Literature Film Quarterly (1999) - It's the cold war, stupid: An obvious history of the political Hitchcock
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(c) Literature Film Quarterly (1999)
It's the cold war, stupid: An obvious history of the political Hitchcock
At the risk of sounding stupid and obvious, I'd like to point out that this paper is only incidentally about Alfred Hitchcock. Its true subject is indicated by the prominence of the two most important words in my title, which are stupid and obvious -- that is. the words "stupid" and "obvious." What I'd like to talk about, A propos of some ideas about Hitchcock's cold-war films, is the role of the stupid and the obvious in the process of interpretation. And the best way for me to begin is with two anecdotes, both ostensibly about Hitchcock, but really about the vital importance of the stupid and the obvious.
The first anecdote is one of the best-known stories in the Hitchcock annals. Having decided that uranium hidden in wine bottles would make a good MacGuffin for Notorious, Hitchcock and his screenwriter Ben Hecht went to see Robert Milliken at Cal Tech to ask him how big an atom bomb would be. This was still before Hiroshima, and Milliken's reaction was to ask if Hitchcock and Hecht were trying to get themselves arrested along with Milliken. The filmmakers were working on an impossible idea, Milliken went on, and they'd better think of something less preposterous. Later, Hitchcock found out that following this subversive meeting, the FBI had put him under surveillance for three months.
Now the point of this anecdote isn't to tell us anything new about Hitchcock, who's presenting himself as a lucky guesser about the topicality of uranium rather than a director with unexpected expertise in quantum mechanics. (Many readers, in fact, will probably share my suspicion that it doesn't really tell us anything new about the FBI, either.) If you told this story to a student who said, "Wow, I never thought about the possibility that Hitchcock might be a Nazi spy," you'd just roll your eyes because the student had missed the point of the story, which is precisely not to suggest any new reading of history, but to remind us of a reading we already know: in this case, that only somebody as stupid as the FBI could possibly suspect somebody like Alfred Hitchcock of being a danger to national security. The story raises the possibility of Hitchcock as a threat to national security only to ascribe that belief -- the belief even in the possibilitv that Hitchcock might be a security threat -- to somebody else, somebody too stupid to realize what everybody knows: that Hitchcock's reputation as an important filmmaker ought to indemnify him against such wild accusations as Milliken's and such paranoid behavior as the FBI's.
The story works, then, by drawing a line between what everybody knows -- what I'll call the obvious -- and the people who are too stupid to realize what everybody knows. People like the FBI agents are so stupid, in fact, that they can hardly be called people at all, since (by definition) they don't know what everybody knows, and therefore aren't part of everybody. In drawing a line between the FBI and the rest of us, the story -- and this is its real function -- provides a comic bonding experience for the rest of us by congratulating us on knowing what everybody knows. Why do we deserve to be congratulated for knowing no more than everybody knows? Because we're smarter than the FBI, which is too stupid to know it.
This dialectic between the obvious and the stupid motivates a lot of great anecdotes that congratulate their audience on what they already know, but it may seem to have little to do with the writing of interpretations that propose to tell people things they don't already know. I hope my second anecdote, however, will clarify this relation -- although the anecdote itself is so much less well-known that, as far as I know, this is the first time it's ever been told.
One morning at Baylor University's 1996 Hitchcock conference, I wandered into a session on Hitchcock and the Cold War. The first paper in the session argued that Marnie, though it might seem apolitical, was actually structured by a cold-war logic of the sort outlined in Robert Corber's admirable book In the Name of National Security. The second paper discovered a similar cold-war logic in North by Northwest and James Cameron's True Lies. The third paper, again citing Corber, found it in Vertigo. Although I hadn't then read Corber's book, I found its leading argument pretty familiar by now -- that Hitchcock's films of the 1950s "limited the potentially endless dispersal and displacement of the spectator's desire by bringing it into alignment with the nation's security interests," and, "by invoking the homophobic categories of Cold War political discourse ... virtually guaranteed that gender and nationality functioned as mutually reinforcing categories of identity" (6). So after the fourth paper returned to North by Northwest to identify the United States government as the Oedipal father, and the floor was opened to questions, I was emboldened to ask the panelists if they could name any American film of the 1950s or early 1960s that wasn't a Cold War allegory. None of them could, though I got the impression they weren't really trying. (Once I had thought about it, I had no trouble assimilating films as different as The Desperate Hours and Gigi and Breakfast at Tiffany's to Corber's cold war model, and I wasn't trying that hard myself.) So I asked the panel if every contemporaneous film incorporated a similar political subtext, what was the point in revealing that subtext in any particular film. This question, I'm sorry to say, brought the session to an end as abruptly as the revelation that I was with the FBI and I'd been following the panelists for three months might have done, and ever since then I've wondered why.
