🚀 go-pugleaf

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)
larsson@Mail.Mankato.MSUS.EDU

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