Dwan's framings seem to conspire together with the sets to create edges that operate somewhat like the cracks in memory (not necessarily a suggestible one). The unseen is not enough for it and the visible is too obvious and overcomes its powers almost immediately. What happens is that the framing and sets are combined together into an autonomous whole, such that the actors become like half-measures in comparison to it, or helpless contributors to its perfect functionality. It's not merely that we're obliged (via découpage) to recall who we're looking at when they've nearly disappeared from the shot and especially when these half-vanished figures are the subject of that very shot. Rather, these figurations prove how the frame works somehow like the memory: it "can't place it," so to speak, it can hardly remember whether Ballard shot McCarty's brother from front or behind. So whether or not past situations have an answer to the exigencies of the present debacle is insignificant. Dwan's sets function like cues for the memory of the frame to unleash itself on the actors. They seem all the more uncanny as they move haplessly between situations, operating simultaneously on the impulse of the present, with a constant mind towards a past that may or may not be legitimate. It would require numerous viewings to get a handle on all the different sides of Dwan's framings and what each side is concealing. For example, from the left-hand side we see how the edges of a shot are able to depict a ten-gallon hat as something unseen to us. The complexity with which events conspire together is immaculate enough to even render the confusion that hides within the trickster character of Dolly. But this is a universal precept for Dwan. Even if a shot contains a depth to it, it never feels like anything except an ironic comment on the tenacity of the singular plane that stretches out like a lexigraphic script. Whether a character is facing us directly, they are always seen from the side, as it were. So the unknown side of self-interest that conspires behind the purported regime of law and order—the judge's head half cut-off by the shot—corresponds nicely with the repeatedly invoked, Hobbesian motif of civilized society. What we see elsewhere, however, is the reckoning of a situation as it appears to these characters. McCarty castigates Johnson's attempted treachery by situating him in a humiliating place nearly out of the frame. Of course the entire interaction is the direct object of this shot. But the viewer has no choice but to look at where a kind of void is situated in Dwan's spaces, which is directly next to the actors.