Notice that what was under debate in my question and the panelists' pregnant silence wasn't the accuracy of Cold War interpretations of Hitchcock but their obviousness and the ways that obviousness might have limited or secured their aptness. My question attempted to trivialize the political reading of Hitchcock's SOs films by making it sound self-evidently obvious. If everybody knows that Hitchcock's films from Strangers on a Train to Psycho use the discourses of national security -- in particular, systematically valorizing the nuclear family dominated by a professional male and stigmatizing the homosexual villain -- to organize the characters' desires and the audiences' fantasies, and if virtually all contemporaneous films adopt similarly politicized mobilizations of desire, then what is to be gained by tracing the operation of this pattern in any one exemplary film?
The assumption behind my question, in other words, was that scholarly discourse engages to tell its audience something new, something that isn't already obvious. Unlike anecdotes, which can be savored even by an audience that already knows them well, a scholarly paper is bound by John Searle's well-known dictum: "No remark without remarkableness." Each of the panelists, I was implying, was presenting a cold-war reading of a Hitchcock film as if it were important because of its novelty; but if they all agreed on their readings and their terminology -- all of them gave pride of place to Corber as if he had set a standard for political readings of Hitchcock -- then why didn't they assume that we would agree with them too, and so consider their assertions true but unnecessarily so?
The scene I am describing, of course, rarely gets played out at academic conferences; its site is more often the undergraduate classroom -- when I ask some poor student, for example, what Hitchcock does to make the shower scene in Psycho so threatening for the audience, and the student replies, accurately but not helpfully, that well, for one thing, Janet Leigh gets killed in that scene. The appropriate response to this sort of obvious answer is not "That's wrong," but "Yes?" -- a question whose subtext is "You need to go beyond the obvious, stupid."
Needless to say, the panelists themselves took a rather different view of this agon. After all, they hadn't collaborated on their papers, nor were they contending that Hitchcock had intentionally turned his films into cold-war recruiting posters; discovering that their analyses took such similar forms convinced them all the more strongly of the power of their insights and their potential applicability to a wide range of films. So when I asked whether they could think of any cold-war films that weren't inflected by cold war ideology, they figured I was the one who was stupid, since the point each individual paper had considered too tendentious to make, but the papers taken together rendered obvious. was that all movies from a given period will carry a political subtext marked by the orthodoxies of that period -- exactly the point my question was making in spite of its triumphantly hostile tone. How could I miss the point that if some apparently neutral films from a given period had a political subtext, many others would as well? Just as I thought they were stupid because they were proclaiming the obvious as if it were noteworthy, they thought I was stupid because I couldn't even accept the obvious as true.
Despite our disagreements over just what was going on in this exchange, it seems to me that what brought the panelists and me to an impasse was precisely our unspoken agreement on a deeper rule of academic debate: that the function of scholarly discourse in the humanities is to make the tendentious obvious through persuasive argument. A premise that cannot be made persuasive -- the premise, let's say, that Vertigo failed at the box office because Hitchcock extended his usual cameo appearance by substituting himself for James Stewart in all the film's long shots -- can hardly serve as the point of a scholarly argument. But a premise which is already obvious -- the premise, for instance, that Vertigo is unusual among Hitchcock films because it has an unhappy ending -- is equally inappropriate as the point of a scholarly argument because it contravenes the fundamental promise of scholarship to tell us something new -- a promise by which all scholars are bound until they become administrators.
