Rule Of Symbolism / Film

Rule of Symbolism in films.

• Alfred Hitchcock
• Blade Runner
• Frankenstein
• The Godfather
• Star Wars
• The Wizard of Oz
• Woody Allen

---

Films — Animation

• The Book of Life:
  • Jorge says when Manolo trips on the stairs as a kid, it symbolizes that he’s the kind of person who stumbles but keeps getting back up.
  • Jorge explains why Joaquin lost his eye.
• 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 Human Sacrifice. 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.
• Disney films:
  • Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: Snow White symbolizes kindness, while the Queen symbolizes envy.
  • Pinocchio:
    • Jiminy's badge is initially a throwaway joke, but it would also serve as a validation of his work as Pinocchio's conscience, and his own personal growth over the course of the film. Jiminy first mentions the badge after he accepts his job from the Blue Fairy. Except, Jiminy gets off to a rough start with his new position. He's late on his first day, he fails to free Pinocchio from Stromboli's cage, and he even allows the kid to get nabbed by Honest John for a second time. He was downright inept at his job in the first half, although he thankfully gets better later on. After Geppetto manages to escape the belly of Monstro and Pinocchio's finally made human, the Blue Fairy would reward Jiminy with a gold, star-shaped badge reading "Official Conscience." It's more than just a reference to the wishing star that kicked off the overall plot. It also validates Jiminy for sticking with Pinocchio through difficult times, including through Pleasure Island and Monstro's stomach.
    • Pinocchio had never heard of the ironically-named "Pleasure Island" before Honest John pitched it as a cure-all for everything that ailed him, although the Coachman apparently branded it to the youth (mainly young mischievous boys like Lampwick) as a sort-of anarchist utopia. Despite this being partially true, it leaves out the essential point that their stay ends would with the boys being magically transformed into donkeys — most of which lose their ability to talk and get sold by the Coachman, while those who still can talk are being kept for some unknown sinister purpose. It's partially used as part of a donkey-themed pun, but mostly it emphasizes Pinocchio the film's use of physical transformations to reflect one's internal morality. Good and bad behavior would lead to alternate outcomes.
    • 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 (especially 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.
  • Cinderella: Cinderella symbolizes humility, while Lady Tremaine symbolizes pride.
  • Sleeping Beauty: Aurora symbolizes patience, while Maleficent symbolizes wrath.
  • Robin Hood (1973): Richard's crown is much too big for John, and wearing it makes him look like a prat. The crown gags are symbolic of John's unfitness to rule, of him being too "small" a person to step into his big brother's shoes. And headgear.
  • The Little Mermaid (1989): Ariel symbolizes purity, while Ursula symbolizes lust.
    Ursula: And don't underestimate the importance of "body language"!
  • Aladdin: The Genie's bracelets aren't just a cool accessory, they're handcuffs binding him to the lamp. When Jafar becomes a genie, the bracelets show up simultaneously with the lamp that sucks him in (and in the sequel, the metaphor becomes visual as when Jafar tries to fly away, the bracelets glow holding him back), and once Aladdin wishes the Genie to be free, his wrists become bare — though the sequels and series have him wearing them back, as in the Genie's words, "I'm only a slave to fashion".
  • In The Lion King (1994):
    • The symbol that Simba has overcome his unnecessary guilt is that the torrent of the cleansing rains pouring down on Pride Rock after the final battle wash away a wildebeest skull.
    • The directors stated that the image that sums up the movie is Simba's little paw stepping into his father's huge pawprint. To the point the remake downright used it as its first poster◊.
  • The Hunchback of Notre Dame: Judge Claude Frollo's death symbolize him being Dragged Off to Hell 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. The DVD commentary for the film even points out that Frollo falls into the inferno in the shape of an inverted crucifix.
    • An eagle-eyed viewer may notice that when Frollo smashes up Quasimodo's wooden model of Notre Dame and throws a figurine of Esmerelda against the wall, he also knocks over a figurine of himself in the process. Not only does this Foreshadow his Villainous Breakdown in the end of the film and how he'll ransack Paris, kill and subjugate the people and even directly attack the cathedral 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 fireplace and staring directly into the flames while ignoring the gigantic cross hanging above it. And when he 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, he yells "Get out, you idiot!" and turns away from the door and back to the roaring fire, vowing to find Esmerelda if he has to burn all Paris in his search.
  • The Princess and the Frog: Tiana symbolizes diligence, while Facilier symbolizes sloth.
  • Frozen: According to one of the directors, Olaf symbolizes the love between Anna and Elsa.
  • Moana: The Reveal that the lava demon Te Kā is the nature goddess Te Fiti makes perfect sense, as the Hawaiian islands are created from volcanic soil, which is incredibly fertile. Strip out the life-giving aspect, and you're left with just the volcano.
• Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio features a Setting Update from late 1800s Italy to Fascist Italy as a way of symbolizing that citizens of a fascist regime are "puppets" to the rulers.
• Koati: When the main villain Zaina (a coal snake) is dropped on a cactus after her defeat, an eagle comes to fight her instead of joining the other animals in the Mouth that Does Not Speak. This reassembles the eagle fighting a snake on a cactus, seen on the flag of Mexico. This symbolizes the fact that the rest of the animals have found a home in the Mouth that Does Not Speak. She is also awfully close to the lava.
• Monsters University: 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 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 in order to become the best scarer in the world, and he frequently wears the lucky cap for inspiration. In the end however, Mike realizes he's not cutout to be a scarer because 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's long dream of being Monsters-Inc. best scarer is dead.
• Patlabor: The Movie as a whole has a lot of Biblical Motifs, with the villain Eiichi Hoba being named after Jehovah and his plot inspired by the Tower of Babel narrative in the Book of Genesis, and the arcology targeted by Hoba being named the Ark. The economic redevelopment of the Tokyo Bay Area that underpins the plot is dubbed the Babylon Project, another major Old Testament name. Mamoru Oshii was inspired to add it all in based on Noa Izumi's given name sounding like Noah of the Ark.
• In Sing, after Meena's singing literally brings down the house at the end of the show, instead of seeing a regular open-air stage with the theater's signature crescent moon, the audience (both in-story and out) are left with a view of a clear night sky, illuminated by a full moon.
• Tangled: After Rapunzel has realized she is the lost princess of Corona and Gothel has been using her, she blocks Gothel's usual Affectionate Gesture to the Head by grabbing her wrist, which symbolizes she's no longer in her power and knows the truth about her hoarding and coldhearted image.
• Turning Red:
  • According to Domee Shi, the red panda is what Mei transforms into because it symbolizes quite a bit about her and her story; red pandas are close to their mothers (which is how Mei and Ming's relationship starts out), they eat bamboo despite how it lacks nutrients (much like how teenagers love junk food even though it's not good for them), and the colours of their fur represent Mei's heritage as a Chinese-Canadian girl (their fur is red and white; red is an important colour in Chinese culture, and red and white are also the colours of the Canadian flag).
  • For the women in Mei's family, transforming into a red panda and the attendant personality changes symbolizes the coming of adolescence and the accompanying rebelliousness and need for independence — a major thing in Chinese culture, where Generation Xerox is kind of a big deal. In the end, Mei decides to embrace her panda side, symbolizing her desire to strike a balance between her family's legacy and the culture she shares with her friends and schoolmates.
• Up: The main reason that the balloon-carried house works so well is because it's tied in to some very effective and heart-wrenching thematic elements of the movie.

Films — Live-Action

• All About Eve:
  • We don't about Eve's true nature when we see her at the very beginning of the movie receiving the prestigious Sarah Siddons Award for theater performance. However, right before Eve touches the award, she's frozen. The freeze-frame allows us to fly backward through time and learn everything Eve did to get her conniving little hands on that award. By the time we know the whole story, the award is more than an acting accomplishment. Yes, Eve earned it by her performance on-stage, but her performance off-stage was equally impressive. The people Eve stomped on to get to this point — Margo, Karen, and the gang — know this better than anybody. The award returns a few minutes later when Eve leaves it in a taxi cab. Was she tired, or did she not really care about the award as much as she acted like she did in her acceptance speech? Either way, the award is picked up by a girl calling herself Phoebe, who's insinuated herself into Eve's life even faster than Eve wormed her way into Margo's. We last see Phoebe holding the award and looking at herself in Eve's tripled mirror. There are hundreds of Phoebes and hundreds of awards, making us wonder just what else people will do just to get this flimsy-looking trophy. The award seems to represent all the worst of the theater world — its superficiality, cutthroat ambition, and fleeting fame.
  • All the important women in this film are rich, so we always see them in luxurious furs. They live in New York City. It gets cold there. More than just looking pretty, the furs begin to represent a difference between New York theater actors (i.e. real actors) and Hollywood actors (i.e. terrible horrible no-good celebrities). A Hollywood actress arrives at Margo's party, and we never even see her, but we do get to see her sable coat. Karen makes a smart observation, saying, "Women with furs like that where it never gets cold…" When Birdie comes to retrieve the coat, she has to ask which one is sable. To Birdie, Margo's assistant who doesn't have a fur coat, it's nothing more than just another fur coat. When Karen asks what she expects, Birdie says, "A diamond collar, gold sleeves — you know, picture people..." She doesn't realize she's not far off, considering all the outlandish outfits that show up on the red carpet... When Margo announces that she and Bill are getting married, someone asks her what she'll wear. She says, "Oh, something simple. A fur coat over a nightgown." That's a loaded image. It contains glamour and sex, but also suggests that those fancy furs are covering up something much more ordinary. They're like that glittery trophy — they look good but don't necessarily mean anything. Underneath, even the stars are just real people.
  • Mirrors are a big part of any actor's dressing room. Not because they're vain, although they may be, but because it's necessary for an actor to know what she looks like. In this film, the mirrors are all about self-reflection — the psychological kind. When we're first introduced to Margo Channing, she's looking in a mirror and taking her face off, so to speak. Also her hair. We see Margo stripped down, looking at herself. Margo the woman, not Margo the actress. As we learn, though, Margo has blurred the two. Just as we look at her reflection and wonder who she is, she wonders the same thing. Mirrors have a similar function in the role of Eve, but with a twist. Critic Kate Bellmore suggests that Eve is a psychopath and that the mirrors help to visually represent her mental illness. It's almost as if Eve has to look in the mirror to remind herself who she's supposed to be at any given moment. If the shape-shifter lets her guard down, the whole act is up. Finally, mirrors play a part in the movie's final scene with Phoebe. The phrase "smoke and mirrors" comes to mind here. In fact, Margo smokes like a chimney, and there are plenty of scenes where she's enveloped in a cigarette haze, too — another way of suggesting her identity crisis. The mirrors represent one of Joseph Mankiewicz's favorite themes, which Harvard Film Archives describes as "the theater as a mirror game of real life in which human identity is revealed to be mercurially unstable, an illusion founded in role-playing and disguise".
