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

Figure 103. The Lady from Shanghai
In the subsequent scene (fig. 104), she dies violently together with her crippled
husband after they shoot one another to death, shattering mirror after mirror, false image
after false image, man and wife unable to differentiate each other from the countless
images each projects and reflects, until they both collapse stained with blood, bullet-torn.
The numerous mirrors replicate the many levels of deception and trickery, surrounding and
closing in upon the protagonists, until the moment when the viewer cannot tell what is
factual and what is false impression. The younger man, the wife’s lover (played by Welles
himself), a witness to this mutual murder, flees the Funhouse, falling through trapdoors,
sliding down ramps, tripping over himself, and running off into the dawn.
Welles works here within an aesthetic matrix that neither the studio tradition nor
film noir had come up with before 1947. The concept of mise-en-abyme is expressed here
to its fullest extent, the whole idea being intentionally to confuse and disorient the
spectator (the viewer is in fact placed within this dramatic mirror maze), as well as to allow
dual feelings of intimacy and infinite regression to exist as spatial and temporal
representations.
358