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In both its narrative and narration, Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now explores the theme of vision while exploiting an ineluctably visual medium to undermine confidence in what one sees. Early in the film, one of the central characters, John Baxter (Donald Sutherland), says, "Nothing is what it seems" and, a little later, "seeing is believing." Between these opposing and familiar attitudes, the film examines the dangers and rewards of different kinds of vision. On one level the film is about the spiritual and psychological dangers, particularly as Carl Jung conceived them, of a narrow insistence that "seeing is believing"; by fixing on the material world and believing only in what he sees or thinks he sees, John Baxter rejects hidden forces of whatever sort, and ultimately his rational mind betrays him. Pride of intellect, the insistence that nothing lies beyond the rational, is his downfall. On another level, both ironic and reflexive, the film exploits the tension between the attitudes expressed in the two maxims to comment upon the nature of narrative film, particularly narration's codes of association that films and their audiences depend upon. Such codes are, of course, necessary to the process whereby a film's fragments become an integrated whole, but, as Don't Look Now makes clear, they can be manipulated in the discourse in unconventional ways that leave an audience uncertain about how to associate and interpret the images before them. Indeed, in Roeg's film one may wonder if anything is what it seems. One's customary confidence in interpretation is undermined by competing codes of association, trompe I Oeil effects, and images from both past and future whose narrating source one is unable to discern with certainty. Moreover, the film's images (as well as its characters) raise psychoanalytic questions of the kind addressed by Don Frederickson in his important but neglected study of "Jung's distinctions between sign and symbol, and between a semiotic attitude and a symbolic one" (167).
At the level of story, Don't Look Now is a contemporary Gothic thriller in which the solution to the mystery explodes into another, deeper mystery. In elegant and often unsettling images, the film looks at the unknown, the mysterious, the awful, suggesting that to see only with one's eyes is hardly to see...