The Horse Who Drank the Sky: Film Experience Beyond Narrative and Theory

The Horse Who Drank the Sky ˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚ ...

Author: Murray Pomerance

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The Horse Who Drank the Sky

˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚


˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚ Film Experience Beyond Narrative and Theory

Mu r r ay Pom e r a n c e

rutgers university press new brunswick, new jersey, and london

To Leslie Mitchner

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Pomerance, Murray, 1946– The horse who drank the sky : film experience beyond narrative and theory / Murray Pomerance. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8135-4327-7 (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8135-4328-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Motion pictures. I. Title. PN1994.P6535 2008 791.43—dc22 2007037880 A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library. Copyright © 2008 by Murray Pomerance All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 100 Joyce Kilmer Avenue, Piscataway, NJ 08854–8099. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law. Visit our Web site: http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu Manufactured in the United States of America

Le résultat obtenu,—et ceci au point de bouleverser completement les sens de l’Humanité. Il devient tout à fait impossible de distinguer le modèle de la copie. [The result is to confuse completely the senses of human beings, to render the copy and the original indistinguishable.] Villiers de l’Isle Adam, L’Eve future

C ON T E N T S

Acknowledgments

Overture

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1

Thinking about the studios at Neubabelsberg, The Dreamers, Doris Day, the predicament of the “onlooker,” Now, Voyager, and Dead Man 1

A Voluptuous Gaze

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Thinking about a dream of Sandra Oh, Short Cuts, Safe, Sideways, The Lookout, Disturbia, The Dead Zone, the gaze or the glance, turning away from film, the “cinema of attractions,” glancing at plot, Magnolia, battle effects, Rebecca, Requiem for a Heavyweight, Gojira, “panoramic perception,” and vertiginous games 2

The Hero in the China Sea

36

Thinking about Nicholas Ray’s filmmaking, storylines and lines of action, performance and continuity, and Rebel Without a Cause 3

A Great Face

62

Thinking about Alfred Hitchcock, North by Northwest, monuments and legalities, Mount Rushmore, stereopticons and the rear-projection process, Gary Cooper, George W. Bush, James Stewart, and Cary Grant

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contents

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The Smoke and the Knife 86 Thinking about Fritz Lang’s M, police procedure, craft thieving, the rationality of smoke, women in Weimar Germany, motherhood and surveillance, severing and civilization

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A Call from Everywhere

110

Thinking about On the Beach, The Exorcist, acousmêtre: the voice that cannot be seen, The Wizard of Oz, And the Ship Sails On . . . , The Man Who Knew Too Much, Pan’s Labyrinth, Trafic, narrative and de-acousmatization, and Stage Fright 6

As Time Goes By

139

Thinking about cinematic transitions, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Lawrence of Arabia and the pre-lap, The Passenger, Blackmail, The Graduate, “faux pre-lap” in Chinatown, Three Days of the Condor, The Conversation, the upholstering buffer, the acousmêtre passé, the “gasp” and the “turn,” From Russia with Love, The Bourne Identity, Saturday Night Fever, editing and sound in the 1970s, Stanley Kubrick and Nestor Almendros 7

The Speaking Eye

166

Thinking about the speaking eye, the democratic screen, Jaws, animal performance, acting and authenticity, falling out of role, cinematic realism and cinematic reality, My Man Godfrey, Mischa Auer, “reading” the screen, the morality and politics of watching, the “doctrine of natural expression,” the filmmaker’s will, and cinematic “importance” 8

Not an Unusual Story

187

Thinking about Vertigo, Dinner at Eight, the sound revolution, John Barrymore, The Last Laugh, class structure and the comedy of manners, modernity and social collapse, The Great Depression and ressentiment, writing that obliterates the writer, “looking marvelous,” performance and biography, and the acting of Marie Dressler

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206

Thinking about the cinematic sense of place, fragmentation, shellshock, explosions in cinema, Babel, Until the End of the World, Royal Wedding, extraterritoriality and television, Fahrenheit 451, the coup d’oeil, Sergeant York, “invisible landscapes,” theater design and “marginal appreciation,” mental vertigo, The Bourne Supremacy, Tourettic cinema, Blow-Up, color, and The Band Wagon

Works Cited and Consulted Index

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ACK NOW L E DGM E N TS

I bear considerable gratitude for a number of friends and associates who have helped me make this book, so much gratitude, in fact, that simply expressing thanks seems entirely insufficient. But I do thank Nancy Agli (Long Island City); Matthew Bernstein (Atlanta); Steven Carr (Fort Wayne); Noelle Carter, University of Southern California Warner Bros. Archives (Los Angeles); Susan Clermont, Music Division of the Library of Congress (Washington); John Gary Coakley (Palm Desert, Calif.); Lynne M. Coakley, J. C. Backings (Culver City); Ned Comstock, Cinema and Television Collection, University of Southern California (Los Angeles); Terry Dale (Los Angeles); Brett Davidson, Fairbanks Center for Motion Picture Study, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (Beverly Hills); Michael DeAngelis (Chicago); David Edgar, British Film Institute Library (London); R. Bruce Elder (Toronto); Jeffrey Flannery, Manuscript Collection of the Library of Congress (Washington); Lester Friedman (Bethesda); Cynthia Fuchs (Washington); Doreen Fumia (Toronto); André Gaudreault (Montreal); C. T. “Terry” Gillin (Toronto); Henry and Susan Searles Giroux (Hamilton); Mary Beth Haralovich (Tucson); Dave Heath (Toronto); Nathan Holmes (Chicago); E. Ann Kaplan (New York); Anastasia Kerameos, British Film Institute Library (London); Martine Kerzanet (Paris); Valdo Kneubühler, Espace chercheurs, Cinémathèque française (Paris); Kristine Kreuger, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (Beverly Hills); Bill Krohn (Los Angeles); Nay Laywine (Toronto); Curtis Maloley (St. Catharines); Ernest Mathijs (Vancouver); Marianne McKenna (Toronto); Linda Harris Mehr, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (Beverly Hills); Douglas Messerli (Los Angeles); Janet Moat, British Film Institute Library (London); Nigel Morris (Lincoln); Jerry D. Mosher (Santa Barbara); Peter Murphy (Toronto); the Library of the New-York Historical Society; Polo Ornelas, SONY Pictures xi

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Studios (Culver City); R. Barton Palmer (Atlanta); Jonathan Paw, the British Library; Stephen Prince (Blacksburg, Va.); Andrew Ramos (Chicago); Catherine Rivers, Music Division of the Library of Congress (Washington); Jenny Romero, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (Beverly Hills); Rose St. Pierre, Film Reference Library, Cinémathèque Ontario (Toronto); Kevin Sandler (Tucson); Steven Jay Schneider, Paramount Pictures (Los Angeles); Kathleen Sheehan, Widener Library, Harvard University (Cambridge); Steven L. Snyder, the Franklin Institute (Philadelphia); Vivian Sobchack (Los Angeles); Matthew Solomon (East Brunswick, N.J.); Jamie Thompson (Toronto); Nancy Virtue (Fort Wayne); Carole and Michael Wilson (Los Angeles); Pamela Wojcik (Chicago); and Anna Zagoloff, Central Park Conservancy (New York). Substantial writing time for this project was provided through a Research Award from Ryerson University, and with the generous assistance of Carla Cassidy, Dean of Arts there. Dennis Mock (North Bay and Toronto) was inspiring and supportive to me at a crucial time; his foresight and generosity were central in making this book and much else possible, and I have forborne far too long in giving him the credit that is rightfully his. Two critical thinkers have gone out of their way to spend time with portions of this manuscript, and I have benefited in ways I could never have imagined from their kind and insightful comments. These are Andrew Hunter (Toronto) and William Rothman (Miami), to whom I express my affection and respect. And my friend Tom Gunning—in ways even he, I think, would not have envisioned—has moved and enlightened my composition of these pages. Authors frequently make a public show of thanking their editors, and well they should, because the best of editors have a way of finding truths even an author does not know he wishes to speak. And this makes it a pleasure at all times to acknowledge Leslie Mitchner at Rutgers University Press for her exceptional and wise sensitivity to all matters of prose relating to film and the filmic experience. But my long association with Leslie and her colleagues— Arlene Bacher, Christina Brianik, Penny Burke, Marilyn Campbell, Alison Hack, Anne Hegeman, Donna Liese, Alicia Nadkarni, Elizabeth Scarpelli, Molly Venezia, Jeremy Wang-Iverson, Marlie Wasserman, Ann Weinstock, and Winnie Westcott—has been so rewarding and amicable that I feel it proper to say a special thank you now. Eric Schramm (Dallas) makes copyediting into a dialogue of true friendship. It is a delicious challenge to work with a team so devoted to what a book can be. Nellie Perret and Ariel Pomerance are true collaborators in this, and lived supportingly through the writing for long, often painful months. I hope the residue for them is a pleasure of the screen and a happy surprise. Toronto-Los Angeles-Paris, August 2007


˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚

˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚ Overture

Late in June of 1982, in a mumbling crowd, and daydreaming about the stars, I followed two nine- or ten-year-old boys out of a screening of E.T. the ExtraTerrestrial. As we hit the cold light of day and turned onto the sidewalk outside the theater, one said to the other, rather drily, I thought, “Good directing.” “Yeah,” said his friend, “and excellent cinematography.” For the “Wow!” I waited, but it never came. Now, it is easy to imagine these two as recent Ph.D.s in cinema studies, still, perhaps—I hope not!—holding back that “Wow!” It seems necessary to take a new look at the act of watching motion pictures in our society, so very much has it become stylized as one or the other of two different extremes: as frivolous and unreflected “entertainment” or as sanctimonious scholarship. What we see onscreen could come, not to enlighten and inform, or to entertain, but to move us. “We go to the movies instead of moving,” Tom Wingfield muses in Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie, and sadly, for many viewers—both those who are obsessed with Nic Cage’s or Orlando Bloom’s or Halle Berry’s or Angelina Jolie’s dating history and those who need to link everything they see with Lacan or Žižek or Baudrillard or Mulvey—the idea of being affected by a movie, or the idea of stopping long enough to consider the way one has been affected, seems out of the question if not entirely valueless. But Tom was wrong, I think. In going to the movies we are moving—certainly we are being moved—and it is pleasant and illuminating to think about how this can be the case and what it can mean for us that it is. Film can move one to write a book; that much is certain. This particular book, very like a film, should introduce itself by its action, rather than relying on its author’s alien voice to do the task. So it is that I have no plan here to warn the reader about what these pages will say, or prepare some charming pathway in which educated eyes may carefully tread. Again as with film, let the ongoing unfolding afford what it will. The vulnerability we 1

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cherish as we open ourselves unforewarned to the flickering screen, like the silence that brings us to delight in music, that jettisoning of our knowledge and our past in which we are willing to engage when we encounter art, quite as though to save ourselves from being consumed by the flames of our knowledge, becomes a property that divides and manifests itself as experience, wonder, allure, intensity, fearsomeness, beauty, truth. Read on, if you would.

Here is how the great aesthetician Siegfried Kracauer (1889–1966) described the studios, in the Berlin suburb of Neubabelsberg, of Universum-Film AG, founded in 1917 and until 1945 the dominant force in German filmmaking: It is a desert within an oasis. The natural things outside—trees made out of wood, lakes with water, villas that are inhabitable—have no place within its confines. But the world does reappear there—indeed, the entire macrocosm seems to be gathered in this new version of Noah’s ark. But the things that rendezvous here do not belong to reality. They are copies and distortions that have been ripped out of time and jumbled together. They stand motionless, full of meaning from the front, while from the rear they are just empty nothingness. A bad dream about objects that has been forced into the corporeal realm. (Ornament 281)

How often critical theory of cinema adopts this perspective, even unthinkingly, fostering creation of, and attention to, that familiar schism between make-believe and actuality, between fact and nothingness! Something true and evocative lies in hiding behind something fragile and superficial. For example, sucrose, much-polished Doris Day, she who sang and sang “Que Sera, Sera,” reveals in her autobiography that (in real life) her son (Terry Melcher) had turned down Charles Manson (he who murdered Sharon Tate) for a recording contract, and was now himself a target: “By setting all this down in a book,” suggests Dennis Bingham, drawing our attention to the hollowness of her screen persona, “Day meant to fry the eyes of those who would tie her to the railroad track of her virginal reputation” (7). Yet what a captivating railroad track it is, offered by that onscreen purity and sweet voice. As interesting as Bingham’s critique is, as provocative as hollowness is, could one not look at Cézanne’s oranges as well and complain or notice that they cannot be juiced; or listen to the eighteenth variation in Rachmaninoff’s Paganini Rhapsody and argue cogently that when it beats approximately seventy-two times a minute, the heart really does not make melodies like this (a melody that pianist Jon Kimura Parker, about to perform it for Valentine’s Day, 2007, called the “most beautiful . . . of all time” [“Studio Sparks,” CBC-FM, 13 February 2007])? In all such approaches, what things are is taken to be much more important, much more valuable, than what they appear to be: appearance itself is denigrated. In

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Fritz Lang’s M (1931), a man slinks through the dark wet streets looking out of the corner of his eye lest he be caught as a murderer, even though we never see him commit a murder, even though we cannot know how he knows himself as a killer; how inconvenient it is, we might think, with some sanctimonious sarcasm, and how distracting from what is truly serious that murderers in our real world—that is apparently so far away from the image world—are not to be found slouching and creeping through the shadows with the ineffable staginess of Peter Lorre. William James wrote in his Principles of Psychology that an object of our love seems to us to have a heightened reality. And W. G. Sebald suggests that the “personification of an ideal” might be “overshadowed by mortality from the start” (201). The lover watches his beloved’s every move as though it were choreographed by Martha Graham (or Pat Birch, or Michael Kidd), elevates every trivial gesture into beautiful significance, attributes meaning to each nonchalance, harmony to every syllable, grace and poise to those lovely features lit by the sun or the moon or by nothing at all. What if we attempt to understand film as lovers rather than as critics? (It is perhaps too much to ask that nineyear-olds watching E.T. should have been lovers of film, but is it too much to expect that they should not be critics?) And what if, quite willingly entranced, we disdain to give ourselves up wholly to the mere transports of rapture but instead also attempt to penetrate, to establish connections, to work out the formulae, to derive an understanding of how it is that we can be touched the way we are touched? Must we always take one extreme position or another: looking at a love object, be only swept away; or, looking at cinema with intelligence, adopt the posture of that jaded outsider who knows very well what reality is? (“Human kind,” wrote T. S. Eliot, “cannot bear very much reality.”) When I am watching a film, I am engaged with it. Nothing else has existence for me in the way or to the degree that film has existence, at such times, and indeed film, when I am watching it, swells and becomes a universe, is the world. In Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers (2003), some young Parisians attending screenings at the Cinémathèque française in 1968 (Louis Garrel, Eva Green) try to sit very close to the screen so that they can catch the visions before anyone else does: that is what I mean. Later, in a café or in my study, I read what some writer says about these fleeting images and am caught in a strange utopia between the screen world as I remember it and the textual stratagems through which this writer reflects upon that world, to me. Such a profound gap, such an emptiness, such a nowhere stretches between the film and text! And even when the text is gloriously illustrated with photographs, I can see almost always that what is in the photographs has not managed to voyage into the critique, that the critique has held itself nobly away from trucking with the highlights and shadows, the curvatures, the planes of focus, the lines, the textures of luminosity—not to say the color, if there is color—in the photographs.

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Film swells and becomes a universe when we are watching it. Sitting very close to the screen to catch the visions before anyone else does are Eva Green (1.) and Louis Garrel (c.) in Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers (Recorded Picture Company/ Twentieth Century Fox, 2003). Digital frame enlargement.

