10 Hidden Meanings Of Famous Movie Scenes
Think you know everything about Inception? Dream on.
Audiences are now so used to having mainstream movies spell everything out for them, they don’t feel the need to think for themselves. In modern blockbusters there’s not much subtext or hidden meanings to be found, but it wasn’t always this way.
Directors and screenwriters love to find a way to sneak some hidden meanings or subtext into their work, implanting them into key scenes for fans to discover on their own. Often these little nuggets won’t be found for years or even decades, but they help shine a new light on the story or the characters. It could something symbolic, or a background detail so well hidden it passes most viewers by; it might even be a story point revealed via a throwaway gag.
Even major fans won’t notice these details, but once they’re revealed they add a rich extra layer to the experience. So let’s take a look at ten movies that carefully hid messages in plain sight, and what those messages add to the story.
10. Stalemate - The Thing
For anyone paying attention, The Thing is teeming with hidden clues and subtext; for example, did you ever notice that Windows drops the keys during the scene where Bennings is infected, how the intruder is later able to destroy the blood supply?
John Carpenter feels the movie worked so well because he had a long pre-production period on it, allowing him to really think about the script. His biggest addition was turning the movie into one long, very destructive game of chess between MacReady and the alien. This is established in MacReady’s introduction, where he plays computer chess and feels certain of victory, only to get beaten at the last moment. And what does he do then? He destroys the computer rather than lose.
The movie then plays out like a chess game, where teammates – or pieces - get taken off the board and MacReady is constantly losing the upper hand. When he realises the alien has essentially won he destroys the camp to rob it of victory. And then, in the last scene, he doesn’t know if Childs is infected or not, meaning the game ends in stalemate; no wonder he looks so exhausted.