Saturday, June 27, 2020

The Terminal

I re-watched The Terminal last week and noticed the significance of a visual element.  With very few exceptions, everyone who interacts with Viktor Navorski wears a uniform, even if it's a loose definition of the term (Dixon, for example, doesn't really wear a uniform, but he's always shown in a suit).  Viktor, on the other hand, while ostensibly living out of his suitcase, shows quite a bit of variation in what he wears.  The sartorial sameness that everyone else exhibits visually represents Viktor's being stuck "in a crack" and having to wait.  Nothing around him changes very much, even including the clothes that everyone wears.

I re-watched the movie to-day in order to confirm this, and I noticed an-other small detail I'd never seen before.  In the scene where Dixon is interrogating Amelia, Viktor is visible in the security camera footage in the background, holding a bouquet of flowers and waiting for Amelia:


(Here's a post I wrote about The Terminal last year.)