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North by Northwest is famous because of one scene. Now, that doesn't mean the rest of it is lacking, as it should be common knowledge of its solidified place in the canon of the greatest American films in the history of the cinema, but the zenith is found in a classic Hitchcock concept: the image of the pursuer and the pursued. Its famous sequence of a crop-duster aircraft leaping towards Cary Grant's Roger O. Thornhill in the Midwest countryside - bullets flying near his dives for survival - is constructed through the context of a world unknown: a place not designed for your color or creed or gender or social status. It is an environment, depicted via the absurd logic of a home becoming a prison, which is entirely turned against you. It is what many people feel like when they wake up in the morning. Thornhill's anxiety of normal, simple structures and people, such as the bus and the man waiting for it, defines a clash between uncomfortable normalcy of culture and those who oppose the system because they don't know how else to live. In Hitchcock's universe, an airplane with assassins at the controls is an obvious occurrence, but for Thornhill, it is a symbol of confinement and hostile order taking hold of even the most inhuman machine and making it ruthless. What else to do but run?
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