4. The Murder. There is no real demarcation between this section of the film and the preceding one. After leaving her apartment Emma walks to an executive building, enters, takes an elevator, goes down a corridor and into the factory owner's office, and (after an exchange of words) shoots him. The screen remains fractured throughout, and the two voices continue their "dialogue".
   However, there is an intensification of the general tendency toward decomposition. Increasingly the voices of Emma and Muriel are out of temporal alignment with the image, sometimes jumping ahead to events which have not yet been depicted, and sometimes lapsing back to anterior moments, in which might best be described as a linguistic vertigo. They also echo each other with greater and greater persistence, often reducing the words they speak to mere reverberant sounds. Actions ––Emma's entry into the office, the firing of the gun, the dialing of the telephone afterwards–– are shown over and over again, from different angles, until they seem devoid of meaning.
   The fantasmatic nature of Emma's behavior also becomes increasingly evident in this section of Splits. The fact that she inhibits a "time outside a time" ––a space in which the same performance is endlessly replayed, although the actors may change– is indicated not only by the film's formal repetitions, but through a number of additional theatrical and cinematic signifiers. Emma "(waits) in a frozen set for hours, rehearsing lines, inventing new ones"; she repeats "her words like a love poem, so many times, over and over"; she describes her verbal exchange with the factory owner as a "text".
   After what seems to be yet another metaphoric reference to the cinematic apparatus at the climatic moment of this sequence ("I hid my eyes when the shots crashed. There was another take, then another take ... the lights stay lit") that reference is abruptly literalized: we are given a shot of Emma's arm reaching with the gun from frame left into the view-finder of a camera aimed at her from frame right. Twice we watch while a male crew member turns over the chair on which the factory owner sits, sliding him to the ground.

   The father to whom Emma refers is of course not the late Mr. Zunz, but the symbolic father –– disembodied, omnipresent, a transcendental signifier which assimilates all actual fathers to itself, erasing their singularities and wrapping them in a "blizzard" of adequacy. A father who remains outside of history, in a mythic "time outside of time".
   Emma has in effect traded in one set of Oedipal desires for another, those of the daughter for those of the son. These desires, no less than the others, doom her to the compulsive repetition of a scenario which admits neither of completion nor egress. A scenario, moreover, which accomodates questions of capital, geography, politics, sexual difference only as metaphors for its own impoverished terms –– which buries all differences but its own "in the uniformities of snow and wind". Thus Emma kills the fac­tory owner not because she sees in him the representative of a class or sex opposed to her own, or even an antipathetic cultural order, but rather because she sees in him the father. Starving Asians, striking workers and flooded cities command her interest only as beaten children.
   The complicity of the cinematic apparatus in the maintenance of the Oedipal "figure" of "dance", as it is here called, is foregrounded not only in the murder scene but in the final section. Through this expose Splits addresses the pressing need for film to articulate a multitude of new and different fantasmatics,  fantasmatics which hold open to viewers and listeners other subject positions than those to which they have been so far confined, which gives them something other to desire than the death of the father or their own subordination.

   5. The Escape. The murder sequence comes to an end as Emma dials the phone, an event which is communicated by means of seven abrupt and highly repetitive close-ups. the last of which loses focus. A series of hand-held black and white shots follow, as Em­ma runs from the scene of the crime. A falling glass, a fluttering lace curtain, a magazine cover depicting the arrest of some political activists, a corridor, a stairway. Emma fumbling for her purse and gun on the floor, and a close-up of her eyes all com­municate her continued sense of disorientation. Again we catch a fleeting glimpse of a crew member with a camera. There is a grainy,  almost noir quality to these images.
However, Splits concludes with a dazzling, full-screen color shot of Emma passing through the revolving door of the office building to the outside. The camera does not exist with her; instead, it remains inside the door for almost six full revolutions, and is still trapped there as the last frame freezes. This is the most visually vertiginous moment of the film, and it continues for the viewing subject even after Emma's footsteps "crumble into reason" .
   As Emma emerges from the revolving doors we are told that "she gradually returned to normal and fell asleep wherever she was. Her dreams were very restful that day and there was no terror in her soul". She thus leaves behind not only the revolving doors, but the claustral confines of the Oedipal drama. What makes possible her escape from the paternal mise-en-scene in her sudden understanding that each of the players is "the keel of a view navigating a circumscribed space"; that (like the revolving doors) the actors in that tired tableau are "locked in a strange figure", doomed constantly to retrace the same circle, "dissociated" from history.
   The fact that the apparatus is left behind - that Emma secures her divorce from it at that moment as she abandons the beating fantasy - underscores the profound implication of classical cinema in the articulation and maintenance of Oedipal desire. It is to the disintegration of this alliance that Emma refers in the concluding words of the film:

   The "seminal death" is the extinction both of the devouring father and the devoured child. It is also Katz's own break with a certain avant-garde tradition, a tradition which responds to the terrifying legibility of classical cinema with an occlusion both of the subject and the object: which, appalled by the Oedipal drama. turns away from narrative altogether; and which, hoping to avoid the ideological coercion operated by traditional generic and representational codes, preoccupies itself instead with the pristine materiality of its "own" specific codes. The rupture - and the rapture - of Splits is the movement which it struggles to effect within the field of subjectivity and desire.