Finn Morse
The American New Hollywood generation is an incomplete puzzle without one of its more inspiring giants, director Robert Altman. Instead of limiting his early career with a quiet run of experimental films, Altman swung for the fences. Across his 13-film run in the 1970s alone, he redefined movie genres including war, musicals, and westerns. These unconventional works (“M*A*S*H,” “Nashville,” “McCabe & Mrs. Miller”) garnered generational international respect in their countercultural approach to the growing mundanity in American genrefare. Instead of making somber hopeless war pictures, Altman would turn them into ragebaiting screwball comedies complete with enough stars to fill a football field.
Robert Altman’s films are widely recognized for large casts and countercultural genre approach, not without exceptions to this directorial mold. For example, the far lesser known psychoanalytical character drama Images, released in 1972. The film is one of Altman’s rare character analysis films, prompting to analyze one specific character instead of his frequent hatfuls. Taking out the fanfare and needledrops, you have an analytical thriller about a woman trapped in suburban conformity and unable to express her internal choice.
Operating adjacent to films like Persona and Wild Strawberries, Images is an esoteric watch, complete with mind tricks and surrealism. It was silently brushed off by critics during awards season for two New Wave hits of 1972, awards darlings Cabaret and The Godfather. Now, over fifty years later, one of Altman’s most underrated works is a stable of 1970s surrealism. Through the recontextualization of storytelling and repressed confinement, Images marries infidelity to tabloid psychosexualism, criticizing the ethics of inauthentic domestic living.
The film follows the married Cathryn (played by Susannah York) after she receives a phone call from an unknown woman. The call feeds her information about how her husband, Hugh (played by René Auberjonois) has been having an affair. This triggers Cathryn to hallucinate interactions between her and the men she has had affairs with during her marriage to Hugh. She sees different versions of people, conjures ghosts, and even a duplicate of herself. During a trip to their vacation home in rural Ireland, Cathryn faces images of her past and present, confronting her fears in order to come to terms with her identity.
Hugh’s preferences and lifestyle choice directly contrast that of Cathy’s. There are little details that pile up. Cathy wanted to have whisky with a spaghetti dinner, only for Hugh to shoot it down for his choice of wine. Cathy’s mismatched lifestyle does not pair with Hugh’s picture-perfect preferences. In her opening scene—chomping down on the apple of knowledge—it is surmised that Cathy wants more from her picturesque Garden of Eden. The contrast is impossible to ignore when looking at Hugh’s hobbies, mainly hunting birds and woodland critters. Cathy’s afternoon sees her sitting in the forest reading and writing a story of unicorns, surrounded by ponies and other small animals. Cathy is an animal. Hugh hunts animals. The two don’t belong together.
This detail is further emphasized with the motif of Hugh’s personal tripod camera, introduced to the audience by photographing a dead deer’s head. Every time Cathy moves around the house, the camera appears to have moved to follow her. The expectations of domestic living are always breathing down her neck, and heightening her anxieties. Hugh’s several dangling wind chimes — seen in his car, their urban bedroom, and the back porch — glisten and chime annoyingly, almost egging Cathy on. A seemingly beautiful representation of their marriage is rendered irritating.
Elements like the camera attribute to Images constant horror genre references. Movies like Psycho (1960) and Rosemary’s Baby (1968) serve as a reference, subliminally echoing Images lyrically and visually. Cathryn’s hairstyle is reminiscent of Marion Crane and Rosemary Woodhouse, short blonde hair like Marion, done up in a bob like Rosemary. The scenic drive through Ireland’s countryside looks like the car from Psycho pulling up to the Bates Motel. Cathryn holding a concealed knife directly references the famous knife scene in Rosemary’s Baby.
The horror references also apply to other earlier horror films. The opening scene appears to model its phone call, theme of infidelity, and even production design from Mario Bava’s horror anthology Black Sabbath (1963). Driving through the mountains looks like Hugh and Cathryn are driving to Dracula’s castle in Dracula (1931). These physical attributions to horror are further backed by Japanese sound designer Stomu Yamashta’s building of tension in the atmosphere.
