I had seen Roman Polanski’s 1976 film The Tenant a few times during my first two years at Reed. The apartment and its intensely claustrophobic environs had for me almost upstaged all the characters in the film.  There are lots of moody shots of the main character (portrayed by Polanski) staring out the window into the courtyard and into the windows of the neighboring apartments.  One of the more startling developments in the film is the moment that Polanski sees himself through the window of another apartment.  The idea of looking at or considering one’s self as an external observer deeply interested me. 



I was also drawn in by the structure of the film’s somewhat circular plot.  The movie starts with the Polanski character visiting the previous tenant of his new apartment in the hospital. This previous tenant, a woman who fallen from the apartment window, is bandaged, in a body cast and in traction.  She has an almost mummy like appearance with only her mouth and one eye visible.  Though this previous tenant is a complete stranger to the Polanski character, she nevertheless displays a panicked sense of shock as she screams at seeing him.  After a series of events that seem to transfer various attributes of this previous tenant onto Polanski  (far too complicated to go into here), the Polanski character himself jumps out of this very same apartment window.  He winds up in the hospital, bandaged in the same mummified way, only to witness his younger self - in a complete recreation of the film’s beginning - come into his hospital room to “visit.”  And the now bandaged Polanski screams... 



There are lots of interpretations of the Polanski film: gender roles, Marxist (victimizer-victim) etc.  What I liked was the prospect of examining various parts of one’s self as distinct, separate personalities: the work self vs. the “at-home” self, the aesthetic self vs. the personal self.  These make for dynamic moments in the film and stark contrasts in the drawing sequence when we (through the eyes of our artist narrator) are able to look at this very narrator in multiple simultaneous contexts: inside looking out, outside looking in; the subject of the drawing, the subject of the drawing shown to be creating the drawing in this very drawing itself.  The “horror” part of the Polanski film is the seemingly inescapable loop or the circular plot.  So too does this drawing sequence become an enclosed loop, not only its own plotting, but also in its dominant subject matter - the drawing within a drawing/ “Droste effect”/ the aesthetic narcissism of being trapped in a kind of hall of infinite mirrors.