When Judith comes into the kitchen where Larry is grading homework, she starts off her announcement that Larry is going to be sloughed off in favor of Sy by saying, "Honey?" Larry, not really seeming to listen at first, responds with an automatic and barely audible echo of this term of endearment. (I recommend turning on the subtitles on the DVD, so the dialogue can be followed better.) This scene is where the "I haven't done anything" thematic element--if that's the right term--first appears. Larry in defending himself against Judith wanting to divorce him says, "I haven't done anything." Then Judith says, after Larry more or less asks, that she and Sy haven't "done anything." Whether they have done the deed together is one of the mysteries of the film, like the dybbuk question at the beginning.
In the Columbia Record Club call scene, Larry says he didn't do anything and Dick Dutton's voice explains or tries to explain how doing nothing is what resulted in his being sent Santana Abraxas. So, doing nothing also has consequences, which is a rather complementary idea to what Larry tells Clive about actions having consequences.
When Arlen--with studied casualness standing at the office door each time he is seen--asks Larry about publications of his that might be of interest to the Tenure Committee in their deliberations, Larry says, "No, I haven't done anything, I haven't published."
When Arthur is brought to the house in handcuffs by the police, he pleads, "I didn't do anything!"
So at this moment I count four scenes of I haven't done anything in the movie.
And finally for today, a thought from The Moviegoer by Walker Percy: "There was this also: a secret sense of wonder about the enduring, about all the nights, the rainy summer nights at twelve and one and two o'clock when the seats endured alone in the empty theater. The enduring is something that must be accounted for. One cannot simply shrug it off."
This is something I thought of myself, in regard to a particular new classroom where I took the first semester of calculus at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, years before I read any of Percy's books. Those empty, unobserved seats attached to the floor in the classroom while no one is in there--that fact needs to be considered, thought about, questioned. Percy said it better, though: Accounted for. How the heck can that be achieved? I bring this up here because this is what quantum mechanics deals with, sort of. A quantum system supposedly endures quite deterministically, and quite beyond observation, until the moment it is subjected to a "measurement" or "observation." Then quantum probability and the Copenhagen interpretation of observation--or some other interpretation--must be considered.
The lonely enduring of Schrodinger's Cat in his or her box unobserved during the one hour period in which the poison gas has a 50% probability of being released must somehow be accounted for.
