History RuleOfSymbolism / Film

*** An eagle-eyed viewer may notice that when Frollo smashes up Quasimodo's wooden model of Paris and throws a figurine of Esmerelda against the wall, he knocks over a figurine of himself in the process. Not only does this {{Foreshadow|ing}} how his VillainousBreakdown in the end of the film and how he'll destroy Paris and her citizens to get what he wants, but also how his all-consuming lust and mania for Esmerelda will ultimately be his own undoing.
*** During the "Hellfire" song, Frollo is singing into a gigantic fireplace and staring ''directly'' into the flames while ignoring the gigantic cross above it. And when he finishes the song and asks God to answer his prayers, a guard opens the door behind him and informs him of Esmerelda's escape; the guard is framed in a soft and peaceful light, and may represent God offering Frollo one last chance to let Esmerelda go and turn away from sin. Naturally, being Frollo, [[IgnoredEpiphany he yells "Get out, you idiot!" and turns away from the door and back to the roaring fire]], vowing he'll find Esmerelda if he has to burn all Paris in his search.

** ''WesternAnimation/{{The Hunchback of Notre Dame|Disney}}'': Judge Claude Frollo's death symbolize him being DraggedOffToHell by first attempting to slay Esmeralda whom he views as a heathen, declaring "And he shall smite the wicked and plunge them into a firey pit!" before having the Gargoyle he's standing on break off and apparently come to life as Frollo falls into a "lake" of molten lead that takes up the entire screen below.

* In the Donner Cut of ''Film/SupermanII'' , Clark gets his powers back by Jor-El giving him the last of his life energy or something through a shiny projection of himself...or something. Irrelevant as the scene is designed to bring full circle the words spoken by Jor-El back in the first Film/{{Superman}} film and furthering the Christ/God/Father/Son themes. "The son becomes the father, the father becomes the son."

** At an early point in the movie, McMurphy boasts that he is going to break out of the mental hospital by lifting a water fountain and chucking it through a window. The inmates don't believe him, so he bets them money he can do it. He fails, but he shames the inmates by saying eh at least tried unlike everyone else. The water fountain's a symbol for McMurphy's undying sense of freedom. He never believes that anything is impossible. He will never stop trying to live life his way, and that's exactly why the folks at the hospital eventually give him a lobotomy. Then later on in a deeply symbolic moment, Chief Bromden kills McMurphy and then lifts the same water fountain that McMurphy failed to lift earlier in the movie. Lifting the fountain is supposed to be impossible, but Chief reminds us that anything is possible for those who refuse to give in to authority.
** McMurphy always holds onto his pack of playing cards with pictures of nude women on them while in the mental hospital. This tells us a lot about McMurphy as a character. For one thing, he views women as sexual objects, which we see when he shows the doctor one of the nude cards and casually asks, "Where do you suppose she lives?" Keep in mind that he's been convicted of statutory rape. The cards also show that McMurphy likes to gamble in every sense of the word, and often take risks. Finally, McMurphy's very devoted to playing games he knows he can win. That's why he gets so upset with the way Nurse Ratched always manipulates situations in her favor. As McMurphy tells one doctor, "She likes a rigged game." He symbolizes his dislike for her by loudly flicking through his playing cards while she's trying to speak. That's not to say he doesn't like a rigged game, he's just annoyed that someone is better at rigging the game than he is.
** Nurse Ratched is a dictator when it comes to deciding how things are going to work in her hospital ward. But she also has this clever way of ''never'' seeming like a dictator as she uses false logic to make it seem as though all her judgments are objective. For example, she lets the patients vote on McMurphy's idea to watch a baseball game only because she knows they'll vote against it. When the patients reverse their votes on the second occasion, Ratched still gets her way by saying there were only 9 votes from the 18 patients, not caring that only nine of the patients are lucid enough to know what they're voting on. So whether things go one way or another, Ratched will find a way to get her way, and if the patients get upset about this, she'll just send them off for electroshock therapy. Basically, voting in this movie symbolizes a fake sense of freedom – the belief that your vote and your opinion count when they actually don't.
** When Chief Bromden sees McMurphy's lobotomy scars at the end of this movie, he realizes that the hospital has made McMurphy into an obedient zombie for life. His scars mark the final victory of rules and conformity over freedom and the individual, which Chief is aware of. Chief kills McMurphy feeling it was the only way to give Randle back his freedom. McMurphy became a hero to the other patients in the ward due to his ability to stand up to Nurse Ratched, and didn't want to see him wandering around with dead eyes and a scarred forehead, so Chief decides to take matter into his own hands and to give Mac back his freedom his own way and then he gave freedom to himself by breaking out of the hospital and running off into the forest.

