The movie Trading Places is one of my favorites. Like many films I love, it's full of visual art. As an adult, I now wonder: was this some kind of stealth cultural education on the part of the filmmakers? Subliminal pearls tossed before us kids who were there for the raunchy humor and Eddie Murphy's trademark laugh? The opening credits show a montage of famous bronze statues in Philadelphia, along with scenes of the divide between rich and poor that is the movie's main theme.
The overture of Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro , also a story of the poor scoring off the rich, plays over. One of the most interesting shots from cinematographer Robert Paynter looks up at Jamie Lee Curtis, playing the prostitute Ophelia, from the perspective of Dan Ackroyd, as the disgraced Louis Winthrop III, who sits on the ground after spending the night in jail and being thrown out of his bank.
It's a great shot. Curtis, flamboyant in a curly red wig and cheap fur jacket, stands at the vertical intersection of two unremarkable glass and concrete buildings. Claes Oldenburg's monumental sculpture Clothespin mirrors her from behind, a looming shadow or sentry. Clothespin is one of Oldenburg's many sculptures of everyday objects crafted on a huge scale. In the artist famously said, "I am for an art that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum. It's a nice counterpoint to Curtis's sexy, powerfully feminine Ophelia, whom we will soon see in a jaw-dropping ruched minidress.
And then without it. Oldenburg had kicked around the clothespin idea previously, considering it at one point for a public sculpture at the Dallas-Fort Worth airport. In the context of Trading Places , the clothespin can be read as a symbol for Ophelia and Louis, who team up romantically with each other before they team up with Eddie Murphy's Billy Ray Valentine to overthrow the callously rapacious Duke brothers in a commodities trading scheme involving frozen concentrated orange juice.
The clothespin could also be read to represent how Ophelia will help Louis hold it together—she will save him when he sinks into despair, she will press herself literally against him to keep him warm as he shivers with a fever in bed.
