Here's part of an interesting article. You can also see screen shots at this link:
http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/blog/2011/05/notes-on-a-slow-zoom-robert-altmans-3-women-1977.html
Standing in an aquarium with his arms outstretched, the Creature from the Black Lagoon makes a cameo appearance in Robert Altman’s 3 Women, but his presence is anything but gratuitous. Like everything else in this poetically unified film, he is there to echo, relect, or comment upon some other aspect of the movie. 3 Women is a movie filled with doubles and reflections. (The 3 women of the title double and reflect each other.)
The half-human, half-reptile Creature is another version of the archetypal reptoid semi-humans that we see throughout the movie painted by artist Willie (Janice Rule) on walls and on the bottom of swimming pools. The enclosed tank in which the Creature stands is like the world of the film in microcosm, 3 clams or oysters (undoubtedly female) threatened by a predatory male — just as the 3 women of the title are threatened by “Edgar,” Willie’s hypermasculine, philandering husband.
The tank is shot slightly from above to emphasize the tension between the water’s rippling surface on top and the murky world underneath, a visual motif repeated throughout the film, much of which is shot through rippling liquid. The colors in the frame – pale pinks and purples, yellow, and aquamarine – are the same colors that dominate the film as a whole. The fishtank anchors our viewpoint inside the apartment at the Purple Sage Motel that is shared by Millie (Shelley Duvall) and Pinky (Sissy Spacek), the film’s two main protagonists.
This is not a static shot, however, but the beginning of a very slow zoom from inside Millie’s and Pinky’s second-story apartment through the fishtank to the motel courtyard below. Slow, nearly subliminal, zooms were characteristic of Altman’s widescreen visual style from the 1970s onward. Where a tracking shot defines space, emphasizing its three-dimensionality, a zoom collapses space, making it fluid, dreamlike, and subjective. As this particular zoom proceeds, our attention shifts from foreground to background. Seen through the tank, as though she were one of its watery inhabitants, Willie enters the courtyard from frame left to perform some gardening. The rippling line at the top of the frame marking the difference between surface and depth becomes increasingly blurred. The zoom subjectively links Millie and Pinky, inside, to Willie, outside ...
When, halfway through the film, Pinky attempts suicide by jumping from the second floor into the motel pool, the film’s various poetic threads come together. Pinky floats comatose with her arms outstretched like the Creature at the top of this post. Viewed through the rippling water, the reptoid monsters painted on the bottom of the pool writhe ominiously.
Freud told us that water imagery was symbolic of the womb. Altman evidently took him seriously. Thus, Pinky doesn’t die from her plunge into the waters of the unconscious, but is reborn with an entirely different personality.
Identities mingle and blur.
As Altman says, the 2 women become 3 women who become 1.
What eventually dies within the film is 20th Century patriarchy, leaving behind a unified female family who need a man, as the saying goes, like a fish needs a bicycle.
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ValleyMermaid
12 years ago
:) Thank you! I appreciate it! I find this very interesting!!
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xxpo
12 years ago
You're welcome. It is interesting isn't it, the way the Creature in the Fish Tank threatens the 3 clams.
But then after Pinky floats in the pool, like the Creature in the Fish Tank, she also starts learning how to use the gun at the shooting range, and kind of becomes the Creature who's in control instead of being controlled?
Then by the end of the story when the Creature is gone and no longer a threat to them anymore, the 3 WOMEN also live Happily Ever After ... like at the end of Fairy Tales?
That was also a pretty funny remark about them needing a man as much as a fish needs a bike to ride.
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dark_frances
12 years ago
Freud told us that water imagery was symbolic of the womb. Altman evidently took him seriously.
Thanks for posting this, the line I quoted actually seems to help me to understand the flick a little better. So motherhood seems to be the key of the story - this would make some sense, considering Pinkie's refusal to recognize her parents (which had been previously close to invisible to Millie, when she picked them up from the station), Millie's transformation into a mother character for Pinkie (although Millie does state at some point that she does not want to have children), and of course, Willie's failed birth. Motherhood does seem to be to some extent an unwanted burden for both parties (mother and child), an accidental byproduct of lovemaking - which would also explain the strong impression made on Millie by the sight of Pinkie's parents hugging. It may have reminded her of her own story - having been born not because the parents desired a child, but because the mindless nature of her parents' body (which might be referred to by the primeval nature of the humanoids drawn by Willie) had led to pregnancy after some lovemaking. Pregnancy as a bare biological reaction (burdening females much more than males), which society has tried to coat with various rationalizations and nice connotations, but which is still just an often unwanted, wild, mindless, careless, intrusive, painful reaction of the female body in the presence of the male body. After all, the birth scene is the high point of the movie. From this angle, it must be very unsettling to think that this is how humans are brought into existence...
It still doesn't fully explain why Willie's son had to be dead, but then I read somewhere that the whole movie had stemmed from a dream Altman had, and which for some reason he decided to turn into a movie (as if we don't already have our own unsettling dreams), so finding some sense in it is already a dramatic victory .
Btw, I was just wondering, why are most dreams unsettling?... Maybe because they are, to a large degree, just some gymnastics of the brain without the noise of daily awareness, and as such, when the awareness is reinstated in the morning, the memory of the unconscious dream feels unfamiliar, alien - and implicitly unsettling?
there's a highway that is curling up like smoke above her shoulder
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FilmFormula
8 years ago
The half-human, half-reptile Creature is another version of the archetypal reptoid semi-humans
The creatures are indeed reptilian. Reptiles and snakes molt, shedding their skin when they've outgrown it and emerging anew, which is arguably what happens to Pinky. She is reborn in the pool and emerges out of her coma with a new personality. Because of the molting, snakes represent immortality and rebirth in some cultures (or so Wikipedia says) and there are actually a few paintings of snakes in the bar that Willie works at. Pinky even touches a painting of a snake.
I recently did a video on this topic, along with my personal interpretation of this brilliant film, so check it out if you'd like:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihXhgfsVg84If snakes and reptiles represent rebirth, then it ties together with water being symbolic of the womb! Especially since the reptile men are in the pool.
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