• All Quiet on the Western Front:
  • The weapons of war are terrifying inventions that bring only pain. While words can grasp at the horrors of war, they can never fully express them. Reading about war can only hint at the devastation of battle: only through experience can you truly understand. Both the original novel and Milestone's adaptation attempt to grasp at war's horrors through a visual medium ... knowing full well that you can only use art to begin to touch the hellscape of war. Milestone's goal was to depict the ghastly injures and death these weapons dealt. And, while the film's imagery might not completely encompass the real experience, it's pretty damn unsettling. The major weapons featured in the movie are rifles, shells, bombs, barbed wire, machine guns, and hand-to-hand armaments such as knives, bayonets, and spades. That's a lot of weapons. Even by today's standards, the battles scenes are super gruesome, even with black-and-white blood. Machine guns mow down lines of men. Soldiers trip over barbed wire, shredding their flesh in the process. The hand-to-hand combat scene in the trenches is harrowing — watching swarms of men stab, slash, and beat each other in claustrophobic quarters is not meant to be taken lightly. Tanks and airplanes made their wartime debut during World War I. Kat mentions both to Paul while discussing the Germans' struggles to defend their lines... right before being killed by an air raid. Though the high war-tech invented for WWI is mentioned in the film, we don't actually see a lot of it in action. This was likely due to technical limitations.
  • Wartime trauma is another huge factor in the adaptation. Beyond the physical violence, Milestone also focuses on the psychological trauma the weapons of WWI reaped. During Paul's first stint on the Front, we begin to see the mental toll they have on the soldiers. For one thing the soldiers had nearly an entire week of no sleep because of the constant noise of bombs going off near and even worse, they never knew when one of those shells would hit. Kemmerick suffers even worse than Paul, mentally eroding to the point that he tries to leave the safety of the dugout. Other cases of mental anguish include Paul's depression over killing the French soldier and Albert's suicidal longing after learning his leg has been amputated. At that's not even getting into "shell shock" for after the war ends. Paul suffers from depression when he returns home. Kemmerick has nightmares after witnessing Behn's death, and Paul feels guilty over surviving when his friends haven't.
  • Due to constant bombardments and barrages of men advancing into machine-gun fire, The appropriately named No Man's Land is a nightmarescape of mud, shell holes, gnarled barbed wire, splintered trees, and, of course, corpses scattered about like seeds thrown onto a field. Consider Paul's experience during the German offensive. The church — a holy place where men are meant to gather to worship — is blasted into ruins. The graveyard next to it is hit with shells, literally raising the dead from their graves to mingle among the living. When Paul takes cover in the crater, he's forced to stab a French soldier. He then attempts to comfort the soldier by providing him a drink, but all he has to offer is muddied, bloody water lying stagnant at the bottom of the crater. Even a basic, life-sustaining necessity such as clean water is absent within No Man's Land. In comparison, when the soldiers take leave from the Front, they're often surrounded by pastoral nature. They eat their fill of beans and bread and lie beneath a tree that remains intact rather than uprooted by shell blasts. That's just how tough times are. Another time, Paul and his comrades find a river to bathe in. With more than enough water to drink, the soldiers get to clean away the dirt and grime that covers them during their time at the Front. Again, they're excited by a cold river. The differences in the landscape help show how the soldiers' states of mind change — it's all location. Away from the Front, the landscape can provide the physical needs of the soldier, allowing him to turn his attention to more social considerations. He can discuss the purpose and worth of the war, take care of his body by eating and bathing... and even get close to hot French girls. But every aspect of No Man's Land requires the soldier to focus on survival and only survival. Every broken tree, muddied crater, and bombed-out building reminds us that death is an ever-present danger — death of the soldiers, death of nature, death of everything.
  • Kemmerick's boots have Italian leather, comfy insoles, the works. But the previous owner was gunned down while wearing them. The owner before him? Blown up. The owner before the owner before him? Shredded by shrapnel. We're first introduced to this jinxed pair of footwear when Kemmerick parades them about during boot camp. He places them jokingly on Mueller's shoulders. Since the army lives on its feet, a soldier needs proper boots for the long marches and days of work — especially on the Western Front. Between the mud and unhygienic conditions, soldiers require good boots to prevent blisters, frostbite, and foot fungus. Later, Kemmerick's wounded by shrapnel. As he lies dying in a field hospital, Paul and his friends visit him and Mueller notices the boots. Mueller asks Kemmerick if he can have the boots since he won't need them. As the group leaves, Mueller confesses to Paul he didn't want to get the boots over Paul. Mueller's confession shows us how the war has changed these young men. Mueller has to think about his survival at all times. Although asking for the boots upsets Kemmerick — it's basically the equivalent of saying Kemmerick would die. Kemmerick can't use the boots, but another soldier can. In fact, they could save another soldier's life. We see that survival has to always be at the forefront in a soldier's mind, sacrificing more "civilized" considerations such as decorum and thoughtfulness. In the end, Kemmerick does die, and Paul takes the boots for Mueller. Mueller's shown proudly marching with his new boots, but he's injured during an offensive in No Man's Land. Next, we see Peter marching in the boots — and then Peter's shown being killed while going over the top.
  • If you take a good look at Kantorek's blackboard behind him. The phrase he's scrawled there is the first line of Homer's The Odyssey, which roughly translates to "Tell me, oh Muse, of that ingenious hero who traveled far and wide." This line supports Kantorek's worldview and provides us an insight into his militaristic fervor. Having been raised on the classics like The Iliad and The Odyssey, Kantorek sees war as something glorious, an event where nations invest young men and get worldly, ingenious heroes. And his own words follow a similar ideal: "Here is a glorious beginning for your lives. The field of honor calls you." Of course, he believes that. His experience of war comes from the ancient Greeks, who didn't exactly like to write epic poems about losers or dead men. Odysseus went to war and then had an epic poem written about him.
  • "Oscar" — a rat that hangs out with the soldiers — chews on a piece of the soldiers' bread, and Kat throws his shoe at the little beastie. While Kat tosses the bread aside, Tjaden retorts he'd regret that choice. Rats aren't thought of as being so brazen about snatching food from people, but in the trenches, the humans have entered the rats' world: the world of survival — kill or be killed; eat or be eaten. Later, the men are starving and Kat returns from foraging with stale bread and no butter — the same food that Oscar foraged from the soldiers earlier. Rats come pouring into their dugout and the soldiers begin killing them with their spades. Immediately afterward, the Allied offensive starts, and we see the soldiers fighting in the trenches. They use all manner of hand-to-hand weapons to kill each other, including the same spades they used to kill the rats. The contrast shows us the equalizing of man and beast as a result of the war. Both live in holes; both forage for food; both fight, kill, and bite to survive. The film suggests that we shouldn't talk about "dogs of war" so much as "rats of war."
• An American in Paris
  • The film famously ends with a 17-minute jazz-classical ballet set against a backdrop of famous French paintings... that takes place entirely in Jerry's head. Even though the scene's a Big-Lipped Alligator Moment, it still somewhat serves as a symbol. Jerry's dream sequence is pretty much his way of dealing with his sadness over losing Lise, as well as his frustrations about his painting career. It's a fantasy world he creates to cope with his unfortunate reality, using vast, vibrant color. The ballet sequence is Jerry's method for blowing off some emotional steam.
  • If the ballet symbolizes Jerry's grief over losing Lise, then the red rose that bookends the ballet is a symbol within a symbol. The brilliant red flower represents the elusiveness and fragility of love. Just like love, the red rose is beautiful, and Jerry finds it when he least expects it. It appears out of nowhere, and then Jerry spends his entire dream dance-chasing it across Paris. The connection between love, Lise, and flowers extends beyond the red rose, too. At one point during the ballet, Jerry dances with Lise in his arms only to have her disappear and be replaced by an enormous bouquet of flowers that Jerry lets fall to the ground. Basically, love is fleeting and extremely difficult to hold on to.
  • When we first meet Lise, via of Henri's description of her to Adam, Henri portrays Lise as a complex young lady. She's elegant and refined, but sultry and seductive. She's adventurous and modern, but nerdy and bookish. She's basically a woman with a multifaceted personality, a young woman whose complexity is the source of her nontraditional beauty. As Henri rattles off different personalities — elegance, passion, dorkiness, and so on — we see Lise firsthand. Each time Henri's description changes so does Lise's costume. Each of Lise's outfits symbolizes a different facet of her temperament. Her threads demonstrate and reinforce her complexity. At least they do for Henri, since Lise's symbolic fashion show takes place in his imagination.
• In Batman (1989), the Batwing flies into the air directly in front of the moon to make the Batman symbol, then flies back down, with no explanation as to why Batman would just fly up for a second.
• The film version of Being There ends with Chance The Gardener walking on water.
• Beyond the Lights: A pop star wearing outrageously revealing clothing is nothing new, but all of Noni's clothes in the first half of the film either have chains incorporated in them or some form of bondage. This is to represent how she feels caged in her life. Once she starts to take control of her life and deal with her depression, her style in clothing is looser.
• The Birth of a Nation (1915): Yes, even a film with massive Values Dissonance such as this one, can have a surprising amount of symbolism. Though it's not exactly subtle...
  • The straightforward film ends with a mind-bogglingly trippy closing scene. The vision reflects the stated anti-war purpose of the film. We see a personification of war — a massive armored soldier sitting atop a steed — attacking a group of screaming people on the left side of the screen, while the right side is filled with dead bodies. Slowly, the scene shifts. Instead of a group of wounded people, we see a group of happy folks partying in togas. Instead of a giant warrior superimposed over them, we see Jesus Christ himself. Ironically enough, neither of these scenes take place in modern times — they seem either medieval or ancient. On one hand, the symbolism is pretty simple: war is bad and Christianity is good. On the other, however, it seems to be a subtle way of implying that Jesus is on the side of the South, which seems pretty absurd considering the whole slavery business. Either way, it's quite the trippy way of closing out a film that takes an otherwise realistic approach.
  • The varied state of the Camerons' plantation mansion reflects the state of the South at large. At first, the house is completely luxurious. This establishes the mansion — and the Camerons themselves — as symbols of the Southern aristocracy. The house becomes a major target during the war. For example, at one point a group of guerillas attack the house, ransacking it and setting it on fire. Later, during Reconstruction, Lynch makes it his goal to cause as much damage to it as possible. Because the house represents the Southern aristocracy, these attacks represent the perceived targeting of that aristocracy by the North during the Reconstruction. Furthermore, the house's resilience despite these attacks reflect Griffith's belief that this line of nobility is alive and well in this new American era.
  • Animals pop up often throughout The Birth of a Nation, and they carry a different sort of symbolic resonance each time. For example: When we first meet the Cameron family, There's a gaggle of adorable puppies and kittens playing at their feet. This is supposed to relate them (and the pre-war South as a whole) with innocence, an innocence that Griffith thinks is sullied after the Civil War. Later, the villainous Silas Young is shown beating a dog and giving it to other men for even more nefarious deeds. This is not a particularly subtle way of revealing the dude's evil nature. Soon, after Lynch beats up the dog, Ben and Elsie are seen kissing a dove together. It's a way of relating their love to peace between the North and South, as doves typically symbolize peace.
