One cannot help noticing that apart from its comic and mythological layers “Scoop” also abounds in sexual imagery:
- a man in a boat;
- a woman in a box (where Splendini, as he terms it, “excites her molecules”, and not only hers (Sondra Pransky’s a.k.a. Jade Juilliard Spence’s) — during another performance, an older and less attractive woman is chosen from the audience to participate in the “experiment”, whom Splendini scorns later on during a conversation with Sondra — it is the young and beautiful Sondra who attracts him, not the old and unattractive woman he laughs at);
- a locked music room in the basement of Peter’s house next to a wine rack with lots of bottles sticking out from the wall, the room is full of music instruments that, according to Peter, “need to be played” (or at least that’s what he tells Sondra when he tries to lead her into temptation).
Later, when Sid and Sondra sneak into that music room to search for evidence, Sid takes a French horn from the collection and, holding it in his hand, asks Sondra whether she knows the joke about a musician who played the French horn and his wife; Sid never tells the joke in the film (because Sondra never asks him to), so the spectator can only speculate. After some time Sondra and then Sid both find important evidence under the horn.
The images of Splendini and Peter Lyman are obviously contrasting — Splendini is old and physically unattractive, he is also shown as a person frequently forgetting things (e.g. although he claims that he uses a mnemonic system, even remembering a simple sequence of digits (the access code to the music room) poses a difficulty to him: at first, he cannot remember it to get into the room, afterwards he cannot remember it to get out of it, while Peter gets in and out whenever he feels like it; even Sondra asks scornfully whether Splendini really needs a mnemonic system to remember just three figures).
Furthermore, Splendini tries hard to “charm people”, as he puts it, but Sondra finds his jokes stupid, while Peter attracts her at once and effortlessly at that. Finally, for security purposes Sondra introduces Splendini to Peter as her father — a choice Splendini obviously does not welcome.
Another thing to note are, well, teeth — they are referred to much too frequently to ignore the fact (about four or five times throughout the film, and this is not a movie about dentists); one of such instances is when Sondra tells Peter Lyman (a woman’s dream impersonated, the perfect man, with whom she is having an affair while investigating the case) that he has fine enamel. Teeth are a common symbol for vitality, creation, potency, because strong teeth are able to seize and bite the food, which is needed to maintain life in one’s body. Nothing of the kind (i.e. fine enamel, strong teeth) is said about Splendini.
Finally, Splendini perishes in a car accident driving a Smart car on the wrong side of the street — he fails to save the girl, she saves hereself, eventually; having failed to join in with the young, Splendini disappears.