Button And Button Sparknotes

“Button, Button” Film-Text Element Essay

In the short story “Button, Button” by: Richard Mattison there was a plot that portrayed greed and selfishness. A woman, who wanted money more than she wanted to be with her husband was offered $50,000 to press a button, and murder someone that she didn’t know, or thought she wouldn’t know. She was a conceded women who only caredd about herself, but learned her lesson when her husband was killed in a train accident. This writing was made into an episode on “Twilight Zone” and there were many similarities and differences throughout the scenes that were shocking yet equivalent to the story.
Richard Mattison is a writer with dark humor, and in the story, Norma, the wife of Arthur, had many flaws, and
The director, Peter Medak, made Norma way worse of a person than what she was truly shown as in the text, “‘Fifty thousand dollars, Arthur,’ Norma interrupted, ‘A chance to take that trip to Europe we’ve always talked about,’ ‘Norma, no,’ ‘A chance to buy that cottage on the island.’ ‘Norma, no.’ His face was white” (Mattison, 108). Norma wanted what any other person wants, she wants experiences, and in order to take trips, money is a big factor in that. Mattison wasn’t portraying Norma as a terrible person in this writing, he was portraying this character as a person falling into greed. This button was a trap and sadly Norma fell into it. Medak, in his film showed Norma as a “witch”, just an evil person. Throughout the episode there was no good shown in Norma whatsoever. In
I felt that same exact way when I was reading Mattison’s story. Norma wanted that $50,000 more than anything in the world, and pushing that button was always on her mind once she found out about it from Mr. Steward. “How ridiculous, she thought. All this furor over a meaningless button. Reaching out, she pressed it down. For us, she thought angrily. She shuddered. Was it happening? A chill of horror swept across her” (110). In the text Norma had finally decided to press the button. She had thought, this is stupid, nothing is going to happen, but something did happen, and the results weren’t good. The same suspense was shown in the episode on the TV show, and my heart had stopped when Norma hit that button. The camera angles in the shot were at a lower angle making Norma look powerful and incharge, and the music playing in the background made everything Norma was doing looked suspicious and wrong. In the story Mattison portrayed Norma as desperate and afraid of the button. Both text and film elements had shown lots of promise of suspense, and Medak stayed faithful to the suspense throughout the