• Black Lightning (2009): The Nanocatalyst that powers the Black Lightning is curiously shaped like a human heart, which both Kuptsov and Dima get to hold in hands near the end of the film.
• Black Swan would also invoke this trope. For instance, Mila Kunis's character Lily wears her hair out during ballet training and doesn't bother to do any warm-ups. It's to demonstrate her free-spirited nature, even though no ballet studio on Earth would let her get away with either of those things.
• Blood Machines: Tracey's mechanical body resembles a woman bound, gagged and restricted in a harness that evokes physical and sexual torture, showing how A.I. are mistreated as tools and beasts of burden by the men that use them. After she turns against Lago, she manifests as a nude, human body similar to all of the other entities, freed of her shackles.
• Bonnie and Clyde:
  • Clyde's pistol is long, hard and caressed by Bonnie within the first few scenes of the film. The first time the audiences see a gun, Clyde holds it at crotch level and Bonnie strokes it, murmuring "Yeah." To make the innuendo levels more disturbing, we see that Clyde has a match held between his teeth. As he holds his pistol near his fly, he moves his teeth in such a way that this (very erect) matchstick waggles up and down. Bonnie states that Clyde didn't have the courage to use it, and when he proves he does in robbing a general store, Bonnie starts smooching him as they drive away. But once they get to a secluded spot, Clyde jumps out of the car saying he's not much of a lover boy to which Bonnie snarkily replies, "[his] advertising is just dandy. Folks wouldn't guess [he doesn't] have a thing to sell. She's clearly referring to the "advertising" of the gun. Guns are so synonymous with penises that Bonnie assumes when a man shows off his gun, he's intimating that he'd like to show off something else, as well. There are more than just phallic guns in this film. You can't rob a bank without firing off a few warning shots, and the police that track and ultimately kill B & C are locked and loaded.
  • One point of the film has Buck Barrow tell a cheesy joke about a boy's sick mother and the boy having to feed her a fresh quart of a milk every day with brandy in it. She would drink a little more every day for nearly a week, then on the final day, she'd swallow the whole thing down and then tell him not to sell their cow. The joke has a dark undercurrent. It's about something poisonous being slipped into something wholesome and going undetected. The old woman doesn't want to drink alcohol — she's a teetotaler who doesn't believe in drinking. But by drinking fresh milk laced with brandy, she not only chokes it down, but she begins to love it. There are some serious parallels between the story of Bonnie and Clyde and the relationship of this woman to her milky brandy. The woman drinks a little more brandy every day, and she begins to crave it so much she can't think of doing without it — "don't sell that cow!" Bonnie and Clyde experience a similar progression. They start out small — Clyde commits armed robbery, and Bonnie's an accomplice. They get in a little deeper — Clyde kills a man, and Bonnie aids in armed robbery. Finally, they're both wanted for multiple crimes that include the murder of police officers, Clyde's brother is dead, and they're both wounded. Clyde's so used to the crime that informs his life that he's not able to think of a life without it. Like the woman in the joke, he can't make a distinction between wholesome milk (or an honest life) and poisonous brandy (or a life full of bank robbery).
• Casablanca:
  • It's suggested that in Casablanca, it's usual for there to be a gambling room built into the back of a club or restaurant. But the fact that there's one at Rick's might hold a bit of symbolism. There's a recurring theme of luck in Casablanca. Take Ilsa's arrival at Rick's joint out of all places for instance. Pretty unlikely right? Ugarte hands the letters of transit off to Rick a matter of minutes before he's arrested. That was lucky. Strasser arrives at the airport just as the plane door has closed and the aircraft starts down the runway. Also lucky. There are quite a bit of close calls like this throughout the film, perhaps hinting that the events are being guided by another hand.
  • Rick's bar is the one central location in the film, And right in the middle of the bar is Sam's piano. When you also consider the fact that the piano is where the letters of transit are hidden — the one thing on which the entire plot hinges — you know that piano is important. The piano also provides a link to Rick's and Ilsa's past. It's where Ilsa first goes when she enters the café; she asks Sam to play for a song that used to be "their" song, a song that Rick has refused to let Sam play because it just hurts too much to hear it. And then, there's also the iconic scene where the German officers are singing their anthem, and then Laszlo swoops in and gets the orchestra to start playing France's anthem. It's representative of the whole political struggle that's embedded in this story. Music is the expression of the soul; it steps up to the plate when words are insufficient. And there are so many times in Casablanca where, despite all the brilliant dialogue, something can only be said with a look, or a touch, or a kiss.
  • Rick Blaine himself is a walking piece of symbolism. For example, Rick's an American, and pretty much the only one in the movie. He holds out for a long time, doing whatever he can not to get involved in the war, or to take sides. He only inserts himself at the last minute, when it begins to threaten his own personal interests, and is finally inspired enough to make waves. America acted exactly the same way when it was considering becoming engaged in World War II. It wasn't until Japan bombed Pearl Harbor that we were compelled to join the fray.
  • "La Marseillaise", the French national anthem, is more than just an emotional scene, it's also an important one. Victor Laszlo, fed up with the Nazis singing their Nazi song in their Nazi manner, tells the band to start playing "La Marseillaise," to counter it. Everyone joins in, the Germans look cranky and Rick's bar ends up getting closed down. One way this is important is that it's a big step forward for Rick actually picking sides in the fight. La Marseillaise" is the French national anthem, but the Nazis largely occupied France in the early 1940s when the movie was made, and nobody played that song on German turf as it was banned: Vichy France, which technically ran Casablanca, used a song called "Maréchal Nous Voilà" as its anthem. As a result, "Le Marseillaise" became a theme of the French Underground, and of similar French Resistance forces trying to free their country from German rule.
  • There's a brief scene at the end where Captain Renault dumps out a bottle of Vichy water and tosses it in the trash. The motivations are hinted at in the movie but it doesn't go into a lot of detail, and may be a skippable scene for modern-day viewers. When the Germans defeated France, they divided the country into two. They themselves occupied the eastern half of the country — including Paris, the actual capital — but because they had bigger issues (including Communist Russia), they set up a puppet government in the western half of the country, with a capital in Vichy France. Technically, Vichy was neutral in the war, but they basically danced to the Germans' tune... and because they controlled Casablanca and other French colonies, we can see that playing out in the film. So basically, Renault's dumping his Vichy water signals that he's no longer willing to be the puppet. He's ready to fight the Germans just like Rick is. But on a subtler level, it also makes a very pointed statement about the U.S. government's position on the whole thing.
• The Bourne Series: Water symbolizes death. In The Bourne Identity, Jason was discovered in the middle of the ocean after having been shot by Wombosi's men, without any memory of his life beforehand. In The Bourne Supremacy, Marie gets shot while driving, taking their jeep off the bridge to the water below, and we later learn that Jason's first Treadstone mission took place on a rainy night. And in The Bourne Ultimatum, it's shown in flashbacks that, as David Webb, he was waterboarded into becoming Jason Bourne when he first joined Treadstone, and in the end, he falls into the water after apparently being shot, mirroring his first appearance.
• Chinatown:
  • Despite the film's title, it takes several hours to get to the actual Chinatown. Only the final scene of the movie is actually set there. But before then, Jake talks with Evelyn about how he used to work in Chinatown as a cop, saying that he did "as little as possible" on the job. He said: "[he] thought [he] was keeping someone from being hurt and actually [he] ended up making sure she was hurt." A similar scenario happens at the ending, were Evelyn's been shot and Noah's captured his daughter/granddaughter, Walsh ushers the signature line "Forget it Jake, it's Chinatown". In this case, "Chinatown" refers to a situation that can't be helped … because the person trying help is out of their depth. Even though Jake's realized the truth about what's happening, he's too late — and the cops are too unwilling to give him a fair hearing. At the end of the movie, Jake's suffered the same nauseating defeat that he initially suffered when he worked as a cop in Chinatown the first time.
  • The bad guys in the film want to steal water which is a natural element already free in nature. But when you live in a desert community in California, the need for water can become desperate, especially when you consider that, in the film, L.A.'s in a drought. Hollis Mulwray wanted to make sure that the water would be publicly owned, but Noah Cross, his greedy partner, wanted to continue to own the water company privately so he'd be able to make a profit and, maybe more importantly, maintain power and control over the city via the water supply. Cross's trying to dominate a crucial natural resource, because if you can control one thing that's necessary for life (like water) naturally you can control everything else, outstripping or buying out the power of the mayor and others. Noah ultimately wants more than money — he wants absolute power.
  • Noah's incest of Evelyn when she was around 14 reflects the above point near perfectly. The incest is the same sort of crime as water theft, except on a personal level. Noah's secretly stealing water by misappropriating it and letting it run down channels and aqueducts at night. He's also misusing the nourishing power of water by hiding on his own land instead of letting it go to the people who are meant to have it. This can be seen as a metaphor for what he's doing to his own daughter — he's abusing her and mistreating the human power to bring forth life in the same way that he's abusing and mistreating a natural resource and its ability to bring forth life.
  • During a scene where Jake and Evelyn are making out, Jake points out a black mark in the green part of Evelyn's eye that's apparently a flaw in the iris. The flaw in Evelyn's eye symbolizes the flaw in the system itself — Evelyn's a good character, but she's personally experienced the corruption bred by greed and by the hunger for power. Her father is stealing the city's water, and he's had a child with her through incest. From a distance, everything probably looks okay — but when you look closely, something's off. That's been Jake's experience throughout the whole movie. He sees that Hollis' death isn't a suicide and that he's been set up... after he learns that the woman who hired him wasn't really Evelyn. These inconsistencies eventually reveal an even more corrupt and evil state of appears than Jake could've realized. The flaw in Evelyn's iris initially suggests that there's something wrong with her — like maybe she's in on her father's scheme. But in reality, the flaw lies in the family she comes from, specifically in her monstrous father.
  • If Noah had just chucked Hollis' dead corpse into the ocean, Jake Gittes never would've been able to figure out most of the mystery. After the police pull Hollis' drowned corpse out of the reservoir, Jake goes to see the dead body at the city morgue. The mortician — appropriately named Morty — notes the irony of the situation, commenting to Jake they were in the middle of a drought, and the water commissioner still somehow drowned. The method of death is something that seems logical on its surface, but the cops are able to look into it enough to realize that someone set Hollis up for adultery to make his death look like a suicide. Yet, they don't discover as much as Jake, and don't realize that Evelyn didn't kill Hollis — the murderer was Noah.
