Speculations (so to speak) about symbols: > Ken Mogg wrote: > > Now, please, what is the 'obvious' sexual symbol in STRANGERS ON A TRAIN > when Miriam's strangling is reflected in a lens of her glasses lying on > the grass (the other lens has been cracked)? I'd love to know! My mind > simply goes 'boingg!' when Wood says the symbolism is obvious. Is the > lens supposed to represent spilt semen, or something? (But semen isn't > reflective.) A ruptured hymen? (But that sounds far-fetched to me.) > The equivalent of birds attacking people's eyes in THE BIRDS? (Ditto.) > > > Ken, > > Wood was probably referring to the Hollywood convention of eyeglasses > denoting the power of the "look", which in theory-speak means that anyone > who has the power to look at other people (in Hollywood, almost always men > looking at women, thus the connotation of sexuality) also has power over > them in other ways. There's been alot of work done on the way women have > been depowered in Hollywood films very simply by removing their glasses, > symbolizing that their ability to be on the "looking" rather than the > "looked at" side of the relationship has been taken away. > > Just a thought. > > Jason Lapeyre > York University Although I don't have a source at hand, there are more blatant, pre-Lacanian Freudian meanings connected with eyes and glasses, although I've heard them associated with both male and female genitalia. (Maybe check out Leon Edel on Henry James--all those characters with monocles!) It's not an uncommon set of images in Hitchcock: the eyes on the curtain being cut in Dali's dream sequence from SPELLBOUND, the broken sunglasses in Thornhill's pocket in NORTH BY NORTHWEST, etc. Don Larsson ---------------------- Donald Larsson, Mankato State U (MN) [log in to unmask] ---- Screen-L is sponsored by the Telecommunication & Film Dept., the University of Alabama.