IJ study archive

Blood Sister: the finale — "the object’s symbolic unsubtlety making both…"

quote

the object’s symbolic unsubtlety making both Hal and Bridget Boone cringe. […] They stare at each other for countless frames, the office wall behind them cruciformly pale where the unnamed object’d hung.

Context

Audience wincing at symbolism in real time — and again two sentences on, when the door's carved CONTRARIA SUNT COMPLEMENTA motto "makes Hal cringe so severely it's Boone who has to supply the translation Kent Blott asks for." Meanwhile the prose measures a stare's duration in "frames" — the scene can't describe the film's time except as film — and the pale cruciform ghost on the wall where the "unnamed object" hung is the image-economy joke: the symbol so obvious it works even as an absence.

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