In talking about the important questions these two anecdotes raise about the role of the obvious in the act of interpretation, I've chosen "interpretation," with all its historical affinities with the humanities, as a term broad enough to cover the analysis of literary and cinematic texts that produces the discourses of literary and cinema studies; the interrogation of historical and legal documents that underlies the writing of history and law; and the critical examination of the world around us that's at the heart of philosophy and science. Despite my carping argument to the conferees at Baylor, it is clear that interpretation would grind to a halt without frequent doses of the obvious. Interpretation begins with what's obvious or axiomatic -- what we can take it for granted that everybody knows -- and then moves toward an analysis that defines its utility and originality in contradistinction to the obvious. In its aspiration to tell the truth about the past, for example, history has an unmistakable tropism for the obvious -- the stories that bring communities together by becoming the consensual myths of those communities' genesis and development. Besides, where would history behow would students ever be motivated to study and remember it -- if it weren't for myths retailing the obvious? Even myths that everybody knows are myths -- Robin Hood stealing from the rich and giving to the poor, George Washington admitting that he chopped down the cherry tree, the myths of the frontier and the White Man's Burden and trickle-down economics -- play a constitutive role in a community's self-image. For better or worse, every history that offers a new version of the past -- for example, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's recent Hitler's Willing Executioners, or, for that matter, Corber's In the Name of National Security -- has to root itself in the very interpretations it is rejecting, the ones its target audience now finds obvious -- in order to get a hearing, because the true domain of history, as of all humanistic discourse, is not the original or the tendentious, but the arguable, the contested area between the obvious and the outrageous or unprovable.
Interpretation depends on the obvious in a second crucial sense when it demarcates the boundaries of the arguable and establishes just what is and is not to be put under debate. Every scholar is familiar with phrases like "John Searle's well-known dictum" or "it is clear that interpretation would grind to a halt" or indeed "every scholar is familiar" that mark the obvious not only as a rhetorical point of departure for the arguable but as an invitation to individual readers to see themselves as part of a community that shares assumptions and procedures which are assumed, for the purpose of any given interpretation, to be foundational. Such phrases define the arguable by establishing ground rules about what is not, or what is assumed not to be, arguable. Even though all interpretations, whatever their focus, compete with alternative interpretations that they have to characterize as incomplete or imperceptive or otherwise stupid if they're to make a case for themselves, interpretation cannot simply conflate the obvious with the stupid, since the obvious provides not only an indispensable point of departure for their arguments and an exhortation to communal norms that make argument possible but the goal of a new consensus that every argument seeks to create, even though reaching beyond consensus to unanimity would render future interpretations unnecessary. Interpretation is not simply a discourse stretched between the obvious and the outrageous -- although it is that -- but a dialectic between the old, rejected obvious and the new, improved obvious each interpreter seeks to inculcate, all the while strenuously insisting that this particular interpretation is anything but obvious. In this paradoxical sense, the obvious is not simply the enemy of interpretation, but the condition that makes it necessary and in principle its goal as well.
In theorizing history contemporary historiographers like Hayden White and Simon Schama have argued that the truths of history are themselves historically contingent -- that each community generates the kinds of history it needs to sustain its claims to power and identity, even though those histories are inevitably subject to further revision as new communities rise to power with needs for their own new histories. This notion of history as a narrative site of endless negotiations and renegotiations -- a soap opera subject to eternal rewrites by a committee whose members never even meet except at academic conferences -- rather uncomfortably recalls my anecdote about Hitchcock and the FBI, since history is always threatening to collapse into an anthology of old stories which had no higher goal than uniting their communities against the outsiders too stupid to accept them, and which are always being outmoded by new stories with no higher goal despite their smug revisionist fers or, and which may not even have been true in the first place.
Recent theorists of interpretation, faced with potentially devastating attacks on their activities from critics charging them with arbitrariness or subjectivity or solipsism -- why argue for a particular interpretation as more timely or comprehensive than earlier interpretations if somebody else will just produce an interpretation next week that's more timely or comprehensive than yours? -- have therefore been at pains to theorize the relation between the obvious and the arguable, though they rarely identify this relation in such homely terms. One theorist who does is Stanley Fish, who defends the integrity of the work of interpretation even though interpretations are constantly subject to change by arguing that one cannot, properly speaking he a skeptic, and one cannot be a skeptic for the same reason that one cannot be a relativist, because one cannot achieve the distance from his own beliefs and assumptions that would result in their being no more authoritative for him than the beliefs and assumptions held by others or the beliefs and assumptions he himself used to hold. The conclusion is tautological but inescapable: one believeS what one believes, and one does so without any reservation.
