works is a ‘Vedette’ (‘celebrity’), as if to suggest that
stardom, like the film image for Bazin, ‘helps us to remember the subject and
to preserve him from a second spiritual death’ (Bazin 1967: 10).

Time Pieces
According to Mary Ann Doane in The Emergence of Cinematic Time, film’s
archival function was both the product of and a reaction to the increasing
rationalisation of time brought about by industrialisation:
The archive is a protection against time and its inevitable entropy and
corruption, but with the introduction of film as an archival process, the
task becomes that of preserving time, of preserving an experience of
temporality, one that was never necessarily ‘lived’ but emerges as the
counterdream of rationalization, its agonistic underside – full presence
(Doane 2002: 223).
In this sense, film soon came to represent (that is, both to record and enact) a
specifically indexical, or idiosyncratic, unpredictable, and contingent form
of temporality that was perceived as being on the wane at the time of
cinema’s invention. Film was embraced as a tool of nostalgia, an antidote to
the transformations wrought by industrial capitalism, which, Doane notes,
changed our perception of time itself, ‘[t]hrough its rationalization and
abstraction, its externalization and reification in the form of pocket watches,
standardised schedules, and the organization of the work day’ (2002: 221).
(Even non-working schedules have become standardized: the beggar to
whom Amélie offers a coin rejects the money, saying he doesn’t work
Sundays.) It was through this rationalisation and abstraction that time and
money became equated, an equivalence evoked by the huge Omega watch on
which Amélie’s neighbour Dufayel has his video camera trained day and
night: ‘Omega’ may be the be-all and end-all in Greek letters, but it is also a
brand name.
In many ways, Amélie seems obsessed with time. The film is littered with

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EZRA: THE DEATH OF AN ICON 307

missed rendezvous, appointments made and broken, close-ups of clocks and

watches anxiously checked. When we see footage of Diana’s car crash for the
first time, the film’s emphasis on temporality is underscored as the narrator
intones: ‘29 août. Dans 48 heures, le destin d’Amélie Poulain va basculer . . .’
This use of the date and invocation of the classic deadline structure at once
situates the film historically and lends it a sense of inexorability, a
fatefulness. This linear temporality, however, is seemingly at odds with the
synchronicity emphasised at the beginning and end of the film, which opens
and closes with a note of the date and time, accompanied by a voiceover
naming various things that are taking place at that exact moment. Time is
similarly suspended when Amélie pauses to calculate the number of sexual
climaxes occurring in Paris at a given moment. This ordering of contingency
mirrors the function of cinema itself, which attempts to capture fleeting
moments in order to withdraw them from the otherwise unstoppable march
of time, but also serves to process and reorder random experience, to endow
it with meaning and rescue it from oblivion, in much the same way that
Amélie does when she helps a blind man (shown standing in front of a shop
called ‘Temps libre’) down the street, narrating the various sights along the
way. Cinema, with its reliance on indexical representation and its
privileging of the contingent, perfectly embodies the tension between
singularity and the systematic. There is a moment in Amélie that neatly
encapsulates the terms of the opposition: on a bus, Amélie recites a line of
poetry she is reading – ‘Sans toi les émotions d’aujourd’hui ne sont que la
peau morte des émotions d’autrefois’ – to the bus conductor, who replies,
‘Ticket s’il vous plaît.’
More generally, this tension is at once thematised and enacted in the film
by two kinds of representation, which could be called, on the one hand,
representation based on presence (‘There it is’), and, on the other hand,
representation based on resemblance (‘It’s like this’). Representation based
on presence encompasses all the indexical signs – footprints, photographs,
audio recordings, and videos, but also the arrows and the pointing statue
that lead Nino to the telescope through which he views Amélie holding up
his lost photo album. A small boy helpfully elucidates the indexical function
of the pointing statue as conduit or medium when he points out to Nino:
‘Monsieur, quand le doigt montre le ciel, l’imbécile regarde le doigt’. (In
much the same way, the Glass Man, whose nickname refers to his brittle
bones, also functions as a kind of medium, a transparent window or ‘index’
directing attention to things beyond himself.) Amélie may be of the digital
age, but it continually points nostalgically to the indexical, privileging the
immediacy of human contact over mediatised, iconic identification. Doane
argues that, by attempting to capture fleeting, unrepeatable moments,
indexical media such as photography and cinema at once resist the systema-
tisation of time and contribute to it. She writes, ‘The technological assurance
of indexicality is the guarantee of a privileged relation to chance and the

