My thoughts: It's a film about a movie director whose whole life has fallen apart. His relationship with his wife is rocky, he has a director's version of writer's block (director's block?), he is surrounded by pushy people. The movie has a lot of dream sequences, some of which are ways for him to remember the good times, others what he wishes would happen. As a director, he is used to bossing people around, but seeing as he isn't able to do that anymore, he just dreams of it. The first scene (he's in a smoking car, trying to get out; people around him watch; he gets out, tries to fly away; someone's attached a rope to his ankle to pull him down) is a literal take on his situation. Because he has no other ideas, he BS-es a movie with a rocketship, which he can't back out of anymore, because his producer has build a giant scaffolding where the rocketship scenes will be filmed. He kills himself in the end, and the last scene of the movie shows him and everyone in his life parading around the scaffolding to his direction, finally getting his way.
See? Simple and straightforward, pretty much.
Points brought up in class discussion by over-thinking classmates*:
- The mirrors that feature heavily in the movie represent the fact that the movie is a movie about the real director's making of this movie. Wtf?
- The giant scaffolding symbolizes the Tower of Babel (Babylon? I'm not sure. It's been a while since I last read the bible).
- The movie presents subjective reality. It's hard to tell whether what is happening is real or not because there is fluid transition between fantasy and reality. And that is why the reality in the movie is subjective. Again, wtf?
- Some stupid thing about causality.
- The movie parallels Dante's Inferno, and the scene in the sauna at the health spa is hell. Huh?
- Early on in the movie, when the main character goes in the bathroom and turns on the light, a dim light comes on. Five seconds later, the whole place lights up. Some dude in class: that's the director's way of making his presence as the director known. He wants the audience to be aware that they're watching a movie and not reality. Professor: it's just a light; flourescent lights do that sometimes.
*Paraphrased, because I wasn't exactly paying attention.
posted by Life @ 8:26 PM
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