After Hours — the keys
A cab ride in fast motion that eats Paul's only $20, then a set of keys dropped from a loft window with the camera riding them down at his face. The point-of-view shot as a joke, a threat and a stunt that nearly went wrong.
- point-of-view
- camerawork
- editing
- setting
- iconography
- close-reading
- scorsese
- point-of-view
- stunt
- ballhaus
Observation
Paul gets into a cab uptown and gives an address in SoHo. The driver takes off as if the car were in a cartoon: the picture speeds up, the cab darts between lanes, stops dead, lurches off again, and the $20 bill in Paul's hand flies out of the open window. He arrives downtown with nothing for the fare.
The street is empty. He rings the bell at the loft, and a woman leans out of a high window and throws down her keys. The camera goes with them. For a second or two we are the keys, falling four storeys straight at Paul's upturned face. Then he is inside.
What the sources say it is
The urban-space chapter of the Companion has timed the ride and named the driver:
The ride itself is compressed into 1 minute and 17 seconds of screen time, serving as an ellipsis between the city that Paul knows and the city he doesn't. The anonymous taxi driver serves in the role of Charon, ferrying Paul between one world and the next.
— smc 354
The money is the first coin of the plot: the cab darts "in fast motion and starting and
stopping so suddenly that Paul's $20 bill – the only money he has on him for the night – flies
out of the cab window" (smc 354).
The keys are the shot everyone remembers. Amy Robinson, who produced the film:
There was a shot that Marty designed, the famous key-drop shot. Kiki drops the keys out the window before Paul comes upstairs for the first time.
— Robinson, in Kelly, unpaged
"He wanted it from the point of view of the keys," she adds (Kelly, unpaged). How they got it is its own story (The keys nearly killed Griffin Dunne).
Connotation code by code
Point of view
This is a point-of-view shot with no one behind it. Keys do not see. The camera borrows the grammar of the subjective shot and gives it to an object, which turns the grammar into a joke and a threat at once. Kelly reads it as a warning: "they become a threatening missile, hurtling down from above toward Paul's upturned face. They are a warning: He enters this world at his own risk" (Kelly, unpaged). Ebert reads the whole film's close-ups the same way: shots that promise importance and do not deliver it (Close-ups for no reason). The keys are the loudest of them.
Camerawork and editing
Two kinds of movement, both artificial. The cab uses undercranking, the oldest comedy trick in
cinema, so Scorsese is announcing a genre. The Companion notices the break with his usual
style: he presents the ride "in a decidedly comedic and fantastic manner, eschewing his
typically hyperreal style and foreshadowing the overarching surreality that infuses the rest of
the film" (smc 354). The key drop is the opposite: a real object moving at real speed toward a
real face, and you can feel that it happened.
Setting
The keys come out of the window because this is SoHo in 1984:
converted factory lofts, few intercoms, artists living above the street. Kelly makes the same
point in brackets: "(no intercoms in SoHo)" (Kelly, unpaged). The address, 28 Howard Street,
is "just a few blocks west of the Little Italy of Mean Streets, and yet there is no hint of the
shared geography that the two films inhabit" (smc 355). See SoHo before the money, 1984.
Iconography
Keys, money, locks, buzzers. The film is built from small urban objects that stand between a person and a door. Kelly: Scorsese "again uses objects—the keys, the twenty-dollar bill—as symbols of emotional states" (Kelly, unpaged).
Audience
The shot is built to make you flinch, and that is the lesson: a camera position can produce a physical reaction before any meaning arrives, and a comedy can use the reflexes of a thriller.
A small dispute
Kelly's narration says "Marcy must drop her keys to Paul". Robinson, in the same book, and Ebert both say it is Kiki. It is Kiki's loft, and it is Kiki at the window.
Compare
- Taxi Driver — the phone call — another Scorsese camera move nobody in the story asked for, which he admits shows "the hand behind the camera".
- Bickle sees through glass — the other Scorsese New York seen from a cab, where the city arrives through a windscreen instead of being driven through in fast motion.
- Psycho — the opening — the camera finds a window and goes in. Here the window throws something out.
Writing leads
- Time the cab ride yourself against the Companion's 1 minute 17 seconds, and count how many shots are undercranked.
- Find the other point-of-view shots given to objects in the film. How many are there before Marcy dies, and how many after?