Summary
During another basketball game, O is knocked down and is sent to the hospital. After he recovers, the students all go out to a party. Hugo gets Mike drunk and encourages Roger to start a fight with him. The fight ends with Roger being cut by a broken bottle. When Coach Goulding hears about the incident, he suspends Mike from the team.
Hugo approaches Mike and tells him that only O can get him back on the team, and O will only listen to Desi. Hugo encourages Mike to get closer to Desi so that she will talk to O about letting Mike back on the team. Mike agrees and begins spending more time with Desi. Meanwhile, Hugo begins to plant seeds of doubt in O's head about Desi. Hugo tells O that he should "watch his girl," and notes that if Desi was able to keep their relationship a secret from her father for so long, she is capable of even more deception and is not trustworthy. O shrugs off Hugo's comments but starts becoming frustrated whenever he sees Desi with Mike.
One night, after O and Desi leave for the evening, Emily steals the scarf that O gave to Desi and gives it to Hugo.
Analysis
In this section of the film, the images and events help foreshadow O's eventual fall. The most significant instance of foreshadowing occurs during the basketball game when O is briefly knocked unconscious. He is thrown against the gymnasium floor, which is painted red to delineate the lines of the basketball court. The camera pauses on this image, showing O sprawled out on his back against a sea of red. This dramatic portrait foreshadows the death and destruction that will eventually befall O and the other students, despite O being at the pique of his athletic and social life. After this moment, Hugo's plan starts to take effect through the brawl between Mike and Roger (instigated by Hugo, who got Mike drunk); simultaneously, O's enviable life starts to crumble, though he is unaware of it at the moment.
The conversation between O and Hugo in this section of the film is important because of its implications for gender and its relationship to the film's source material. The conversation takes place while O and Hugo are lifting weights, situating the dialogue in a hypermasculine and competitive atmosphere. As Hugo begins to convince O that Desi is unfaithful, he relies on a misogynistic perception of women as fundamentally deceptive, secretive, and untrue. This understanding of women has a deep-seated literary history, and Shakespeare himself wrote many texts that questioned the sincerity of female characters. This misogynistic view stemmed, as many scholars have argued, from a distinctly male anxiety over fathering children. As land and wealth were passed through a patrilineal system of inheritance during the early modern period, men were constantly on edge about whether they were the true biological fathers of the children their wives gave birth to. As such, women were pressured into remaining virgins until marriage. All of this history is at play in the film, as the source material – Shakespeare's Othello – features a main character who has similar anxieties about his virginal, innocent, and doting wife, Desdemona.
