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

From the first thirty minutes of the film, Fritz Lang gives the viewer every reason to
understand why a decent respectable man suddenly abandons his ideals, starts stealing to
maintain his delusional dependence on Kitty, and hits rock bottom at the conclusion of the
film. Once again, the parallelism with Renoir’s La Chienne is obvious. Using repeated
imagery of mirrors and reflections 84 and portraits, Lang visually accentuates the selfentrapping
model of duplicity and deceitfulness characteristic to exploitive human
relationships.
The countless mirrors that appear, especially inside the apartment, displaying
reflections of Kitty, are crucial symbolic elements. They appear throughout the film
apparently randomly but are in fact positioned so that the viewer can gradually understand
Kitty’s two-faced nature. 85 In part, this leads me to the point of Plato’s metaphor (the
allegory of the cave) which he used to contrast the common understanding of knowledge,
truth, and reality with what seemed an obvious “un-reality”, the cinematic projection of
images. This powerful symbol in the film manages to expose plainly what is before us,
forcing us to interpret and evaluate what we see. Whereas Kitty uses them as a means to
emphasise her vanity and superficiality, for us these meta-projections of images within
images stand for distortions of the true ugliness of the character. Very often we see Kitty
gazing at her own reflections in a Narcissus-like manner enjoying what she sees. Just like
the object in the director’s viewfinder, the mirrors delimit excerpts from a diversity of
pictures either through their outlines or through their frames. Depending on their position
(as with the camera), a mirror can tilt these frames or put them at a disturbing angle.
Similarly, the camerawork of Fritz Lang provides a noir mise-en-abyme story in The
Woman in the Window, about the virtual dreamlike world and the imprisoned Id of a
criminal psychology professor, an ordinary middle-aged man, invited by a young, goodlooking
woman to go to her apartment to see some drawings. The frame below (fig. 76) is
chosen to illustrate Alice Reed (Joan Bennett) with a nude female torso ironically being
reflected in the mirror behind her, as a symbol of professor Wanley’s forbidden desire. I
will come back to this issue of mirrors and reflections in my analysis of subsequent films
84 A good example of a mirror reflection is the image of despair reflected on a mirrored wardrobe whilst
Chris is on his knees in their bedroom rummaging around in search of the insurance money from Adele’s first
husband’s death which she has hidden some place (in a replica scene of Renoir’s Adele (Magdeleine
Bérubet)).
85 Or the double-faced nature of Chris Cross for that matter: in the room scene above (fig. 67), Chris’s
leaning body holding the ice-pick to kill Kitty is ingeniously reflected in the mirror of the wardrobe,
emphasising thus the other side of his personality.
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