I just saw this movie for the first time today, and was impressed with the subtle symbols sprinkled throughout, the Chinese golden rain tree, the deer running off and returning home, and the reflection of the fire on the t.v. screen. Nice job, Sirk and Co.!
The closest movies to my heart: http://www.imdb.com/mymovies/list?l=46910443
I liked the shot where the camera moved closer to the television to show Cary's reflection, her bleak expression. It showed that she would never gain satisfaction from television as everyone wanted her too.
"I'd rather be hated for who I am, than loved for who I am not".
We have to remember that in the early to mid-1950s, Hollywood was terrified of losing customers to its big rival, television.
I can imagine that the reflection of the fireplace fire in the turned-off TV screen may have been (in the words of Cary's Freudian-influenced daughter) "a wish of moviemakers to see TV burned all to HE##"!
Stupid!?! I never called you stupid! To call you stupid would be an insult to stupid people!
It's more rather the view of Sirk that television would turn people into zombies who would rather live life through TV than live it itself.
Proud member of the Pro-film Anti-digital Society (PFADS).
Good call ("Burn, television! Burn!").
Read George W.S. Trow's "Within The Context Of No Context" and "My Pilgrim's Progress: Media Studies, 1950-1998".
[deleted]
It's fun to watch Douglas Sirk's many films in which he puts mirrors and reflective surfaces of all sorts into his films as a major way to tell his story visually. Dialogue didn't seem that important to him.
In that way, Sirk is a lot like Alfred Hitchcock.
E pluribus unum
Are there other examples of the way Sirk frames the television here in the rest of his filmography?
Or other examples from the era anyone can think of?
I know there's a scene in Rebel Without a Cause in which the TV is prominent and there's a more unknown film called Meet Mr Lucifer in which a TV is passed between neighbours and ruins their lives!
I'm just trying to build up a good bank as its increasingly looking like my subject for a dissertation next year - Technophobia/"televisionphobia" or along those lines.
I have plenty of later examples such as Poltergeist and Videodrome but yeah, just curious if there were any more films, from say the 40s-60s, which deal with this subject, even fleetingly.
Thanks in advance.