In describing the dilemma of the "critic or teacher [who] felt compelled ... to give up an interpretation because it no longer seemed as self-evident as it once did," Fish writes consolingly:
Since you will always believe in something, there will always be something to teach. and you will teach that something will all the confidence and enthusiasm that attends belief, even if you know, as I do, that the belief which gives you something, and gives it to you so firmly, may change.... In short, we try to persuade others to our beliefs because if they believe what we believe, they will, as a consequence of those beliefs, see what we see: and the facts to which we point in order to support our interpretations will be as obvious to them as they are to us. (Is There 361, 364, 365)
Despite his proclivity for framing his arguments in spiritual autobiography, Fish never identifies any particular sources for his model of interpretation. Whether or not he borrowed the model directly from Thomas Kuhn's influential book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, his argument resembles Kuhn's so closely that the two have often been attacked on the same grounds. Kuhn's own argument most closely resembles Fish's in its cognate distinction between "normal science" -- the kinds of research, "firmly based upon one or more past scientific achievements" that constitute and illustrate "the body of accepted theory," which are found in textbooks -- and scientific revolutions. which are based on transitions or shifts from old to new paradigms -- that is, assumptions or ways of defining the physical world or a scientific problem that are "sufficiently unprecedented to attract an enduring group of adherents away from competing modes of scientific activity," and "sufficiently open-ended to leave all sorts of problems for the redefined group of practitioners to resolve" (10). This last stipulation is vital, because a crucial feature of a successful paradigm is that for all its sense of obviousness, it leaves its practitioners something to do. As Fish has remarked of the endless labors of the Milton Society and the Spenser Society: "It is the business of these societies first to create the work and second to make sure that it will never get done" ("No Bias" 743).
Kuhn's scientists, like Fish's humanists, shuttle back and forth between a normative certainty in the truth or utility of their paradigms and the occasional, momentous sense of communal doubt that leads them to embrace a new, superior paradigm as equally obvious. What makes scientific revolutions so revolutionary is, by definition, their contrast with the normal certitudes of experimental science. Although Kuhn acknowledges that "the scientific enterprise as a whole does from time to time prove useful, open up new territory, display order, and test long-accepted belief," he adds, "Nevertheless, the individual engaged on a normal research problem is almost never doing any one of these things" (38). Instead, Kuhn equates "normal science" with "puzzle-solving" -- "achieving the anticipated in a new way," as the scientist is spurred on by the challenge of intellectual puzzles and the certainty of a solution (35, 36).
The achievement that made Kuhn's argument so influential -- his book constitutes something of a paradigm shift itself -- was his displacement of the old, progressive model of scientific revolution (scientists move from the inaccurate beliefs of yore to ever more precise and correct beliefs about the physical world) by a new model based on social psychology (scientists work within a given paradigm until it fails to satisfy them, embrace a new paradigm only under duress, and then work within the new paradigm not because it is more accurate or comprehensive but because it suits their needs and assumptions better). I am not well-enough versed in the history of science to say whether Kuhn's description of scientific revolutions is apt, but I have serious reservations when it is applied, as it has been so often and so indiscriminately, to academic discourse in the humanities.
It is no wonder why the model of interpretation Fish adopts from Kuhn -- we all inhabit our beliefs about the world, or science, or history, or a given text, as if they were obvious and self-evident though we accept the possibility that some future change in our thinking may come to make them look stupid and replace them by a new set of beliefs we will inhabit as equally self-evident -- has been so widely influential in the humanities, for it reconciles in a stroke two commonsensical but apparently incompatible beliefs: the belief that interpretations made in good faith can be defended as obvious, and the belief that contrary interpretations will seem equally obvious to those who hold them. and will come to seem obvious to whoever is persuaded to adopt them. But I do not think this model describes very well what I do in my own critical work, and I think it is even more remote from what I do in my teaching. Let me propose a different model of humanistic discourse instead.
Fish, like Kuhn, assumes that what academics of every stripe spend most of their time doing is what we might call normal humanities, normal interpretation -- inhabiting and expounding positions whose truth seems obvious and self-evident. From time to time some paradigm shift may force a teacher to rethink the position he or she has been accustomed to take for granted. When the shift is complete, the teacher will inhabit, and will be able to expound, a new position that seems equally self-evident.
Consider the implications of this argument. When you publish scholarly books or papers, or when you stand up in conferences to address your colleagues, how often does it seem to you that what you're saying is so self-evidently true that anyone who doesn't agree with it must be stupid? And how often do you offer your theories about history or interpretation as just that -- theories on the very edge of your professional competence and temperamental certainty rather than their center -- and you offer them in a hypothetical, let's-try-it-on mode rather than a categorical, listen-up-maggots mode? Tempting as it is to believe, as you read the reviews that greet your new book, that the reviewers divide into the smart people who agree with what you say because its truth is obvious and the stupid people who just don't get it, I doubt that most humanists read reviews this way, because for all the solidity of their physical presence, there's something deeply, immitigably tentative about scholarly books, some sense that any argument worth making to our professional colleagues is not obvious but by definition arguable.
