DEAD AGAIN
(1991; d. Kenneth Branagh, w. Scott Frank)

Plato’s androgynes fe/males split in past but fated to rejoin in love: triangle of reincarnated lovers Margaret/Amanda + Roman/Mike trying to get back together, w/ private eye Gray (ambiguity: the man btwn [cf Kristeva’s 3rd Party]) + childish killer Franklin spanning the yrs. Roman, executed in ’40s for wife Margaret’s death, cdn’t separate from (not-the-)mother/nanny Inga (psychological construct enabling child to bridge oedipal mother-attachment into mature romance by projecting mom-qualities onto similar 3rd party), who "delivered" him from Nazis + occupied his next-door bedroom; present-day Mike similarly trapped in ambiguous realm, unable to love now that Inga’s real son Franklin (not-the-self: Mike’s complex taken on life of own) has grown into corrupt child-man + sometime (not-the-)father/advisor (caught w/ his "hand" in Margaret’s "drawer" in past the oedipal invasion thwarted, locking him in perpetual childhood w/ mom in backroom + no real father to help project him into adulthood).

Mike 1st seen in car — in transit/ion — on wrong side of road + pointed in wrong direction, mute A/man/da also "suspended": w/drawn from rest of world, speechless + hiding under pseudonym (not-herself) Christ/ine (the martyr), obsessed w/ scissors (separation: cutting Roman’s hair in 1st scene à la Samson, castration which throws world into ambiguity + confusion) + mistaking herself for the victim-female when she’s really got a heroic artist-"speaker" (movie’s twist that she reincarnated Roman) inside.

Mike also in denial, his womanizing repression of feminine in himself (the mother Franklin keeps in his bkrm), quitting smoking unwitting denial of both phallus + death-wish + yearning to know self; when Inga gives him anklet (yoni, fem symbol à la a manda-la) coveted by Frank + which reveals his true Margaret-i.d., he’s made whole again + granted "permission" to love (i.e., as long as we keep feminine half in submission, society will never be complete/ly happy).

B+W theatricality of flashbacks still more denial (separation into extremes vs full range of color, à la film’s polarization of sexual identities) + joking on Citizen Kane (obscured i.d.s, Gothicism, Xanadu-style house, Gray-as-Leland in resthome interview, critics’ comparisons of Branagh to Welles as young Shakespearean auteur) + Rebecca (Manderley + mother-servant entanglement, lampooning other comparisons of KB to Olivier in Roman’s reluctance to enter "your pathetic little medium," film).

Past as nobilty suggests disordering of heaven in our mythical history (Eden + separation from the womb, this ruination always the work of jealous children) + present fallen world, its upsetting by a servant’s son the postwar creation o/t middle class (which Mike + Amanda now part of), now in danger of extinction.

(No one really "dies again.")