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

mistress’s luxuries. While putting the money into an envelope, the camera keeps its
distance, offering only intermittent moments of clarity through a recurrently high angle,
when his boss appears from the top of the stairs, viewed from a low angle, at the cashier
window unexpectedly: “I just caught you in time”, he says to Chris, who looks terrified at
his boss’s presence (the low angle of the camera emphasises his towering status) and starts
sweating and feeling “caught in the act”. These words could not be better directed had J.J.
Hogarth known about his employee’s intentions, and they certainly carry different
meanings here. The most important one is the fact that from the beginning of the film, as I
explained in the previous section, Chris has been “caught in time”, tangled in the “fatemachine”
embodied in his time-piece. However, J.J. does not think that Chris was setting
that money aside in an attempt to steal from the main safe. Then the high angle of the
camera peers down on Chris - we again see Hogarth at the top level looking down onto
Chris who is passively and obediently in his small cubicle, like in a prison cell (with the
bars that enclose him) not unlike the imprisoned bird in its cage at his home. This camera
angle captures his intimidation visually, showing that Chris is both trapped in his
helplessness and judged from on high.
Later Johnny learns that some art critics were enthusiastic about the two paintings
he had picked up from the apartment. In a comedy-like scene, Johnny fabricates some
foolish story and makes the critics believe that it was actually Kitty who had painted them.
They seem flabbergasted as the paintings have such a “masculine force”, as one of them
says to her: “You’re an extraordinary artist… Your work is very strong, Miss March”. The
scenes that follow stage an avalanche of lies from both Johnny and Kitty. Just as the two
art critics leave the apartment, Johnny kisses Kitty to show his exhilaration over his
successful scam of publicising Kitty as the famous painter. Immediately after that, we see
him slapping her on the face when she says “If I had any sense, I’d walk out on you”. This
is another scene which establishes the sado-masochistic bond between them: Kitty admits
that part of her attraction to Johnny is the physical violence and the abuse. As Patrick
McGilligan notes about this triangular relationship:
The Chris Cross character happens to have the same occupation as a brother the
director barely acknowledged. All of Chris’s joys are furtive: not only does he paint
behind closed doors, but like Lang he derives furtive pleasure from gory items in the
newspaper. Under such oppressive conditions, who could blame a fellow for taking
a mistress? (…) But extracurricular sex can lead to entanglements. Kitty, the woman
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