The place where we think we're stating the obvious is, I suppose, the classroom, where our students come to adopt our beliefs -- at least until the day of the exam -- rather than challenging them, and where, by convention, we can therefore get away with dispensing the same bromides, the same interpretations, the same outlines of history year after year, courtesy of the same yellowing set of lecture notes. But here Fish's model seems to me even less apposite. It is true enough that when I teach the technology of film, for example, I seldom vary much in what I say, since low-key lighting and wide-angle lenses continue to work much the same from year to year -- even though I do try to be sensitive to the possibilities inherent in new special-effects technologies or new constructions of such familiar elements of the mise-en-scene as cigarettes. But my interpretations of particular films, film genres, historical periods in filmmaking, or the relations between films and their cultures generally, rarely stay the same, because unlike technical data, they are constantly being challenged by students' own ideas in class discussions and papers, by the different configurations each new course filmography creates, by the release of new films that encourage me to reinterpret their progenitors, and by the restlessness that always makes me want to come into the classroom with something new, something different, something I'm not quite sure about myself. If I may presume to generalize from my own experience: I don't think academics spend most of their class time affirming, asserting, attesting, expounding, maintaining, pontificating, or otherwise stating the obvious: I think they spend most of their time, or at least they try to spend most of their time, challenging, considering, exploring, hypothesizing, pondering, provoking, questioning, searching, suggesting, wondering, and otherwise needling their students to think for themselves.
Of course it often happens that I have nothing new to say about a film because my interpretation has come to seem self-evident. But when this happens, I normally stop teaching the film, because there's no point in telling students something that seems obvious, and because the dynamic that develops when a student disagrees with a cherished truism, as opposed to a fresh hypothesis, can turn ugly, since my goal in class is to provoke arguments, not to win them. Ten years ago, when I was working on a book on Hitchcock, I taught Vertigo constantly -- one lucky student told me he'd studied it four times in four different classes with me -- but eventually I settled into an interpretation of Vertigo that satisfied me so much that there was no point in teaching it any more. So I moved on to other films -- not, as Fish suggests. because there's always something obvious to teach, but because there's always something arguable -- something that, thankfully, isn't obvious.
In other words, the centrality of the arguable, the true domain of interpretation, breaks down the distinction between the normal certitudes and the momentously abnormal paradigm shifts Fish considers so central to interpretation. Reed Way Dasenbrock, borrowing Donald Davidson's distinction between an interpreter's "prior theory" -- "a set of assumptions about the dispositions, beliefs, and language use of the speaker/writer" -- and his or her "passing theory" -- "a modified version of the prior theory adjusted to fit what we have learned about the other" -- argues against Fish that the end point of interpretation "is not a reification of our own prior theory," because interpreters adjust their prior theories in the direction of what they take to be a provisional agreement between speaker/writer and interpreter.... There is ... no necessary relation between a text and the passing theory an interpreter develops in response to it, no indisputably "correct" interpretation. Prior theories and passing theories are both irreducibly plural, and this is in accord with our actual experience of interpretation. But if there is no perfect meeting of minds, the minds that have interacted do not remain unchanged in the exchange. Prior theories are never monolithic, never an exact match of each other or an exact match for the situation. Prior theories, therefore, always undergo modification in the situation for which and in which they are advanced.
Even theorists like myself who prefer Dasenbrock's account of interpretation to Fish's are left with several questions. If prior theories of interpretation are always plural and always subject to modification by the situations that transform them into passing theories, and passing theories are always tentative and provisional -- if, in short, interpretation is essentially transactional rather than monolithic and positivist. then why do we so often feel positive in our interpretations? Why do we sometimes give papers or write essays in which our theories or interpretations, so novel to us that they demand public utterance, seem at the same time self-evident, even though they fly in the face of beliefs we held so recently? Why, for that matter, does Fish maintain with apparent sincerity that every intellectual position he has occupied always seems self-evident to him until new evidence forces him to abandon it for another position that seems equally self-evident, so that, except for those brief paradigm shifts, he is never not positive in his beliefs, however frequently they change?
