The Extraordinary Image by Robert P. Kolker

Author:Robert P. Kolker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ART057000 Art / Film & Video, PER004030 Performing Arts / Film & Video / History & Criticism, SOC022000 Social Science / Popular Culture
Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Figure 27. Hank and Tana in Touch of Evil.

He visits her later in the film when she is reading her Tarot cards. “Your future is all used up,” she tells him. Here Welles composes Hank beneath the head of a stuffed bull, not only a visual reference to Hank’s own fall but a foreshadowing of Hitchcock’s images of Norman sitting in his parlor under those predatory stuffed birds. Unlike Norman, Hank does not hide his predatory nature. But his luck as a bull of a law enforcer, a forger of evidence, is over, undone by a Mexican, whose very ethnicity he despises. The Mexican gathers evidence on Quinlan by recording his conversation, adopting some of Hank’s own methods. Everyone is trapped. In both films the characters finally have no air—Hank in the swamp; Marion in the shower and then her body in her car in the swamp. Tana goes off into the darkness: “He was some kind of a man. What does it matter what you say about people?” Norman, now Mother, sits in his cell, the camera slowly tracking into him until his mad grin is displaced by his mother’s grinning skull and punctured by that chain pulling the car out of the swamp. But this final movement is not a liberation but a further rupture, an ugly, violent image that, with Norman’s psychotic grin, ends the film with a question mark and a sinking feeling.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.