Tuesday, February 13, 2007
Monoliths
The powerful rock formation reminded me of a scene in "A Passage to India" where the female lead visits a stone Hindu temple that contains all sorts of sensual carvings and is covered with jungle growth. She nearly has a nervous breakdown over her exposure to this elemental, sexual force. And then, of course, there's the famous monolith in "2001: A Space Odyssey," standing erect and mysterious and austere among the savage primates. Is the rock in "Picnic" just another example of the mysteries of life and nature finding expression in a phallic symbol?
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6 comments:
Cosmic extrusions notwithstanding, I saw nothing phallic about the rock.
I think the way it's described, the camera angles that show it soaring into the sky like the spires of a cathedral, the sensual response that it seems to provoke — the math teacher in her mere pantaloons, for God's sake! — all suggest a sexual connection. It's not literally penis-shaped like most phallic symbols, but it's a rock-hard mass towering above the landscape and inspiring wonder in all who see it — and a desire to mount it. That's phallic enough for this dame. Hehe
Okay, now I get it. I always assumed phallic symbols had to be phallus-shaped.
I remembered that you mentioned "A Passage to India" while we were watching. Roger Ebert noticed that similarity, too:
"For me, 'Picnic at Hanging Rock' evokes E.M. Forster's novel A Passage to India, made into a film by David Lean in 1984. In that story, a party of British visitors tours the Marabar Caves, which have the peculiar property of turning all speech into a meaningless echo. One of the women has something happen to her inside the cave -- the novel never explains what it is -- and her sexual hysteria fuels the rest of the story. The underlying suggestion is that Victorian attitudes toward sex, coupled with the unsettling mysteries of an ancient land, lead to events the modern mind cannot process. That is exactly the message of 'Picnic at Hanging Rock.'"
The rocks are certainly cast as sexual—the landscape is better cast in this movie than the people—but it is not strictly phallic. The girls weave through several narrow clefts as they climb their way up, they are sometimes framed through a cave, and then finally, they disappear one by one into a final cleft that we cannot see into as if they are returning to the womb.
Cl, Rick has just expertly described your vagina theory of the rocks.
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