I must remind myself—as, morosely, I do again and again—that we live in a prosaic society, where laws are inscriptions, fictions are sentences, truths are enunciations made into prose; and thought is inexorably verbal. Can a picture not be a thought? Of course it can. To express one’s thought one might use a camera, not a pen. One might show what one sees and understands. It is as a writer that I mention this, someone who does use if not a pen then a word processor, and whose habit it is to make thought stretch through paragraphs and shape itself using words. (Tom Gunning said once that if there was a difference between his approach to cinema and mine, it was because “you think of yourself more as a writer, while I think of myself as a historian. My point of course was not the divergence of these two but their convergence, but also the manner in which they can provide a completion of each other.”) Oddly, in the way that a writer uses them there are very few words in cinema—perhaps even no words at all; no linguistic symbols with underlying meanings or referents, connectable in linear series to expostulate and elongate a principle. Sounds, yes. Melodies, yes. Pictures of some world and, sometimes, even of signposts containing words inside that world—but then the signs are pictures. The cinema is neither pre-linguistic nor pre-verbal, but it is pre-scriptural. It takes us to a time before we knew how to write with ink, when we wrote with our eyes. In the moment that we experience it, cinema is pre-grammatical, specifically in the sense that grammar is the organizing principle of scripture even though there is a “grammar” of images. For the purposes of analysis, exchange,

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and reference—all of these being beyond experience—it is convenient, perhaps, to think of a film in terms of scenes, sequences, and shots—the elements of “film grammar”—an approach that does consistently show the merit of revealing the constructive principles of film by foregrounding them. Just in the way that Kracauer observed of Neubabelsberg, every object of view is in this sense not what it seems to be, every surface a façade, and so forth. And characters are contracted performers, screen movement is laborers’ work in a system that is highly capitalized. And the illusion of narrative continuity is produced through a grammatical system in which certain types of shots are edited together in conventional ways; indeed, the assembly of a film using principles that run against these conventions can sometimes be seen to produce a work that is poetic or revolutionary—Jean-Luc Godard’s À Bout de souffle (1960). But at the moment when we are caught up in our actual gaze at the screen—with our disbelief suspended, as it were—none of this matters, or seems evident, or is visible. From any analysis that concentrates solely on the grammar of film, any analysis that focuses on linking this grammar to political or social circumstances or to historical development, any analysis that highlights above everything authorial style or allegorical tropes, something is inevitably missing. And that is the experience of actually watching the film. In that experience, what is onscreen is magnified and intensified, and the viewer comprehends not by assimilating grammar but by neglecting it, not by detecting social, psychological, or historical principles but by temporarily surrendering the capacity to do so in favor of an engagement, what Erving Goffman calls an “onlooking,” that makes it possible for the film to have an effect (Frame Analysis 124–55). When we walk out of the theater after seeing a film, we may rationalize and then either reify or dispense with the story, the style, the composition, the politics, the historical relation of this to other films; but some trace still lingers to plague us with pleasure or remorse. The fashion in recent years has been to evacuate this pleasure and this remorse, to focus instead upon the structural armature that subtends and supports the screen action. We have, therefore, devoted ourselves to dismantling the image and have forgotten, it would seem, the charged effect an image in its wholeness has when we see it in the dark. We have looked to the image as a linguistic utterance that can and must be deconstructed in a semiological fervor. Once, many years ago, in a magazine I freely admit I have entirely lost track of, I saw a photograph showing a suburban house and its green, green, green front lawn. Someone had taken one of the fetish objects of this household—the television!—and had carefully, even devotedly, taken it apart piece by piece, until there were thousands of morsels large and small; and had laid all the pieces carefully upon the grass. In a way, this is what scholarship and popular criticism, however well intentioned, have been doing with cinema. Lest it should

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affect us, we use an instrumental technique to determine how it operates. As in that horrible, chilling moment in Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, we shoot first. Engaged with film, however, wrapped up in watching it, we find it built not of shots but of moments. The moment, subjectively bounded, perhaps, and yet always evident and always located in the precise play of the screen, is what rouses our emotion and memory. It may be coextensive with a shot, or occupy only part of a shot, or occupy several shots, contiguous or noncontiguous. The moment, inevitably, is what we remember and retain, what we possess of the screen and incorporate into ourselves and our worlds. Here are two exemplary cinematic moments that take on newness and a kind of brilliance when seen in light of one another: In Irving Rapper’s much-admired film Now, Voyager (1942), Bette Davis plays Charlotte Vale, a plain-looking spinster heiress to a Boston fortune, at first constrained and continually reproved by her harridan mother (Gladys Cooper) and then put under the gentle psychiatric care of Dr. Jaquith (Claude Rains), who encourages her to take a cruise, which she does. She suddenly transforms herself into a stunning and cultivated fashion plate (assuming the name Camille Beauchamp) and meets handsome, winning Jerry Durrance (Paul Henreid), who falls in love with her but cannot consummate this love because he is trapped in a lonely marriage. Every cell has its ray of light, however. Jerry’s daughter Tina (Janis Wilson), being shy, plain-looking as Charlotte ever was, and neurotic, has come under the spell of Dr. Jaquith, at whose retreat the now recovering Charlotte one day encounters her. The two become friends, and Charlotte, incognito, devotes herself to the loving task of bringing Tina out of her shell—her only way of being close to Jerry. One night, Charlotte is awakened by the sound of crying. She steps into the adjoining room where she finds Tina in tears. Tactfully, she comforts the little girl, holding her until she falls asleep. Then, as the bedside alarm clock shows that hours have passed, we see her lying with Tina asleep, and hear in voiceover the thought in her head: “This is Jerry’s child in my arms. This is Jerry’s child clinging to me.” Tina is stretched horizontally across the screen at bottom, her head resting upon her arm at left. Behind her, and a little above, Charlotte mimics her position, so that Charlotte’s head, almost touching Tina’s, might be a ghostly double (with more light on it, and with a gleam of purpose in the eyes as beneath her cheek the girl peacefully sleeps). In Jim Jarmusch’s eccentric and beautiful Dead Man (1995), a young man named William Blake (Johnny Depp), having traveled westward from Cleveland in the late nineteenth century to find work, becomes embroiled in a love triangle and is shot in the chest. He escapes into the forest, where he meets a native guide named Nobody (Gary Farmer), and for days the two men meander among the still trees, William continuing to weaken through his mortal

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journey. One morning he leads his horse into a clearing where something lies dead upon the ground. Around him on all sides sound the calls of coyotes. Approaching, he sees that the object is a tiny fawn, shot in the neck. He reaches into the bullet hole and takes some blood, then rubs it on his own chest, on his forehead, on his nose and chin. Then he removes his bowler hat and slowly lies down on the ground next to the fawn, so that his head, adjacent and above the fawn’s, duplicates the dead animal’s stillness rather like a ghost. Under them are dead leaves. Ahead of William, not so far away, is his own end. Aside from the facts that Charlotte and Tina are pointing to the left of the screen, and that William and the fawn are pointing to the right; and that the setting of one shot is a comfortable bedroom and of the other a forest clearing, these two shots, made more than fifty years apart by filmmakers with very different sensibilities and dramatic purposes, share an identity. Both are about a confrontation with the void, both are about the need for contact and assimilation through duplication. William will not manage to bring the fawn back from the precipice in the way that Charlotte will rescue Tina, but the bonding and commitment of self are the same. While Charlotte is linking herself to a love even more profound than she can feel for the girl, a love for the man who is the girl’s father and with whom she will never be united, William is linking himself to a love for nature, for time, for the Greater Purpose of all life. Whether or not Jarmusch was aware of Rapper’s shot—it is hard not to imagine that he was—the two moments resound against one another powerfully, and both are available for us to see, to glean, and to wonder about. The cinematic moment has its own organization and architecture, may stand upon an expression of an actor’s mouth (John Wayne smiling at Ed Asner in Howard Hawks’s El Dorado [1963]), a look in the eye (Dorothy Malone malevolently egging on her brother’s jealousy from a high window in Douglas Sirk’s Written on the Wind [1955] or Diane Baker cupidinously watching Sean Connery and ‘Tippi’ Hedren leave for their honeymoon in Hitchcock’s Marnie [1964]), a tree moving in the wind in the background (as in the Lumières’ Le Repas de bébé [1895]), the passage of a train (whistling through the station in David Lean’s Brief Encounter [1945]), the color of an object in the corner of the screen (a view through the doorway of the Hotel de la Gloria in the final shot of Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger [1975]). It may depend for its power on a long culmination of a character’s statements and considerations, a kind of enchainment of increasing probabilities and weights that plays out in a kind of sigh, as we see with the Marie Dressler performance in Dinner at Eight (1933) or in Raymond Massey’s final acceptance of James Dean in East of Eden (1955); on the evocation possible when a line of action and intent is played out fully, as we see in the work of Nicholas Ray. The moment may endure, as in Charles Foster Kane’s dying breath; or may be evanescent, as in the dances of Astaire and Charisse in The Band Wagon. While the inherent subjectivity