The answer, I think, is that in reaching a new interpretation of a particular text or a more general intellectual problem, we often do not merely outgrow our old interpretation but disavow it. That is, we pretend to our audience, and often to ourselves, that we have never thought otherwise than as we do now, and dismiss the person who did think that way (a way that, as often as not, was crucial to our reaching the new perspective which enables us to disavow the old) as either stupid -- someone who believes what no intelligent person could believe now -- or more often consensually faceless, one of the anonymous others who believe the obvious. The mark of disavowal is to make the obvious (what we used to believe, but what we now disavow and externalize as what someone else, or everyone else. believes) into the stupid, so that what everybody believes, which would be a perfectly good basis for most social conversations, becomes the bete noire of humanistic interpretation, the one thing no one wants to be caught believing. Fish notoriously manages this maneuver by discussing his previous avatars as if they were other people who were simply wrong, though the present-day Fish is never either wrong or at all tentative in his beliefs; interpreters less deft or original who change their interpretations simply ignore their own earlier pronouncements or externalize them as examples of what "we" used to believe. (A necessary corollary of such a positive position, of course, is that we never shall think otherwise than we do now -- a position Fish has also managed with great resourcefulness.)
Given the inevitable mutability and disavowal of earlier interpretations -- the only true constants in the history of interpretation -- it seems clear that although there may be such a thing as normal science, there's no such thing as normal humanities, because the very nature of humanistic thought. unlike what Kuhn calls the normal experimental puzzles of science, is to challenge the assumptions of its participants, rather than to move toward conclusions whose existence the community presumes. Hence the state of affairs Fish considers normal -- the sharing of self -- evident assumptions within an interpretive community -- is profoundly abnormal within a community of scholars who have anything to say to each other at all. If I began this essay, "Alfred Hitchcock was born in London on August 13, 1899," my audience who wait restlessly for me to get to the point that would make the essay worthwhile -- the arguable, non-obvious premise which, paradoxically, is the normal condition of humanistic discourse. But if I began with one of Corber's cutting-edge argumentsfor instance, "implicit in [Vertigo's] emphasis on the consequence of Scottie's lack of historical knowledge is a critique of the Beats and their rebellion against the stifling conformity of the 1950s," or "the remake [of The Man Who Knew Too Much] helped to consolidate the postwar settlement by suggesting that women who tried to combine raising children and pursuing a career were not only irresponsible but unpatriotic" (159, 148) -- the audience would think it was business as usual, no matter how strenuously they disagreed with what I was saying, because they would recognize that I was making a serious claim on their attention from the start because I was advancing an argument that was eminently arguable.
My hunch is that if I did adopt one of Corber's arguments as a point of departure, some readers would think it was stupid because it was so outrageous, while others would think it was stupid because it was so obvious. I would have no defense against the readers who thought it was too obvious; but to those who thought it was too outrageous, I could at least point out that the tide of history seemed to be against them, since recent books like Jonathan Rosenbaum's Movies as Politics and Margot Henriksen's Dr. Strangelove iv America -- not to mention the jaundiced re-examinations of Hollywood history collected in Mark Carnes's Past Imperfect -- strongly suggest that we're in the middle of a period in film studies marked by a radical re-politicizing and re-historicizing of the timeless masterpieces of yesterday, and that what was unthinkable a few years ago is well on its way to representing a new consensus.
Interpreters, of course, have long been taught that interpretation itself is the humanistic activity that corresponds roughly to the normal experimental science Kuhn finds in textbooks. What kinds of activity do we undertake when everybody agrees on a theoretical framework or a methodological procedure? In English departments like my own, we use consensual paradigms to interpret texts; philosophy professors across the campus write critical commentaries on canonical philosophers and what they take to be the standard philosophical problems; historians undertake research into what really happened when Montcalm's forces were defeated by Wolfe's or Hitler attacked the Jewish problem. We might say that in between revolutionary paradigm shifts, what we do is interpret the available evidence in the light of currently fashionable theoretical principles. But the correspondence that contrasts normal science and interpretation, on the one hand, with paradigm shifts and theoretical revolutions, on the other, is too rough to be useful. In particular, it breaks down in two crucial ways that emerge from an obvious history of the political Hitchcock.
By an obvious history, I mean not a history of Hitchcock's political films everybody can agree on, but, as the accompanying chart will suggest, a history of what critics of Hitchcockfirst journalists, then academic interpreters, and most recently film theorists -- have considered obvious about the political tendencies of his films. For the sake of convenience, I've isolated four distinct historical moments in Hitchcock criticism, but I don't claim any special privilege or significance for those moments, except that the consensual beliefs we find in them are clearly distinct from each other, and bounded in each case by stupid things nobody but the FBI could ever believe, and outrageous things nobody but a crackpot would ever suggest.
