At the end they show a hand covering a red jewel. What is that all about?
Shes in the piller??? Like, inside?
shareGeez. YES!
I admit I did not catch this when I watched it.
At some point in the movie during one of the flashbacks of the redhead lady there is a shot of her hand showing us the big red jewel on her finger. Then after she is killed, there is a scene at the construction site in back of the arena where a worker is lowering an onimous black body bag(?) down into a tube. There is a cement mixer nearby. Then during the credits we see them rebuilding the New Millenium and raising a pillar, and we see the bright red jewel showing through the cement. True, I have no idea how that could happen, but still...
We come into this world naked, screaming, and covered in blood. Why should the fun end there?
Okay, maybe it's just me because I missed part of the movie. But, I thought the female soldier with Sinise was the woman in a red wig, in disguise to give Sinise an obvious alibi. They looked an awful lot alike if it wasn't. I thought that maybe it was Tyler in the column, since he just dropped off the radar. Plus, it seemed like the body they were lowering was pretty substantial and those were not woman's hands. Now, of course there's no guarantee that DePalma didn't just point at some random guy and say "hey, you, get wrapped in black plastic and go hang from that hook". But I think his attention to detail is good enough that he wouldn't have shown the hands. So, I'm a bit confused. Also, we spent a little much time with that man caressing thst column. I guess they were trying to get at the idea of burnishing. But still....
shareI agree. It felt like they zoomed in on that guy's hand for like 2 and half minutes. It was such a weird detail to end the movie with. I know I didn't really care what happened to that girl.
shareCould it not just have been a symbol for a snakes eye?
‘She was already eminent when my eminence was merely imminent’
i agree that it shwed that guys habd for way to long...but as far as her being lowered into the cement and the ring showing throught...wasnt she in a duffle bag..why can we see the ring...and i dont think they offed tyler
shareShe's wearing the ring when she is in the soldier uniform. The body is wrapped in plastic and rope as they lower it into a mold full of cement. There's a close-up of her hand with the ring on it hanging out of the plastic.
shareYou said "the body looked substantial"......just remember that Sinise killed a guy same time as he killed girl with red ring, so.......it was probably both bodies the worker was lowering into that pillar shaft to fill with concrete...so that would explain why bag looked so big and it just happened that girls hand with ring just popped out by accident.
Admission--- I never paid attn to that part of movie so I missed it....it was this page I found after getting curious in seeing in credits with that red jewel in concrete pillar being installed.never noticed red ring in movie, either....so good catch by some of you and an eye-opener for me.
Sooner or later a person would be looking up and see the sun's rays bouncing off a red jewel and it would thenbe so noticeable, however nobody would ever think 2 bodies were inside that pillar.....Cage's character may have spotted that scene after getting beat up good, but maybe he was too woozy to notice it as he went up those stairs behind that guy lowering bodies down in pillar tube? I bet most viewers never saw that ending part with jewel in concrete at all as they clicked it off when const scene was happening at end and credits started to roll. Thanks again to ever 1st caught this scene as it fired up attention.
The jewel indeed belonged to the female soldier from Commander Dunne's crew whom he executed, along with his other henchman, once they'd been made out by Santoro. We later see a tarpaulin with their dead bodies inside being poured into concrete by two "casino employees".
Just like the reconstructed Atlantic City casino (after the hurricane) has dead bodies poured in its foundation columns, the jewel in the concrete column at the end of "Snake Eyes" is an allegory for the fact that most of American History is build on a foundation of dead bodies and violent deeds (be it the native Indians' massacre, the Civil War, the Johnson County War, the Kennedy assassination, etc.).
While DePalma's films very often quote Hitchcock's cinema (formally speaking), his cinema is in fact much more obsessed with the Kennedy assassination, the Zapruder film and how these events contributed to the shaping of the recent American History and psyche.
A lot of DePalma's films from before 1998 can be read on some level as an allegory on this episode of American History, and in particular on the fact that the Zapruder film was over-analysed, frame by frame (by both the government and private individuals) and that no truth ever came out of it.
If you look closely, films like "Phantom of the Paradise", "Blow Out" or "Snake Eyes" are all haunted by these events.
"Blow-out" is about a man who recreates the equivalent of a Zapruder film, only starting with sound takes (to which he later adds still photographs that he animates in a short film with sound), to try and elucidate a political assassination. Like "Snake Eyes"'s jewel in the concrete column, it also ends with a fiction built on a violent deed (a horror film in which the real scream of a murdered women is used in the soundtrack).
In Snake-Eyes we have another political assassination, a conspiracy, as well as a patsy that is immediately disposed of (as was Oswald). The TV presenter at some point also directly mentions the Kennedy assassination.
In this film DePalma also entertains the idea that truth can possibly emerge (or not) from a multiplication of artificial viewpoints (during the Kennedy assassination, would a reverse shot in the Zapruder film have shown if a second shooter was present on the grassy knoll?).
It is a metaphysical fantasy (already present in films like Antonioni's "Blowup", DePalma's remake "Blow Out" or even "Mission: Impossible" and it's fantastic sequence revealing Jim to be the bad guy...) that you can apprehend truth by investigating the "representation of reality" (pictures, videos, etc.) instead of reality itself.
Something DePalma fundamentally doesn't believe is true (and which shows in almost ALL of his films).
DePalma famously replied to Godard's statement that "Cinema is truth 24 times per second" by the aphorism "Cinema lies 24 times per second".