The Eye Has It

Everyone knows that the musical sequences in Chicago are in Roxie's imagination. But what if the whole movie were in her imagination? No, we're not going to talk about the Illuminati and chemtrails, but we do have a fun Chicago conspiracy theory to share. The very first thing we see in Chicago is a close-up of Roxie's eye.

Why they eye? There are no other eye close-ups… not even at the end to close things out. But if we look to other movies that deal with distorted reality—like Vanilla Sky and Requiem For A Dream—you'll see that a close-up of an eyeball is often a neat visual cue that we're about to go way deep into a character's mind. In other words: fasten your seatbelts, because things are about to dreamscape-y.

So what if the whole movie is Roxie's imagination? What if the musical numbers were imaginative sequences within her fantasy world: dreams within dreams. Okay, it's a little Chicago-ception, but this would mean that Roxie never actually killed Fred Casely. Maybe she wasn't even in an affair with Fred Casely. Maybe she just imagined how to get famous—have an affair, kill a man, go through a trial, and sing some amazing numbers along the way.

That ka-pow sound you just heard was your mind exploding.