Isn't it amazing how this movie -and really all our analysis of the movie- make completely mundane things seem super-meaningful. Who would have ever guessed that laundry, buckets, coffeepots and even shirts could be so exciting and interesting?
Amazing, indeed. I know of very few works of cinematic fiction that posit so much meaning into everyday objects. The nearest other example that came to mind was that of the oeuvre of the great Japanese filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu, who lovingly detailed the daily domestic world of his middle-class characters, sometimes paying as close attention to the accoutrements of their environment as to the human beings wielding them. His famous 'pillow shots', wherein the camera lingers on a space after the human inhabitants have departed, are a salient example of this. But in Ozu, these objects always exist in and of themselves. They never serve as symbols for some underlying human or archetypal element, which is precisely how the objects in BBM function.
Jean-Luc Godard has written of Alfred Hitchcock being a filmmaker from whose films we primarily remember objects as opposed to people. Windmills, wine bottles, a glass of milk...we retain more vivid memories of these things than we do of the characters and stories comprising
Foreign Correspondent,
Notorious, and
I Confess, respectively. As a conveyor of mysterious yet vital power through objects, Hitchcock attained not only supremacy as a rare poet of cinema, but even became "master of the universe". I submit that in
Brokeback Mountain, Hitchcock's oeuvre has met its equal in the poetic and mythic uses of symbol-laden objects that Godard so evidently celebrates.
