Mike Frank wonders: > in this case, though, i can't "not forget" that the "car/license plate/ > new car/stolen money thing is a red herring" because that's an > argument that either i've never before encountered [or have somehow > managed already to forget] . . . so i'd appreciate it if edward o'neill > [or someone else] would recapitulate the argument for those of us > standing in the need of enlightenment . . . I'm not sure if Ed means it this way (intention again!), but the car/money . . . thing is the initial impetus for the narrative--Marion steals the money to start a new life; she buys a new car with it (although her motivation for doing so collapses with the state trooper watching her buy the car). Newcomers to the film are likely to see the money as a major plot element. After the murder, Hitchcock has the camera tease us by drawing attention to the money--only to have Norman (who certainly could have used the cash) toss it into the trunk unaware. It's one of the grandest of Hitchcock's "McGuffins." > [warning: THEORETICAL post script follows: the larger issue raised by > this conversation is one that likely haunts all of us who teach introductory > film courses, courses in which we try to get students to find meaning > in features of the image [or the editing] that they tend to ignore . . . lots of > us have had the experience of getting students to notice camera angles, > for example, or the use of mirror reflections in the frame, and then trying > to show them [convince them?] that these features are intentional and > meaningful . . . all too often students, feeling empowered to READ > details that they had previously ignored, start coming up with the most > extraordinary [not to say extravagant] readings of the hero's shoes, or of > the heroine's name, or of the fact that the villain's phone number begins with > 555, which in some occult system represents the devil -- and so on . . . 555? They must be transposing from 666! > in principle the issue here is, of course, an enormous [and perhaps > insoluble] problem in hermeneutics . . . but i wonder if anyone out > there has come up with some helpful suggestion, some rule of thumb, > that is useful in dealing with this question in the classroom, especially > in classes where the last thing we want to do in begin a frontal > attack on the hermeneutic circle or the intentional fallacy . . . At the risk of exposing my formalist roots, I think that one rule of thumb might be the internal consistency of "hidden meanings" (a term I loathe!) within an individual film or within a filmmaker's oeuvre. In that case, is a "reading" of shoes, name, or 555 consistent with other aspects in the film itself or with what we know of a filmmaker's particular sense of playfulness? There's no guarantee of "correctness" in such interpretations (there never is), but it can help to give a set of guidelines (unless you want to go the opposite direction with a reader-response or deconstructive play in reading). Andrew Sarris has lovingly pointed out the prevalence of staircases and mirrors in Hitchcock's films, and I can see his point, even though staircases and mirrors are not uncommon items in various households. But Hitchcock established himself very early as a director who likes to tweak the audience, to cause a gasp and then pull back the curtain to show the man at the controls of the Machine for Making People Gasp (his cameos being just one mechanism for doing so). If we are tempted to read meaning in the PSYCHO license plate, we have precedents for doing so in Hitchcock's work. Think, for example, of the only houehold key that Ingrid Bergman is not allowed to have in NOTORIOUS. Its brand name is "Unica"--a unique key indeed! Such play lends credence to the report that Hitchcock and Vladimir Nabokov considered briefly a collaboration. Those license plates in LOLITA (the book) *do* mean something themselves! But sometimes, as Sigmund himself said, a cigar is just a cigar. Similarly, all the Catholic iconography in Scorsese's films begs for one to assign it meaning, and similar cases can be made for the films of dozens of other directors. On the other hand, there are hundreds of still other directors for whom it is much harder to find any such consistency. One other thought: The slipperiness of interpretation is especially marked in the case of what Bordwell and Thompson call "referential" meaning. A marquee in FIGHT CLUB announcing 7 YEARS IN TIBET with Brad Pitt standing in front of it makes a clear allusion to another film by the young star--but does it imply* anything deeper (say, that the nonviolence of the Dalai Lama has been forsaken by the star)? I have no way of knowing, but it could be worth discussing (if anything about FIGHT CLUB is worth discussing). On the other hand, referential meaning depends on our ability to spot the reference in the first place. Students have to be told about Alger Hiss and Whitaker Chambers to get Roger Thornhill's offhand comment, "I see you've got the pumpkin" in NORTH BY NORTHWEST. It is only on such recognition that we can go on to consider if (along with a newspaper headline mentioning Richard Nixon) there is an angle to be explored. Don Larsson ---------------------- Donald Larsson Minnesota State U, Mankato [log in to unmask] ---- Online resources for film/TV studies may be found at ScreenSite http://www.tcf.ua.edu/ScreenSite