The Obvious and the Code

This article assesses the film The Big Sleep through the complex analysis of cinematic elements, concluding that the seemingly simplistic nature of Hollywood classicism is actually quite complicated. In a highly constructed and deliberate schematic, he argues, The Big Sleep emphasizes repetition- a redundancy that subverts itself beneath codes.

To be fully candid, the specifics of this coding process read to me more like a foreign language than it did like logic. I truly cannot elaborate artfully on the details of the shot-by-shot analyses; however, I can confidently conclude that such coding shapes the overarching narrative of the story. A sense of symmetry is created through angle shots, number of shots, repetition, dialogue, and balance.