Joaquim da Silva Fontes, Significação e Estabilidade do Género no ...

Stroud (Ray Milland), who finds himself trapped inside “the big clock” and its grinding
gears at its climax.
Indeed, much of the action of the film, as James Naremore notes, is “based on long
takes or sequence shots requiring complicated camera movements – as when Ray Milland
secretely enters the kitchen door of a luxury apartment, discovers a dead body in the living
room, rearranges the evidence, retraces his steps through the kitchen, holds a brief
conversation with a man in the hallway, and exits via the elevator” (Naremore 1998:167).
The most effective scenes in that film are designed to convey the scattered, luminous
lighting of a Manhattan office building during working hours. These stylistic features
constitute essential elements in defining film noir as a visual iconography, made up of what
Geoffrey O’Brien calls “a nexus of fashions in hair, fashions in lighting, fashions in
interior décorating, fashions in motivation, fashions in repartee” (O’Brien 1991:45).
In Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train the presence of similar machines, namely
trains and clocks, establishes a precise timetable for the whole film. In many noir
productions trains represent a (false) escape from the noir city, and in this film, together
with the clocks, the train specifically represents an oppressive force that indicates a realitybending
process. The two parallel train tracks appear to deviate from their mechanical
logic, when criss-crossing at a certain time, indicating the coexistence of good and evil that
lurks within us all. Guy Haines (Farley Granger), an apparently soft-speaking and goodhearted
man, begins a sudden conversation about “criss-cross” murders with Bruno
Anthony (Robert Walker) - this is when two men each kill people who are the enemies of
the other. Thus, as Robert Stam notes, this “elaborate verbal and visual play on the
expressions “criss-cross” and “double-cross” (crossed railroad tracks, crossed legs, crossed
tennis racquets, tennis doubles, double scotches, alternating montage as double, (...) and so
forth)” (Stam 1992:64) enforces a significant iconic recognition (the codes by which we
recognise objects) and iconic designation (the codes by which we name them). As Charles
Peirce would declare the fusion of the iconic world with that of the symbolic creates a new
dimension. In this particular film, for instance, featuring two Doppelgänger characters,
Hitchcock draws attention to the articulation of word and image, at times structuring
sequences through near linguistic formulations (for example, the cross pattern on the
cigarette lighter – fig. 71).
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