Having drawn the categorical lines between the various uses of the screened hand, I hope it might be helpful to offer a brief analytical example of how these can be applied to a single film. This concluding approach should reveal two methodological qualities at the heart of the whole project. Firstly, the method can be tested in its usefulness for exploring how cinematic texts are working – thematically, with specific symbolic references, stylistically, and in the construction of narrative and character – and concentration on the hand should ideally expose elements of these facets that might otherwise have been less apparent. Secondly – and perhaps in contravention of any proposal that might suggest a neat and hermetically clear-cut taxonomy – consideration of the five strands within one film should reveal areas of conceptual overlapping, blurring, and dialogical interfacing. In this respect Steven Spielberg's 1975 blockbuster Jaws is a useful model. At different instances in the film, hands are visually and/or aurally framed, in images and/or dialogue, as important components of the construction of meaning, affect, and pleasure for the spectator. I will take each of these in the order in which I set out the preceding chapters.

Of the core themes apparent in the film those that come to mind directly include: man's fight with, and subjugation of, nature; the social position of masculinity as identified and performed; the conflict between human welfare and the profit motivations of capitalism; and the relative benefits of formal (academic) learning over lived experience (and vice versa).