We’ve talked a bit about what doors mean to us, as part of our psyches … how they represent symbolic gateways, new beginnings and (old!) endings, transitions between one state and another, and all of that. Well, people in Hollywood recognize this too, surprisingly! And over the years there have been many movies made either centering around doors, mentioning doors in the title, or having them as a recurring motif, which is supposed to subconsciously indicate something to the audience. Here are a few of them…

Sliding Doors

This 1998 movie starring Gwyneth Paltrow just couldn’t work without the doors in it! Basically, there are two simultaneous plots in this movie, one based on Gwyneth Paltrow catching a train (making it through the sliding door), and one where she is delayed slightly, and the sliding door shuts in her face. When she catches the train, she makes it home in time to find her lover cheating on her, when she doesn’t catch the train … she doesn’t find him! The symbolism of the door opening, and the door closing, is obvious – the closed door is a missed opportunity (in the film) for emancipation, freedom and happiness, as she misses out on finding out the truth. The open door is then the opposite …
For what my opinion on movies (as a door knob blog writer!) is worth, I give this one 4 stars :-)

The Door in the Floor

I love poetic titles like this one, and think the movie title is much better than the novel it is based on, A Widow for One Year. That could so easily be a woman whose husband dies, and she waits a year before remarrying. Not particularly interesting! The idea of the door in this movie is highly symbolic, but not necessarily a noticeable motif when you are watching it. The couple in the movie, Jeff Bridges and Kim Basinger, are having family troubles … cheating, personal tragedy, an inability to move on. The ‘floor’ of the title represents what lies beneath the surface, and the door in the floor is the access point for what isn’t said, but is definitely there. In the movie, the ‘door’ comes in the form of a person – a young man who becomes fascinated with Kim Basinger.
We’ll have to explore that concept of people as doors, literally … could be very interesting! 3 stars for the movie.

The Boy Next Door / The Girl Next Door

I can’t write about just one movie here, because there are actually over a dozen movies named The Girl Next Door, or some variant thereof, and at least half a dozen named The Boy Next Door! I’m not sure how to explain filmmakers’ (or film-titlers’) fascination with boys and girls next door … perhaps something to do with the grass being always greener on the other side of your fence. Presumably it is because you would see those people every day, but they do plenty of things that you don’t see … but perhaps could, if you just watched the movie named after them! As a secondary note, for some strange reason, most of these films are gay-interest or mildly pornographic… so while your own doors are mysterious and symbolic, there are infinitely more provocative things going on behind your neighbours’ doors, apparently!

Early 1900s ‘Door’ Films

For what reason I do not know, there are scores more films produced early in the 1900s containing the word ‘door’ in the title than there have been since around 1930 onwards. There are some fantastic titles, like Pimple’s Mystery of the Closed Door, and other more usual titles, like The Open Door, The Locked Door, The Little Lady Next Door, The Bolted Door, The Door That Has No Key, and The White Man’s Door. All of these were made before 1927. This could perhaps be something to do with world culture at the time … in the same way that anti-communist America was fascinated with monster films, because they portrayed people’s unseen fears (and then people conquering them), perhaps this fascination with doors earlier in the century was due to a general perception of change, moving forward and moving away from the old … highly possible at the time of the Industrial Revolution and in between two World Wars.

Photo credits: L O B B Y C A R D S by Lavannya Goradia

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