Phone conversation with Frank

I think there is a great deal to be said about the use of color in connection with the plot and characters in this film; but I also think there are some key observations made from just dialogue, specifically the first phone conversation between Dorothy and Frank, which I will get into later. The scene I chose to close read starts with Jeffrey breaking into Dorothy’s apartment with a key he obtained from an earlier scene and I ended right about the time Dorothy found him in the closet; so kind of one scene bleeding into the next. I think this sequence is an important scene because it captures the characters so well and foreshadows the plot to come. I’ll start with Sandy, who is actually not in this sequence at all and I found that fitting to most of the rest of the movie. Sandy gets sucked into this dark world by Jeffrey that Frank runs and Dorothy is victim to but Sandy is never really in danger. She never even meets Frank I don’t think and she meets Dorothy the one time near the end; other than that she is literally on the sidelines kind of watching Jeffrey’s descent into this dark world. I found it fitting that she was outside the apartment, with safe distance from what was really going on.

What I found fitting about this scene for Jeffery’s character was the fact that his previous brilliant plan was to dress up as a pest control guy and get access to Dorothy’s apartment so he can crack a window to sneak into later; however, there was no window in the kitchen and luckily found a key hanging from the counter to steal instead. The important thing that I think that earlier scene and this second break-in scene points out about Jeffrey is his inability to come up with an actually good plan and his Gumping his way through them. What this tells us about the character is that he is getting in over his head and that he is really not the great Detective that he may think he is and he is not prepared for what’s the rest of the plot has in store for him. This point is made apparent again when he uses the bathroom right in the middle of his big break-in, thanks to the Heineken, and as a result nearly gets caught and messes up the whole warning system Sandy had thought of for him. I’m not an expert at B&E, but I think most people have the common sense to pee first or hold it for later. I digress, again - he’s over his head. I think it’s also important to note his clothes, a little darker than previous scenes, but he was introduced in the beginning wearing dark clothes, represent a connection to the dark side of his psyche; probably the pervert side Sandy had mentioned. As he watches Dorothy undress from the darkness of the closet, he is a sort of peeping tom and at the same time he is still an outsider to this world he is about to encounter.

Although Dorothy was introduced in the earlier scene, almost nothing was revealed about her. She was on guard so to speak when this unannounced pest control guy shows up at her doorstep, which is fitting with her situation that is revealed later. However, in this scene, she thinks she is all alone and only then does the audience get a true introduction of her character. She is wearing a black dress but is almost immediately de-clothed and is just wearing her underwear. This exposes her, or sort of sheds that false appearance we got of her earlier and now we begin to really see who she is. This also makes her vulnerable to the peeping tom in the closet, in a physical sense, and when the phone rings, she is also “undressed’ in that conversation and reveals a lot about her character, in an emotional sense. What we get from the conversation is that she is in distress over a man named Frank, who is with someone named Donny. She is worried about Donny and she seems subservient to Frank. She keeps calling him sir, excessively. At the end she says “Mommy loves” so now the pieces are starting to fit together that Donny is her son. This conversation is a great foreshadow of what happens to Dorothy throughout the plot. Basically, her family is being withheld from her by a psycho named Frank; we don’t get a lot of details as to why or how this happened. If you fast forward to the end of the movie, we don’t have much more than that so in a sense this conversation sets up the whole plot for Dorothy’s character.

And then we have Frank. He hasn’t even appeared on screen yet but we know some things about him from this conversation that I think are important, because again they setup the character that entertains us for the rest of the movie. We know Dorothy obeys him by the way she speaks to him, constantly referring to him as “sir”. We know he has her family but we don’t know why. We know he has some kind of weird obsession with the song Blue Velvet because she says “I like to sing Blue Velvet”. Even before his really bizarre introduction, we get a sense that this Frank guy she is speaking to is short a few marbles and he is in charge, which is exactly what we see as the plot progresses.