* Done InUniverse by the eponymous heroine of ''Film/ThatLadyInErmine'' wears an [[PrettyInMink ermine coat]] to show her majesty to an invading army, along with [[DoesNotLikeShoes bare feet]] to show humility.

* ''WesternAnimation/MonstersUniversity'': At the beginning of the movie, during a school field trip to the Monsters-Incorporated scare factory, Mike impresses a scarer by being able to sneak into undetected into a child's bedroom, and the scarer gives his lucky cap to Mike, which inspires the latter to Enroll in the Monsters-University Scarer Program top become the best scarer in the world, and he frequently wears the lucky cap for inspiration. In the end however, Mike realizes he's [[spoiler: not cutout to be a scarer because [[DreamCrushingHandicap he's not frightening enough]], and after he and Sully return after being stranded in the human world by overloading a door portal, Mike's lucky hat is seen burning close by, to show that his life long dream of being Monsters-[=Inc.=] best scarer is dead]].

*** Whales are typically seen as benevolent, slightly spiritual creatures, but that wasn't always the case, especially for Monstro. While the titular puppet-boy had encountered a lot of bad guys over the course of his adventures -- scammer Honest John, exploitative businessman Stromboli, and sociopaths like the Coachman -- who are all nasty in their own right (''[[VileVillainSaccharineShow especially]]'' [[CompleteMonster that last one]]), Monstro is on a whole other level. Monstro represents something bigger and more ancient... pure evil. The counter-balance to the Blue Fairy's pure goodness. The thing that destroys wishes instead of granting them. The Blue Fairy tells Pinocchio that lies keep "growing and growing," but this can also apply to morality in general, as minor misdemeanors can gradually get worse.

* ''Film/AllQuietOnTheWesternFront'':