In 1945, the year the FBI keeps Hitchcock under surveillance for three months, everybody else in the world knows that Hitchcock is an expert entertainer, an apolitical filmmaker unlike, for example, Frank Capra or William Wyler or Elia Kazan. Although he's made films like Foreign Correspondent and Lifeboat on political subjects, those films represent no more than consensual American national sentiment about the war. Back in the 1930s, when Britain's relations with its European neighbors were considerably more ambiguous, Hitchcock's political thrillers -- the first Man Who Knew Too Much, The 39 Steps, Sabotage, The Lady Vanishes -- either conscientiously expunged every identification of particular rogue nations (Mr. Memory dies at the point of telling Hannay what country's foreign office he's working for) or give the nations phony names like Bandrika. Despite Hollywood's show of national solidarity by awarding Rebecca the Best Picture Oscar for 1940, filmmakers like Michael Balcon who stayed behind in Britain widely consider Hitchcock an opportunist who abandoned his country at her darkest hour.
By 1969, Hitchcock's status is completely different. Film study has now made dramatic inroads into the academy, and no academic critic would describe Hitchcock as merely an expert entertainer anymore. Thanks largely to the work of the Cahiers journalists in France, Robin Wood in England, and Andrew Sarris in America, he is now widely acknowledged as an auteur, a creative artist whose humanistic themes have universal import -- a position urged at every point, as Robert Kapsis has pointed out, by the publicity machine at Universal, and consolidated by the English publication two years earlier of Francois Truffaut's book-length interview. The only false notes in the consensual hagiography is the dullness of Hitchcock's two latest political thrillers, Torn Curtain and Topaz, which don't seem humanistic or universal or even particularly thrilling. The consensus is that Hitchcock is getting old.
By 1988, Hitchcock the auteur is as dead as Hitchcock the man, killed off by the antiintentionalist tenets of post-structuralism -- tenets aptly summarized by Corber's charge, still five years in the future, that "by installing himself as the originating agency of his films, Hitchcock diverted critical attention from the concrete historical forces that conditioned his artistic production in the postwar period" (139). Instead, Tania Modleski has, as if in reply to Robin Wood's contemporaneous question -- "Can Hitchcock be saved for feminism?" (371) -- used Hitchcock's films as a touchstone for feminist theory, as if both feminism and Hitchcock would gain something important if the answer was yes. (One of my colleagues attending the Literature/Film Conference the following year complains that Modleski never cites Hitchcock's published interviews as evidence of what his films really mean -- a complaint that puts him in the same league as the 1945 FBI.) An unexpected benefit of the decline of auteurist readings of Hitchcock is that the Universal films from Marnie to Topaz become more popular as symptoms rather than analyses of the ideological contradictions everybody is now looking for.
The situation hasn't changed so radically ten years later, except that yesterday's question -- are Hitchcock's films charged with ideological commitments? -- has received such a decisively affirmative answer that nobody would ask it anymore -- or at least, anybody who did would be looked at askance. Certainly Robin Wood's assumption that it was somehow worthwhile trying to prove that Hitchcock was really a feminist who made feminist films has been left in the dust. At the same time. a corollary assumption implicit in Wood's question -- that some films can't be saved for feminism because they're just not feminist -- has been outmoded by the consensual belief that every film can be saved for feminism, and for ideological debate generally, because every film is shaped by historical and ideological commitments and contradictions. Hitchcock's films are now political, in other words, for precisely the same reasons, and to precisely the same degree. that everybody else's films are political too. The idea that some films are somehow politically innocent is as preposterous as the belief that the FBI ever really had Hitchcock shadowed. That's right: Yesterday's truism has now become today's exploded myth, as the box to the recent Twentieth Century Fox video re-release of Notorious briskly informs me: "The director claimed that the script's references to uranium alarmed the FBI, which suspected Hitchcock had learned the secret of the atom bomb. But the story later turned out to be simply Hollywood folklore."
