While the shot is a crucial plot device, it exceeds its narrative function. That is, it is

visually extra-diegetic; the plot would work just as well without this uncanny shot.2 If

Leisen had cut from the shot of the balcony where the coat is hurled (Figure 2-2) to the

medium shot when the coat falls on Jean Arthur's head (Figure 2-3), the missing "falling"

shot would not have affected our narrative understanding of the film. Yet, the shot was

filmed, and as such, it has the intensity of a cinephiliac moment, one that signifies well in

excess of its narrative content. As we have seen with Roland Barthes's argument about

stills from Sergei Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible, there is something beyond the symbolic

meaning that "exceeds the copy of the referential motif, [such that] it compels an

interrogative reading" ("Third Meaning" 53). Unlike the look of the rest of Easy Living,

here, in an instant, a fur coat suddenly appears foreboding, and, for a moment, a

screwball comedy seems to surreptitiously encounter the surreal.


 session


Figure 2-2: J. B. Ball hurls the coat from the balcony