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and personality of the received moment make it a slippery subject for rigorous analysis, nevertheless it remains the substance and flesh of our experience of watching films, the reason we wish to watch them again and again, the substrate of their melody, the envelope of their pathos and glory. And because cinema is art, it remains true that the most assiduous and earnest commitment to looking at its historical, social, psychological, compositional, authorial, and political aspects finally brings any serious viewer to a consideration of love: love of the screen, love of the cinematic image, love of the peculiar kind of light that is to be glimpsed in the dark theater coming from this magical world, that holds us fast to our fixation upon film—love of life, because just as it includes people life includes cinema. The most important thing about cinema, indeed, is that we are alive with it. In this spirit, André Bazin wrote that critical analysis of film “can yield nothing but a crude enumeration which overlooks the essence that only taste can uncover. But try to make taste the subject of criticism! After all, an appreciation of its vulgarity or refinement presupposes love and familiarity” (“Beauty” 165). It would be a worthwhile project to select and elaborate upon a number of stunning moments in various films, each such discursion constituting not only an extended meditation upon a feature of cinema—the impulse and continuity of characters’ action, their postures, the way they use things; the choice of a setting; the philosophy of décor; a movement of the body; a rhythm; the angle of a gaze; the utility of a prop or a supporting performance; a single line of dialogue; the imminence of death or closure; the purity of a color—but, more particularly, a devotion to some relatively tiny, catchy, decisive fragment that pinions attentiveness and shifts our understanding. I have in mind such fragments as a photograph stunningly seen, a picket fence used as a blind, a monument, the look in a woman’s eyes as she recognizes what mortality is, a dog happening to be sitting in a chair, grass that shines green in the darkness, a horse who drank the sky. I suppose that in doing this here, by bringing into discussion the actual viewing experience of the one film spectator I know intimately enough, I am in some way addressing—and I hope showing sympathy for—Stephen Prince’s lament: “It is an embarrassment that film scholars have written so much about spectatorship at a level of almost total theoretical abstraction while other disciplines have done systematic work on real viewers”: Psychoanalytic film theory has had little to say about the complex ways viewers seek correspondences between their experience and what they see on screen. . . . Film theorists . . . have constructed spectators who exist in theory; they have taken almost no look at real viewers. We are now in the unenviable position of having constructed theories of spectatorship from which spectators are missing. (76, 77, 83)

ov ert u r e

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The pages that follow originate with a certain constancy of love and intend to open out the viewer’s experience into a broader understanding of film in context. As George Coulouris snarls to Cary Grant in Clifford Odets’s None But the Lonely Heart (1944), “Go to the films if it’s love you’re looking for.” Coulouris’s character doesn’t believe in this love, to be sure, but in truth, if we are to eclipse the mechanical tedium of the anatomy lesson and spring into a real consideration of film’s true body, we must.

chapter 1

˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚ A Voluptuous Gaze In order to give this kind of sensation the intensity and brutality capable of shocking adults, powerful machines have had to be invented. Thus it is not surprising that the Industrial Revolution had to take place before vertigo could really become a kind of game. —Roger Caillois, Men, Play and Games, 25

Oh! A man struggled for months to start writing a book he had been conceiving for twenty years. Then one night, as though to round off his battle, he had a powerful dream. The Korean Canadian actress Sandra Oh, playing a role in some arcane oneiric drama, suddenly leaped up backwards onto a high windowsill—a feature of an industrial setting, with chicken wire embedded in the window glass and a powerful blue-gray illumination streaming through from outside—and used some invisible mechanism or a gesture to cause the window behind her to open. From outside now, an intense draught circled in around her, as though a fan were blowing in air, and at this not only did her long dark tresses spin and twist (as did those of the ghostly Snow Fairy in the second of Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams [1990]) and her lavender-blue cotton gown suddenly blow up in her face, spreading out like a massive anemone, but her legs went up with this breeze, as though they were light as gossamer, and spread themselves. The dress itself was floral like Karin Dor’s, as, dying by John Vernon’s hand in Topaz (1969), she slowly crumples to a marble floor while it blossoms out around her; and its blowing up was, of course, that of Marilyn Monroe’s fabulous white chiffon, as she stands over the subway grate in The Seven Year Itch (1955) (with her husband Joe DiMaggio fuming across the street, as legend has it). Underneath this dress, at any rate, Sandra Oh had nothing on. Boldly visible, confrontational, therefore, were not only her vaginal opening, orange and dark as l’heure fauve, but her anus as well, her urethral meatus, and her dark pubis. It was not unlike standing mesmerized in a shady gallery of the Musée d’Orsay in front of Courbet’s L’Origine du monde (1866), forty-six by fifty-five 10

a vo l u p t u o u s g a z e

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centimeters, with the creamy nightdress pulled up to reveal those articulate lips which never quite manage to reach a moment of speech. Perhaps she made a squeal of either delight or surprise, the woman he was dreaming of, but the dreamer felt and knew himself, decisively, to be lifting his hands to cover his eyes and face, and then to be turning away. As he turned, with a fragmented glimpse of those luscious organs, did he not see the woman’s own hands race down to cover them? “Sigmund Freud,” said the dreamer to himself, “must be cackling in his grave over this. But without his help I can grasp immediately that I did not want to be seen by Oh’s sex. I did not want the Eye of Polyphemus, lolling casually between her legs, to spy on my spying.” It is true that the dreamer had recently watched one or the other of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films, and that this marriage of vagina and pupil is, of course, a Tolkienian image, the “eye of Sauron,” played upon extensively by Jackson with his giant flaming optico-vaginal device high in the air, that punishes everyone it can see. Is there also something of a (John) Bergerian or (Laura) Mulveyan hint that the dreamer considered himself entirely to inhere in his own power to project a gaze, a power he now quickly withdrew for self-protection (see Berger Seeing; Mulvey Pleasures)? For several weeks, the man went about his writing, perplexed and unable to forget the dream. He had never been introduced in real life to Ms. Sandra Oh and could not claim a particular knowledge of her work, being aware only that she had played a number of not-so-large roles in film and television, including in The Red Violin (1998), and that she was at the time of the dream an up-and-coming face who had won awards—a Boston Society of Film Critics award, a Broadcast Film Critics Association award, a Phoenix Film Critics Society award, and a Screen Actors Guild award—for her performance in Alexander Payne’s Sideways (2004). She had recently begun starring on television in Shonda Rhimes’s “Grey’s Anatomy,” a program he had never watched but spot commercials for which persisted in interrupting other programs he cared about rather intensely. Sideways he had seen—literally—on a flight from Heathrow, unable to master the plastic headphones (the characters didn’t look interesting anyway). Feeling no attachment of any kind to Sandra Oh, he could admit that her lavender-blue gown and his wife’s graduation dress from considerably more than a decade earlier were almost identical. On the day of the graduation he had given his wife several dozen roses. Roses are vaginal. And so on. Once, he formed this interpretation of the dream: “I am not a scientist, because a scientist does not turn away from seeing or being seen.” Even calling these parts of her body “privates,” he realized, because to himself he was doing this, clearly set up a scheme of interpretation, a perspective, that denied the openness and matter-of-factness of the sight, its medical reality, so to speak.