I don't mean to suggest that my chart gives anything like a complete picture of the debates in Hitchcock studies over a period of fifty years; it tries to isolate only one strand of a rich and complicated series of dialogues. Nor will I belabor the point that the movement of beliefs in my chart, like that of the scientific hypotheses Kuhn analyzes, is from right to left, as yesterday's unimaginable speculations become today's obvious agreements and then tomorrow's retrograde stupidities. Instead I want to emphasize two features of this history that depart dramatically from Kuhn's model of scientific revolutions. The first is the extraordinary rapidity -- or, as I'd call it, the ordinary rapidity -- of change in the ways critics have perceived Hitchcock over the past fifty years. First he's an apolitical entertainer, then a humanist/universalist auteur, then a valued prize for ideological approaches like feminism to win or lose, then grist for an all-devouring political mill. We might argue that every one of these new views of Hitchcock is revolutionary in its immediate context, but surely this meaning of revolutionary,, which posits three revolutions in half a century, is remote from Kuhn's. Every one of these new arguments about Hitchcock, bracketed and shaped as it is by stupid beliefs nobody would cling to anymore and unimaginable speculations nobody would seriously entertain, must have seemed revolutionary to its first proponents. Furthermore, once a new political argument -- let's call it a new paradigm enters the realm of the arguable, political reinterpretations of such unlikely films as Marnie in the light of that new paradigm must seem revolutionary to the interpreters (if they didn't, the interpreters wouldn't offer their reinterpretations as significant). Finally, when the paradigm, strengthened by readings of exemplary or canonical films, is extended to a hypothesis about movies generally, that move seems revolutionary as well. Yet all this is the normal work of interpretation, which is always, by definition, on the edge, but not over the edge. So the distinction between normative certitudes, periods during which communities share a working model of obvious procedures and interpretations, and momentous paradigm shifts in these procedures and interpretations which Fish borrows from Kuhn to describe the apparent progress of interpretation breaks down for humanistic discourse, because there is no normal state of consensus among scholars -- what is normal is disagreement that feels like disagreement, whether one is advancing a single new interpretation or a new way of defining the field based on previous interpretations. The number of other debates that are raging over the same half-century in the tiny area of Hitchcock studies will indicate the revolutionary ordinariness of any single argument.
This leads to my second point. If we divide interpretive hypotheses into the stupid (ideas that nobody believes anymore), the consensual (truisms that everybody accepts), and the unimaginable (speculations too wild to believe), and map the kinds of discourse that are proper to each of these three domains, then it seems clear, despite the undoubted value of the bonding utterances in the consensual domain of the obvious -- for instance, "Hitchcock is the Master of Suspense," or "Vertigo is Hitchcock's greatest film" (two remarks which would have had some claim to novelty in 1945 and 1969 respectively, but which now both have roughly the same valence as "Nice day if it don't rain") -- that the discursive transactions that remain within each of these three realms of assumptions are much less important than those that mediate between different realms -- affirming a community's self-image by ridiculing the beliefs of the stupid, or, more importantly, treating outrageous speculations as if they were arguable in order, ultimately, to shift the frontiers of the obvious. Given the ubiquity of jokes and arguments in public discourse -- given, in particular. the centrality of arguments in humanistic discourse -- it is no wonder that beliefs about exactly what is too obvious to point out are constantly changing.
I began by saying that I wanted to consider the role of the obvious and the stupid in the humanistic discourses of interpretation. I hope by now I've demonstrated that the stupid isn't just what a given community doesn't believe, but what it disavows -- what it insists it never believed, however strongly it used to -- as either something too stupid to believe. or something too obvious for a community of scholars to believe. even though they have to believe it to follow the course of a given argument. By disavowing the obvious (the consensual basis of every argument) as stupid (what nobody would be caught dead thinking), humanistic scholars project and extend an unending war within themselves onto the larger scholarly community.
The normal status of the interpreter of the political Hitchcock or anything else, therefore, is not consensual certainty but a kind of enlightened self-doubt, an endless projection onto the community of a dialectic of quarrels within the interpreter him -- or herself. This dialectic is unending, and therefore truly dialectical, because it is fundamentally interior, as I meant to suggest in the title of this paper, which echoes the famous memorandum ("It's the economy, stupid") James Carville, trying to keep Bill Clinton's 1988 Presidential campaign focused, posted in front of his desk -- a memorandum addressed directly to himself, the only person who can legitimately be called "stupid" in civilized society.
The normal way of resolving these quarrels with ourselves. of course, is by reinterpretations bolstered by textual evidence -- exactly the experimental procedure that the FBI, good scientists that they were, were following in 1945 in having Hitchcock shadowed -- if, after all, that's really what they were doing. Perhaps, as the bottom right-hand column of my chart suggests, the ideal role model for the next wave of film history is that far-sighted postmodern visionary who, we now learn, wore dresses and was convinced the rest of the world was out to get him: J. Edgar Hoover. Remember: You heard it here first.
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