When I heard that Hugo was playing in the theaters in Japan i was overjoyed. I missed the movie during my winter vacation in the states, and I really wanted to see Martin Scorsese’s newest work. My girlfriend lived closest to the theater, so I went to her place and we saw it together. Whenever we watch movies together, we usually like to say comments to each other; a funny observation, story plot discussion, or whatever springs to mind. Unfortunately, the Japanese etiquette for movie watching allows for no talking what so ever. I was following this rule diligently (as a Japanese Studies major in college I felt it was my scholastic duty to follow Japanese customs), my girlfriend, on the other hand, decided not to follow that rule. In her defence, she was not very loud, and no one complained, but I found myself a little embarrassed. She kept on going about the “notebook” that appears early in the film, but never seems to come back into the plot. I kept on saying “it doesn’t matter!” in order to silence her complaints, but the truth was that I was becoming curious too.
In the beginning of the story, the protagonist, Hugo, has a little notebook that is one of the last possessions he had to remember his father by. Early in the movie the notebook gets stolen from him, and Hugo then has to work off his debt to a toy maker in order to get the notebook back. The problem is that Hugo never gets the notebook back on screen. I thought maybe this was an oversight, or perhaps the audience was supposed to forget about the notebook, but there were several other things that sort of bothered me too, like how all the meanings put into any object Hugo puts into always came up short. Hugo just seems to want everything to be a symbol, something that has a “function,” but everything seems to follow through for him.
Then with all of Hugo’s failure to bring any real meaning to objects around him, the first real antagonist of the film, Georges Méliès, manages to infuse meaning into everything he creates. Though it is that meaning that Méliès grows to despise and makes him unable to create anymore. It is that contrast of meaninglessness trying to form meaning, and the meaningful trying to be forgotten that is the true central theme of Hugo as a movie. Perhaps that is what Scorsese is also trying to say about preserving old movies. People are trying to find meanings in all these new movies and think that they are “fresh,” but in the end they offer nothing that the old movies that people are seemingly trying to forget offer.
Or maybe it is about how I should stop trying to find meanings in all these movies and listen to what my girlfriend has to say, even when we are in the cinema.
In the beginning of the story, the protagonist, Hugo, has a little notebook that is one of the last possessions he had to remember his father by. Early in the movie the notebook gets stolen from him, and Hugo then has to work off his debt to a toy maker in order to get the notebook back. The problem is that Hugo never gets the notebook back on screen. I thought maybe this was an oversight, or perhaps the audience was supposed to forget about the notebook, but there were several other things that sort of bothered me too, like how all the meanings put into any object Hugo puts into always came up short. Hugo just seems to want everything to be a symbol, something that has a “function,” but everything seems to follow through for him.
Then with all of Hugo’s failure to bring any real meaning to objects around him, the first real antagonist of the film, Georges Méliès, manages to infuse meaning into everything he creates. Though it is that meaning that Méliès grows to despise and makes him unable to create anymore. It is that contrast of meaninglessness trying to form meaning, and the meaningful trying to be forgotten that is the true central theme of Hugo as a movie. Perhaps that is what Scorsese is also trying to say about preserving old movies. People are trying to find meanings in all these new movies and think that they are “fresh,” but in the end they offer nothing that the old movies that people are seemingly trying to forget offer.
Or maybe it is about how I should stop trying to find meanings in all these movies and listen to what my girlfriend has to say, even when we are in the cinema.
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