Phoebe in the Mirror
Perhaps the most striking image in the entire film is the image of Eve's young admirer Phoebe donning Eve's jacket, holding Eve's already-forgotten Sarah Siddons Award, and looking at herself in a three-fold mirror, her image multiplied infinitely around her. With this image, the viewer is transported into Phoebe's starry-eyed psyche. The celebrity life she dreams of is one in which her triumphant image is multiplied forever, a kind of sublime immortality and glory that knows no limits. The image shows that the desire for fame—for Phoebe and for Eve—is an insatiable one, a never-ending search for validation and acceptance that can never come.
Margo Onstage
Margo Channing is, of course, a brilliant and renowned stage actress. Thus, a great deal of her time is spent onstage. However, we never actually see her act in the play that she is supposedly so brilliant in. The only moments we see her onstage are when she is taking her bows at curtain call, and when she storms into the theater during the day and forces the creative team to tell her that they have chosen Eve to be her understudy. Sensing that she is being undermined by her own boyfriend and her most admiring collaborators, Margo takes center stage and puts up a monstrous and remarkably compelling fight. On the stage where she shines so brightly, Margo refuses to let the glib young Lloyd Richards tell her she is merely an instrument. She yells back at him and claims the stage as her own. In this moment, the play and real life bleed together ambiguously, and we begin to wonder, what is acting and what is life? Margo Channing is the most compelling actress of all, taking up space onstage with a brilliant fervor and a terrifying presence.
Margo Smoking at the Sarah Siddons Awards
When we first meet Margo, she is sitting at a table at the Sarah Siddons Award ceremony, calming smoking a cigarette. She is introduced to us by Addison as a star, but we do not yet know all that she has been through in her association with Eve. As Eve goes up to receive her Sarah Siddons Award, Margo simply sits in her seat, smoking a cigarette casually, her eyes narrowed knowingly. Margo is a woman who seems to have seen and heard it all, and this image shows us—even before we know much about her character—that she is not one to suffer fools or to be played for a fool. The image of Margo smoking a cigarette while watching the amoral young striver go up to receive her award communicates a great deal about the story.
Eve in the Rain
When we first meet Eve in flashback, she is a fanatical young admirer of Margo's; she attends every performance of Margo's play, and she waits outside the stage door every night, rain or shine. In an unstylish hat and a trench coat, Eve hardly looks like an aspiring actress. Rather, she looks like a crazed and misguided fan, someone who has become so overcome with appreciation for a celebrity that she forgets her own needs. Especially having just seen Eve as an award-winning actress at the Sarah Siddons Awards, the image of her as a pathetic autograph-seeking fan is an affecting contrast. The desperation of this image, a young impressionable girl waiting in the rain to meet her favorite actress, foreshadows the deep desperation that will drive her to build out an entertainment career for herself.
