The Age of Innocence
129
Woodward tells us that, with Newland’s and May’s upcoming marriage,
“two of New York’s best families would finally and momentously be
joined.” The multiplicity of objects, surfaces, designs, and images
fractures our attention, sending us back and forth from these details to
each room as a whole, while simultaneously our attention is further sub
divided by Woodward’s narration which, except for the explanation for
Mrs. Mingott’s downstairs bedroom, provides information unrelated to
the items the camera explores.
Scorsese’s use of paintings in particular creates a sense of
windowed multiplicity characteristic of hypermediacy. Paintings
dominate most of the film’s interiors; nearly every inch of the sets’ highceilinged walls is covered with them. As noted previously, Scorsese and
his designers relied heavily on late-nineteenth-century painting as models
for designing the film’s sets and costumes. In addition, Scorsese reports
that he “found the characters through the paintings” (Helmetag 164), as
he decided that each character’s home would be dressed with a different
set of paintings to reflect—and thus reveal—^his or her character. (Martin
Scorsese Interviewed). The paintings hanging in Ellen’s unorthodox
home in particular—^reproductions of two paintings from the Macchiaioli
School, a precursor of French Impressionism—are strikingly different
from those in the other characters’ homes, visually illustrating the
difference in Ellen’s world view from that of Old New York society
(Martin Scorsese Interviewed).
More to the point here, the walls hung with paintings call to
mind the heterogeneous “windowed style” of webpages and desktop
interfaces, as well as such pre-digital media as Dutch oil paintings of the
“art of describing” school. As Bolter and Grusin point out, the inclusion
of mirrors, windows, maps, and other paintings within these Dutch
paintings resulted in works that present “the world as made up of a
multiplicity of representations” (37), their hypermediacy arising from
their having “absorbed and captured multiple media and multiple forms
in oil” (37). In like maimer, Scorsese’s painting-filled walls present a
multitude of images, each of which, he states, tell a story so that his
characters’ living with the paintings would be “almost like a theatrical
experience” (Martin Scorsese Interviewed 24). Similarly, Kathleen
Murphy has equated these walls of paintings to banks of TV screens or
computer monitors. This hypermediacy reaches its apex in a visual pun
where Scorsese places Samuel Morse’s Gallery o f the Louvre (18311833)—in which the human figures are dwarfed by a towering wall filled