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308 FRENCH CULTURAL STUDIES 15(3)

contingent, whose lure would be the escape from the grasp of rationalization
and its system.’(10). Yet this ‘escape’ is illusory, built into the system itself:
‘. . . the rationalization of time characterizing industrialization and the
expansion of capitalism was accompanied by a structuring of contingency
and temporality through emerging technologies of representation – a
structuring that attempted to ensure their residence outside structure, to
make tolerable an incessant rationalization’ (11). This strategic paradox is
illustrated perfectly by the video camera’s nonstop recording of the clock
outside Dufayel’s apartment: it registers the uninterrupted, ‘real time’ of the
time piece, showing the contingency of the structure, but also the structure
of contingency.
The other kind of representation is that based on resemblance. In addition
to the mimetic arts such as representational painting and digital filmmaking,
representation based on resemblance also includes acts of reconstruction
and bricolage, ranging from Dufayel’s painting of a painting and the phoney
letter that Amélie pieces together from her concierge Madeleine’s long-dead
husband, to the video compilations of television programmes that Amélie
makes for Dufayel and the newsreels and foreign film subtitles that are
doctored or ‘personnalisés’ in Amélie’s active imagination. Here, representation
shades into deception, like the disguises that Amélie dons in the photos of
herself she inserts into Nino’s album (and like the ‘false’ picture of Paris
painted by Jeunet’s use of digital technology). They lead the viewer farther
from the subject, rather than closer to it, like the arrows that Nino follows up
the steps of Montmartre, thinking they will take him to his mysterious
admirer, when in fact they lead him away from her, to a telescope, yet
another technology of vision that mediates his view of Amélie. This dance of
proximity and distance exposes the illusory potential of the index: like
Bazin’s beloved Nanook, who in fact played to camera, simulating the
actions that Bazin took to be a slice of life (see Rony 1996: 111–26), the
index is – if not always, then at least often – already iconic.

Conclusion
Amélie is a film that brings people together, both within the diegesis and
beyond. In the film, Amélie touches the lives of those around her, bringing
them nearer to each other: she reunites Bretodeau with his grandson; she
makes her concierge believe that her dead husband really loved her; she
plays Cupid for her hypochondriacal work colleague Georgette and the
paranoid café patron; and she inspires her father to go out and see the world
after spending years in isolation. In France, Amélie united Left and Right,
with politicians from all points on the political spectrum organising private
screenings, and publicly proclaiming their love of the film (Vincendeau
2001: 22).

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EZRA: THE DEATH OF AN ICON 309

The contact that Amélie privileges is allied with contingency not just
etymologically (in its celebration of characters who reach out and ‘touch’
someone) but semantically as well. The film seems to be against iterability,
against iconicity: as long as the Glass Man makes endless copies of his
painting, he will never ‘get a life’. Yet it is he who opens Amélie up to the
contingency of singular events, exhorting his young friend, on videotape, to
‘take a chance’. When Amélie and Nino finally kiss, Dufayel tells Lucien,
who has been filming them, to turn the camera away, thus underscoring the
literal obscenity of the act, its need to occur off stage (ob-scene). Dufayel
attempts to preserve the absolute, unrepresentable singularity of the
encounter by refusing to mediate it, that is, by refusing to turn it into a
media event, but he cannot prevent the encounter itself from being utterly
iconic. Like the fifteen sexual climaxes she ‘observes’, Amélie’s decision to
‘take a chance’ invokes instead the wholly licit and non-fortuitous pleasures
of the classic film plot. Each of the fifteen orgasms occurring in Paris at a
given moment may be spontaneous, but together they lay down a law of
averages, creating an actuarial basis for the prediction of other cinematic
climaxes. As Doane oberves, ‘In line with the logic of statistics, the cinema
has worked to confirm the legibility of the contingent’ (2002: 208). So, at the
end of the film, even though it is the video that brings the hitherto star-
crossed lovers together, the sheer predictability of their union, the ‘fabulous’,
storybook fulfilment of Amélie’s ‘destin’, recalls the ending of countless
Hollywood films. The film’s very resistance against iterability itself reiterates
the indexical drive of the cinematic medium (which is another way of
saying: the unrepeatable – it’s been done before). In turn, Amélie herself has
become an endlessly reiterated icon, one whose story is reassuringly
familiar, and whose face has been reproduced all over the world. Although
the film appears to endorse iconoclasm, it ultimately (if knowingly)
reproduces a cliché.

References
Bazin, André (1967) What is Cinema? Trans. Hugh Gray. Berkeley and London: University of
California Press.
Derrida, Jacques (1995) Mal d’Archive. Paris: Galilée.
Doane, Mary Ann (2002) The Emergence of Cinematic Time. Cambridge MA: Harvard
University Press.
Kaganski, Serge (2001) ‘Amélie pas jolie’. Libération, 31 May.
Lançon, Philippe (2001) ‘Le frauduleux destin d’Amélie Poulain’. Libération, 1 June.
Lipovetsky, Gilles (1993) L’Ère du vide. Paris: Gallimard.
Rony, Fatimah Tobing (1996) The Third Eye: Race, Cinema and Ethnographic Spectacle.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Rosen, Philip (2001) Change Mummified. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Vincendeau, Ginette (2001) ‘Café Society’. Sight and Sound, August : 22–25.

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310 FRENCH CULTURAL STUDIES 15(3)

Elizabeth Ezra is Senior Lecturer in the School of Modern Languages and

Cultures, University of Stirling. Address for correspondence: School of
Modern Languages and Cultures, University of Stirling, Stirling FK9 4LA.
e-mail: e.r.ezra@stir.ac.uk

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