Abstract
In the Hollywood remake of this study Julianne Moore will play the femme fatale, bedecked in a purple outfit with neck tie, she’ll deftly drop a Wedgewood millstone onto a slightly-foxed copy of ‘The Use of Daniel in Revelation’. This is a stunning, innovative, and insightful book. Faced with the daunting quantity of verbal near-parallels with OT prophetic texts that abound in Revelation, an NT scholar’s reflex-action is to painstakingly scrutinize each potential source (in its Greek and Hebrew text-forms), in order to dissect the ancient author’s compositional procedure. Fletcher has read all these studies (chap 1) and respectfully builds on the painstaking data that these analyses have yielded. Her focus, however, is reader-centred (cf. Ruiz, Moyise, Jack) rather than author-centred, and proposes an innovative hermeneutical lens through which to view afresh the combined clusters of interwoven OT resonances. This is emphatically not a ‘relabelling exercise’, to propose that Revelation is a pastiche, but rather a ‘re-viewing exercise which reads Revelation as pastiche’ (p 71) in creative dialogue with the film theorists Ingeborg Hoesterey and Richard Dyer (ch. 3). Four test-case studies focus on ‘one like a son of man’ (Rev 1/ch. 4), the ‘whore of Babylon’ (Rev 17/ch. 5), the literary artifice of Rev 18 (ch. 6), and the genre ‘apocalypse’ (ch. 7)—purposefully moving from micro to macro level analysis. Each test case follows a recurring pattern: first, an overview of scholarly interpretations of each test-case and how it is ‘like but not the same’ a multiplicity of OT texts; a similar interpretative issue in a film (or filmic genre) is chosen (eg., Once Upon a Time in the West, Far from Heaven, film noir), read through the lens of pastiche; the insights from the filmic reading are then creatively developed as a fresh vantage point from which to re-read the Revelation test-case as pastiche. The sensitive literary readings yield rich insights, particularly on Rev 18 and the genre apocalypse. This is an important, groundbreaking study that merits a wide readership. It offers an illuminating lens through which to observe the affective force of a text which is so achingly similar to OT prophetic texts and yet which can never be quite the same again.