For all the fame of its climax in the Crazy House hall of mirrors, the central metaphor of The Lady in Shanghai is actually presented much earlier. True enough, the menace that pervades this story verges on the precipice of hysterical insanity through many of its scenes, but it is important to keep in mind that the symbolism of both a crazy house and a hall of mirrors could apply equally well to just about any film noir. What separates The Lady from Shanghai from most—perhaps all—other examples of film noir is set earlier in Michael’s little story about the sharks off the hump of Brazil.
What sets The Lady from Shanghai so far apart from the convention of film noir? It is one of the only examples—and, indeed, may very well the only example—in which the sap recruited by the femme fatale to dispose of her “inconvenience” walk away relatively unharmed. .The femme fatale and her inconvenient husband both wind up dying on the floor of the Crazy House, surrounded by the shattered glass of the mirrors while Michael coolly and calming strikes out of Play Land and toward an ocean perhaps not yet glimmering from a sunset…but soon enough.
Back to Brazil. Michael’s story involves a group of men fishing at Fortaleza when suddenly everybody starts hooking sharks. First one shark bites the bait and then another and another. Before long, the water is nothing but sharks and once the blood starts to shed, it turns into a sick feeding frenzy. More than a mere feeding frenzy; it is a cannibalistic orgy of sharks so inflamed by the smell of blood that almost seem to have gone insane as they literally eat themselves into extinction. And Michael? Well, he’s there to tell the tale later, right?
Michael is an observer; he is not one of the sharks. He is never even in any real danger; the shark are feasting upon themselves. At no point in Michael’s story is there ever any hint that the fishermen were in danger. Which, when you start to think about it, seems pretty amazing. According to Michael, “all about the sea was made sharks, and more shark still and the water tall.” In other words, there was a heckuva lot of sharks in that water and they eventually all went made from the scent of blood, yet the fishermen never faced danger.
The metaphor give away the ending. Michael is an innocent—though sap he may be. One other thing that separates The Lady from Shanghai from every other film noir is that the sap here is notable more intelligent. Michel is a witness; he is involved, yet not involved. Some have described Michael as a Brechtian figure who wandered into a film noir without really belonging in it. As if proving this contention, Michael distinctly calls back to the metaphor at the end by recalling the story of the sharks before observing to a dying Elsa that while the may be bad, she believes, you have to deal with it rather than trying to run away from it.
Michael’s final philosophical rumination is one that would seem ridiculous coming from, for instance, a Walter Neff: “The only way to stay out of trouble is to grow old.” The great saps of film noir—of which Neff is their King—don’t get this. In their world, the point of life has nothing to do with growing old; only with growing rich in one sense or another. Michael is the philosopher-King of film noir saps. He is wise enough to fish among the sharks, but not to go swimming among them.
Philosophically speaking, the mirror scene represents the meeting point of the virtual world of mirrors and the real world of the film. Welles' uses the device of mirrors to remind the spectator of the cinematographic image that coincides when the virtual and the real meet. The mirror scene is also a limit-image in the situation-action-situation logic of the moving images where the characters are forced to take action resulting in a complete destruction of their virtual images. Before the mirror scene Michael's suspension at the amusement park puts 'time out-of-joint' resulting in a distortion of the realistic shooting style of the film after which there is a suspended neurosis (due to time being 'out-of-joint') that results in death of Mrs. Bannister.
