Hábito versus rotina: um estudo sobre os regimes de sentido no filme As horas

Abstract

Grounded on the Landowskian socio-semiotic concepts, mainly those of habit and routine, we aim at analyzing the regimes of sense experienced by the main characters of the movie The Hours (directed by Stephen Daldry, 2002), which shows three intertwined stories: those of three women linked by
Virginia Woolf’s novel, Mrs. Dalloway. The first woman lives in the beginning of the twentieth century, the second, in its half, and the third, in the first year of the twenty-first century. The first character is Mrs. Dalloway’s writer, the second appears reading this book in some scenes and the third has
many characteristics in common with the main character of the novel – “Mrs. Dalloway” is her nickname. We seek to show the complex construction of meaning effects of nuclear characters’ interaction, as well as the intertwinement of their narrative paths. We show the existing articulation between regimes of sense and regimes of interaction, privileging those that conduct habit and routine, that is, the regime of manipulation and that of programming, respectively. A homologous construction of the three interposed narratives in
the movie was found, thus clarifying that what configures each and every one of them is the problematic conviviality between a character that is modalized by wanting-to-do/be and another by having-to-do/be, the first conducting the habit and the latter conducting the routine.