4 Clever Easter Eggs In Acclaimed Movies And Shows Hiding In Plain Sight

4 Riz Ahmed’s Band Shirts In Sound of Metal Tells A Parallel Story

Sound of Metal is about a character (Ahmed) who’s in a duo metal band until he starts to lose his hearing. It’s a great and pretty powerful film that honors the deaf community, features addiction, and has Ahmed absolutely destroying a drum set.

What’s also great is that the movie features Ahmed’s character Ruben wearing a bunch of rad band shirts, and what’s cooler than a band shirt? A band shirt that also tells a story. In this case, every punk shirt Ruben wears has a connection to what’s happening in the film at the time he’s wearing it. You could practically turn off the sound and read the movie via his shirts. Although you wouldn’t want to do that — the sound in the film is too good.

For instance, when we learn that Ruben’s a recovering addict, he’s wearing a Youth of Today hoodie:

Youth of Today is a hardcore punk rock band known for their straight edge philosophies — no drugs and no alcohol — so to find out Ruben’s had problems with addiction makes him wearing this hoodie all the more significant. 

Every shirt he wears has a story. The Einstrürzende Neubauten shirt we see while he contemplates surgery is from a German experimental group who uses scrap metal to produce soundscapes — echoing the distorted, metallic sound of cochlear implants (that we literally hear later in the movie). 

When Ruben meets Joe, the deaf community mentor who’s about to change Ruben’s life in a massive way, drummer boy’s wearing a shirt of a band that has greatly influenced the punk and metal music worlds.

It’s nice that these shirts and hoodies tell Ruben’s story, too. It might be the most intellectual band apparel to date.

3 The Meaning Of All Those Eggs In Watchmen (That’s Still Hidden)

With all the stark themes and strokes of subtleties filling up Watchmen with contrast and nuance, one thing is pretty obvious: That show is all about the egg. There’s an egg event in every episode — sometimes even more than one — and the playful way in which the show uses it to both tap into the vast collection of egg puns in existence as well as make us feel all kinds of unsettling things is just another reason the show is so magnificent.

So many meanings can be found in a simple egg. We have the “Which came first?” paradox, as well as the fragility of something that holds the force of life. Then there’s Angela’s very first scene in the series that is anything but subtle as she pretends to be a local baker and explains how eggs are separated:

“Egg whites are made of protein. When we whip them, we get bubbles, and it’s the proteins that form the walls of those bubbles. If we don’t have walls, it all comes tumbling down. Now, those walls are strong, but they won’t stay that way if just even a little bit of yolk gets mixed in with the whites. So that’s why we gotta separate them.”

There’s been many analyses and discussions on what the deal with all those eggs are, but its most profound meaning ties to the intergenerational trauma the show addresses, as eggs are known to be symbols of fertility, procreation, and most importantly, potential. 

Whatever creator Damon Lindelof had in mind here, those yolky goo’s are pretty hard to egg-nore.

2 The Sound In Dune Deserved All The Awards

There are a lot of things we can say about Dune, but we’re not going to say them today because one thing about the film that is indisputable is the fact that the sound feels like it’s out of this world. It is epic, people. Hans Zimmerman and the sound crew did a fine job on this one. Just listen to what’s happening here in this bananas scene:

Holy Harkonnen in a Hot Tub, that’s gnarly. And that’s not even the best sound scene, by far. The soundscapes in this movie are so good that a quick scan of Youtube shows many a fan having mixed hour-long audios of things like the Sardaukar chant. There’s one that’s literally just the sandworm thumper sound on repeat, for an hour. 

But there’s also a lot more to just sludge being poured into a tub and some character speaking like a demon in reverse. See, every different part of the world of Dune — from the Bene Gesserit to the Fremen to House Atreides, etc. — has a specific sound especially designed to represent them. Not a melodic theme, which is what we usually get in an epic. Only Paul’s journey has a theme like that. 

But Paul and House Atreides also have this special sound that plays when they're in a scene, and so does every other group. Think “Peter and the Wolf.”  And in scenes where more than one group is present, their signature sounds are combined to create wonderful effects — from “sound struggles,” to the perfect marriage of sounds. It totally adds to the dynamics between all the different forces at play in the story, and it is quite masterful.

1 The Yellow In Zodiac Is More Than Just “That ‘70s Color”

Hey, remember Zodiac? Of course you do. You probably haven’t stopped thinking about it since 2007. You still dream about David Fincher’s nightmare movie starring Jake Gyllenhaal as a cartoonist turned detective hot on the trail of that guy who killed people and left cryptic messages like a tween, don’t you? Don’t you?

Yeah, that’s the stuff — the stuff that’s covered with a strong yellow tinge that both screams “‘70s” and also “why does every frame smell like urine?!” Well, there’s a good reason for that, it turns out. See, the color pops up and is associated with the Zodiac’s crimes. Think the yellow cab, think the dry yellow field where that terrible murder took place. 

But it’s not just the killing scenes sporting this awful shade of cat puke. As has been pointed out, it’s also the color splashed about the city of San Francisco and onto every person that’s been affected by the Zodiac killings. Watch the trailer again, and notice the journalists and detectives with their yellow pencils and notebooks, sitting in their yellow chairs everywhere. See the yellow curtains framing the windows of the dark houses. Heck, Robert Downey Jr. even sports a dirty yellow shirt at one point … as do a lot of characters.

Yellow can be the color representing sunshine and joy, but it can also mean warning, toxic, and disease. It’s the perfect color for Fincher’s film, especially since it seeps into every corner of everything, and ends up staining everyone.

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Top Image: Warner Bros.