I agree. Actually, my working theory is that all of the male characters are the same person. In my view, the apartment building is a metaphor for the fractured psyche of a man. Each of the male characters (Dan, detective, landlord) have memories of a woman with lots of overlap. To my mind, these are compartmentalized memories of women at different points of a man's life. To be clear, I'm not saying this is a case of multiple personality disorder or something. Instead, each character is a facet of a single man's relationship with women in his life. All of his traumatic experiences are combined into a female figure named "Laura" representing pain and power. Here's how I'm coming to this conclusion:
1) The movie states that at one point the building was a single space, but has been broken into apartments. The landlord's job is to keep tenants away from each other. The first time Dan ventures into the old hallways, the landlords tries to throw him out.
2) The red door (in the center of the hidden hallways) seems to hold traumatic memories. The landlord seems to possess the oldest female-related memory: the girl having her period. The detective seems scarred by pornographic imagery and Dan seems to remember some kind of violence implied by blood.
3) The bearded man, again living in the walls, is a voyeur and spy. He's killed presumably by the landlord for informing Dan of information he's not to know.
4) The different characters have no insight into the memories of the others. We see this with the lanlord's Laura diary. He's clearly reading some kind of text, but the detective is not able to see any of the words.
5) Hat boxes with the same pattern crop up in the lives and memories of all the characters. The one that we see opened contains childlike things like memories stored away. It also contains the reel with his wife's voice ridiculing him. This also seems to be a memory stored away. The movie even goes so far to have him not recognize it at first, giving us the scene where the detective has to change the speed to bring it into clarity.
6) All of the women in the movie seem to live outside the bounds of the apartments. They don't seem to follow the same set of rules. I'd argue that these are memories of women intruding into the man's mind.
7) Back to the men themselves.... Several jump cuts show physical continuities between the male characters. One very clear example is the landlord wiping his face with his hand, the motion being continued by Dan in the exact same manner.
I'm not sure how Dora or the old doctor fit in. My current thought process is that the man whose mind we're viewing is actually much older. The doctor might actually represent the most recent memories and Dora is his wife.
Whatever the case, this movie is fun to think about. Any other theories out there? Thoughts?
-Pecs like melons and knees of fringe
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TheManInOil
9 years ago
I'd say you're largely right. Dora I think is simply an older woman who seduced him in his youth. He clearly had unhealthy oedipal issues. At least one of the 'Lauras' seems to have been a grown woman when he was a child - perhaps an older relative or a babysitter. My guess is that his early curiosity about sex (which seems to have been a series of traumatic incidents - he may even have been molested) lead him to a pattern of looking to mother-figures when he was young.
But his need for female approval at some point gave way to a violent desire for the young and beautiful, whom he punishes for making him want them. By the time Dora comes to his bed he's lost sexual interest in her.
There's a lot of vaginal symbolism in the film. The head wounds are very much one of these, the result of a violent penetration. Also the hole he bashes in the wall to allow him access to forbidden areas, and the hole in the ceiling of room 7 that drips blood. There's a lot of menstrual imagery throughout and the drive to sex that brings murder with it seems associated with that. So it's quite possible that menopausal women have no appeal to 'Dan' (or whoever he is).
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