  • The American Dream in this film is really an American Nightmare. And the entire populace — with the exception of Jake Gittes — is totally blind and oblivious to all of this. We see a trippy photonegative version of the American Dream. There's see a super-rich guy, Noah Cross, devouring the economy with the help of a bunch of henchmen like Claude Mulvihill and willing white-collar drones like Russ Yelburton. People lower down on the economic scale, like the prostitute Ida Sessions, end up getting used (and/or killed). And the old people in the retirement home who unwittingly cover up Noah's water-theft scheme? They're being gamed too. If the American Dream is dead, Noah and his boys are the worms eating its corpse. All that the hero, Jake, can do is try to help Evelyn escape the horror of life with her father — and he even fails at that. He has no aspirations towards the American Dream of his own that we see, no house on the hill he's striving for. Aside from trying to save the innocent, Jake's one motive is survival. He's like a more desperate, less-physically-skilled Bear Grylls. dominate a crucial natural resource, because if you can control one thing that's necessary for life (like water) naturally you can control everything else, outstripping or buying out the power of the mayor and others. Noah ultimately wants more than money — he wants absolute power.
• The Dark Knight Trilogy: Batman watches over Gotham from high ground once per movie, combines with Cue the Sun across the films: Batman Begins is at pre-dawn, The Dark Knight is at daybreak, and The Dark Knight Rises is in morning twilight.
  • The Dark Knight Rises when bats randomly appear just before Bruce attempt the jump that will succeed and finally climb out of the Pit.
• DC Extended Universe:
  • Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice: Lex Luthor's mop of red hair is like the plainclothes equivalent of a supervillain's mask. Once his crimes go public, it's all shaved off.
  • Justice League (2017): Cyborg spends the bulk of his screentime angry and self-doubting, with his cybernetic implants appearing ugly and erratic. By the film's end, Cyborg has found inner peace — having a group of friends, learning to accept his changes and patching things up with his father — and his enhancements become streamlined.
  • Wonder Woman:
    • Diana (a woman) being the first person to cross No Man's land.
    • Until her last scene, Doctor Poison never takes off or loses her mask. The mask finally coming off symbolizes Diana's newfound insight into humanity. Like Doctor Poison, humanity covers up its ugliness. However, also like Doctor Poison, that imperfection is merely an aspect of humanity as well.
    • Wonder Woman using her bracelets instead of her sword to finish off Ares means that war can't be fought with more war (when she uses the God-Killer against him, it instantly shatters). Using a defensive weapon to protect others by redirecting his attack back to him represents Diana using love and compassion to defeat Ares, by redirecting his aggression back to him.
  • Zack Snyder's Justice League:
    • After killing a Green Lantern, Darkseid — who is the God of Tyranny — fails to claim his ring, which is powered by one's will and imagination.
    • When Batman is trying to climb out of the cooling tower to stand with the rest of the League, Superman offers him a hand so he can escape from the darkness. Also doubles as a Call-Back to one of Bruce's nightmares in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, where Bruce dreamed of being dragged into the darkness by a bat-like monster during his time as an enemy of Superman.
• Deewaar: At Anand's funeral, the lighting changes drastically (i.e. between daytime shots and pitch-black backgrounds) from shot to shot depending on who's in frame and what state of mind they're in.
• In-universe example in The Draughtsman's Contract: Mrs. Herbert points out the significance of pomegranates in Classical Mythology when Mr. Neville brings her some.
• E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial:
  • This film a story about the friendship between Elliott and E.T., both of whom are very short. It's fitting, therefore, that the film frequently employs low camera angles that present the action from E.T.'s and Elliott's points of view. In the forest, we gaze at the giant trees, witness a car pull up, and peer through the brush at the suburbs below, all from E.T.'s perspective. Moments later, when Keys chases E.T., that's shown from E.T.'s viewpoint, too, with lots of quick cuts to Keys' keys dangling from his belt. In fact, we don't even see Keys' face until the final act. Elliott's science teacher is treated the same way. The camera never veers above his elbows; it stays at Elliott's eye level. The intentionally low camera angles establish adults as imposing and even threatening. Halloween is shot from E.T.'s squat perspective, too, as he fixates on the fake knife through Michael's head and appraises Mom's semi-risqué costume. All of these deliberately low camera angles put the audience in Elliott's and E.T.'s positions, causing younger viewers to further identify with them and encouraging older viewers to remember their own childhoods.
  • The flowers —geraniums, to be specific — that Gertie gives E.T. are a really important part of the movie as they represent life. When Gertie first gives E.T. the flowers, they're wilted and basically dead. When E.T.'s alone with the geraniums not long afterward, he looks at them, hums, and they bloom back into life. So the geraniums are also a symbol of resurrection, or rising from the dead. Later, as E.T.'s health begins to fail, the geraniums show up again. Michael's spots them on a nearby stool, as they wilt rapidly just before the scene cuts to E.T. crashing and dying. Then they make another appearance, in the makeshift hospital after E.T. has been pronounced dead. Elliott says what he thinks is his final goodbye to E.T., only to spot the revitalized geraniums on a nearby counter as he exits. He knows a resurrected pot of geraniums means a resurrected E.T., and he's thrilled.
  • The red light in the middle of E.T.'s chest is a glowing example of empathy. It represents understanding and shared feelings. When we first see E.T., he's in the forest with other members of his kind. They're spread out and studying plants. Suddenly, all of their heart lights glow, and they know they have to evacuate. When Keys shows up, E.T. races back toward their spaceship with his heart light literally lighting the way. And when their ship flies away without him, the light goes out. The heart light is a symbol of their connection. His chest doesn't light up again until he finally makes contact with his people again, toward the very end of the film. He's stowed away in a freezer, seemingly dead, when his heart light glows warm red, in stark contrast to the sterile hospital surroundings. E.T. even informs Elliott that the glowing light meant his kind were coming, before launching into a giddy repetition of "E.T. phone home" that nearly tips Keys off that he's very much alive. The final time that E.T.'s heart light shines is when he says goodbye to Elliott. E.T. points at it, and the two embrace. He's about to leave Elliott, his best friend on Earth, with whom he physically and psychically shares feelings, just as he does with his own tribe.
  • E.T. himself has quite a bit of religious symbolism—specifically parallels between E.T. and Jesus Christ. Both dropped down from the heavens and, ultimately, returned there. Both have fervent believers. In fact, Elliott tells E.T. directly, "I'll believe in you all my life. Every day." Both promise to stay with those believers always, at least in spirit: Before he leaves, E.T. points at Elliott's forehead and tells him, "I'll be right here." On top of that, they both rally behind the oppressed and are healers. They're both viewed as threats, misunderstood, and mistreated by the authorities. And most importantly, they both died and were resurrected.
• The Spanish film Hasta la lluvia ("Even the Rain") revolves around a film crew that flies to Bolivia to film a movie about Christopher Columbus, because it will be cheaper. Unfortunately they arrive during the Cochabumaba Water War, a series of civil uprisings meant to protest the government's decision to sell the country's water rights to a foreign multinational. One scene revolves around Spanish conquistadors using hunting dogs to track down rebellious Indians, and later, in the story proper, one of the producers helps the mother of one of the child actors look for her daughter, they drive through town in the middle of a massive demonstration, where they spot police in riot gear using attack dogs to control the demonstrating mob.
• Equilibrium: Probably the only reason the drug ampules looks like bullets and the drug is injected with an apparatus that looks like a gun.
  • Viviana's execution robe is blood red, the color of martyrs.
  • Father extols Prozium as the "opiate of the masses", a frequent variation on Karl Marx's view of religion as the "opium of the people".
• Gigi's symbolism is not exactly the most subtle usage in film.
  • Birds are everywhere in the film as a classic symbol of personal freedom and independence. In one significant appearance, Gigi's at lunch at her Aunt Alicia's eating a poor tiny ortolan: a bird's been reduced to fodder for lessons on proper table manners, the same way Gigi's plucked from the beautiful park only to end up in her aunt's stuffy chambers getting ready to be eaten alive by society's plans for her. In another notable role, Gigi's delivering her angry screed against romance with "I Don't Understand the Parisians," and she throws herself against a wrought-iron park gate. Beyond her, a flock of birds fly across the sky. How's that for a cage-versus-freedom image? And for a third example, as Gaston begins to understand that he's falling for Gigi, he glides through the park, singing, "You're not at all the funny, awkward little girl I knew." In point, swans float by in a pond behind him. Plus swans partially mate for life.
  • The film's characters are constantly dashing up and down stairs. With each climb, the characters (Gaston, most of the time) go upstairs fueled by passion and go downstairs in anger or sadness. There's Gigi, red-faced after playing too long at the park, running up the steps up to her own apartment. There's Gaston, up and down constantly on the stairs to Madame Alvarez's, whether it's a regular social call or in some whipped-up love-fury. Even Aunt Alicia leaves her apartment (a rare occurrence), and charges up her sister's stairs after hearing about Gigi's unthinkable refusal of Gaston.
  • Usage of lush color is everywhere. The green of the Bois de Boulogne, deep reds of Mamita's house, Gigi's brightly-colored schoolgirl clothes, colorful dresses on the ladies at Maxims' all convey excitement and delight, even though they bore Gaston to death. You'll notice that the less sophisticated women and ladies of the demimonde dress in the brightest colors, while the haut monde (fashionable, respectable women) are more subdued. The women in the park are in white and pale pinks, while Gigi's first glam dress is elegant white. Liane's dress at Maxim's is garish, definitely a comment on what Gaston thinks of her — common and crass. Gigi's simple but gorgeous white gown lets us know that she's different from the other mistresses.
• Gareth Edwards says that the HALO jump scene in Godzilla (2014) was meant to resemble "angels descending into Hell".
• In Godzilla vs. Kong, Mechagodzilla is introduced being risen out of the ground on a pedestal and is presented as humanity's replacement for Godzilla (who stands in for God) while also being the incarnate of humanity's hubris and lack of faith. It's ultimately the new avatar for Ghidorah (Satan) to sow destruction. When it emerges in Hong Kong, it bursts out of a pyramid-shaped mountain with the sun and moon above it, like an evil pagan god. All in all, Mechagodzilla is essentially a false god.
• Takashi Miike's Gozu makes almost no sense at all without the realization that, not only is nearly everything symbolic, it uses symbols and tropes drawn from several entirely unrelated sources ( mainly Japanese and Greek mythology, as well as psychological metaphors for the main character's coming to terms with his homosexuality).
• His Girl Friday:
  • Hildy's clothes are a notable figure within the film, especially since the film was released in 1940. When we first see Hildy in Walter's office, she's wearing a striking striped dress and hat — very stylish, very chic, and very feminine. And she herself says she's feminine; she's there with her fiancé Bruce, who in her words, "treats [her] like a woman." Her clothes show who she wants to be: a wife and a mother, with a family and a man to take care of her. When she decides to write the story for Walter, though, she changes her clothes. Inside of feminine attire, she puts on a plain striped jacket (which looks a lot like the male reporter's jackets) and a utilitarian hat (which one of the reporters teases her about). Hildy's changed from feminine, stereotypically womanly clothes to more masculine, utilitarian work clothes, symbolizing her return to the work world.
