Alternative interpretations

She gazes up at the clouds, bleak black ships sailing voyaging through the sky, with golden bottoms that must have been weighing them down. And, without warning she clears a stand of trees and enters a clearing. And, of course it’s the clearing where the man ended up going every night after work to be with his wife and child. The woman tidies her dress as best as possible, and then steps to the window, and is either staring at her own reflection, seeing the bit of blood on her face, the frizzy hair, or staring inside at the child playing with a train on the carpet, and the wife, darning a pair of socks.

The movie ends there, and a long open-ended debate takes place as to what exactly the woman was doing at the window, whether she was staring at herself and wondering what her future was going to amount to, if she was now trapped within the confines of that particular small town for the remainder of her years. This interpretation was more solidly individually rooted and a more typical American interpretation, that she wouldn’t be able to step past the wall of herself and imagine the harm that had just been causes to the family she was observing.

The alternative interpretation was that she’d been looking inside at the child, feeling simultaneously sorry and jealous of the child on the floor and the woman darning socks, for the knowledge that they didn’t yet have, and what they would soon have. This interpretation favored the strangeness of knowing something as catastrophic about someone else’s life without them being aware, and the sort of weirdness that must have caused for the woman as she looked in the window, feeling somehow miles apart and yet intimately close to the blond haired boy pushing a small train across the floor and saying, “Choo, Choo.”

The third interpretation, and the least favored by the critics was that the woman was staring in not so much at the child, but beyond him, at his mother, and secretly hating her for having had a meaningful relationship for a period of nine years with a man that she, the woman staring in the window had loved intimately. And wasn’t it just apropos that on this, the most, or perhaps second  most important day of his life, the day of his death, that his wife would be sitting in a rocking chair staring at a pair of socks and not know, intuitively, as she, the woman in the window, would have that something was horribly wrong, that a light had gone out in her small universe. This was more typical of the psychological realism popularized in 19^th century fiction.

A secondary argument tended to take place about whether the woman actually entered the house or not. He leaned heavily towards the interpretation that she knocked on the door, that it was both in keeping with her character and a start to unraveling the mystery of the man that she loved, that she wouldn’t pass up the opportunity to talk with the wife, find out a little more what her beloved had actually been like, and not just the astral type projection that she kept of him on the wall.

The other interpretation, the one that he didn’t favor, was that the woman had looked in the window and decided to walk away, that she found the sight of the child and the wife living in the unknown too heartbreaking to damage. Metaphorically, it would be like stumbling upon a quiet pond with ducks gliding lazily through it, a soft breeze ruffling their feathers and immediately firing rocks across it, trying to skip them up onto the opposite shore, not mindful of the peace that you’re intruding upon. Though that metaphor falls a bit weakly, as it would be more akin to building a freeway through the area where the pond has been displacing the ducks altogether, so big was the news of the man’s death, was his opinion. This opinion again heavily hinged on the amount of internal guilt the woman already felt at trying to steal this woman’s husband, and now, in her mind, getting him killed.