Killer's Kiss Masks

Both of them lusting after the seductive Gloria, night-club owner Vincent Rapallo and boxer Davy Gordon find themselves in a shop-window dummies factory. Encircled by dozens of female models in the process of being assembled, they engage in a ruthless duel. Armed with an axe or a spur, they smash, skewer, dismember or decapitate the graceful plaster and wax silhouettes. Gordon kills Rapallo who collapses amongst the tangled bodies of the casts. The sequence ends with a close-up of the overturned face of a dummy whose frozen aspect symbolises Rapallo's death mask.

Here, Kubrick uses a visual metaphor to express the characters' subconscious. He places himself in the tradition of the film noir, whose productions express the psychoanalytical theories popularised in the United States since the 1930s from a plastic point of view as much as a thematic one.

Thus the dummies in plaster and wax are so many replicas of Gloria, who arouses the lust and jealousy of the duellists. But these "women" are also passive spectators of their joust, silent, immobile dolls, manipulated (literally and figuratively) by the two men. Sex-objects, they are victims of male violence provoked by unappeased sexual impulses. Behind the violence of the fight, "it is man descending into the deepest part of his subconscious, to the heart of the terrifying labyrinth where sex is violence and where irrepressible frustrations are unleashed" (1).