  • Ralph Bellamy is the actor who plays Bruce Baldwin. But he's also an inside joke. When Louie asks Walter what Bruce looks like, he responds with, "that guy in the movies, Ralph Bellamy". The joke isn't just that Bruce is Ralph Bellamy. It's that he is the kind of guy Ralph Bellamy would play. Bellamy played a similar role to Bruce in the film The Awful Truth — which Cary Grant also starred in. Just as in His Girl Friday, Grant's character divorced his wife, who then took up with a Midwestern innocent played by Bellamy.
  • Prior to the events of the film, Walter hired a skywriter to write in the clouds, "Hildy. Don't be hasty. Remember my dimple. Walter." when he and Hildy were with a judge to be divorced, who delayed the divorce 20 minutes to read it. The large, flamboyant, egotistical message is a good summary of how Walter interacts with Hildy throughout the film. He uses language not so much to communicate with her as to delay her. And he loves using technology to misdirect and to say things he can't get away with otherwise. For instance, Walter yells at reporter Butch's fiancée for keeping him away from the paper, and even tells Hildy they're getting remarried on the phone, but not even on a phone call to Hildy herself. He's talking to Duffy, the copy editor, and casually mentions the upcoming nuptials.
  • Early on in the film, as Hildy and Walter are walking through the newsroom, Walter would go through a door and let it slam back onto Hildy. Hildy would then reprimand him for not being chivalrous. They come to a second gate, and Hildy illustrates the right way to hold it open, letting Walter walk through. They then come to a third gate… and Walter again goes through first and lets it slam on Hildy. Aside from deliberately mistreating Hildy, Walter was being canny. His whole pitch to Hildy, his effort to win her back, is based on his argument that her second most important identity is as a woman. Her first identity was as a journalist. Walter's appeal is to Hildy's professional ambition. He's in love with Hildy as a journalist, not as a potential housewife. By slamming doors on her, he's treating her like another one of his employees. But she's cool with it as Walter's letting her know it's more fun to joke with him than it is to be put on a pedestal by Bruce.
• Inception is filled to the brim with more things that could possibly be symbolic than you'll ever see. However, since most of the film takes place in peoples' dream and it's explicitly mentioned that artificially-created dreams only provide the frame, which is then filled in by the dreamer's subconsciousness, it's mostly justified.
• It Happened One Night:
  • "The Walls of Jericho" are the most frequently used symbol in the film. By the end of the film, all three of the movie's central characters (Ellie, Peter, and Andrews) are in on the joke, which Peter is the first to devise when he puts a blanket up to separate his side of the cabin from Ellie's during their first night together. The actual Battle of Jericho, from the biblical Book of Joshua, is very disturbing. But Peter makes light of it when he says that the blanket he's stringing up will be indestructible, like the Walls of Jericho. He's probably unaware of the irony that, in the end, these walls were brought down by a lot of noise. Trumpet-blasts are traditionally credited with this feat of destruction, and that's why in the film the last thing we hear about is Peter's request for a trumpet. The wall that separates Peter and Ellie — and that seals his promise not to violate her space or her body — finally comes down. Which means these two are going to have at it to their hearts' content.
  • The first thing we learn in the film is that Ellie's "on hunger strike," and from that point, the subject of food keeps coming up throughout the film: donuts, chocolates, and carrots, not to mention the constant references to hunger. Ellie comes from high society, which in this movie is kind of an empty place. Sure, it's fun and flashy, but it doesn't have much substance. In a way, Ellie is "starving" for something real—and she finds it in Peter. It's no accident that her turning point comes when she finally decides to eat raw carrots. They're not fancy, but they're actually nutritious, and they come from the earth. In a way, Ellie is returning to her human roots. On another note, appetite for food is often associated, in literature and film, with the another kind of appetite (one related to sex). And the film can also be seen as a story about Ellie's quest to find—and ultimately to fulfill—her desire. She's never force-fed (even though her father threatens to force-feed her); in fact, Ellie's given space to find what it is she craves—and though that may not be carrots, exactly, it turns out to have a lot in common with the workaday carrot.
• It's a Wonderful Life: The film in general is loaded with symbolism.
  • There's a scene where a young George playfully wishes he had a million dollars, and clicks a cigarette lighter while saying it. When it lights, he exclaims, "Hot dog!" He does this again as a young adult. This represents the romantic, escapist side of George's personality, and shows he still has a child-like sense of wonder.
  • George's famous "lasso the moon" speech also symbolizes unrealistic but pleasant daydreams. Later, when Mary shows George the old, broken-down house where they'd eventually live, she made a sign saying, "George Lassos the Moon" Mary's basically saying anywhere can be the moon if he's with people who love him.
  • "Buffalo Gals" was recorded by various artists over the years. The song plays multiple times during the film, each representing George and Mary's relationship. First, it's heard in bits during the opening credits. Then it's played when they dance at the high school, and Mary sings it later that night as she and George are having romance with each other during the "lasso the moon" speech. She puts it on her record player the night George comes over years later in hopes of bringing back some memories, and smashes the record when George storms out and their relationship was at stake. Then hear the song again from Mary just before she tells George she's pregnant, and an upbeat version during the final credits.
  • Even something as simple as the stair post George pulls off thrice shares some meaning. The first time George pulled the post off, Mary was repairing the house, and George was handling his daily struggle to keep the Building and Loan going, often returning late after work and forgetting about the broken post. The second time occurred when George was irritated about the $8000 going missing, and he was going upstairs to Zuzu, once again forgetting about the broken post. Here it reminds George of what he doesn't have. And the third and final time occurs after he returns from the alternate reality, and he's beginning to appreciate his value in life. This time, he didn't care about the broken post and he kissed it before putting it back into place. This symbolizes how life is full of flaws and you need to embrace them.
  • During the alternate reality scene, Clarence and George sat in Nick's bar when the cash register bell rings. Clarence remarks "Somebody's just made it" as he explainins the connection between bells and angels getting their wings. Nick kicks them out thinking he's crazy and jokenly repeatedly rings the cash register bell saying, "Hey! Get me! I'm giving out wings!". But Clarence's claim turns out to be true, when George returns home towards the ending and a bell rings on the Christmas tree, with his daughter Zuzu saying an angel gets its wings whenever a bell rings. Obviously, the ringing was for Clarence. It's possible the connection between the bells and angel wings he that most bells are beautiful and joyous, pealing out happy times like holidays and weddings like angels.
  • George's daughter Zuzu's flower petals (from a flower she won at school), that George pretended to put them back on the flower after falling off when he's secretly putting them in his pocket, represent life and reality. The petals disappeared after George ceased to exist, and returned when he returns to the real world. For George, they're a token warmly symbolizing all the love and life that wouldn't have existed if he'd never been born. (Because he never would have met Mary and the kids wouldn't have been born.)
  • The film in general as an allegory favor within it. Pretty much all the major characters represent symbols in one way or another. Potter, of course, represents greed, power, and isolation, all ultimately joyless; George is the little guy beaten down by the powerful but who prevails because he's a righteous dude. Mary represents the joys of family and Bedford Falls is every small town where a sense of neighborliness and connectedness shows everyone the real meaning of life. Wouldn't be a Frank Capra film without it.
    • Another way to see it is as an allegory about filmmaking. Film Spectrum said this about the concept:
      Here, Capra takes us through the entire process, as God (the filmmaker) enlists the help of Joseph (the cinematographer) to slowly bring George's flashback (the movie) into focus for Clarence (the audience). He speaks to us as if we're eager film students wanting to learn how to see movies in a new way, through the cinematic eye, through the film theory perspective: "Now look, I'll help you out...If you ever get your wings, you'll see all by yourself."
  • Even the visual effects are there for a reason.
    • Take the drug store George worked in for example, the audience sees them through shelves of medicine bottles. Gower is turned away from the bottles, sadly staring at a photo of his son, who just died from influenza. George is worriedly looking toward the bottle of medicine Gower has just prepared, noticing his mistake with the prescription. There's a ton of information just in that shot. What about the wallpaper? Mary papers the house in a pretty traditional 1940s pattern of people and flowers when it's first being repaid. But, on that same night, a troubled George goes up the stairs to see Zuzu, and there's the wallpaper is now a pattern of nautical anchors. George always loved the sound of anchors being lifted because they signaled the beginning of an exciting journey. Maybe they mean he never got away, or that his home is weighing down on him? Coincidence, I think not!
    • The lighting Capra uses during the alternate-universe scenes is dark and shadowy, to give the scene a terrifying, otherworldly feel. George's abandoned house is all shadows; the police chasing him are silhouetted and backlit; Pottersville is alternately dark and lit up with glaring neon signs.
• James Bond:
  • The World Is Not Enough: At the casino, Elektra King picks the Queen of Hearts card. She manipulates men by making them fall in love with her.
  • In all of his appearances in the James Bond franchise, Ernst Stavro Blofeld uses a black octopus as SPECTRE's logo, symbolizing its omnipresence and behind-the-scenes reach to tilt geopolitical events to its side like a pinball machine. Blofeld also cultivates the image of phantoms as a way to show how he operates from the shadows through proxies. Even in Spectre, where his grudge against Bond has escalated to personal levels, he cultivates the imagery of skeletons and the dead. Like a specter, Blofeld came back to haunt Bond by orchestrating the numerous tragedies 007 faced over the years. And being the Trope Codifier for Diabolical Mastermind, Blofeld is usually seen with a fluffy, white Persian cat and employs cat-like mannerisms himself, such as playing with his victims before killing them.
  • Two paintings play a symbolic role in Skyfall. When Bond first meets Q in an art museum, Q talks about the painting of a once-powerful warship, now in decrepit shape, being towed to the breakers, with the obvious insinuations about the aging Bond. At the end of the film, when Bond has gotten his Bond-esque confidence and skills back and meets Mallory/M in his new office, there a painting of another warship in the background. This one is in its prime and furiously blasting away in battle.
• Joker (2019): Arthur Fleck's apartment building is located at the top of a very long flight of stairs. The first two times we see him on the stairs, he's drearily walking back home in drab clothes and in the dark, the weight of the world on his shoulders. The last time we see the stairs, he's descending them, wearing bright face paint and a vibrant red suit on a sunny day, dancing his way down without a care in the world. At this point he has fully embraced his murderous clown persona and leaving behind his old life, he is finally happy for the first time.
• Juliana:
  • The opening shot is that of Juliana's neighborhood. Particularly, it shows an unpaved street framed by one-store, half-built houses. It's meant to give the feeling that the poor have very few roads available for them in life —they are trapped in demeaning, irregular, bad-paying jobs as well as in their gender roles.
  • There are several shots at the beginning that show Juliana and her friends eventually getting absorbed by the crowd. It mirrors how later in the film it's discussed how easy is for poor kids, especially those who are dark-skinned, to slip through the cracks. People only care for them for a short while, when they are pitying them.
