g on-screen at her top eyelids whereas some finish by running off-screen. During the film, we see Carol go to work at the beauty parlour. By the camera-man shooting over her shoulder, a personal view of her life and how she sees life around her. If the camera was used as her eyes, it would have made these scenes too subjective and too unsubtle. We can therefore look at the same things as Carol, but for our own sakes, though this does leave a certain ambiguity. For example, when Carol walks to work, she looks at an empty, dark kind of canvas ‘hut’ used by workmen (the ones which usually have toilets and/or basic washing facilities in them). Obviously the camera then pans to see this – but it can hold onto the shot for longer than Carol looks at it, giving the audience a chance to understand why Carol might look at it. As her state of mind being like it is, what it symbolises only needs a casual look or glance at it from Carol. As a symbol itself, the empty ‘hut’ represents a pathway or tunnel to a ‘dark’ kind of life – one filled with despair, depression, anxiety, anger, fear, hate, and/or any other types of negative human qualities. Near the end of the film, this ‘dark’ image is shown again, just after Carol kills the landlord with the cut-throat razor. Her face is kept in shadow – an oval of near black – and is framed by her hair, which enhances this image further because it is blond.As I have implied before, Carol’s understanding of life around her is distorted. She frequently sees cracks appearing in walls – which can be read as cracks in her mind. In one instance, Carol sees a crack in the pavement on her way to work. She becomes engrossed by it, and sits down on a bench by it to simply look at it. The shot of the crack taken over her right shoulder shows that the crack runs between her feet. It then splits into two cracks, making the entire crack lo...
