Rope centers on two men, Philip and Brandon, who, within the
first five minutes of the film, have killed their so-called friend, David, and
hid his body in a chest. They later host a dinner party and serve all the food
from the chest which has now become David’s grave. The guests at the party
include David’s father and aunt, his soon to be fiancée Janet, mutual friend
Kenneth, and former house master Rupert Cadell. The four men became close with
Rupert during their time at an elite all-male boarding school.
Brandon believes that he can kill
because he is a privileged, superior being. Therefore, he gets to decide who
should live and who should die. This is a belief shared by mass murderer and
evil dictator Adolf Hitler. They were both elitists, who find it necessary to
eliminate inferior beings to make the world a better place for the superiors.
Brandon represents the type of figure that America was deathly afraid of at the
time.
There are all kinds of actions that
suggest that Philip and Brandon share a homosexual relationship, which this
essay will later analyze in depth. However, both men are completely normal
looking. They don’t outwardly appear to be murderers or homosexuals. Despite
this, they are very dangerous, evident by the fact that they committed a cold-blooded
murder. With the Holocaust still haunting the American conscience and the Cold
War brewing on the horizon, Brandon and his beliefs represent the terrors that
Americans were grappling with. Nazi’s, communists, and homosexuals could be
hiding in plain sight, waiting to corrupt their children, kill their friends,
and shatter their morals. As quasi-Nazi supremacists and homosexuals, Brandon and Philip are the ultimate fear.
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