• Stanley Kubrick:
  • Dr. Strangelove
    • The film's rated PG and pretty inoffensive compared to what in movies and on today, but still Strangelove has been seen as an allegory of sex "from foreplay to explosion". The film is loaded with sexual imagery, mostly phallic symbols. The opening sequence of B-52s being fueled in midair looks a lot like planes having sex. And the background song is "Try a Little Tenderness". Then, of course, there's the famous image of Kong riding the bomb. It's probably no coincidence that the bomb looks an awful lot like a giant penis sticking between Kong's legs. (The airmen have written "Dear John" and "Hi there" on those bombs.) And let's not forget the series of massive explosions that destroy the earth, which, in a certain light, seem about as orgasmic as a thing can be. Maybe the film is trying to show all the Cold War posturing and build up of nuclear arms as a massive case of a penis-measuring contest. The whole thing is about males not feeling sexually potent or virile, and generally trying to prove how tough they are. The scene where Gen. Ripper explains to Mandrake the first time he ever became aware of the "Commies" draining his precious bodily fluids seems to support that idea. It's also probably no coincidence that Ripper is named after Jack the Ripper, the infamous murderer of prostitutes who had some weird sexual proclivities, like murdering prostitutes.
    • Strangelove has a black-gloved mechanical prosthetic arm that he can't control. The black glove belonged to Kubrick, who wore them on the set to protect his hand from the hot lights he was handling. Sellers thought it would be a great prop for Strangelove, and it also reminded him of the black-gloved mad scientist in Fritz Lang's 1927 film Metropolis. As a famous scientist in Fascist Germany, Strangelove probably had access to the latest and greatest biotech engineering guys to design his prosthetic arm. But it has a few glitches; it has a life of its own and has the tendency to fly up in a Nazi salute, or grab Strangelove menacingly. The arm represents one of the movie's major motifs: man-made technology that escapes human control and wreaks havoc on us. Kubrick evidently thinks that's hugely ironic and incredibly funny. In the last scene in the film where Strangelove's gleefully laying out his survival-of-a-superior-race plans for humanity, he's desperately trying to control his disobedient arm while trying not to look like an idiot, but he can't.
  • 2001: A Space Odyssey is famous for its Visual Effects of Awesome as well as all the massive amount of symbolism coming with those visuals.
    • The monolith appears in every section of the film, but we never get a full explanation of its meaning. It's a massive, tall black rectangular object that looks like a giant external hard drive — and kinda is. One with all the information of the universe on it. Floyd's pre-recorded message to the Jupiter crew and his discussions with his moon-based colleagues provide us with the only real clues we have. The monoliths were created by extraterrestrials, but their purpose are unknown. The moon monolith is a signaling device, but the Jupiter monolith serves as a Star Gate and the prehistoric one as a genetic transmogrifier. György Litgeti's "Requiem" plays when the monolith is discovered by the early hominids as well as when Floyd reaches it on the moon. This score imbues these scenes with a sense of awe, and the name of the work refers to a type of song sung during Catholic Mass. Both the hominids and Floyd treat their respective monoliths with a type of religious reverence. The hominids are initially terrified — as most characters tend to be when faced with the almighty — but they soon gather around its base in a huddled group that draws parallels to bowing or kneeling motions used in worship. When Floyd touches the monolith, his hand does so slowly and deliberately, as though he's admiring an object with totemic power rather than studying an object with detached objectivity. Finally, when the monolith appears before Bowman on his deathbed, it does so in a dominating position that resembles an angel of death. Like a religious artifact, the monolith also appears supernatural, as in "unexplainable by natural laws." These monoliths likely follow natural laws that are so beyond our understanding of nature that they appear magical. Their role in the film also seems to be to create humanity in their image. They alter the evolutionary path of the hominids towards that of homo sapiens, and later they change Bowman into a Star Child. This final evolutionary state shares at least one trait similar to the extraterrestrials: the ability to traverse space like it owns the place. This is a nod to several religious beliefs that claim God (or the Gods) created humans to be in his image, such as in Genesis 1:27.
    • Screens and windows are everywhere in the film — and we mean everywhere. 2001 explores our reliance on technology to survive. The near constant presence of screens and windows expands upon this theme. Here, not only do we rely on technology to survive, but our reliance on technology has shaped how we view the world. Consider the scene where the lunar shuttle lands on the moon. The pilots have a view of the lunar surface, but equally important, perhaps more important, to the safety of their descent is the targeting screen between them that changes when they're lined up with the landing pad. A similar scene occurs when Bowman takes the EVA pod to rescue Poole. Like the shuttle pilots, Bowman has a tiny window, but he navigates space through the information provided by his many screens. In the straight-on shots, the screens reflect their information across Bowman's eyes and face, reinforcing the idea that technology interprets the way we view the world. Also, let's not forget that HAL views the world exclusively through lenses and screens. As a character, he can only interpret the world through the means of technology. This results in a worldview that is distorted from a human's perspective, represented by the use of a fish-eyed lens used for HAL's point-of-view shots. Plus, Bowman's transformation into the Star Child has him shedding these screens from his world. After his mind-expanding trip through the Star Gate—where we see Bowman mostly through shots of his eyes—Bowman and his EVA pod appear in the hotel room. The first thing to disappear is the EVA pod with its screens of information. The next thing to disappear is his spacesuit with the glass helmet that reflected so much of his experience to the viewer. Only in shedding his human view, as represented by windows and screens, can Bowman make the transition to the Star Child, a being that will look on the world in an entirely different way.
    • The bone is naturally a very important symbol in the film as it symbolizes humanity's tools and our development of technology. After contacting the monolith, an early hominid sits on top of a pile of tapir bones. He then toys around with a bone, giving the other bones a few experimental taps. He then wallops the skull hard enough to shatter it into pieces. This hominid has become the first human inventor, and he's invented the club. This new invention converts momentum into power, allowing him to strike harder than he could with his hand. It also extends his reach and prevents the risk of injury that attacking with only his body would expose him to. Using this new tool, the hominids begin to act more like humans than we've previously seen them. They hunt tapirs, giving them meat which will increase their caloric intake and further allow for the development of their brains. They also begin to walk around more upright. Finally, they take their new weapons to the watering hole and chase off rival hominids, displaying their power by beating the rival group's alpha male to death. The implication is that it is our development of tools and technology that led humanity to evolve. This development allowed us to conquer our planet. The bone club eventually led to other inventions such as the tools of agriculture, hunting, travel and architecture. And then there's the famous Match Cut. The film is suggesting that all of our technological advancements came from this makeshift club. Just like we evolved from Australopithecus afarensis, and war evolved from waterhole skirmishes, so do satellites have their origins in that original technology. And just as the club improved the lives of our hominid ancestors, technology helps the astronauts survive in space in 2001.
    • Birthdays are a recurring motif in the film. We get word of the first birthday when Dr. Floyd calls his daughter on the video phone. The second birthday is Dr. Poole's. While aboard Discovery One, Poole celebrates his birthday with a video message from his parents. They even bake him a good-looking cake, just to rub in how nasty that zero-G space food looks. Interestingly, parents and child are always separated during their birthdays. Floyd can't make it to Squirt's party, and Poole's message is entirely one-way. He can't respond to the birthday well-wishes. HAL's death provides us the third birthday. As Bowman removes his memory cards, HAL reverts back to who (or what) he was when he was first activated; he sings the song he learned that day. There aren't any birthdays in the first and final sections, but there are two births. In the Dawn of Man section, the early hominids learn to manipulate tools, and in a sense, this is the birthday of the human race. When Bowman becomes the Star Child, we have another birthday. This time the scene depicts the birth of a species hereto unknown in the universe. Note that these birthdays tie into the separation of parent and child we noticed earlier. Just like Floyd is separated from his daughter, these evolutionary births separate the individuals from their parent species. The film's always reminding us of the cycle of death and birth/rebirth. For humans to exist, our early hominid ancestors have to become extinct. Or, in the case of that one hominid, viciously beaten to death. For the Star Child to come into existence, Bowman has to die. In HAL's attempt to succeed in his evolutionary path, he tried to kill his human creators but failed.
• The Last Circus works as an allegory of the Spanish Civil War with the protagonist and antagonist representing the Republicans and the Fascists respectively.
• The Maltese Falcon (1941):
  • The Maltese Falcon itself is rumored to be a solid gold statue encrusted with jewels hiding under a coat of black enamel. Gutman is willing to pay huge sums of money for it because he knows he can receive even more in exchange. The Falcon's backstory is long and convoluted, involving Knights Templar, Charles V of Spain, and a tribute made of jewels. It also doesn't matter one bit. The backstory adds to the "thrilling" part of the story, but in actuality, it's ridiculous. Lots of suspense is built around the falcon, and it's not actually seen until almost the end of the movie. ^SpoilersThe film runs 1 hour and 41 minutes, and we see the Falcon around 1 hour 27 minutes, barely ten minutes before the credits. The newspaper is torn from the bird like a sort of striptease, and Gutman caresses his treasure, except... the falcon was fake. So, in a way, the Falcon was a MacGuffin bringing the entire cast together. When Sam Spade says that the Maltese Falcon is "the stuff that dreams are made of," he's alluding to the fact that it's insubstantial (worthless) and to the fact that everywhere the Maltese Falcon goes, death follows it.
  • If the curly hair, the gardenia-scented calling card, or Cairo briefly touching Spade's rear end when he frisks him doesn't tip you off that Cairo's gay, he also has his umbrella. When we first meet Joel Cairo, he makes himself at home in Spade's office, and he appears to use the cane handle of his umbrella to flirt with Spade, or to feel out what the other man's sexuality might be. Cairo fiddles with the handle, strokes it, and even holds it up to his lips in a way it's amazing got past the censors. A nice way to indicate just who's side he's on.
• Marty:
  • Food plays a huge role in this film. Marty's a butcher out of all possible occupations he could have had, as this position is important to who Marty is … and to the story and story's universe in general. It establishes he's a good man in a good neighborhood, who simply wants to help his Italian neighbors. Food can also be romantic, and love can make you de-prioritize various things, including eating much of anything. At the coffee shop, a close-up shot of Marty and Clara's table reveals crumpled napkins, half-drunk cups of coffee and plate of hardly-touched pie. They're simply too into each other to remember to take a bite. Across cultures, family meals bond parents and children, with cooking typically being a demonstration of love, such with Marty's mother Teresa. Marty's sitting at the Saturday supper table with no less than seven different dishes, even though he's the only one eating.
