Decoding Art: A Beginner's Guide to Unraveling the Hidden Language of Film and Symbolism

Have you ever watched an artsy film that left you lost and confused? Encounter performance art that left you uncomfortable, or underwhelmed? You aren’t alone, but there’s some hidden shorthand in most art you can tap into.

One of the great keys to life is to find joy and meaning in the places we’ve never looked for it, so I’ve compiled a cheat sheet of ideas to fill out your college essays and first-date conversations. Western art especially has a collection of predetermined signals and symbols meant to whisper to your hindbrain, and movies make for excellent examples of how this language is used. 

The first example is High vs Low. Obi-Wan and grade-school tree climbers were right: the higher you are, the more powerful. If there are two subjects in the image, is one of them higher? Taller? Is perspective making a tall person seem short, or a short person seem tall?

Height can also mean a precarious situation, “the higher you are the farther you’ll fall.” It could have esoteric implications, such as rising to heaven or being on better moral ground. If we’re discussing a villain who exists in high places (flight, a penthouse, a skyscraper) then it could mean that they’ll be untouchable until the hero rises to meet them. For example, in Alita Battle Angel, the main character falls from an affluent city in the sky and must work her way up from the slums by regaining the power she used to have.

A good second example is Dark vs Light. This has more connotations than just good or bad, but that’s the device’s most obvious use.

Shadow can mean obscurity, deviousness, or corruption. On the other side, light typically means knowledge, purity, and honesty. It reveals all things hidden and purges the things that lurk in the dark. In some instances bad/violent things in the story only start to happen once the sun sets. Die Hard is a great example: the story begins with banal conflict at sunset (a symbol for things ending coinciding with talk of breaking up) and the attack on the party only happens once night falls. More generally, keep an eye out for characters who literally light up the room or get introduced in shadow.

When this rule is being subverted, light can also be used to imply something is far too harsh, strict, or excessively morally rigid. Take the show Good Omens for example, where Heaven is portrayed as an eye-searingly white office environment. Similarly, if the light is burning and too revealing, then darkness could mean shelter, privacy, and rest. Practically any movie that takes place in the desert employs that subversion, such as Holes.

If you’re having trouble spotting this, try to unfocus your eyes to see if there’s any significant color contrast in the piece.

Now it’s time to combine and  compare our symbols. A lot of symbolism and drama is derived from contrast. The first two items on this list are obvious ones: high vs low, and light vs shadow. The most important thing to keep an eye out for is what is vs what should be. 

Is each character or object what you’d normally expect them to be, or have they been altered? Are they on one side when they should be on another? These contrasts show how the artist thinks the world is vs how it will change, or how the story should change it.

More common contrasts used in stories and art can be order vs chaos, dirty vs clean, broken vs unbroken, and stability vs growth. All of the above are utilized in the film Wall-E.  In combination, the writers argue that it’s better to be dirty, broken, and unsafe by showing a sterile and unchanging environment where robots show more agency and soul than humans do. If you can recognize any contesting values or discrepancies in reality, then putting a name to those differences will bring you one step closer to understanding what the artists are trying to tell you.

Conclusion: Overthink it. Trust me, it’ll be fun. Yes, sometimes overthinking leads to seeing meaning where there is none, but that’s part of the fun. The piece used to be meaningless, or the message was held so close to the artist’s chest that it made sense to no one but themselves. Now it means whatever you want it to. Make funny nonsense, get into debates with friends over how Cocomelon contains the meaning of life! You have absolutely nothing to lose from asking why the curtains are blue, or why the creepy interpretive dancers are shrouded in black.

However, you also have nothing to lose from asking why so much of pop culture is about white vs black, government vs revolutionaries. In fact, you should always question why a director would choose to show one group of people so much dirtier, lower, and shadier than themselves. At all times ask yourself what everyday art asks you to believe and which new ideas you’re encouraged to dismiss. All things in moderation, of course, but this kind of analysis is a good skill to exercise for double-checking a message before letting it sink in. 

That being said, this is definitely not a complete guide. The important thing about interpretation is to see that every last detail is a choice; from color and shape symbolism, camera angles, material choices, audience analysis, music, and so many others. Art rarely happens by accident, and life is a little more interesting when we can recognize that.