Judah on Auto-Pilate
Judah immediately heads to his bedroom bathroom and starts washing his hands after hearing that the hit he placed on Dolores has gone off without a hitch. The scene starts out with him tossing water onto his face as someone might do after hearing terrible news. When he then goes on to wash his hands are carefully dry them off, the point of the imagery becomes clear. It is that almost unconscious washing of the hands that drives the symbolic link of Pontius Pilate washing his hands of the matter of Jesus Christ. The implication is a foreshadowing that he will soon be capable of cleaning his conscience of the murder as well.
Eyes That Don't See
Woody Allen has described the movie as being about people don’t see, especially as it relates to not seeing the rightness or wrongness of a situation. This imagery is imprinted throughout the movie in both visceral and more abstract ways. Judah is treating Ben the rabbi who is slowing losing his vision and literally won’t be able to see by the end. Cliff is convinced that Hallie can’t see the real Lester beneath the polished surface. The single most palpable expression this theme is offered in a close-up of the open eyes of the corpse of Dolores staring into the void. These eyes that literally don’t see anymore are almost immediately juxtaposed against a flashback to Judah as a young boy being told that God sees all and thus the righteous will be rewarded but the wicked punished for all eternity.
Movie Clips
Imagery from old movies are sprinkled throughout to provide almost a Greek chorus sort of commentary. This commentary is used to create a variety of effects by using in a number of different contexts. For instance, a clip from Francis the Talking Mule is inserted as symbolism when Lester’s pompous pronouncement that “If it bends, it’s funny” appears to be voiced by a jackass in the cut of the documentary he immediately rejects. Immediately following Cliff’s sad assertion that the time spent away from Hallie while she’s in England will feel like a prison sentence is a scene from the prison movie 20,000 Years in Sing Sing that turns out to be a transitional device showing the passage of four months in the timeline of the actual of narrative. The plethora of clips from studio-era Hollywood films as a collective becomes imagery which sets the foundation for the comment Judah makes at the end of the film: “If you want a happy ending, you should go see a Hollywood movie.”
A strange man defecated on my sister.
At one point, Cliff is called to an emergency at his sister’s apartment where she tells him a story about meeting a man whom she was prepared to sleep with, but who wound up defecating on her. When he later tell his wife what happened, her surprisingly detached response is to ask why. Cliff response situates why this utter non sequitur of a scene should be considered a piece of imagery deeply embedded within its thematic framework: “Is there any reason I could give you that would answer that satisfactorily?” What this bizarre and seemingly out of place intrusion into the narrative is suggesting that people in this world get pooped on (to put it politely.) God is no more at work in the victims of little moral misdemeanors like making someone an unwilling accomplice in fetishism than he is in the major moral crime like becoming a victim of murder.
