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

woman in the portrait throughout I Wake Up Screaming, for example, remains indefinable
and inaccessible, adding to the confusion at times, an effect which is after all at the core of
film noir’s peculiar oneirism. In this context, therefore, Hollywood’s fetishising use of
certain actresses as iconically alluring – turning them into totems through pictures – is in
itself a metonymic process as well.
Figure 73. I Wake Up Screaming
Of a divergent nature is the painting of the somewhat podgy man hanging high
above the dinner-room. When Charlie pays Chris a visit that Sunday, he stops and stares at
the big oval painting and is informed that it is “the late departed” or Chris’s “wife’s former
husband”, eye-patched policeman Homer Higgins (Charles Kemper). The look is so
intense that he seems to be real, eerie and unsettling at times, as a representative of
repressive authority in this household. Even the fact that he has a medal for heroism (he
drowned trying to save a suicide) on his coat lapel does not seem to impress Chris much.
The conventional “realism” of the painting contrasts sharply with Chris’s own modernist
and visionary painting. The glowing vision of lost phallic power dissimulated in the person
of Homer’s portrait is revealed on that dining-room wall, and it embodies a patriarchal,
masculine authority, whose gaze seems directed mainly at Chris, emphasising his
routinised boredom (especially when he dons the abovementioned frilly apron to do
household chores). In short, one could say that this portrait on the wall glowers over Chris
with an authoritarian and castrating gaze and it represents only the confining conditions of
Chris’s domestic life. Moreover, this idea is further highlighted by an insinuating symbol:
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