Zelig-like

English

Etymology

From Zelig +‎ -like, after the character Leonard Zelig from the 1983 film Zelig.

Adjective

Zelig -like (comparative more Zelig-like, superlative most Zelig-like)

Synonym of Zeligesque
- 2005, Stephan Wackwitz, Stephen Lehmann, An Invisible Country, page 38:
  My grandfather turns up, Zelig-like, somewhere in the background of so many historic photographs and documentary film clips that sometimes I would ask myself whether the obscure but unavoidable ubiquity of his curriculum vitae in the history of the last century did not suggest a notewothy, albeit questionable, capacity to empathize and adapt—a pathological malleability.
- 2019, Chandler Carter, The Last Opera, page 33:
  Zelig-like, Nabokov shows up in Paris during the twenties, In New York and Philadelphia in the thirties, in wartime Washington and postwar Germany, in Paris again in the fifties, and in Berlin once more at the height of the Cold War.
- 2020, Piotrowska Agnieszka Piotrowska, Creative Practice Research in the Age of Neoliberal Hopelessness:
  When discussing the film at a screening at the University of Southern California in April 2018, interviewer Michael Renov pointed out how Elsaesser is almost Zelig-like figure due to his and his family's capacity to be at the centre of history (the family past on the Sun Island, with the filmmaker also being in Paris during 1968, the west coast of the USA during the counter-culture of the 1970s and more).
Having an extremely flexible, inconsistent and/or polymorphic character.
- 2019, Jill Franks, Woody Allen and Charlie Chaplin: Little Men, Big Auteurs:
  Allen's one-liner reveals that he thinks there is something Zelig-like in himself, increasing the intrigue that this human chameleon offers.
- 2022, The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Agency, page 73:
  Ideal agency would exhibit determination in any environment whatsoever; sometimes it would have to do so through Zelig-like polymorphism, so we should not be using ideal agency as our reference point when we are trying to understand the bounded agency we encounter in real life.
- 2023, Andrew Horton, Comedy/Cinema/Theory, page 213:
  Echoing these Zelig-like anxieties in the preface to his autobiographical play The Floating Light Bulb (1982) , Allen flatly states that the author's "one regret in life is that he is not someone else."