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But as well as in the Courbet, the image he had formed of Sandra Oh’s “privates” might have had its source in one of those nineteenth-century medical texts filled with crisp line drawings that display the phalliform clitoris or the enlarged labia of a Hottentot (see Fiedler, Freaks 140), or even in the Archives of Gynecology and Obstetrics, simply because the projection was unadorned, direct, clearly discernible (as though labeled, except that it certainly was not), true and immediate, and thus, for someone accustomed to a certain modesty and sense of propriety—as our dreamer was, being much of a recluse—shocking. It shocked him, what he saw, but of course, and this is the cardinal fact, it did not—having shocked him—go away. To turn away from the turning away: It seems to me that in some ways this dream nicely encapsulates, even magnifies, a central problem of seeing film and, really, it is this action of seeing film and the difficulties involved in it, not genitalia, that concern me in these pages. As the dream sequence began, Sandra Oh was performing in a “film,” yes—a film the dreamer was projecting—but the sense of presence to her presentation seemed sharpened, as though she were really in a room with the dreaming man and he had “woken up” to the sight of her crotch. The dreamer took his turning away as a metaphor for his own concentrated gaze and devotion, surely not evidence of fear or hesitation, since that turning so fully revealed—certainly to him but also to whomever was observing his behavior in this dream, because certainly in this dream he was being dreamed or watched, as it were, by someone else—revealed how he essentially was his looking; how that looking fully swallowed and digested, and then became, the looker, himself; and how what he was looking at was also capable of looking at him looking (see, on this, Dixon It Looks at You); and also, therefore, how looking compounds and constitutes a full measure of engagement with the world.

Not Fully Seen, Seeing A certain propensity does commonly exist among readers for classifying the angle, the language, the school, the orientation, or the style of a piece of text they are working upon, lest it run freely through the mind. Such classification is a principle of order, and order a principle of politics, so the understanding of a statement or treatise as “psychoanalytical” or as “phenomenological,” as “historical” or as “aesthetic,” as “Bordwellian” or “Cavellian” or “Bazinian” or “Metzian” may instantly serve to limit interpretive possibilities and thus reduce strain. More sadly, such a way of understanding even as it reduces strain also reduces play. I have no desire to reduce strain. The issue for me is the depth of regard that is possible, especially in the face of cinema, and what is possible in the exercise of that regard. What our dreamer’s dream of Sandra Oh achieved for him, he understood finally, was a confirmation that he is involved


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in (set in motion by) what he sees, and that what he sees comes in that way to have a fullness of meaning. The dreamer of this dream was—only my pronouns have hinted—male. To break (gently) with many theorists, let me say that I do not take it to be essentially important—as concerns his acts of looking and turning away—that Sandra Oh is a woman and that he is not, or indeed that he is less questionably entirely Occidental than she is (he is of European stock). Race and gender, after all, are not attributes of dream structure, even if they do characterize the figments that appear in a dream and perhaps even work to form the reason for dreaming. While it is true that part of this dreamer’s fascination with what he could see stemmed from the fact that he did not possess between his legs what his dream creature possessed between hers, it is also true, and more profound, that in looking between her legs he was not looking between his own, that his own genitalia were not knowing themselves as he used his eyes (also genitalia) to look at hers; true, too, that as any man or woman in his position could have done, he was seeing a place of beginnings, perhaps his own beginning, perhaps mine! was traveling backward both in space and in time. Hence the appropriateness of the title Courbet gave to his painting. And while any Orientalist scholar could have had a field day with this particular curiosity about this particular woman of all women, the dreamer avows that when the skirt flew up she was, during his brief honeyed moment of inspection, only the unraced bearer of the gazing vagina, even though she became Asian again when in a flash he saw her move to cover herself. As to this covering up: it is conceivable—perhaps it is likely—that when he turned away he peeked at her masking herself, because in wanting to turn away and not be seen, still he wanted desperately to see, and perhaps also to be seen a little in his seeing. Seen a little, but not fully seen, seeing. One could frame a simple enough explanation of the Sandra Oh dream, except that no explanations are simple. A day before it occurred (the man confided to me), he and his wife had taken their teenage son and a few of his friends for sushi. Hours later, he had asked his wife whether it was rude to fail to raise one’s hand to cover one’s mouth if while one was eating one was participating in a conversation, this because two of the boys had repeatedly been doing this all through the meal and, with a growing self-consciousness, he had not. “In Chinese culture it is rude to display the mouth while eating,” she had answered (she is not Asian but her work draws her into situations where she must know details of various cultural practices not her own). The two boys in the restaurant were Caucasian, but along with the son they went to school with many Chinese kids and so might well have learned from their friends to behave this way. Sandra Oh, my confidant had erroneously thought at the time, was Chinese. Sandra Oh’s vagina or anal opening—both of which she hurried to mask—each constituted, after all, a lower mouth, thought I, recalling Robert

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A. Paul’s fascinating essay, “The Eyes Outnumber the Nose Two to One,” where he describes the genitalia as “altogether a very neat analogue of the face . . . And if we add the anus as an analogue of the mouth, as we have excellent psychoanalytic reason for doing, it becomes obvious that a man has two faces, a higher and a lower one, with the same structure” (385), and also warns, “A creature which looks at you with one eye is not reasonable and you can be sure, when it points its eye at you, that it is coming to get you” (383). My dreamer friend’s Sandra Oh was making a squeal, and possibly—how could one know?—the squeal was coming from her vagina. (Is every squeal a vaginal squeal?) So she was covering her (lower) mouth while speaking, although I have no idea what it was she might have been ingesting with that organ at the same time, save, of course, the watcher. Seeing him, devouring him—or at least tasting him—and speaking at the same time, she was being properly polite in creating a cover. And did he lose his own culture in the reverie of looking, did he become a person who was tasting her with his eyes, and are eyes also mouths? Do one’s two eyes constitute together a single three-dimensional mouth, and was the dreamer being polite in his dream, too? Or else: the boys at dinner were covering their mouths the way Sandra Oh was covering her vagina, and so there was something vaginal about the mouths of these boys. Vaginal in what way? I think, not exactly sexually, although obviously that springs to mind (and it sprang briefly to the dreamer’s mind as well). But, as he put it, “One had the sense that one could have been born out of these boys’ mouths,” this because they were uttering, each of them, one after the other, the most brilliant comments which seemed, as they all dined, a way of encapsulating and defining everything. It was quite as though they were stipulating the conditions of existence. He was tired, at any rate, had been writing all day. Perhaps his mind wandered into poesy. And in this frame of mind it was certainly true that the squeals (talk) coming from the covered mouths of the boys—the squeals or the spells—threatened to devour him, in the sense of rendering him invisible by virtue of their expansiveness and fullness, their precision, and their surprise. “Well!” as Jack Benny used to say, covering his mouth, rolling his eyes. As I have not seen the dreamer for several months, I cannot say whether the dream recurred or whether he ever entirely solved its riddle.

Gaze Power John Ellis writes—and I cannot quite agree to see it his way—“Voyeurism implies the power of the spectator over what is seen. Not the power to change it, but the knowledge that the actions being undertaken are played out for the spectator. This is so too with cinema,” and so on (Fictions 45). And here, he is echoing much that has been set down about the viewer’s ability to control