  • The film's older characters are obsessed with death. When Teresa comes over to ask her sister to move in, the former begins with the positive story of the honeymoon postcard she had received from her young son, married the weekend before. But Catherine, was more interested in talking about the death of her husband's cousin's mother. Then shortly afterwards, she notes the death of the Abruzzi tavern proprietor, and an old Irishman neighbor who had died just the day before of "pleurisy". At the bar, Angie's looking for Marty (who was with Clara at the time), and in the foreground, a scene unfolds with two ladies. One tells the other the story of a young woman they both know, who had six children. She got pregnant again, even though the doctor had said she wouldn't live if she had another. She goes on and has the baby, "a big healthy boy of nine pounds," and dies straight away. "That's a sad story," the other lady says, without much inflection. The strange old lady obsession with death speaks to something larger within the film's themes: That everyone's nervous and self-conscious at every stage of life. Marty is self-conscious about not getting married; Tommy is self-conscious about the fact that he's missing out on the single life now that he's married; the old women of the world are self-conscious about being that much close to the Great Beyond.
  • During the day, the older generation takes centerstage, with Teresa and Catherine attending their duties and the men all out at work. But at night, things get a little transgressive and the younger set takes over to dance, gossip, and booze it up. Every proper establishment is well-lit, but the in-between spaces—the stairs to the dance hall, inside the parked cars, under a bar awning, or beneath the Grand Concourse—are all dim. And dim is the place to be if you're going to try to have a little fun.
  • Even though World War II is less than a decade behind Marty's time period, it's only mentioned twice: First, when Clara's blind date says that he'll introduce Marty as his "army buddy," and second, when Marty tells Clara about his life after the war. While the first mention is fleeting—maybe just a reminder that most men around Marty's age are vets, too—the second does a lot of explaining about who Marty is and how he got that way. When he got back from the war, he tells Clara over that untouched pie, he felt like he had lost step with everybody else. He didn't sleep, couldn't find a job, and even thought of suicide… which he acknowledges is a key sin for a Catholic like him. Thankfully a family friend offered Marty a job as a butcher, and he stayed there since. Maybe the film's saying something about the fate of Marty's generation, and how fighting for his country disrupted an otherwise straightforward family-driven life. WWII is like a kind of global ghost narrative, lurking spookily underneath Marty's family drama and love story.
• The Matrix and its sequels are meant to be interpreted symbolically, namely in regards of the allusion to a Messiah (Neo), mathematical concepts (the Matrix itself, its structure, and Neo's presence rendering the mathematical equations unsolvable) and existentialism (Agent Smith's desire to escape the false reality of Matrix). Also has been confirmed to be a trans allegory by its directors, The Wachowskis.
• Men: Most prominently, there is the fact that all the men in Cotson have the same face, but it is never directly acknowledged by the narrative, making it clear that it is a literary device of sorts, and is likely intended as a commentary on the patriarchy; i.e. "men are all the same — literally". Then there is the mysterious stalker, who menaces the protagonist, Harper, and is implied to be the Green Man, a mythical figure who is very much seeped in death-and-rebirth symbolism in his own right. And then, during the final confrontation, all of the men who attack Harper gradually come to suffer the same injuries that her husband, James, sustained in his death.
• On the Waterfront:
  • Pigeons are in the same family as doves — as in the symbol of peace and the symbol of urban infestation and white splotches on a car are basically cousins. They're certainly treated that way in this film. Joey Doyle, himself a saintly symbol of goodness and innocence, likes to keep pigeons as pets on the roof of the apartment building where he lives. This seems like a pleasant hobby...and it also shows us that Joey is a nurturing sort of guy. But the downside to being a pigeon — or Joey and that their easy prey. Johnny's gangsters shove Joey off a roof and, later, a kid named Jimmy kills all the pigeons in order to get back at Terry for snitching (Terry takes care of the pigeons after Joey dies). So, pigeons symbolize goodness and innocence, but also the vulnerability of being good and innocent. During one point in the film, Terry appropriately makes a hawk analogy to Edie (Joey's sister). Hawks are often prey for pigeons, and here the hawks are people like Johnny Friendly and Charley — predators — while the pigeons are defenseless good guys like Joey and Kayo Dugan. The pigeons just don't have big enough talons to defend themselves. Additionally, the phrase "stool pigeon" is synonymous with "police informer" which is what Joey, Kayo and Terry are.
  • Crucifixion is also an important symbol in the film. Crucifixion is tied up with the death of Jesus, and the idea of sacrificing oneself for the greater good. And, in this film, Father Barry applies this symbol to Joey and Dugan, who've both been killed by Johnny's mob after word got out that they were planning on turning police informant. He references this in one of his peptalks to the remaining rebelers. Also, it's not just the villains committing them. It's the cowardice and indifference of bystanders. If the other longshoremen followed Joey's lead and turned against Johnny — who hadn't been helping them at all, anyway — Johnny wouldn't have stood a chance. Terry's act of courage at the movie's end finally shakes everyone out of their cowardice and makes them abandon Johnny together, once and for all.
  • Terry goes from accidentally helping a murder at the beginning of the movie to being a symbol of redemption at the end. A pretty impressive character arc for a washed-up ex-boxer. After doing the right thing and testifying against Johnny, all he gets in return is a near-lethal beatdown. He doesn't even get medical treatment, not even from Edie and Father Barry, but they do give him encouragement to get back up and keep walking. By doing so, he's showing the world — and Johnny Friendly — that he's not beaten down. Additionally, if Terry walks into work, the other workers say they'll follow him, telling Johnny off once and for all. So, Terry makes it into the warehouse, and everyone follows him, leaving Johnny behind to rage and yell, stripped of his power. This scene is not only symbolic of the "hard road" of redemption, but of the movie as a whole. Kazan is basically distilling the entirety of the film down into a several-minute long scene. Because the whole movie was about a dude who has been beaten by life doing the hardest thing: getting up, dusting himself off, and doing the job that needs to be done. And that, in its most literal form, is what's happening in the last scene of the movie.
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest:
  • 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.
• The Pale Man from Pan's Labyrinth is (according to Word of God) a walking metaphor for the Catholic Church during the Spanish Civil War (the Church sided with the fascists during the war and was highly complicit in atrocities that followed their victory) and more generally, for institutional evil preying on the helpless. The Pale Man has a blank face and sees through eyes in his palms, so he only sees what he reaches out to take. He sits at a table with a vast banquet of delicious-looking food which he doesn't eat (and according to the bonus comics from the DVD release, can't eat), but will mercilessly hunt down anyone who takes even a tiny grape from the fruit bowl.
• In the film version of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, a scene takes place in a bathhouse which produces an usually high amount of steam. The symbolism comes from the fact that in this scene Rosencrantz first notices that one of the players is an Expy of himself, and he begins to suspect that things might be more than they seem. In essence, Rosencrantz is finally seeing through the fog.
• Saving Private Ryan has a scene where a Jewish GI is pinned down to the floor and slowly skewered through the chest with a bayonet by a Nazi soldier while his cowardly gentile comrade stands outside the room, aware of what is happening but reluctant to step in and stop it. Intentional or not, it works really well as a Holocaust metaphor.
• Schindler's List uses smoke to represent The Holocaust victims; The opening scene shows a candle being lit representing hope and life, then the candle flame is extinguished and the smoke plume then transitions to the smoke billowing from a train steam engine that has just delivered a group of deported Jews to the Nazi authorities.
• Martin Scorsese:
  • Taxi Driver
    • 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, 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 (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 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—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 Jackson Browne'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 we end where we began—with Travis driving around the streets of New York, observing things, stoking his rage. 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.
• Singin' in the Rain:
  • The two films within the film The Dancing (previously, Dueling) Cavalier and Singin' in the Rain function as the "little" movies used to enhance the "big" movie. The Dueling/Dancing Cavalier is the basis for most of the main film's conflict. When R.F. decides it will be a talkie, everything goes haywire and sets the movie's biggest plot points in motion. The Dueling/Dancing Cavalier is also used to deepen our understanding of the movie's major characters. In Lina's case, it's used to bolster her role as an antagonist. All of her involvement in the production is tainted: from being unable to remember where the microphone is to demanding Kathy get no credit. It also shows how tempestuous her relationship is with Don; think about when they enact a passionate love scene while simultaneously threatening to ruin each other. For Lina, the movie within a movie brings out the worst in her. But it also brings out the best in Don. Each time the filming of The Dueling/Dancing Cavalier presents a challenge, Don hikes up his knickers to meet it. It's going to be a talkie? No problem, Don can talk just fine. The screening's awful? Fine, we'll make it a musical. Don sings and dances better than he talks. Lina sings like a dying goat? No worries, Don's girl Kathy has his back. The movie within the movie highlights Don's willingness and ability to change, and it helps him evolve. The second film-within-the-film is the self-titled "Singin in the Rain" film Don and Kathy made together. It serves as their first feature film together and cements their happy ending and love for each other.
  • The Broadway Melody Ballet — despite being a massive Big-Lipped Alligator Moment that lasts a whopping 13 minutes — is surprisingly essential to the film. It's a dance representation of Don's story rather than his made-up beginnings he rattles off to Dora Bailey at the beginning of the movie, but his real story — warts and all. The young hoofer in the yellow vest is a stand-in for Don. Visually, the ballet sequence may be extremely bright, bold and Technicolored, but, narratively, it's pretty dark. The hoofer comes up against menacing mobsters, gets his heart busted by a materialistic mystery woman, and has to wear a vest that makes him look like a banana. In other words, it includes all of the less-than-glamorous sorrows and struggles that Don encountered as he chased his dreams. It's absolutely glorious as it's basically the emotional climax of the movie represents the crucial turning point in Don Lockwood's ability to reveal his emotions and his internal crisis about his dramatic ability. Earlier in the film, Don tells Kathy that he's not good at expressing himself. Then he takes her on to an abandoned film set and tells her how much she means to him through song and dance in an improvised production number complete with fog and wind machines. This earlier sequence suggests that the only way Don can express authentic emotion is through song and dance. So it makes sense that the "Broadway Melody Ballet" is how Don chooses to tell his true story; it's the biggest musical number in the whole movie. It's also no coincidence that the whole sequence looks like a stage production. Remember that Kathy kick-started Don's whole emotional evolution when she proclaimed the theater superior to movies.
• From The Sixth Sense. Would you really expect a woman to wear a bright red dress to a funeral? You would if she's the killer.
• Sucker Punch, when you have a metaphor/fantasy scene, inside another metaphor/fantasy scene, which all reverts around another metaphor/meaning.
• Sunset Boulevard:
  • The film begins with our lead character Joe dead in Norma's in-ground pool. Said pool serves as a symbol of wealth and status and ends up being the site for Joe's death, after he failed to attain that wealth and status himself. Earlier in the film, when we first see the pool, it's empty and has rats crawling around in it. The huge pool, languishing in this state of decay, encapsulates the destroyed glamor of Norma Desmond's silent-era Hollywood. But, apparently, taking Joe as a lover brings Norma back to life, and in her excitement over the movie she thinks she's starring in, she has the pool cleaned and refilled. Joe sticks with Norma because it gives him a chance to enjoy fine things (like the pool) and be pampered with gifts.
