As usual Mike Frank asks good questions. What I meant by saying the "car/license plate/new car/stolen money thing is a red herring" is just what Don Larsson helpfully pointed out. It's a MacGuffin. (Now we're really bad: explaining one arcane term with another. Maybe I should add that it's the *objet a* too....) All I meant was that we're invited to fixate on these details in terms of their impact on the chain of events (the hermeneutic code), if not on their symbolic meaning. After Marion's murder, the issue becomes not Will Marion get caught? but rather will Norman's mother get caught? Both of these are there to distract us from the solution (in a way that could probably described in terms drawn from S/Z). But the question of what we do in teaching students to interpret is crucial. The kinds of over-interpretation Franks refers to--looking for religious references, e.g.--are one specific kind of interpretation: the kind which seeks to translate the text via a specific code. (E.g., Dorothy's shoes are red because red means danger or red means sexuality or red means communism....etc.) What needs to be argued in such cases is why this code is more valid than another. Formal interpretations merely strive to say how the elements of the text relate: Dorothy's shoes are red because the film is organized by primary colors; her dress has blue, the road is yellow; only so many choices were available for primary colors; the witch being green is determined by her relation of opposition to the shoes blah blah blah. But such interpretations are dry because they have no semantic dimension: they are sheerly syntactic. Thus in practice we often yoke these formal approaches with expressive interpretations: that is, we say formal patterns not only play organizing roles but they express psychological states or traits of the characters. Thus the "in-itself-ness" of the aesthetic is rescued by narrative, and pure form gives way to storytelling as a value. Both of these kinds of meaning, however, are different from intentional meaning. The kinds of meaning described above obtain among the parts of the work but not between the sender and the addressee. Intentional meaning is tempting to apply because we rely on it so often when are reading messages in order to get the sender's intentional meaning. The commonality of this situation does not exclude the existence of other possibilities. Thus the question of the license plate is partly a question of what code to bring to bear, with what we should link the license plate, and how far to interpret these codes and linkages as emanating from a sender, whether A.H. or the set dresser. Sincerely, Edward R. O'Neill ---- Online resources for film/TV studies may be found at ScreenSite http://www.tcf.ua.edu/ScreenSite