The imagery of the wallpaper in the film was overdone, I think. The story described the wallpaper in great detail, so I was excited to finally get to see it when we watched the film. It turns out, however, that the wallpaper as a symbol impacted me with much more force in the short story. Perhaps the added imaginative effort, or at least the process of visualization that is inspired by reading There is a recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down.

I get positively angry with the impertinence of it and the everlastingness. Up and down and sideways they crawl, and those absurd, unblinking eyes are everywhere There is one place where two breaths didn't match, and the eyes go all up and down the line, one a little higher than the other.

The film, paradoxically, by showing more, gives too much away. In one way we can say that the film is offering a reading of the story through the image of the wallpaper.

The first still suggests the idea of imprisonment, by placing a series of vertical bars throughout the wallpaper. In addition, imprisonment is suggested by the face appearing to be in the background of the wallpaper. In the close up, this face shows some of the bulbousness described in the text.

In the text, however, the lolling broken neck, and the two bulbous eyes present more than just a face. They image death. They also pour from the narrator as imaginative description. One might interpret that the narrator's outpouring parallels the author's description. Or the figures may point toward a more psychological interpretation. On one level, the film's vision of the wallpaper restricts these possibilities.

Return to the film wallpaper site, to the Yellow Wallpaper site, or to the American Literature Survey Site.