The Maltese Falcon Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 4500 words

The Maltese Falcon - Essay ExampleThey are then sent home. If almostthing should happen to one of the packages, so that it ruptures inside the mule, then that mortal dies. If the mule tries to flee once he or she enters the country, the handler will pursue the mule to get the profit back, and to keep the mule from telling what has happened. afterwards the process, the mules are shipped back home, with a good amount of cash for the dangerous trip. The poster shows Maria kneeling beneath the outstretched hand of a man, who is prop a packet of heroin out to her. The posture, however, makes it resemble a communi stooget receiving the wafer of Communion from a priest. The juxtaposition of sacrament with such a poisonous line of mildew gives the viewer a troubling impression one might assume that the filmmaker hopes the impression would be sufficiently troubling, or at least interesting, to temptation viewers in.The common trend in semiotic analysis of film has been to hold back at what symbolic objects mean. What, for example, is the dual meaning behind the small home of heroin proffered by the priest Structuralists have stopped asking a wealth of different skepticisms that could well provide an intriguing range of responses (Wadia). A question that the structuralists would not ask, for example, would be why the context of Communion was chosen as a representation for the drug suppliers Why not make the situation look more like violent coercion Why not make the idea of the mule a symbolic part of the scene While some of the answers may be similar to those raised by the first question, it could also be that these questions would raise additional questions about the relationship between religion and coercion, the cater that the drug lords have over life in certain parts of the world, among other notions. The idea behind a newer form of criticism comes from Roland Barthes, one of the germinal names in all of structuralist and semiotic thought. In his essay Ch ange the Object Itself, he shows how tired he is of the ways in which semiotics has belong an institution rather than a breath of fresh air. Semiotics has changed from a truly deconstructive force to a discourse, stock of phrases, catechistic declaration (Barthes, p. 166). In other words, even the idea of deconstruction itself has come to signify a certain set of assumptions beyond, or even completely different from, in some instances, the objective of the thinker. Rather than take apart existing myths and replace them with new ones, Barthes, writes, the semiotic idea is to fissure the very representation of meaningnot to change or purify the symbols precisely to challenge the symbolic itself (p. 167). In the particular instance of film, the cinematic image is constantly re-appropriated by the various agendas of its viewers Marxism, feminism, postcolonialism - to the point where each film can come to serve as a grand epic for any number of groups who can find the proper imagery a nd symbolism in the baloney (Wadia). This makes the Barthesian opposition to a fixed set of meanings inside discrete systems of signification an intriguing part of film theory.However, given the visceral symbolisms so often wedded to the visual image, the task of challenging the very idea of symbolism is problematic. Barthes writes of a third meaning that can exist even in