Novels and Poetry (Symbol)
Where Michel is physical and instinctive, Patricia is reflective and verbal, which is manifested in her career of choice and her desire to become a writer. Throughout the film, Patricia makes references to various literary works, including Romeo and Juliet, Faulkner's The Wild Palms, and Dylan Thomas' Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog. Michel has no interest in these works, but Patricia seems infatuated with them, taken with the poetic perspectives of the authors and the beauty of language. Thus, novels and poetry become a symbol of the difference between Patricia and Michel—the fact that where Michel looks at things as they are, without hidden meaning or allegorical significance, she looks at things more figuratively and with an attention to their poetic significance. This difference between them is at the crux of their misunderstanding, as her looser, fanciful relationship to the world leads her to get Michel killed at the end. Her fixation with novels symbolizes her infatuation with the abstract, her looser grasp of reality and consequence.
The Movies (Motif)
Cinema and the movies come up as a kind of motif in the film. First, Michel encounters a poster of Humphrey Bogart, a Hollywood figure he seeks to emulate. Then, when Patricia is trying to evade the cops in order to find Michel, she buys a ticket to a movie in the middle of the day and descends into a dark theater, followed by an inspector. As the projector rolls the movie, she sneaks into the bathroom and escapes the surveillance of the inspector, and the drama of the movie on the screen only adds suspense to their chase. Immediately after, she and Michel go to a Western, where they share an intimate moment and relish their shared sense of adventure. The tension of the police chase is mirrored by the action on the screen in the Western, and one gets the feeling that part of the erotic thrill shared by Michel and Patricia is their shared sense of being in a movie of their own making.
Mirrors (Motif)
While visiting a girl he knows, Michel sits in front of a vanity mirror while holding a smaller mirror to his face. He stares at himself in the two mirrors, fascinated with his own image. This image represents his self-interest and shows the fact that he is cut off from his own identity, disassociated from his true self and fragmented into multiple identities. Later, at Patricia's apartment, he and Patricia spend a lot of time standing in front of the mirror in her bathroom. We see two versions of them, the real-life version and the version they are projecting into the world, as represented by the mirror. The fact that their images are multiplied suggests that they are each alienated from their self-presentation, that they do not quite understand the relationship between their respective personas and their true selves. The motif of the mirror represents the ways that the characters' egos become separated from their inner lives.
"Live Dangerously Until the End!" Poster (Symbol)
Early on in the film, Michel walks past a poster that says "Live dangerously until the end!" The poster represents Michel's general philosophy of life. He believes it is important to keep moving forward, to never look back or reflect too much, and instead to live with a certain reckless bravery. The poster represents the ways that the world has taught Michel this ideology—the fact that he has picked it up from various sources throughout his life. Even though Michel is alone in his running from the cops, the various media he encounters encourage him to keep living the wild life.
Humphrey Bogart (Symbol)
Not long after arriving in Paris, Michel sees a poster for a Humphrey Bogart film, The Harder They Fall. He stares at an image of Bogart, the iconic American hero of film noir. Bogart looks older and cynical, his smirk and craggy features suggesting a world-weariness and no-nonsense approach to the challenges of life. Michel stares back at the poster and tries to emulate it, even imitating some gestures of Bogart's, grazing his lip with his finger. The poster symbolizes all of the qualities of confident masculinity that Michel would like to cultivate. The contrast between Bogart and Michel is marked, representing the fact that Michel is in over his head, a young and impressionable man trying to live as if he's seen it all.