* Creator/FrancisFordCoppola:
** ''Film/TheGodfather''
*** The name "the Godfather" has a symbolic ring to it. Just the word itself, comprising "God" and "Father," seems to say a lot: It conveys power, the sense of a patriarch or maybe of a wrathful deity. In Christian tradition, godparents are the people who will assume legal guardianship of their godchildren in case the actual parents die. (It's largely an honorary function, nowadays.) In the movie, "The Godfather" is more a guardian of both his literal and symbolic godchildren's interests: He protects them by going around the law, demanding their eternal loyalty. All they have to do is agree to return the favor -- by means illegal or legal. There ''is'' something oddly god-like about this relationship, since it bears a similarity to the way an ancient Roman deity might reward his or her devotees in exchange for a sacrifice. The Godfather is a kind of puppet-master too -- trying to pull strings that other people are holding (this is depicted in the logo for the film's title, where a hand pulls marionette strings attached to the words). [[NotUsingTheZWord Interestingly, no one in the mafia called the head Don of a family "Godfather"]] until after Puzo did it in his book. The head of a mafia family was just called the "boss of the bosses," or ''capo di tutti capi'' in Italian.
*** The horse head scene is a very iconic moment. Jack Woltz wakes up with a horse head in his bed, showing him that the Corleones mean business. Apparently, this forces Woltz to give Johnny Fontane (a Music/FrankSinatra expy) a part in a movie that will make him a star, despite his personal distaste for Fontane. In the years since the first film debuted, putting a horse's head in someone's bed has become a widely known symbol of sorts -- shorthand for making someone an offer they can't refuse, or forcing them to give you something they don't want to give you.
*** After the Tattaglia family assassinates Luca Brasi, the Corleones' feared hit man, they send a message to the Corleones: a fish wrapped in Brasi's bulletproof vest. The message is clear: He "sleeps with the fishes," meaning that his corpse is weighed down at the bottom of a river (maybe the East River, a historically great place to dump dead bodies). It's pretty effective as a symbolism term.
*** Oranges are another large factor within in film, as they show up whether someone's about to die. When Vito gets shot in the street, he's buying oranges, which scatter on the ground as he falls. When he dies at the very end, its while peeling an orange and putting the rind in his mouth to make funny faces at his grandson. Before the horse head shows up in Jack Woltz's bed, we see an orange at the table where he eats dinner with Tom Hagen. [[{{Foreshadowing}} Oranges show up at the meeting with the five families, near the mob bosses who will later be murdered.]]
*** At the end of the movie, Michael is literally becoming the godfather to Connie's child while also becoming ''the'' Godfather to the Corleone family, sealing his position with blood. [[{{Irony}} There's a heavy irony in the scene,]] [[{{Hypocrite}} as Michael stands in church saying that he "renounces Satan and all his works" while a massacre that he ordered progresses in the world outside.]] It demonstrates the wide chasm between appearance and reality: This churchly dude, renouncing Satan, is actually semi-secretly embracing the world's evil. This is the scene of Michael's final transformation: He's becoming the thing that he's been trying to be, the Don, the ruler, and it turns out that this is a pretty violent, pretty awful position to hold. ''He's'' being baptized, in a way, but it's an evil, anti-spiritual baptism. He's establishing his new identity through murder. Sure, he's developed some worthy traits -- he's cool, competent, and capable of putting business above taking things personally. But those positive traits are put in the service of violence and destruction. Michael is losing his soul, which is, strangely, his triumph. He's made a strong effort toward becoming damned, becoming the leader of a criminal empire, and he's finally made it. There's something admittedly impressive about him as a villain, since it took so much work. He's not just following his impulses like a serial killer: He's disciplined. A present-day parallel is Walter White's transformation in the drug kingpin Heisenberg on ''{{Series/Breaking Bad}}''.
*** At the end of the movie, Connie accuses Michael of having her husband, Carlo, murdered. He straightfacedly denies it, even though it's entirely true. He repeats the same lie to his wife Kay, as well. Michael is capable of lying to his loved ones for the sake of his criminal business interests -- which is totally cold, but the inevitable result of his journey. Kay watches as Michael's capos (underling bosses) gather in his office. One of them closes the door, and then the movie ends. This signifies Michael's transformation into ruthless crime lord, sealing Kay outside of his inner world. He's not the golden, studious war hero with whom she was originally in love. He's gone into a different realm, and the closing door symbolizes that he's fully entered into that new world of wickedness. It's a transformation that required a lot of work, but it's placed him, in the end, in a strange and potentially isolated position.

