BSBA 2
SECRET WINDOW
The movie is about writing and the insanity of writers. For those of you unfamiliar with the process...imagine spending months or even years of your life working on a painting that you yourself can never see. You become so close to what you create that you have no idea if it's any good, and the growing doubt of your own ability along with the fear of wasting so much time and effort will most definitely have you pulling your hair out.
Johnny Depp plays Mort Rainey, an odd-ball writer with hair that looks like a mop, and a delightfully slovenly appearance, undergoing a painful divorce from a wife who he found cheating. He has locked himself away in their vacation cabin deep …show more content…
The first scene establishes that Mort has multiple selves and experiences a trauma. Then we start the movie proper. We have the by now ordinary shot over water, up to a house and in the window, then we go down the stair partway. The stairway shot is directly out of ‘Psycho’ and in fact that starting sequence of zooming through the window to a bed was used to begin the "remake". And as we go directly into a mirror where the entire film takes place. In fact, we see the reversal later in that same mirror when Mort sees only the back of his head. That's how a mirror would work in a reverse world, reverse. The story is the film itself. The secret window is the mirror and so on. And of course, as the story goes on...we get a full exploration of the affects of immersing yourself in a fictional world. It goes on to show the paranoia and madness that can come from men when they don't have the steady influence of reality to keep them anchored. If I remember the original story correctly, the 'secret window' becomes something of a metaphor for the later action of the story. This is not really explored in the film, and any in the audience might end up wondering what the title of the film really