photo credit: dearsomeone
To unwind after a long day of interpreting literature in my dissertation, I like to watch movies about other people performing interpretations.
Probably the most famous “interpretation scene” takes place in Hamlet. Depending on how the king reacts to his play The Mousetrap, Hamlet believes he will be able to determine whether the king killed his father. (This scene also delivers the memorable line, “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.” It’s the queen’s evaluation of the play, and still useful today if you want to tell someone to shut up in the most pretentious manner possible.)
Hollywood has maintained a surprising interest in textual interpretation as a plot device. In the spirit of Lavelle Porter’s list of interesting academic movies, just out in the GC Advocate, here are my favorite movies that contain a crucial metacritical scene.
The Conversation (1974) Fall in love with Gene Hackman all over again as his divided loyalties affect the way he interprets a recorded conversation. Also, be prepared to hear the sentence, “He’d kill us if he had the chance,” many many times.
Rashomon (1950) Four people give their testimonies of a rape and murder they all witnessed, but everyone’s story is completely different. There is no “text” per se, but this is the consummate movie about the ways a person’s subject-position determines perception and representation.
A Letter to Three Wives (1949) Just as they are leaving for a weekend trip, three gal pals get a letter from their fourth girlfriend, who announces she’s run away with one of their husbands—but she doesn’t say which one. What a meanie! Each wife spends the rest of the weekend (and movie) interpreting the letter as an indictment of her ostensibly happy but secretly troubled marriage.
In the Loop (2008) An entire war depends on the interpretation and managed circulation of a report called “PWIP-PIP,” written by a lowly assistant played by the still adorable Anna Chlumsky. A climactic scene involves a political team’s feverishly deleting footnotes and changing verb tenses… just like the exciting moments in my life!
Kiss Me Deadly (1955) One of the most noir-y noir characters ever, Mike Hammer, (Ralph Meeker) has to interpret the poem “Remember” by Christina Rossetti in order to understand a mysterious message from a dead hitchhiker. Detective stories, of course, are always about interpretation in some way—but not usually about poetry interpretation.
Others I’m forgetting?
Great post, Talia. A couple more that come to mind:
Se7en: Morgan Freeman’s character interprets aestheticized murders and some Dante and Chaucer too.
Pi: Lots of interpretation there including of pi itself and the Talmud.
The Name of the Rose: Medieval scholar-sleuth sleuthing, act of reading leads to death.
I’ll think of more.
Talia, you are, again, a walking treasure-trove of information! Wish I had no dissertation to (re)interpret, and time aplenty to check out all the movies in your list!
What pops up in my mind is The English Patient for its Hungarian references (obviously) and the fact that, in the movie, Hungarian expatriate/potential German spy in Cairo during WWII, Ralph Fiennes walks around reading and talking about Herodotus in the desert. By the way, the novel itself, by Michael Ondaatje, is a beautifully written, lyrical book, in case you are in search of some extra summer reading….
Kiss Me Deadly… Is that the movie that shows a very early answering machine?
On another level is the Polish director Krzysztof Kieskowski, who, in a series of films, The Decalogue, interprets and dissects the ten commandments, one by one.
It’s not textual, but there’s a great dream interpretation performed by Ingrid Bergman, playing a psychiatrist, in the Hitchcock movie ‘Spellbound.’ Salvador Dali designed the dream sequence, and different scenes from it are interspersed with Bergman’s analysis. The dream had been worrying Gregory Peck, who is suffering amnesia, and its interpretation yields the answer to his plight as well as the key to unraveling a murder. I am collecting movies about amnesia, and this is one of the best.