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by looking: that oft-quoted essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” by Laura Mulvey, is a central resource. Power, however, is the ability to change. To say “power but not the power to change” seems meaningless. What is this “power” of the spectator that Ellis detects in our ability to be the ones for whom the spectacle is created and at whom the spectacle is aimed? It is scopophilia—if we are to adopt the language of the psychoanalytically based theorists of the 1970s—in the name of which the entire apparatus of the cinema is constructed, managed, maintained, developed. Cinema is thus configured as the manipulative servant of the puissant viewer, whose intrinsic and spontaneous desires and needs to see, whose pleasures of the view, are accounted for and addressed by a filmmaking system that continually profits by dutifully acceding to the audience’s demand. I would argue that the filmmaking system, on the contrary, accedes to the pressures involved in showing, and that it needs and desires to show. The films that are made are not necessarily the ones the viewers want to see; they are the films the filmmaking system wants and needs to make. Voyeurism is not a mode of power; it is a way of acceding to the power of the exhibition, a passive response. The idea that the gaze is powerful rather than submissive is misleading. More bluntly: viewers surely desire to see a world, but not so overwhelming a one as cinema relentlessly shows. Leaving behind this dreamed body of Sandra Oh, the lavender dress, the breeze through the window (a recollection of the chilling wind outside orphaned little Yuri’s window in Dr. Zhivago [1965]?), shame, modesty, that rising flush, the boys eating sushi, the polite covering of mouths, dispensing with it all one may remain inspired to wonder about: one’s own gaze, not so much a power as an act, and an act that brings both delight and shame, both focus and trepidation. Not, I must emphasize, the gaze in general, the gaze as process, but what it is that I experience in my own act of gazing, of seeing film. Film, not the gaze, is central. What I experience when I see; and what I see when I have this gazing experience. To speak of the gaze in general one stands outside, or beyond, oneself and discusses state power, the organization of experience, the enculturing of ocularity, vision, and visibility as agencies of control, ultimately surveillance or diagnosis. But what invokes these constructs is the objective gaze as social or cultural process, not one’s personal gaze. Personal experience has no role to play in such invocation. Yet when I gaze personally I am caught by, swirled into, the vortical object. I achieve vertigo. Vertigo, indeed. In his opening credits for Hitchcock’s Vertigo, the designer Saul Bass engages this connection ludically. The gazing eye in a woman’s face—the eye is gazing but also apparently paralyzed, frozen, blinded by light—becomes a vortex which entraps the watcher’s vision. At first Vertigo seems a film playing upon a screen, but then swiftly it becomes a world in which I must participate, a kind of dream itself. I take this way of looking to be engagement.

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In Robert Altman’s Short Cuts, there is a display of our capacity for engagement. A married woman (Jennifer Jason Leigh) makes money by performing telephone sex while her family—a husband who tends to people’s swimming pools (Christopher Penn) and some small children—move around her. She changes a baby’s diaper while regaling her client about the lovely taste of his “balls.” To see this woman as a victim of sexualized labor practices—a kind of prostitute with no land holdings and no capital of the kind routinely available to men—forced into the sex trade by virtue of her disempowerment, while not absolutely inaccurate, is simplistic. In this particular case, there is an avidity to her working style that drives her husband into a jealous fury, so that at one point he demands to know why she never talks this way to him. He represents a dominating male culture (he is a character created by a citizen of that culture), that creates and perpetuates this kind of female labor in order to preserve and develop its own pleasure, and yet he recognizes, too, that she is restless and zealous in the degree of involvement in her work and the extent to which she practices it. Her phone log is jammed full of calls, so she is making very good money. Apparatus theorists would argue that the males who telephone this woman have the power of “the gaze,” or certainly the power of the ear, and that her performance is engendered utterly by their instigation of the call. While they do not have the power to change what she says, the fact of their being ready to listen to her constitutes the overriding “power” to effect her performance in the first place. But in Short Cuts, the lie is given to this kind of analysis by a tiny moment, in which she is working herself up (in homage to Klute [1971]) to an orgasmic moan for her client. Suddenly, finished early, he disconnects and she is left holding the phone. For a flash of an instant we see that there is shock and dismay on her face, before she quickly hangs up and mentally terminates the routine. This housewife/entrepreneuse is a Method actress, wholly involved as she works. The abrupt disconnection of the call highlights the intensity of that involvement, now shattered. That involvement constitutes her own agency, and to speak of it as a metaphor for filmic performance (which it also is) is to say that the camera system (of which she is a part) has its own discreet involvement; is involved with itself, at least as much as it responds to the viewer’s presence. More: it must be involved even when it fails to seduce the viewer’s presence, as is proven by the numerous well-crafted, even brilliant cinematic flops people don’t watch, that do not earn back their investment and fall into oblivion. They, too, are open to a gaze. I think it unnecessary to claim, in order to substantiate its interest and importance, that the spectatorial gaze has power, that the gaze itself turns the film system on and off or winds its cranks. The performer wishes to perform (performance, after all, is action); and even in gazing we become performers who wish to perform, more than simply passive all-swallowing receivers. Even without power, the viewer’s gaze is worth thinking and writing about.


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It is true in the end that a dream is only a dream; that a dinner is only a dinner; that a film is only a film. Yet I think that by linking a dream to a meal and a film in these opening comments I am pointing to a fundamental nexus. As nourishment, film is incorporated. And incorporated it passes into dream.

Withdrawn To elaborate upon just one more strand of the theme that is being woven here, I must note that my dreamer friend was also overcome, in his Sandra Oh dream quite as (on occasion) in waking life, with the conviction that one should not look (a conviction engaged thematically by Godard in the traffic accident sequence of Weekend [1968], where we endure a long delay at the back of a line of cars on a country road, slowly inching forward, only to discover finally the bleeding remains of bodies and torn vehicles that all the drivers have been stopping to stare at). And so the turning aside was in part a way of saving himself from censure by others, since over time we have come as a culture to embody in our glances certain ways of justly regarding the world and of rightly holding back from regarding it, showing modesty (see Naficy “Veiled Voice”). Sol Worth and John Adair reported that for the Navajo they studied, to look into a man’s eyes was to deliver a blunt insult to honor (Navajo Eyes). A return to a primal scene, no doubt. But now I find myself asking: was the dreamer pulling away from the object of his perception—the body of Sandra Oh, or at least, in its dream reality, “the body of Sandra Oh”—or was he terminating his engagement in the act of sight? Was it her or was it himself that he needed so vitally to escape? Wasn’t the withdrawal not only a movement away from “her” (the Other) but also, and more importantly, a movement away from one’s own movement? It is probably not possible to see all of what is in front of our eyes. (I take this to be the central theme of Wim Wenders’s astonishing Until the End of the World [1991], where a man [William Hurt] wants desperately to see everything within his field of view.) But viewers of films nevertheless typically (and casually) practice many forms of withdrawal: ritual avoidance by focusing, that is, concentrating on a particular aspect of an image—say its narrative placement and function—at the expense of everything else; scanning (as is increasingly necessary in films, very frequently action films, with very short average shot lengths [see Bordwell]); cropping—taking the beloved star’s face out of context, a practice solidified and mass-circulated through the production of publicity photographs; or routinizing, as when a car driving down a particular street at night is treated as nothing more than “a car on a street” like and equivalent to any other “car on a street” in any film. Both The Lookout and Disturbia (each 2007) commence with violent car crashes, just as Cronenberg’s Crash (1996) is filled with them, and we can routinize these as only “car crashes” so that they

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evanesce, even disappear from memory, rather than standing out as detailed complex actions in which a material object is fragmented, reshaped, warped, twisted, scarred, burned, scratched, punctured in a very particular way. What happens in The Lookout, in fact (with Joseph Gordon-Levitt), recalls a crash of astonishing proportions (with Christopher Walken) in David Cronenberg’s film version of Stephen King’s The Dead Zone (1986): it comes at night, out of nowhere, apocalyptically, transcendentally, one could almost think, beatifically. It is also possible, and has become something of a habit nowadays, to turn away from images by listening to what is onscreen—exercising a fetish for the sound track, musical or spoken (as, for example, with School of Rock [2003] or Magnolia [1999] or Donnie Darko [2001]) or else tracking through dialogue for clues as to the mystery of the story (as in Notes on a Scandal [2006] or any James Bond film, or any slasher film, or any film noir where the myriad character names must be sorted for the viewer’s version of moral order to prevail). One can withdraw by taking images to be mere illustrations of the narrative text, which is considered to be primary (and primal). Or the graven image in general may be thought a pervasive enticement to sin, playing against the biblical dictate to shun its lure of pleasurable enchantment or information; so that while we fear to gaze raptly and deeply we are still secretly—thus guiltily (and a little blindly)—attracted. A withdrawing resolution is to use the quick glance, a way of looking while not looking, seeing more than nothing but less than it is possible to see. Perhaps we feel the image will contaminate us in a very pointed and specific way, because we will have been exposed to corruption from its exact content. As in the habit of holding the mouth away from view while eating, so in watching cinema we may fear that something presented to the eye is exactly and precisely poisonous or contaminative to the social context, or else destructively temporal, annihilating our opportunities for pretending that time is not passing—for example, a simple physical accomplishment under gravity, such as the town car gliding down the road in the introduction to Todd Haynes’s Safe (1995)—and we may grind away at it swiftly just to be able to move on. Our commitment, say, to gnashing and mashing natural substances before they are slid down the throat helps us proceed through time without sensing it. The boys in the restaurant covered their mouths, that tactic worked for them, and for our part we do not quite look at that gliding car, at the way it moves, the street it moves on, the houses it moves past; we say summarily, thankfully, but dismissively, “Suburban street.” Happily, title cards are superimposed above the Haynes image, so that we can read instead of seeing. A film called “Safe,” by a director named “Todd Haynes.” Surely, too, in seeing one is compromised. In Sideways, Paul Giamatti, disconsolate and at the end of his tether, guzzles a tub of red wine on a winery visit, thus making a scene and invoking the forces of social order, to such a degree that his buddy, Thomas Haden Church, has to drag him out of the place.


