Spike Jonze Shorts Stories

Abstract

Cynthia Felando demonstrates the relevance and significance of Jonze’s narrative shorts in his larger filmography. Felando argues that these short films both reflect and enrich our understanding of Jonze’s auteurist preoccupations. The short film is treated as its own genre with important specificities, including several related to storytelling, narrative, character, and genre conventions that differentiate it from the feature-length film. The chapter’s aim is to establish the viability of contextualizing Jonze’s narrative shorts as shorts, and to demonstrate the value of an analytical approach that addresses their continuities with and differences from his feature-length films. Felando considers his narrative shorts in relation to discourses in the emergent area of short form media studies. The primary analytical focus is on Jonze’s fiction shorts, although his other shorts-related titles are cited to demonstrate the persistence of several of his recurring storytelling, character, and thematic strategies.