In the film, Some Like it Hot, I chose a cigar for my anchor point from the first 5 minutes. After reading the blog post I am a bit confused, but feel I have a slight grasp of the message and connection between "universal" and "concrete."
Various cigars recur throughout the film beginning with a center frame shot of a man drinking a scotch and lighting a cigar at a restaurant. This is a example I believe of a concrete instance of the cigar, another being one of the gangsters who kicks the cigar out of the man mouth they just shot. These are material, or human instances correlating to the repetition of the cigar.
The cigars also come into play in the "universal" term, for instance when one of the two men talks about the "smokin" girl in the "slumber party." Also Jack Lemmon's character says, "his mother will approve because I don't smoke," when talking about his new fiance. These are two different examples of the cigar being used in a different context or in the view of ideals or values, such as the last quote I mentioned, which showed the values the man's mother had and how she will approve.
Yeah, Lemmon's comment about his "mother's approval" is a particularly good example. By repeating the notion of "cigar," Lemon's own internalization of his position as "wife" emerges in the form of a visible absence (a trace glimpsed in the passage between the two iterations of "cigar").
ReplyDelete100/100
CS