A shot may establish some empathy as the narrator tells us the character's pathetic story, yet time and again a cut to a seemingly unrelated object breaks whatever connection Maclaine has established. Going beyond mere toying with the viewer, the film at once plays on our human sympathies and shatters the very possibility of such involvement. Shots of Walter running around San Francisco emphasize its hilly, spatially unsettling topography, a motif throughout the film. Years before Hitchcock took San Francisco's verticality as a metaphor for inner turmoil in the great Vertigo , Maclaine made even more radical use of the city, tilting his camera to rotate a steep street into a vertical line, then going beyond it until it seems people and cars should topple off. Still more disruptive is Maclaine's editing.
Film history offers many models of what a cut can do.
In more poetic films editing can be additive in a different way, piling image on image as if weaving a tapestry a metaphor made explicit in some of Brakhage's films. A cut from the first section, for example, shifts from black and white to color, from far to near, from the geometrical to the organic. Maclaine's editing constitutes neither accretion nor fusion but a kind of visceral tearing, questioning not only the unity of our culture but the possibility of a unified consciousness, anticipating many postmodern theorists who seem unaware of his work. For Maclaine, each character's existence is a discontinuous flood of often unrelated thoughts. And just as the pink flowers are compelling in themselves, so Maclaine speculates on the sound track that the murderer must also have a story worth telling.