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While we are not obliged to be specifically embarrassed on his behalf, since we know full well that we were not included for real on this “visit” and thus are not present in the “room,” we are forced to the awareness that the producer and director of the film, Michael London and Alexander Payne, have arranged for placement of this scene in such a way that it will confront us; in short, it is known that we are watching the scene, even and exactly as no particular person knows that any particular one of us watches, and the scene is being played out to—not simply for—such watchers as we are, by performers who desire to be seen. By watching a film we join a hypothesis. In Lewis Gilbert’s Alfie (1966), a principal character continually looks into the lens when he speaks, invoking, addressing, noticing “us,” and so we are compromised as viewers of what he shows. The same is true for us even when characters do not look “into our eyes”: watching Chaplin murdering his wives in Monsieur Verdoux (1947), Keanu Reeves and River Phoenix petting under a blanket in My Own Private Idaho (1991), Sharon Stone being interrogated in Basic Instinct (1992), Dennis Hopper terrorizing Los Angeles with his bombs in Speed (1994); or when too many of them look at us, and look too long: Robert Montgomery’s Lady in the Lake (1947). Turning away from the screen can permit us to deny our participation, to cling to our innocence: we are not watching the multiple wife murders, the homosexual lovemaking, the detainee’s crotch, the bomber’s nefarious planning, Philip Marlowe’s interlocutors. And also, it goes almost without saying, we may claim a certain moral high ground, one reserved for those who do not stoop to pay attention to what is culturally and politically defined as “base,” “vulgar,” “licentious,” or “repulsive.” The screen, in short, can be “dirty,” and our refusal to commit to it can be a strategy for keeping “clean.”

A Gaze Is Not a Glance Perhaps our turning away is a betrayal of the way in which we look. We are living in an age when motion pictures have dominated both popular and visual culture, but also when most people who go to movies do not watch them very carefully. Criticism, by and large, seems blind to film itself, to what is inherently visual about it, critics glazing over their subject with plot rehash, unformed opinion, star publicity, and open-ended theorization borrowed wholesale from the press kit. Popular discourse about film is minimalist, focusing—if on anything—on explosive moments badly described and incompletely experienced and neglecting the way the screen is composed. Scholarly discourse almost never refers to the look of the screen, except obliquely and cursorily by stating a shot type. To make sense of this we must consider two quite different ways of watching the screen. A gaze is not a glance. In a way quite different from the way I intend to mean this, and derived from the work of Ellis, Timothy Corrigan suggests

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one way of considering this important difference. The “gaze,” for him, is the constant, repetitive, located, and habitual concentration of the spectator upon the movie theater screen (emphasis mine), exercised during the days of traditional film exhibition during, and shortly after, the golden age of Hollywood. The commercial cinematic image is for Ellis “the perfection of the photographic,” large, usually substantially larger than the individuals watching it . . . the audience is seated in rows, separated from each other to some degree, and the image is projected in near-darkness. This induces a particular kind of mental state in the commercial cinema viewer: a concentration of psychic activity into a state of hyper-receptivity. . . . Sitting still in the dark has overtones of sleep and dreaming. (Visible Fictions 40)

By the time of the videorecording revolution, however, notes Corrigan, certainly by the 1990s, films are quite as likely, even more likely, to be screened by individuals and families in the context of their homes on videotape, so that (as he sees it) the viewing process is riddled with interruptions, interspersed and interlinked with other related and unrelated activities, and personally editable, at least in the sense that projection can be stopped and started at the viewer’s whim. “When a movie is viewed through a VCR,” writes Corrigan, “it is even more so a selected experience and subject to the choices and decisions of the spectator” (28). He quotes Jean Cocteau’s observation that the world is seen “out of the corner of the eye” as a paramount characteristic of the (new) “glancing mode” of film watching. While films in the theater were gazed at, suggests Corrigan, videotape and now, of course, digital video disc usher in an era of the glance. Perhaps it is interesting to add to this thought Ortega’s observation that the glance out of the tail of the eye constitutes the “height of disdain” (“Point of View” 123). While one may find Cocteau’s dictum eminently sensitive to a certain aesthetic problem in cinematic viewing, a problem brought on by the diminution of the theater space, the invention of the multiplex, and home viewing, it does not seem necessary, following Corrigan, to see the glance as being conditioned by the age of video or by the intermeshing of film viewing with domestic activity that video called for and permitted. Even if certainly it is true that domestic activity can lure the eye of the viewer away from the screen, and that certainly it very frequently does this, home viewing has the potential to be intensive, and glancing has also occurred in the movie house. Operating in the movie theater much as it does elsewhere in modern life as an extension of our ability to race through or elide experience rather than dwelling within it, the glance can organize even our least domesticated viewing in the dark. It is narrative, of course, that facilitates, organizes, and develops this ability to race through experience, narrative that systematically turns us away from the screen.


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A certain structured development of narrative involvement early in the twentieth century, studied by Tom Gunning and André Gaudreault and elaborated upon at length by Gunning, effected in cinema a disorienting change from a mode of perception in which the eye was both caught and fixed—say, fascinated—by features seen onscreen. Moving pictures until about 1908—the earliest of these, in the last decade of the nineteenth century, Gaudreault terms “les vues animées”—had constituted what Gunning and Gaudreault call a “cinema of attractions.” Gunning writes: Here the assumption of narrative primacy becomes more of a barrier to understanding than a useful hypothesis. While storytelling is not totally foreign to cinema before the nickelodeon boom (1905–1909), a number of apparent stylistic anomalies and an often radically different mode of exhibition lead us in another direction. Rather than early approximations of the later practices of the style of classical film narration, aspects of early cinema are best understood if a purpose other than storytelling is factored in. Cinema as an attraction is that other purpose. By its reference to the curiosity-arousing devices of the fairground, the term denoted early cinema’s fascination with novelty and its foregrounding of the act of display. (“Now You See It” 42)

The screen was thus the locus of an optical appeal, and the moving image was in and of itself a reason for paying attention and becoming involved. The fact of representation itself “constituted the initial fascination of cinema” (43). This philosophical entrancement of sorts, and this wondrous consideration, were replaced by a form of perception the central characteristic of which was propulsion through a chain of apparently relatively probable links, a story, which is to say, an unhesitating extension of the viewer’s attention, at each moment, backward in order that the present moment might be linked causatively with what, immediately before, had led to it. “Narrative,” as Gunning puts it, “invokes the spectator’s interest . . . by posing an enigma” (“Now” 43). For Paul Goodman, this “enigma” is a progressively decreasing and resolving improbability (see Structure). What Gunning and Gaudreault call “the cinema of narrative integration” is born with D. W. Griffith’s work at Biograph, near a point late in the first decade of the twentieth century. With narrative integration, the viewer is “engaged” in the story by means of various techniques of shooting and editing and a corresponding new mode of performance for camera, for example, the close-up on the wrench at the end of The Lonedale Operator (1911; see Gunning “Systematizing” 29–33). By implication, in order for viewers to look at a narrative film in a theater—Corrigan would call this the “gaze”—it was really necessary to “glance”: the propulsive narrative impulse, so carefully addressed by filmmakers such as Griffith, demands a racing—and therefore always impulsive—attentiveness in which each moment

