Literature Film Quarterly (2004) - Hanging with Hitchcock
From Alfred Hitchcock Wiki
(c) Literature Film Quarterly (2004)
Hanging with Hitchcock
Alfred Hitchcock is widely regarded as a great artist, infinitely more profound than a master of "mere" suspense. In The Hanging Figure: On Suspense and the Films of Alfred Hitchcock, Christopher Morris defines suspense, through interdisciplinary scholarship, not as our anticipation of what will happen next to an admired protagonist. This fails to account for "recidivist suspense" upon subsequent viewings of, say, a Hitchcock film. Rather, Morris suggests that Hitchcock was effectively a deconstructionist, and the suspense resides, as in all art, in undecidability. Thus in Rear Window, suspense is not just about accused murderer Thorwald's invading Jeffries's apartment to do physical harm. When Thorwald asks, "What is it that you want from me?" neither Jeff nor the viewer can answer.
Hitchcock said, "The world is a 'glamorously dangerous charade.'" So also film -- photons on a screen, clignotements, images of actors and objects -- consists of signs without referents in endless, unpredictable relays of meanings. The history of Hitchcock criticism -- whether New Critical, feminist, or New Historicist -- has variously explicated the director's bleak view of the universe, or his gender or Cold War ideology. But with figure and ground, the ground, too, is figural, both inside and outside the text.
Morris shows how interpretation follows the de Manian two-stage act common to all hermeneutics: First we observe a figure, then apply a series of assumptions, a code -- say, psychoanalysis, feminism, postcolonial, or queer theory -- by which we may work our way through previous New Critical or other interpretations, eagerly anticipating some "bottom of things" that proves the validity of our pet framework. The promise of graspable meanings is seductive, inevitable, and futile. Yet Morris gives exquisite, close readings of eleven of the master's films, elaborating aspects of most others in passing, yielding, he avers, no rich ambiguities, no paradoxes, nor any Concordia discors, but the suspense of arbitrary signs.
His subject, theme, and mode of analysis are complex and demanding; his avowed "misreadings" well earned. But rather than write an abstruse prose supposedly organic with the mode, Morris proceeds in a clear, engaging -- I daresay readable -- style, insisting that all signifying practices are unreadable. His working hypothesis is that "suspense is best understood not discursively but figuratively," a trope for which is Hitchcock's oft-repeated hanging figure. He could as likely have chosen doorways, portraits, jewels, or other iconographic representations found in the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts at an exhibition of "Hitchcock and Art: Fatal Coincidences" in 2001. Arbitrary signs apply equally to criticism: Contrary approaches in Hitchcock studies cancel themselves out, engendering still more questions about the films.
Morris would expose the erroneous assumptions in all ways of knowing. And Hitchcock's conflating the MacGuffin -- or empty plot pretext -- with his famous cameos is telling. This "parabasis" implies no real identity, either before or behind the camera, only baseless successions of personae. Thus, the act of film direction becomes associated "with the most questionable transfer of all, the shift from sign to referent." So much for Hitchcock the auteur, for "artwork exists independently of its creator." The Cartesian Self, Western metaphysics, and the unconscious come under doubt. The phenomenological world in general and Hitchcock's art in particular are but circulating signs (Ã la Derrida's trope of the postal) devoid of any identifiable origins, causality, reference, or inherent meaning.
To illustrate the apparent "universality" of art's self-reflexive deconstruction, Morris researches current theories of suspense, and Hitchcock's own contradictory remarks on the subject, only then to analyze various examples of suspended figures in noncinematic, visual art across cultures and time. A Russian mid-Paleolithic pendant, he asserts, "is a hanging figure made by a 'quotation' from nature, one that calls into question both nature and signs... These functions of the pendant are echoed in postmodernism" (60). After briefly reiterating this point using non-Western and pre-Christian iconography, Morris tests the hypothesis against Michelangelo's Santo Spirito Crucifix (1492-93), Titian's The Flaying of Marsyas (1570-75), Rembrandt's The Flayed Ox (1655), Winslow Homer's The Life-Line (1984), Toulousse Lautrec's poster Le Pendu (1892), The Hanged Man of the Tarnt Cards (1932-present), Rubens's Prometheus Bound (1611-18), David's The Death of Marat (1793), and Koons's installation, Two-Ball 50/50 Tank (1985). Don't miss the exquisite analyses!
