The Aviator

[Moosferatu]

Can anyone explain to me what was going on in that scene where he looks at the old guy sweeping right before he starts repeating "show me all the blue prints" over and over again? The first time I saw it I had no clue what flashed briefly on screen when he looked at the guy. I just saw it again and realized that they were actually a couple of shots from when he locked himself in his private theater. So, now it makes even less sense. Why would he being seeing flashes of something that hasn't even happened yet? Does anyone get what was going on?

[nsps]

1) The reason he became upset in the first place was that the guy was using a dry broom (he tells the plane designer whose name I can't remember to clean the floor with wet brooms from now on). A (mildly) obsessive-compulsive friend of mine confirmed that dry brooms are incredibly unsafe, and also said that the dog issue, as well as other ones, were very accurate.

2) The flashes into the future are of what Hughes's mental status would become show the triggering mechanism of the problems that are becoming increasingly difficult to suppress. Also, since the sweeper is an old man, as he looks at Hughes he is partly showing Hughes his mortality and his future. In Hughes's later life, he locked himself into his private theater on top of his Vegas Casino, so it has multiple meanings there. The flashes aren't meant to be flashbacks of Hughes's memory, but representations of his emotional state. Scorsese must have felt (perhaps wrongly, given your confusion) that the best way to inform the audience of his character's thoughts were to use images of future occurrences in which these feelings were brought to an extreme.

Hope that's mildly helpful.

[Moosferatu]

Yeah, I figured it might have been something like that. Thansk! Practically impossible to catch that from watching it once since you hadn't seen those scenes before and they go by so fast.