What's Eating Gilbert Grape Entrapment Essay

There are many ways for a director to use film techniques to express an idea to an audience, and one such idea that was expressed to the audience of the visual text “What's Eating Gilbert Grape” directed by Lasse Hallstrom, was that of entrapment. This was achieved in the mommas death scene, by using: props, camera shots, lighting and music, to help the audience understand the idea of entrapment and how it relates to momma with how she is trying to break free of this idea.

Props was one technique used by the director to help the audience understand the idea of entrapment. This was done by using a couch, a prop commonly occupied in the Grape family home by momma, an obese widow, to hint at the fact that for many years the couch acted as a sanctuary for momma where she had everything thing done for her as she stayed put. This is like a family of birds where baby birds sit tight in a nest and have everything done for them, except in this case

In the momma’s death scene as momma is climbing the stairs, the director uses this technique of lighting along with a close up shot to keep the audience's attention focused on momma, which acts in a foreboding manner as if to suggest or hint at her death. This was done by having the camera angled upward with momma facing downward, so that the darkened lighting of the pale coloured roof above momma could be used to implore the audience to focus more on the brightly coloured face of momma, which draws in our eyes to concentrate on mommas facial expressions to gain a sense of how momma is feeling, rather than to look elsewhere. This shows the director wanted to subtly induce the audience into looking at the centre of attention of this scene, Momma, to give the foreboding effect of her