Close-ups for no reason

Griffin goes into a room, and it cuts to a big close-up of a light switch on the wall, just a light switch, and the lights go on, but nothing else really happens. It's like a psychological twist each time, a joke.

— Scorsese, in Kelly, unpaged

He did it on purpose and often: "There was constant cutting to extreme close-ups for no reason, just to build up paranoia and anxiety—total anxiety" (Kelly, unpaged). He calls the whole film "a parody of film noir and also a parody of a thriller. The angles themselves are parodies—the angles, the cuts, and the Fritz Lang–type shots, the Hitchcock parodies" (Kelly, unpaged).

Ebert explains why it works, and it is a good paragraph on film grammar:

If the close-up is a device to underline the importance of a moment to a character, Scorsese used that knowledge to exploit unmotivated close-ups; Paul thought something critical had happened, but much of the time it had not.

— Scorsese by Ebert, unpaged

"In an unconscious way," he goes on, "an audience raised on classic film grammar would share his expectation and disappointment. Pure filmmaking" (Ebert, unpaged).

That is the lesson. A close-up is a promise, and the audience keeps it for the director. Break the promise often enough and the audience starts to feel what Paul feels, a man in a world that keeps signalling importance and never paying off. Scorsese's own model is Hitchcock: "After Hours is to some extent a parody of Hitchcock's style" (sos 101), and he names one borrowed shot, a hand holding the invitation over the ground below, which "refers back to the moment in Mamie where she's holding the gun" (sos 101; the scan's OCR reads Marnie as "Mamie").

A case for Editing and Camerawork. Compare [[The Wrong Man taught the camera to be paranoid]], where the same director took Hitchcock's guilt seriously, and After Hours — the keys, the loudest of the empty close-ups.