“Always be escalating,” then, can be understood as “Be alert, always, to the possibilities you have created for variation.” If an element recurs, the second appearance is an opportunity for variation and, potentially, escalation. Let’s say that, in a film, we show a place setting (plate, spoon, fork, knife), and then the camera tracks across three other, identical place settings. That’s static. But make the right adjustments to each of the four plate/spoon/fork/knife arrangements, show these in sequence, and that more variation-blessed sequence will be felt to have escalation in it and, therefore, meaning. For example: let’s say that, as we track over the plates in sequence, we see: (1) correct/full arrangement (plate/spoon/fork/knife), (2) spoon missing, (3) spoon and fork missing, (4) all the silverware missing (only the plate remains); this will be felt to mean, let’s say, “evacuation” or “diminishment.”

Here, the pattern of variation isn’t too neat or directly metaphorical. (The clothes don’t, for example, go from unfrozen to frozen, as Nikita and Vasili soon will, but are frozen the first time we see them.) We barely notice the variations at speed but, on closer examination, feel them to be perfectly pitched. Rather than neatly spitting out some predetermined, reductive meaning, they produce a feeling of mystery, the metaphorical world lightly infiltrating the physical.