On Xavier Dolan’s musical parentheses

ABSTRACT Several critics have described Xavier Dolan as a gifted yet self-indulgent filmmaker. From the stylish costume design to the carefully composed arrangement of colors and objects within the mise en scène, Dolan’s films would seem to be guilty of an over-investment in the image. This essay interrogates the aesthetic and affective possibilities that the ostensibly intolerable textuality of Dolan’s films allows by focusing on their distinctive deployment of the musical parenthesis. What may one gain by indulging in the pleasures of the parenthetical mode? The expectation according to which such pleasures should be dispensed with moderation betrays suspicion towards a filmic mode of stylistic and emotional excess that oversteps certain boundaries and, in so doing, undermines hierarchies of value and taste. This essay questions the authoritative appeal of these hierarchies, arguing that there may be something valuable – and queer – about their displacement.