Given Alice's frustrations in her marriage and her official social-symbolic reality, married to a guy who smugly just takes her for granted as a passified, domesticated 'trophy' wife (Bill is looking at himself in the mirror when responding to Alice's question earlier in the bathroom, "How do I look?"), the scene with the suddenly 'disappearing' woman in red coincides with a transition in Alice's temperament, in her "symbolic space" and libido: she is temporarily 'escaping' from Bill and her somewhat claustrophobic formal social milieu, quickly knocking back a glass of champagne in one quick gulp, seeking abandon, seeking the real of desire, some outlet for her repressed desires in the context of a non-repressive, unfulfilling conjugal-marital domesticated reality. In short, the transition from the banal everyday 'reality' into its crucial support in 'fantasy', in escape and hidden transgressions, into Desire. So many of the film's other sudden anomalies occur during a character's reality-to-fantasy transition, or vice versa, or between repression (reality, the symbolic order) and the repressed (desire, libido, the transgressive, the prohibited, the hidden).
The film is portraying how what we take for quotidian 'reality' is actually entirely structured by a conflict between unconscious fantasies (desires and drives, manifesting as symptoms) and symbolic fictions, that 'reality' is a constructed simulation, an acted-out fiction, a staged 'fake', is what repression is (rules, regulations, language, identities, the symbolic domain), and only emerges because something is repressed, namely the void of the Real which we then cover over, conceal with Fantasy, the fantasmatic-real, that determines what we desire. The film is a fiction that takes us out of reality to reveal the fiction that is 'reality' itself, as it is only by means of fiction that we can glimpse the real, glimpse however tentatively the truth about ourselves that we repress in our everyday life world, our quotidian reality, the truths that we really believe about ourselves but are unaware of. Glimpse the shattering, traumatic, sublime real.
It artistic mode, its conjuring form, is that of modernist Expressionism, narratively Kafkaesque, geometrically Escheresque, visually embodying many leading Expressionist painters and photographers, from van Gogh, Schiele, Ernst, Bacon, to Helmet Newton, while articulating core psychoanalytic and metaphysical insights about the nature of reality, fantasy, subjectivity, identity, sexuality, politics, and the real.
The film is also very carefully and systematically colour coded, it's visual colour textures directly interconnecting with its social and sexual relations, with its libidinal and socio-political economies, it's portrayal of the structures and functioning of Power. The spectrum of light (visual as well as political and libidinal) is central to the film's aesthetics, with not only all the references to Rainbows and Christmas trees (with their rainbows of colour), to multi-coloured pool balls, with their metaphorical and affective meanings, but also to the entire detailed compositions of colour in a scene or shot.
Red = Symbolic authority, master signifier, power, basis of reality/symbolic order, dominance (a 'domino' is a hooded cloak with a mask, originating from medieval times), control, and the 'phallic'. It covers over the void, the secret that there isn't any, just the incomprehensible abyss of the impossible Real, of nothing.
Blue: Libido, desire, sexuality, but also all that is repressed, forbidden, prohibited, transgressive. This is why, for example, we see that Mandy in Ziegler's bathroom was wearing a blue dress, women wearing clothes seen copulating at Somerton have blue dresses, and so on.
Purple/magenta (red + blue): Decay and death, but not just empirical death, but also SYMBOLIC death, the collapse of reality, of subjectivity, of subjective destitution, as happens Bill when he sees the mask on the now-purple bed sheets. Domino was wearing purple (gets HIV), the dead senator was lying under magenta sheets.
Black: morality, commitment, marriage, duty, formal symbolic order , certainty, security, rigidity, repression, submission, controlled, enslaved (and, as Alice says, 'whatever the f--- else!'). Alice wearing a black dress, not because she's a widow, but 'because I'm married!'.
Green: both organic nature (all the plants and trees we see, including Christmas trees) but also non-organic nature/culture (store canopy/awnings, lamps).
