Orpheus and mirrors

 Jon Vitka

Orpheus

    After watching the movie Orpheus I found myself quickly seeing some weird hidden meanings within the movie. Whether it was the desire of love, or whether it was to do with death being a woman, or even if it was the odd hand-holding with the main character and Heurtebise. What I found the most interesting was the mirrors that were reflecting Orphee. Throughout the movie, we get many glips of Orphee seeing himself in the mirror but, some of the scenes of him looking through the mirror were very questionable in the sense that he could have been Homosexual or even gay. 

    As you can see from the photo above, this was one of the scenes where Orphee was oldy worshiping his own reflection as if in a cartoon where you see a male cartoon figure like Johnny Bravo who keeps looking at himself in the mirror. Both of them are obsessed about how they look to a point where it looks very homosexual in a way. Now in this movie, we have other scenes where he tuches a mirror or has something reflecting his face right back at him, almost constantly throughout the movie. Which brings me to another statement I wanted to say which is the relationship between the odd lyrics within the car that Orphee was so obsessed over with, so much that he would even ignore his own wife? 

    Within the text passage we received before the movie, there's a part that talks about weird phrases that would sound like poems. "'The voice of light' by means of a line drawing, although it was still not fully articulated; once it had totally expressed its self" (Page 4). I read this page over and over again trying to figure out this voice of light meaning and whether it had to relate with the words being spewed out in that car. I Later came to the conclusion that the voice of light is the person who speaks the truth to Orphee as if it was an underline meaning of telling him that he was gay. For example, during the time where he was trying to decode this voice of light, his wife was dying and he clearly didn't care that she was telling us maybe he is gay. Maybe him just hearing these weird words caused him to bring the light(true self) out and that's why he smeared his whole face against the very first mirror that he saw the women walkthrough. I personally still think that they really do a very great job of hiding homosexuality within this movie, sure there could be some easy scenes that could hint towards it but, you have to really pause and think about it.

    I wanted to quickly bring up something that might not have caught a lot of people's eyes when they were watching this movie. During the very first scene, we see Orphee talking to the boy who would soon later get hit by the motorcycle. As he is talking to him, he gives this weird face to him as if it was sexual, maybe it was just an odd coincidence that he made this odd face to the boy. It then got really suspicious during the first car ride with the boy who is now dead, since Orphee was clearly more concerned with the boy's health than the princess, a little bit too much concerned in my opinion. Why would you be that concerned over this boy you just met rather than the fact that you just jumped into a car with a strange woman who literally took the boy instead of the police officers and then proceeds to ask you to come with her to some strange place. Anywho that maybe just me overthinking it, but, I just wanted to make sure just in case if it was somewhat remotely relatable to the topic of homosexuality. 

    My thought about the movie is all over the place, to be honest. I honestly thought this was one really far fetch movies that you could find out there in this world, as the plot was very jumbled throughout the movie. We already know the Orphee is married and that this princess is actually dead her self yet we find out that Orphee quickly says he loves death right in front of his wife, as his wife doesn't seem to even care. We also learned that death itself is being controlled by these three men who act like juries in a trial. It was very confusing but for some reason, I was able to still follow along and get the very gist of the movie, even if it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. I personally like how they used the death cab which is usually two motorcycles driving next two a cab in between them since it helped quickly tell the viewers that this had to deal with death. Lastly, I wanted to say how remarkable it is to slowly find homosexuality within these movies.