I am an avid fan of psychological thrillers, and have many favourites in this genre. Repulsion was the last film I watched, and I thought it was brilliant.
However, the part about the cracks appearing in walls went over my head. Can anyone explain what they signified?
Just her mental cracking-up
shareNotice how she also tried to brush away the sunlight going across the chair, as if it was a living thing.
That, the cracks, the rotting rabbit, the spuds growing on the potatoes, all signs of her losing touch with reality, and sinking faster into delusion.
As well as the hands coming out of the wall
shareI thought this was pretty obvious!
inability to maintain borders. Very typical for psychosis, she can't mentally distance herself from others. The locking herself in, the cracks, the repulsion/disgust... it's all about the feeling that the rest of the world is closing in and she can't avoid it.
sharepossibly her crack (vagina) opening up...she was meant to be a virgin - LOL
SRS it was just blatant but effective symbolism she was cracking up
Yes...perhaps a broken hymen (?)
Symbols can work on several levels, of course. I guess it just shows that things are falling apart...that her solid world (or emotional barrier) is wearing down and things are coming through.
Yeah. Having read the DVD sleeve mentioning she was a virgin, I noticed all the innuendo. The tooth brush in the glass, and early on the sister(I think?) says something like "we need to fix that old crack". Later she's staring at cracks in the pavement, which could be interpreted as the shape of a womb or vagina. Trimming the cuticles can also symbolize breaking the hymen or foreskin.
share[deleted]
I always thought it was influenced by the short story "The Yellow Wallpaper". Actually I'm pretty positive Polanski must have read it, as it seems to be a huge influence on the film as both works have a similar unreliable narrator and general progression.
wiki - "The story depicts the effect of confinement on the narrator's mental health, and her descent into psychosis. With nothing to stimulate her, she becomes obsessed by the pattern and color of the wallpaper. "It is the strangest yellow, that wall-paper! It makes me think of all the yellow things I ever saw – not beautiful ones like buttercups, but old foul, bad yellow things. But there is something else about that paper – the smell! ... The only thing I can think of that it is like is the color of the paper! A yellow smell."
I've seen many films and television shows borrow this symbol of the wallpaper to illustrate a deteriorating mental state. Who can forget the unforgettable ending of Through a Glass Darkly?
Very good that you mentioned "The Yellow Wallpaper". Its a classic short story and they (Polanski/Brach) could have read it before. But according to Polanski himself, in his autobiography, he and Brach sat in a hotel room, smoked weed and brainstormed up the whole film, improvising so to speak! When a critic saluted Polanski for their incredible accuracy according to the hallucinations and depicted psychosis(assuming the filmmakers have studied real "cases"), Polanski just explaned for the readers of the book, that he used improvisation, intuition and maybe their own psychedelic experiences...
shareThe cracks probably signify the world crashing in on her. Most of the posters on this board didn't mention that, at one point, Carol thought she saw the sidewalk cracking, too. Since she was outside, it wasn't as bothersome, but it was the beginning of her world "cracking up." From the outside world, she could seek sanctuary in her own home, but when the walls began to crack there, too, her world became smaller and smaller, and nowhere was safe.
It wouldn't surprise me if Tom Holland (director/writer) and Stephen King (writer) "borrowed" the visual concept from this movie when they filmed "The Langoliers." The "cracks" there were representations of rips in time and space, a more developed concept of late than it was in the 1960s.
From both a cinematic and psychological perspective, the cracks in the sidewalk and later in the apartment walls were pretty literal. Symbolic, yes, but literal nonetheless.
Mystère . . . et boules de gomme . . .