Columbo, Cassavetes, and a biography of friendship

Through intertextual analysis, this article focuses upon the concept of friendship – the affective and relation dimensions of which function as a type of biographical narrative capable of being discerned and derived from actors performing together. The case study for this examination is the close and longstanding friendship and working relationship between Peter Falk, John Cassavetes, and Ben Gazzara. Its intertext is composed of the television series Columbo, memoirs by Falk and Gazzara, the collection Cassavetes on Cassavetes, the friends’ talk-show appearances while they were promoting the Cassavetes film Husbands, and documentary footage concerning Cassavetes’ films. The article argues that by setting such texts alongside one another, the ineffability of love and friendship is rendered tangible on screen. Its method, moreover, models those ways in which Celebrity Studies provides not only an analysis of key figures but is a field that can be designed in conversation with the subjects we explore

Aesthetics · Art · Biography · Conversation · Friendship · Literature · Media studies · Memoir · Narrative · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · Communication · Computer Science · Foucault, Power, and Ethics · French Literature and Criticism · Narrative Theory and Analysis · Psychology · Social Psychology