Thursday 31 July 2008

Hand

And talking of McCay ...

I once published an essay on the relationship between the original film of King Kong and McCay's Little Nemo books. I'm sorry I missed this image, which has the clearest relationship with one of the key iconic images of the movie. The hand reaches into our bedroom as we sleep and carries us away. What's going on? It touches, partly, on the sense we have (in sleep) of being physically immobilised, as if gripped in a giant hand; and it also literalises the idea that sleep 'carries us away'. But it is the menace in the image that startles me (are we all, on some level, afraid of sleep? Is sleep a monster that abducts us?)

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