* ''Film/TaxiDriver''
** At the beginning of the film, Travis Bickle's taxi emerges ominously from a cloud of steam. It has a really eerie vibe, as good things almost never come from a misty, spectral place into the light. Lit with the garish neon lights that start flashing past us after the taxi becomes visible and Travis' eyes are seen surveying the street. The screenwriter posted that a taxi cab was a metaphor for loneliness, meaning that Travis Bickle was dealing with isolation. Plus, since this is the first shot of the movie, [[EstablishingSeriesMoment it lets the viewers know right of the bat that the film won't be a zany romantic comedy about a taxi driver looking for love, but rather gritty exploration of a dark, grim place.]]
** When Travis is still obsessed with winning Betsy over ([[ItMakesSenseInContext after disturbing her with a porn film on their first date]]) he tries to make it up to her by buying her flowers. But since he doesn't know her address, he's left with the bouquets lying around his room, which would start to rot and produce a smell that gives him a headache. He also imagines that he has stomach cancer. The decaying flowers would mirrors Travis' own mental state of decay. Since he's failed to connect with another person —who would've accepted the flowers— they stay in his room (like he constantly does) and fester. They're a good thing gone bad, which maybe implies that Travis really was, originally, a good person who is now rotting on the inside. Travis would even burn the remaining flowers, symbolizing that he's put Betsy and the whole human dream of love and connection behind him and just wanted to wreak vengeance on New York at that point.
** Travis wears his Marine jacket nearly everywhere. The jacket has a patch on the shoulder, identifying him as a member of "King Kong Company." This was apparently his unit when he was a marine in Vietnam. According to the director, the King Kong Patch is meant to symbolize the fact that Travis Bickle is like King Kong trying to save Ann Darrow in [[Film/KingKong1933 the film]]. Like King Kong, he doesn't really understand what he's doing — King Kong is the one threatening Fay Wray's character to begin with (despite not realizing it), and Travis is doing the same thing to Betsy. He thinks she's a lonely person he wants to connect with, but he goes about interacting with her in a crazy way. Then near the end, when he liberates Iris from her position as a child prostitute, he plays a still crazy but arguably more valorous role. While it's certainly true that Iris is better off in Pittsburgh with her parents than basically being an underage sex slave, there had to have been a more rational way of aiding her than a murder rampage. Like Kong, Travis' aggressive state of being prevents him from approaching things in a less lethal, more constructive frame of mind.
** While driving, Travis' muses in his diary: "Loneliness has followed me my whole life. Everywhere. In bars, in cars, sidewalks, stores, everywhere. There's no escape. I'm God's lonely man." Travis didn't create the term "God's Lonely Man", rather it was title of an essay by the great American author Thomas Wolfe. Travis is a kind of archetype of the lonely person — he is "Man apart" as the poet James Wright phrased it. He's "God's lonely man" but his defining quality is the fact that he embodies separation from God and humanity and pretty much everything except for his own sense of anger. He completely embodies loneliness as "the central and inevitable fact of human existence" and shows its awful consequences—a descent into madness and violence.
** When Travis is sitting in the diner with the other drivers, they're telling him he should get a gun for his own protection. while, he takes this advice, he has more than his own protection in mind. While they're giving this advice, he seems kind of distracted, particularly by the tab of Alka Seltzer fizzing in his glass. He's likely memorized by the bubble action because he is—like the Alka Seltzer—fizzing with anger and discontent on the inside. He's kind of at a simmer that will eventually come to a boil. The camera lingers on this image because it symbolizes Travis own inner state. While the cabbies are trying to talk with him and be normal and human and friendly, he's inwardly seething, and searching to find a target for his hidden rage.
** The most crucial scene in the whole movie —the point it hinges on— is when Betsy rejects Travis over the phone. As he tries to convince her to go out with him again -- after the porn movie incident -- the audience can't hear her responses, but the viewers can interpret that she reasonably doesn't want to go out with a guy who acted like a total creep on the first date. However, those viewers are also meant to empathize with Travis due to how messed up he is—he really isn't capable of interacting with humans in a reasonable way, and that's his tragedy. His entire spiel is desperate and still indicates he doesn't really understand what he did wrong. After the rejection from the call, the camera pans away from him and focuses on an empty hall—as Scorsese put it, the rejection is too painful to watch. Also, the empty hall is itself an image of urban loneliness, of New York desolation. When Travis finishes his phone call, he walks down that hall and into a deeper and even crazier form of loneliness.
** When Iris tries to get in Travis' cab, Sport drags her out and throws a crinkled twenty-dollar bill to Travis. Apparently, this is meant to make sure Travis doesn't report the fact that Sport is forcing Iris to remain a child prostitute. Travis keeps the twenty and gives it to the brothel timekeeper after he visits Iris and tries to convince her to leave and go back to her parents. It seems the $20 symbolizes a particularly repulsive strain of corruption and evil. Sport is pimping a 12-year-old girl, an unambiguously evil act, simply for money. The crinkled 20 is the root of all evil. Travis keeps it and gives it back to the timekeeper because he's rejecting it. Even though he embraces violence and his own form of nihilistic evil—the kind that leads him to almost assassinate Charles Palantine—[[EvenEvilHasStandards Travis hates the corruption and exploitation that Sport represents]]. Travis is violent because he's going crazy; Sport is violent because he's morally bankrupt… and sane. Sport's a symptom of the city's own insanity, its money-based depravity, which enrages and repulses Travis—especially when it's used to exploit an innocent kid, like Iris.