Cathy’s first affair, with a Frenchman named René (played by Marcel Bozzuffi), appears to her whenever she is left completely alone. He is a conjuration of guilt, especially considering how he has been dead for three years, the result of a plane accident. Cathryn banters with René with such casualness, yet externally rejects his flirtatious advances. Infidelity is furthered in Cathy’s second affair, a one-time fling with family friend Marcel (played by Hugh Millais) turned into advance after advance. Sometimes it happens right next to husband Hugh and Marcel’s daughter Susannah (played by Cathryn Harrison).
The affairs are two sides of the same coin. René symbolizes sexual casualness, a countercultural theme emphasized by the pair’s dialog. René speaks lines like “Remember my bed, when you miscalculated?”, mentioning periods and pregnancies, destigmatizing them. Even something as small as the word “boob” being spoken levies casual sexuality. But Marcel, the symbol of sexual superiority, creates stress and discomfort for Cathy. He spouts on about how he had his ex-wife tracked down for her infidelities, evocative of how he’d never let someone get away from him. Every place she turns to, Cathy is trapped. Hugh is boring and irritating, René gone forever, and Marcel unable to see her as a person. This turns her to take action for her own good.
A montage crosscuts Cathy sleeping with each of the three men in separate memories. Each scene is shot in one continuous close-up shot, only cutting to switch scenes and times to the next of the three men. The camera angle shifts and speeds its movements to match Cathryn’s headspace and thrill in escaping. At the end of the scene, she awakes to find herself in her lame hallway again. No frenzy of thrills, no liberation. Just Cathy, and her dull domestic stairwell.
Cathryn’s discomfort is characterized in the string-heavy emotional score, courtesy of composer John Williams. Before entering galaxies far, far away in the late 1970s, Williams rose to prominence in smaller films like these. The music of Images is cited as one of Williams’ personal favorite scores to date, a perhaps surprising choice given Williams’ Resumé. Scenes like Cathy running in the Irish countryside benefit greatly from its piano-led crescendos, driving up tension in a seemingly peaceful environment. A lyrically perfect match to this tale of mismatched feminine identity.
Once it becomes clear how she needs to separate herself from her past, Cathy acts. She shoots René in the chest, per the conjuration’s request. In reality, she shoots the aforementioned camera that surveilled her, freeing her from two unwanted relations in one climactic action. Hugh receives a call from his business in the city, requiring him to leave Cathy alone for the week, with Marcel rearing his ugly figure. She kills Marcel by stabbing him in the throat with a kitchen knife. Her old affairs are over, giving her time to focus on the present.
Cathryn’s clone, seen all over the place, represents a collection of ideas, ranging from faith to infidelity. Our Cathryn is almost haunted by this unrelenting vision of herself, which seems to show up just to torment her. Eventually she confronts the figure, who talks lovingly, like she wants to help Cathy. Instead of listening to the mental clone’s words of endearment, she runs her off the road and into a waterfall. An incredible wide shot shows a costumed dummy take hit after hit as it descends the rocky cliff. Satisfied, Cathy drives home.
On the drive home, Cathryn smiles and laughs, breaking the fourth wall and looking directly at the audience. She has broken the camera, and doesn’t fear it anymore. But upon reaching her home and expecting Hugh to welcome her, she instead finds her clone once again, clothed in a towel. She hadn’t run her alternate persona off that cliff. It was Hugh, her connection and sense of belonging to someone. Now, Cathryn is where she began, confused and alone.
Images interludes story beats with Cathryn reading the children’s book In Search of Unicorns, (a real storybook written by York, also credited as an Images co-writer). The book is a whimsical tale of pursuing an unattainable goal, personified by a unicorn, and how everyone in the world is searching for it.
Cathryn could have played the part of the housewife by taking care of her home and husband, but would never feel the thrill of living. She could have embraced her urges and lived recklessly, satisfying her being in sexual relationships. In the very last shot of Images we see Marcel’s daughter Susannah complete the puzzle which she and Cathryn had been working on together. The finished picture contains a unicorn—beacon of wonder—and a tiger—a reminder of life’s real dangers. As René said earlier, “It takes two to tango.” The final image is both a tiger and a unicorn. Cathryn is this image.