This is not only the case for the colour of character"s clothes, but also for other items and objects throughout the film. For instance, all the females with whom Bill has an emotional, sexual, or familial relation are 'strawberry-blonde' or red-haired (Alice, Helena, Domino, Sally, Marion, the models, Milich's daughter, Amanda Curran, and so on), while others with whom his relation is formal or professional are black or brown-haired.
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Xav6101
8 years ago
Now, did you or didn't you explain why Kubrick orchestrated this subliminal and mind boggling vanishing woman event?
Anyways more questions pop up via this "expressionistic and double reversals approach" from this painting:
https://myfidelio.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/vlcsnap-2013-11-14-16h37m25s120.png?w=300&h=168
Conspiracies? Here is another one.
Was Amanda Curran Dr. William Harford's patient? Did Dr. William Harford find out that she was pregnant? Is there a hidden story which tells that Ziegler impregnated Amanda Curran and could that be the "real" reason why Ziegler ordered a hit?
...Credo quia absurdum...
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countdown-to-zero
8 years ago
As already stated, the hundreds of anomalies are part of the film's aesthetic form, its narrative structure. That is to say, they are not to be interpreted in direct, literal terms, as immediate "empirical" events in the film's story, narrative, or diegesis. To do so is to miss the whole point, to already be lost, like someone misinterpreting the ghosts in The Shining in literal terms as actual empirical entities instead of as fantasmatic spectres. Art isn't about the mere imitation of dumb facticity, of empirical mimisis, of mere technical 'photocopying' of everyday reality (today's anti-art postmodern 'realist' obsession, utterly dreary, repressive, and desublimating), but of interrupting it, breaking with it, revealing that there is more to the world than just the world itself, that there is the sublime dimension, that which exceeds ordinary reality.
The painting of the pregnant woman in Ziegler's bathroom is in fact by Kubrick's wife Christiane (it was one in a series of three), whose other paintings, along with those of her daughter, Katharina, cover the walls of the Harford's apartment, is an ironic-satirical indirect 'commentary', an objective correlative, to what is happening during this scene. The film has numerous such objects, items, artefacts in its scenes that are an ironic commentary or critique on the scene itself, like the book about Lord Longford on the dressing table under the mirror during the intimate scene between Bill and Alice - Longford investigated and published the first major study of the degrading effects on women of pornography and prostitution back in the 1970s. The painting in the bathroom isn't about Mandy being 'pregnant', but far from it; it starkly contrasts with what has happened, of her being drugged and sexually abused by a sexual predator, by Ziegler, who in turn uses and manipulates Bill in his formal symbolic role as Doctor to distance himself from what he has just done, to keep his hidden obscene transgressions 'hidden', away from the public gaze and all accountability (Ziegler to Bill: "This is just between us"), so that he can continue engaging in such transgressions in the future, without affecting official social reality, but simply sustaining it. Bill is already implicated, already colluding with and conforming to Ziegler/Somerton's world and ideology.
Yes, Christiane's paintings are largely neo-postimpressionistic and and figuratively (photo-realistically) Expressionistic. It's as if the film includes a brief 'history of art' in the background, but still relating it all to what is happening in the film, and to its thematic preoccupations. For example:
1: 18th century late-Baroque and Rococo paintings, furniture in the bedroom of the dead senator and father of Marion. There's a famous painting on the wall by Canaletto, of Venice (in a film with numerous references to Italy), a painting that is worth multi-millions. This room reminds us of the bedroom scene at the end of '2001', which was also Rococo, an art form that ended with the French Revolution in 1789. Except there's no mysterious monolith appearing in this world, only symbolic deadlocks and anxieties.
2: The Pre-Raphaelite paintings, 19th century, in Sharky's cafe, all of women, paintings associated with female depression, suicide, and death (accompanied by Mozart's Requiem, 'mass for the dead'), as Bill reads about Mandy's fate.
3: The abstract modern paintings - minimalist, cubist, expressionist - on the walls of the hospital as Bill returns from seeing Amanda Curran in the morgue and is phoned by Ziegler, their very abstractness perhaps reflecting Bill's growing confusion, his uncomprehending bewilderment about all that has been happening and is happening, all his previously unexamined assumptions about reality now being undermined, collapsing.
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