  • Back in the day, when Norma built her mansion at the peak of her celebrity, it was quite the spectacle. But like the pool as mentioned above, it went through hard times. Joe makes a reference to Great Expectations where Miss Havisham gets angry at the world (and at men, in particular) after her fiancé leaves her at the wedding altar. Norma underwent a similar form of trauma when her fanbase and the movie producers and directors who formerly loved her finally got tired of her and shoved her aside. The house manifests the same deteriorating effects, provoked by this loss of love. It's a mirror for Norma's own mental state. Also, the inside of the mansion is filled with pictures of Norma — tons of reminders of her own lost glory and celebrity.
  • When Joe first arrives in Norma's driveway, trying to escape the repo men, Norma thinks that he's the undertaker for her pet monkey's funeral. And when she discovers Joe isn't in fact an undertaker for apes, she orders him out of the house. But he ends up staying when he convinces her to let him help her with her screenplay. Later on, at night, he witnesses the monkey funeral through the window. Joe thinks that Norma's life is empty because she's forced to seek companionship from an ape, but if you look into this more deeply, this subtlety symbolizes how Norma basically wants a dancing monkey to obey and amuse her. This also foreshadows what will happen to Joe himself: Norma probably doesn't really love him, but she needs him to love her or at least give her simulated affection and pay attention to her.
  • Norma's writing a screenplay based on the story of Salome, the Biblical princess who helps pull off a successful plot to behead John the Baptist. Naturally, Norma feels attracted to this role. She fancies herself a young, still-famous actress who could pull it off. The role also mirrors Norma's own destructive tendencies. Joe Gillis may not be a John-the-Baptist-type, but he's seer-like enough to gaze past Norma's illusions and into the abyss of loneliness and sadness lying behind them. And, like John the Baptist, he gets murdered. Plus, the story of Salomé is similar to the kind of Biblical epic that Cecil B. DeMille would direct (he would later do The Ten Commandments starting Charlton Heston as Moses). And since De Mille is the director Norma wants for the project it seems like a match.
  • While it's natural for an ex-movie star to constantly watch their own films, Norma takes it too far. She likes to watch her own movies because she's in love with her own celebrity. Obviously, this shows that Norma is self-obsessed, but it also makes it clear that she lives primarily in the past. Her craving for her own self-image is extreme. This quote from Joe sums it all up:
  Joe: Sometimes as we watched, she'd clutch my arm or my hand, forgetting she was my employer, becoming just a fan, excited about that actress up there she saw on the screen… I guess I don't have to tell you who the star was. They were always her pictures — that's all she wanted to see.
  • Due to her past suicide attempts, Norma's doctors have recommended that none of the doors in her house have locks — so she can't lock herself in a room and kill herself. Basically, while Norma believes that she's still a great star she secretly realizes that she's become significantly diminished in the eyes of the world. It's one of few times she's ever self-aware of this.
  • Betty loves all the unreal film sets and movie magic of Hollywood, since she grew up in a movie business family, she feels completely at home. But since showbusiness comes with a dark side, Betty's forced to try to change her appearance in order to find acting work. This teaches Betty to shoot for something other than stardom, so she goes into screenwriting — since screenwriters, while they might attain some real recognition and a lot of cash, never really become major celebrities. It also reminds her to keep it real. So, while she has idealism about movies, she also wants them to say something, to have a greater point. She seems to be helping Joe shake off his own cynicism in the process... even if it sadly doesn't work out.
• In the Donner Cut of Superman II , 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 Superman film and furthering the Christ/God/Father/Son themes. "The son becomes the father, the father becomes the son."
• Terminator 2: Judgment Day:
  • During the opening title sequence, the playground is shown three times: once on a normal, bright sunny day; next, covered in post-apocalyptic ashes; and last, wreathed in nuclear fire. Representing Heaven, Purgatory, and Hell. In the same sequence, it shows four mechanical horses — the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
  • The intro sequence in 2029 also has a T-800 infantry unit crushing a human skull under its metal foot, a metaphor for Skynet's genocidal crusade against humankind.
  • When the heroes break into Cyberdyne Systems for the finale, Sarah wears the same gray trenchcoat that Kyle Reese wore in the first film. Her donning the uniform of her tough soldier lover is an indicator of how far she has come.
  • When the orderlies catch Sarah in the hospital, they're too focused on holding her down to notice her warnings and to notice the leather-clad man-mountain approaching from down the hallway and are caught off-guard when he attacks them. Essentially representing humanity's response to the Connors and to Skynet/Judgment Day.
  • For most of the film, the Terminator is fully intact flesh over a metal endoskeleton, an infiltrator machine made in imitation of man. Later on in the film, it learns about humanity and takes on some human traits (like losing the Robospeak) and its face gets shot up and ripped off, revealing the machine underneath. The camera however always remains focused on the human half.
• Done In-Universe by the eponymous heroine of That Lady in Ermine wears an ermine coat to show her majesty to an invading army, along with bare feet to show humility.
• Thor: Ragnarok:
  • Costume designer Mayes C. Rubeo explains the significance of Loki's blue outfit on Sakaar, which is one of the very rare instances where the character's signature green is absent from his attire.
    Rubeo: Loki and his [blue] color when we first see him in Sakaar, it's because Loki [...]'s [joined] the Grandmaster, who is some sort of like a tyrant. Loki's there, betraying his own people. [...] So he adopts the same kind of colors, which is uncharacteristic of him and of his actual [green-hued] costume. Then he goes back to his original costume when he finds his senses to help Thor and being a good brother again.
  • On the ceiling mural◊ of the Asgardian Royal Palace, Loki's position in front of Frigga and his forest/dark green robe with gold highlights parallel her pastel green gown with gold accents. They impart visually that he's Frigga's Junior Counterpart (their similarities) and Shadow Archetype (the darker shade of green of his clothing, its sharp, V-shaped lines juxtaposing the softness of Frigga's fabric, plus his more sinister facial expression).
• Julie Taymor's version of William Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus.
• TRON: Legacy:
  • Kevin Flynn is God to the programs, and Jesus in terms of artistic direction. One noticeable scene is when he puts up his hood and walks into the wild after Clu's rebellion, kinda like how Jesus walked into the desert to be tested. Also, if Flynn is God, Sam and CLU are Jesus and Lucifer, respectively, and the ISOs are humanity.
  • Clu's Carrier is different from Sark's; when viewed from the side, it looks an awful lot like a sword.
  • The arrival of the son of the creator is heralded by a star in the east. At one point, Sam mentions they're going "east" to the portal.
  • Flynn's confrontation with Clu has hints of the parable of the Prodigal Son (a father figure accepting/welcoming back his wayward son).
• Victor Frankenstein: Victor dresses with a bit more flair than the other men (even in the case of Finnegan's dandyism, Victor's outfits are still more vivid colour-wise, plus the patterns on his vests are more elaborate and eye-catching). It represents him feeling out of place with the rest of society and wanting to challenge its oppressive rules. Moreover, Victor wears his emotions on his sleeves, so he doesn't adhere to the Stiff Upper Lip norms of British culture — his choice of clothing is as "expressive" as he is.
• Orson Welles:
  • Some critics think Citizen Kane stretches the Willing Suspension of Disbelief in order to include symbolic elements. It certainly is packed with symbols. For example:
    • Rosebud Kane's childhood sled was the last thing Kane was holding onto on the day Mr. Thatcher came to take him from his parents. Rosebud represents Kane's lost childhood, along with everything else he lost when he moved away from home.
    • When Charles turned 25, he takes full control of his fortune and tells Mr. Thatcher through writing that he's not interested in his primary sources of income like mines and oil wells. But he was interested in the newspaper known as The Inquirer. At which point, he almost completely ignores the rest of his fortune to focus on running his newspaper and using it to critique the wealthy class of America — which he is also a part of. Initially, The Inquirer represented Kane's young ambitious dreams of making a real difference in the world and helping out poor people, but once Kane's corruption and ego get the best of him, he drops his good intentions and tries to tell them what he wants them to think, meaning the newspaper also helps chart Kane's Protagonist Journey To Villainy. Eventually, Kane loses his newspapers in the Great Depression which just about spells the end of his young idealism.
    • Rather than spend a lot of his money on investments and things that would make him even richer, Kane chose to buy up a bunch of statues. He even loses a huge part of his fortune buying those statues. Kane's statue collection represents who Kane wants his people to be, which is objects that he can look at and that will do whatever he wants them to.
    • Our title character, is eerily similar to William Randolph Hearst in terms of how things went down. They both ran newspaper tycoons corruptly, they both built their own private estates, they both and they both had a great love interest who they tried to boost up beyond her talents. Not to mention the real-life story of the battle between Hearst and Welles.
• X-Men Film Series
  • X-Men: Days of Future Past:
    • The presence (or at least the desire to have it) or absence of Magneto's telepathy-blocking helmet is a fairly good gauge of how unhealthy or healthy his relationship with Professor X is. As writer Simon Kinberg puts it, the finale marks the beginning of the characters' Friendly Enemy dynamic:
      "At the end of the movie, [Magneto] flies away without his helmet, with the implication that he'll go off and continue to be Magneto in some form, but not be able to hide it from Charles, who'll be able to read his mind and track him. There's a truce of some kind between Charles and Magneto, but there's a part of Magneto that will always be the Magneto we know from the comics."
    • This article has made the following observation about the elderly Erik:
      "From the photos, we see that Ian McKellen's older Magneto has no need for his iconic helmet that protects him from mutant telepaths since he's once again allied with old friend Charles Xavier."
  • X-Men: Apocalypse:
    • The Four Horsemen represent four different aspects of a cult's power to attract and recruit new members.
      Bryan Singer: It has a political faction, and I'd always felt Magneto could fill those shoes. It always has a military faction, so Archangel could fill those shoes as the guardian. There's also a youth faction. Those that you're trying to seduce and grow into your cult — the young, whose minds are malleable [such as Storm]. And lastly, the sexual component, because cult leaders tend to sexualize their position and have sex with half the people in their cult. And the Psylocke character, who was a very bright character in the comic, but is always looking for guidance and leadership, always trying to find the right guy, so she ends up with Apocalypse in this one.
    • There are bookends in Charles' study which are shaped like the mythological figure Atlas, and they symbolize his heavy burden of trying to save the world.
      We look around Xavier's school some more, exploring every nook and cranny of Prof. X's office. We spot a couple of Atlas-themed book-ends, with two muscular men carrying planets on their backs. It makes us flashback to that dark room, where we saw McAvoy cry. If ever there was a man with the weight of the world on his shoulders, it's James McAvoy's Professor X.
    • Charles and Erik have at least one costume which was strongly influenced by Miami Vice, and they are basically dressed as Detective Crockett and Detective Tubbs, respectively. Like Crockett and Tubbs, Xavier and Lehnsherr are Heterosexual Life-Partners.
    • An In-Universe version when Magneto signals his Heel–Face Turn by slamming down two huge girders in Apocalypse's path in the form of an X.

---