One summer I took myself to see Alfred Hitchcock’s The Trouble with Harry, starring a very young Shirley MacLaine. I bought my ticket in the lobby along with a package of Snow Caps and entered the theater. I gauged the exact center seat and sat down to in an otherwise empty theater with an unobstructed view of the screen. As the lights dimmed and images appeared, it was as if I could step directly into the story. Fifteen minutes passed, then a couple came down the aisle, edged sideways into the row just past mine, and stopped precisely in front of me.
My point of view had been altered. My intimate, one-on-one connection to the plot and characters was not only shared but impeded. I thought for a few moments, picked up my belongings and moved several rows back and several seats over. I now had a different point of view. Did this greatly alter my experience of The Trouble with Harry?
A character’s point of view is certainly about physical location in the theater of life. But it’s more about where and how and why their attention is focused based on how they make meaning out of circumstances and events. If I had chosen to stay where I was, I would have viewed the film from between the heads of two other people. By moving, I gave myself an altered but uninterrupted view. However, my experience now included the couple and my reaction to them. As the hero of my story, I was entertained, annoyed, surprised, and intrigued by the film and my fellow movie goers.
Although I remember the film quite well, what I mostly remember about that night was the couple arriving and sitting smack in front of me when they had every other seat to choose from. And now I am telling you my experience based on that altered focus. Point of View means what a character sees because those are their surroundings. But they also choose to see because what is happening around them has meaning to them. As I watched the movie, part of my mind was working on the question of why the couple sat right in front of me and whether I could have behaved differently. That movie, for me, will always be equated with that odd experience. Point of view is not simply naming who will tell the story, it’s allowing that voice to express overtly and implicitly its entire sensibility with all the nuances and contradictions any living being contains. The Trouble with Harry became, for me, the trouble with heads
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