MR. RYAN MURPHY: PROOF THE AUTEUR THEORY IS CORRECT?

Mr. Ryan Murphy has created many shows that have entered the popular culture zeitgeist, many of which are treatments of various groups of outcasts and misfits navigating their ways through the judgements they face. Mr. Murphy's career began in 1999 and continues today, with his production of both movies and television that have achieved both popular and critical acclaim. Mr. Murphy's television resume is as follows....

THESE ARE IN ORDER BY THE DATE OF CREATION

Not only does Mr. Murphy have a long and industrious career in the television industry, he has also made his mark on the feature film industry as well. Those films are as follows....

THESE ARE ALSO IN ORDER OF CREATION

Additionally, Mr. Murphy has a multitude of films that are being developed. Those are....

1) Dirty Tricks, a political comedy.

2) Face, a plastic surgery thriller

3) Need, an erotic thriller

4) In 2014, Murphy was developing a feature film that was based on the life of a reclusive heiress named Huguette Clark, who lived to be 104 and whose will was a subject of much controversy. He is planning to base the adaption on the number one, bestselling book Empty Mansions: The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark and the Spending of a Great American Fortune.

5) Mr. Murphy is also developing a remake of the 1976 cult-classic horror film The Town That Dreaded Sundown. It is set to be directed by Alfonso Gomez-Rejon. 

However, I don't want you to think that this week's blog post is just going to be a biography of Mr. Murphy's work, you can go to wikipedia for that, but rather I want to use his body of work to discuss the auteur theory and how, although his work seems disjunct and not unified by a common thread, in fact, it is unified by its celebration of the underdog and the outcast. 

According the Encyclopedia Britannica, the auteur theory is a theory that was first put forward by French New Wave film magazine Cashiers du Cinema. This theory advocates that the director is the author of his films and that across that director's body of work there will specific characteristics or stylistic choice that can be observed across it. With that definition of an auteur, I would like to submit that Mr. Murphy is an auteur because there are both stylistic and characteristics that are shared across his body of work. One characteristic that is shared across all of Mr. Murphy's work is that he uses the same actors across a multitude of different project. For example, in American Horror Story, the actor Sarah Paulson has played different characters across all the seasons, in the first season she was a medium. in the second season she was a lesbian reporter, in the third season she was a witch, and now in the fourth season she is playing a conjoined twin. Mr. Murphy is not the first director who is known for using the same actors across his films, as another of example of this practice includes Spike Lee. Another thing that points to Mr. Murphy as an auteur is the subject matter that is treated across all of his work. In all of the titles that are presented above, exposure is given to people that are typically on the fringes of either society or the social ladder. With this through line in his work I believe that therefore it is appropriate to refer to Mr. Murphy as a true auteur.