** While, Travis' apartment is very depressing for various reasons, his artwork choice, is a special stand-out. He has a poster in his room saying, "One of these days I'm gonna get organ-iz-ized!" with the letters of "organiz-iz-ed" falling off a ledge. Underneath it, he has a "We the People" Charles Palantine poster. Travis indeed wants to get organiz(iz)ed—but he ends up doing it in a basically crazy, mentally un-organized way. He starts getting in shape, training his body—but he's preparing himself for a rampage. He's becoming organized in one sense, but in another, he's internally falling into disorder. The Palantine poster seems to be a little ironic. Originally, Travis might have put it up because he really did support Palantine (albeit just because of Betsy). Later in the movie, though, it seems to be there because it represents something he hates. He might be using it to motivate his rage.
** As Travis goes begins to lose it, he starts watching TV while holding his gun. At one point, he's watching the show American Bandstand, which used to play pop hits while people danced to them. In the middle of the dance floor, there's a pair of empty shoes, as Music/JacksonBrowne's song "Late for the Sky" plays, containing the lyrics: "Such an empty surprise to feel so alone" and "How long have I been drifting alone through the night?" Both the song and the empty shoes demonstrate Travis' own sense of loneliness and non-being. He's not present in his life, at all—like the pair of empty shoes, he feels like he's in the midst of a world where people like Betsy and Tom are connecting, while he remains alone or invisible. He's not going to participate in the dance of life—instead, he's going to react with anger and vengeance, refusing to join in the dance, and trying to murder his way out of his despair.
** Travis would send an anniversary card to his parents full of dishonesty. Comically, the picture on the front of the card depicts two scouts with the words "To a Couple of Good Scouts!" In the message he writes, he tries to convince them he's all right, while getting the date of Father's Day wrong -- it's in June, but he writes it as July. This shows just how out of touch Travis is with everything and everyone. He doesn't know the day of his mother's birthday, he's lying about dating Betsy and working for the government, and he might even be planning on committing a murderous suicide mission at this point. The card itself is a grotesquely comic symbol of Travis' own delusion—he's trying to retain a connection with his parents, but it's a connection based on lies.
** When Travis decides to assassinate Charles Palantine, he shows up at the rally with a Mohawk. For Travis, the new haircut probably signifies how he's been "reborn" as a cold-blooded killer. He's done with human connection and the search for love. Now, he's just an appetite for destruction. In this sense, it's kind of a parody of the way Buddhist monks shave their heads when they're entering a monastery—a way of symbolizing being reborn, since infants have hairless heads. A close friend of the director actually suggested the Mohawk cut for Travis, based on the way certain soldiers in Vietnam cut their hair sometimes, when they were planning on going into crazy commando situations. This is equally appropriate since Travis is a Vietnam vet.
** After Travis has killed three people, leaving Iris free to abandon her life as a young prostitute, he tries to kill himself, but he's out of ammo. Wounded, he sits down on the couch and waits for the cops to arrive. When they do, he pretends to shoot himself in the head with his bloody fingers. The cops just look on, silently. Unsurprisingly, it's meant to showcase just how crazy Travis has become. It seems like he'd go to prison or a mental hospital or something, as the cops witnessed his hand gesture, but instead he's hailed as a hero, a noble vigilante. The image helps heighten the irony of this transition.
** At the very end of the movie, after Travis gives Betsy a free ride in his cab, his eyes flash in the rearview mirror as an ominous noise sounds. This happens to be Travis' final scene. According to the screenwriter, this indicates that [[BookEnds we end where we began]]—with Travis driving around the streets of New York, observing things, stoking his rage. [[HereWeGoAgain He didn't get better, and he's still crazy, still judging the world from his rear view mirrors.]] People mistook Travis for a genuine hero—they didn't realize he almost assassinated a presidential candidate. Travis himself doesn't seem to have learned anything or gotten over his rage.

* ''WesternAnimation/{{Coco}}'':
** Whenever Miguel looks upon Ernesto's tower in the Land of the Dead, it seems to represent Miguel's life goal of becoming rich and famous.
** Miguel and Imelda's conversation in the alleyway is fraught with symbolism. Miguel is on one side of the gate, free as a bird to pursue his goals. Imelda is behind the gate, held back from her full potential as a singer.
** In pre-Columbian Maya culture, cenotes were sites of HumanSacrifice. The cenote scene represents how Ernesto is willing to sacrifice everyone around him (even friends and family) for success.
** When the audience turns on Ernesto for Héctor's murder and for throwing Miguel to his death, someone throws a tomato at his fine white suit, staining it red. Aptly, this represents that there's blood on Ernesto's hands.

** ''WesternAnimation/TheLittleMermaid'': Ariel symbolizes purity, while [[BigBad Ursula]] symbolizes lust.

** In ''WesternAnimation/TheLionKing'':

* ''Film/{{Marty}}:

** [[SugarWiki/VisualEffectsOfAwesome Even the visual effects]] [[UpToEleven are there for a reason.]]