The heart of this indispensable book, of course, is a series of close readings of early-to-late Hitchcock, again well aided by research. Like the hanging figure in the noncinematic works above, Hitchcock's The Lodger presents a crucified figure with a deferred identity; Easy Virtue's frames declare that identity is "nothing"; The Ring allegorizes the circularity of reading; and in Spellbound Ballantine dreams someone cuts away eyes on drapes only to reveal new eyes hanging in their places. In Notorious doors and thresholds "are figures for unreadable interiors and figuration itself; in Rope suspense is the absent referent, like David Kentley's corpse in the cassone among the party guests. We may hope signs refer to some truth "outside" the interior of Brandon's penthouse, but "the street beneath . . . is a site of empty transfer, like the conversation within." Vertigo's spiraling credits warn us against the pursuit of the tenable only to end with Scottie embracing empty air; North by Northwest superimposes groundless figures onto one another while Hitchcock's message (if there is one) remains absent from the film-as-conveyance, like the director himself who "misses the bus" in his cameo. Psycho is an allegory of empty interiors, all its characters searching for meanings that cannot be grasped. Like the staring eyes of the dead Marion, or the empty eye sockets of Mrs. Bates, the eye/drain dissolve suggests that all our theorizing may be dead seeing. In The Birds the characters' "frantic search" for the cause of the birds' attacks "is allegorized as a denial of mortality." As usual in his endings, Hitchcock destabilizes even this plain theme with the lovebirds about which Cathy exclaims, "They haven't hurt anyone!" This is a point that logic, Morris remarks, "is helpless to refute," until "this deconstructive conclusion... be withdrawn" in favor of "one more fictional construct [likewise] followed by new ones." Torn Curtain's hanging figures and "torn curtains" signify problematic signification. And like other Hitchcock films, it ends "with the embrace of ciphers or the kiss of unreadable faces."
Morris draws on antiquity to regard the figure in rhetoric and in art (from Gorgias to de Man to Hitchcock) as at once temporal and spatial, whose meaning is indefinitely deferred, and to question meliorative theories of history. But this is not nihilism since "one can never avoid reading and rest in a position of rejection." His constant use of "may" surely does not imply nothingness. Rather, it acknowledges possibilities, albeit always mutually canceling. A frequent charge against all-out deconstruction is that (a) its undecidability acquiesces to the status quo, and (b) it is just another (apolitical) formalism, thus, as political as can be. But when Morris argues, for instance, that Hitchcock's Cold War films equate communist and capitalist values, does this not suggest alternative (self-canceling) values?
Morris notes, to me ironically, that his approach is politically ineffectual. I wonder if it is not just the pursuit of the tenable but the apparently futile that also deceives. If a transcendent spiritual or scientific reality cannot be known, maybe the next question is not whether the world is figuration, illusion, maya, but what kind of figuration, illusion, maya it might be. Perhaps all the same deconstructive principles would apply -- "horizontally" more than "vertically" -- in a non- or less hierarchical society ("a glamorously [much safer] charade"?). In that context the culture specific to Hitchcock's films might not appear as readable or as alluring, in the first place. Of course, we cannot verify even this given: that hierarchical dynamics governed Hitchcock's world except, as Morris reminds us, through the necessary figures of representation.
Now more than ever, I regard Hitchcock with two minds: one that better appreciates his aesthetic and one that nevertheless sees it as profoundly political: namely, gender issues, middleclass sensibilities, sexuality, the absent presence of race, appeals to status, hierarchy, the will to dominance, the history of conquest -- much of which Morris elucidates as "referents" before revealing them as only "other signs." I have seen these figures as circulating within a cultural logic, capable of producing key Hitchcockian emotions besides suspense. But Morris reminds us that there is never just a within but also a without [cultural logic]. All seeing is "seeing as," for him a scholarly commitment to go on trying to decide not to decide. (Can deconstruction become its own hermeneutic, a willing of the text to be unreadable?) The approach in any case yields many "estranging" and poetic patterns within and among the antiformal elements in Hitchcock's films (I see a certain affinity with Chaos Theory in Morris's analysis.) But if language dictates the inevitability of oscillating between hermeneutic and deconstructive "seeing as," then we cannot avoid taking sides in political struggles, "unpredictable" or not.
While Morris points out that Hitchcock does not, cannot, "intend" his films to be deconstructive per se, his book cannot help giving the impression: "Part of Hitchcock's genius is the creation of so many objects that withhold or withdraw significance in interminable suspense, a thought that the [Montreal] exhibit corroborated." According to Morris's phenomenology, the world is a suspenseful allegory of undecidability. If so, generations of fans and scholars have flocked to the cinema to see how "the master" does undecidability. If the fascinating analysis in The Hanging Figure sometimes stops short of the follow-through I need to awaken more fully from my hermeneutic slumbers; it is not because I am not, by book's end, well trained enough to follow through myself: I'm in suspense as to how Christopher Morris would do it.
This article is available online at the URL shown at the top of the page. |