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of concentration is only partially devoted to what is happening in order that relation forward and backward can effectively be expected and remembered. Indeed, to fully perform a “gaze” in the theater à la Corrigan is to recognize and meditate upon a spectacular quality that is only accessible when the need to proceed through the diegesis can be suspended and the viewer’s regard for the vision devoted entirely to the sense of presence and completeness—the attraction—onscreen. If, in psychoanalytic terms, each narrative moment is characterized by a lack—since it is not what it was and not what it will be—the “attraction” proposed by Gunning, “a cinematic gesture of presentation” (“Now” 42–43), lacks this lack. By contrast, to follow a cinematic story, to race forward in the direction of eventualities, conclusions, resolutions, is merely to glance at what is available at any one moment, to express toward the screen image the “height of disdain.” Some will argue that fascination for the screen and absorption by means of a true gaze at the image need not be restricted to the pre-narrational era but can be classical or post-classical as well. For example, we can be stunned by Han Solo’s Millennium Falcon jumping into hyperdrive in Lucas’s Star Wars (1977) and thereby experience the gaze. (I sat in an audience far underground at Times Square with a few thousand people who simultaneously did this.) Or we can gaze at Grace Kelly’s face in Rear Window (1954), adopting Jeff Jefferies’s point of view, and suddenly it is our gazing self she bends over with her ruby lips and oceanic eyes. George W. S. Trow was stunned by a deep recognition of this “stylish blonde, with access to the Café Society” because growing up he knew that sort of person, “so this film begins to have more meaning for me”: I can remember, at ten, at eleven, at twelve, during the Rear Window years, being confused in exactly the terms laid out in the movie, with absolute authority, by Hitchcock. The world was supposed to be about all of us as, on the one hand, completely powerful, functional people, and, on the other hand, we were supposed to be working from a clean slate on the deepest and most serious problems confronting the world. Yet I saw when I was young that, in fact, when you got to the top or toward the top of things, you found, indeed, very flawed but glamorous people. (Progress 118–19)

Such a reflection abandons the story for the face. Narrative films certainly do not eliminate the gaze, and this book will be an extended discussion, in fact, of what the gaze can invent in selected moments from such films. But we are always sacrificing the progression of a story by succumbing to fascination. When the Millennium Falcon slips into hyperdrive, we choose to forget where we are, how we have come to be here, what has been happening, where we are going, all in the name of gaining the fullest possible consideration of the myriad stars stretching themselves swiftly into light beams against the


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black, black curtain of space. (“WO!” screamed that audience, in unison.) By contrast, often—especially in blockbuster special effects films—our attention is momentarily diverted and fractured by expensive and elaborate digital effects—Hellboy elasticizing himself, New York freezing over in The Day After Tomorrow (2004)—that are perceived and understood not through the process of fascination but as simple, if bizarre, factualities in the narrative chain. Indeed, a sequence of moments crucial to a narrative can be constructed entirely of expensive and grandiose effects. In an effects chain, it is the progressive demand of the narrative and not a full absorption with one aspect of the image or scene, that holds us. Much highly technologized cinema, then, is still built for glancing regardless of the fact that fortunes were spent on the construction of the image. In the primitive Potlatch, the rich man of the tribe threw away food and valuables (see Harris 111–32); in Hollywood, the richest producers throw away shots, sequences, whole films that cost enormous sums, a testament to their ability to make the world expendable. We accustom ourselves to handling visions by glancing, by favoring each extravagant instant in terms of its tendency to lead to somewhere and from somewhere in the immediate sequence of extravagances that is confronting us and that composes a part of the probability slide, that is, the plot. For a contrast: Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia (1999) has an extended musical collage in which, as we pass from character to character and setting to setting to the sound of Harry Nilsson’s “One,” in a reprise of the visitation of plagues upon biblical Egypt Los Angeles is subjected to a storm of plump frogs dropping from the sky (travestied in Stephen Hopkins’s The Reaping [2007]). The sequence, seducing the gaze, is weird and stunning, and it erases the narrative for us as we watch it, going so far, in a way, as to cleanse. Such is manifestly not the effect of the magnificent battle sequences in any part of Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings, where much more money was spent per screen second so that various and arcane special-effects technologies could be employed to simulate thousands of hideous pawns warring upon the battlefield (see Thompson “Scale”). In these battle scenes, one’s memory of the ring tale as it has been developed thus far and one’s hope for its progression along a certain moral pathway are, if anything, intensified, not suspended for the sake of the stunning spectacle. We intercut between many shots, watching each shot only very briefly, and this glancing movement through the action is the central organizational element of our participation, an element, indeed, indispensable to the effects managers, who anticipate our very brief attention span for each shot and thereby calculate the requisite design strategies for seducing us. But even more interesting and important is that it is possible to stage battles onscreen in this way, with rapid cutting from shot to shot—and in blatant contradiction of what battle would feel like to any combatant. It can be assumed the audience pays very little attention to any single moment, any single posture, any single

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angle, any single thrust. Zack Snyder’s 300 (2007) produces a rhythmic tattoo of such thrusts and slashes, obliterating each individual one as an insignificant solo beat in what is intended to be taken as a sweeping narrative development. Such rapid cutting or progression is understood as part of the special effect. Our passage through the panoply of battle movements is our understanding of the battle. When film is viewed from a narrative orientation, each graphic moment must be translated into a set of intentions, causations, preparations, anticipations, reprises, and reconsiderations, that is to say, approaches to and ebbings from eventfulness. In Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940), the new Mrs De Winter (Joan Fontaine) nervously ascends the broad staircase of Manderley, moves toward the west wing, and sees the massive doors of Rebecca’s chambers before her. We focus on the gleaming huge knob, placed so high on the door she appears to be a child as she reaches out to grasp it. But the door, the knob, the grasping, all this conflated—if you will—into a moment of great graphic purity, are understood narratively as resulting from the eager stair climb and leading to the penetration of the chamber and what will occur therein. In the sense that it is the eventfulness of the moment that is significant to the viewer hooked on narrative, what the screen looks like while this is happening, what the camera shows, is reduced to an illustration of a “text.” One could say that when we watch a story, film becomes illustrative, images are informative. When we watch illustrations we do so by glancing, indeed by fragmenting and penetrating them in order to arrive securely at the eventfulness they illustrate. The gaze is an entirely different way of seeing the world, more committing, more intoxicating, more confounding, more philosophically stimulating, and more mysterious. To go back to that hand reaching out for the doorknob in Manderley, say, and gaze at it is to see, all at once, the moment of a child’s heading for a threshold, the door as boundary, the struggle of the hand to take possession of the world that is too big for it, the speech of the doorknob—it is polished, it beckons; not to mention the doors both forbidding and immaculate, and therefore the relationship between purity and threat and possibility. The instant one remembers that it is the new Mrs De Winter, that she has run up the stairs excited and anticipating, that she is about to enter Rebecca’s bedchamber, the instant we acknowledge all this, the hand upon the door vanishes as quickly as a passing note in a haunting musical phrase. While gazing is possible in a theatrical setting, it is surely no more natural there than glancing, and that is another reason why I find Corrigan’s formulation ultimately unsatisfying. Nor, as I have suggested, should we automatically assume that in the domestic environment glancing is more automatic a response than gazing, as Corrigan imagines. We can watch a DVD and pause it at will for reflection, meditation, concentration, re-viewing, all of which


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take us further into the filmic material rather than distracting us from it. Watching Ralph Nelson’s Requiem for a Heavyweight (1962), we are almost forced to this stop-and-start method by Anthony Quinn’s slurred speech, since if we want to grasp what he is saying in his very quiet hazy voice we might need to hear it again and again. As we hear it again and again, his vocalization gains the force of a mantra. The point of the performance is that his Mountain Rivera is living in suspension, as though gazing at life. His very inarticulateness is what attracts us and holds us to his image. Both gazing and glancing occur in movie theaters, and both gazing and glancing occur at home; so it is not the venue of the perception that establishes the nature of the regard, but something in the form of concentration that we muster, and in its purpose. We can be socialized to gaze or to glance. That the evening news is presented as narrative, that our legal system is based in written documents, that the infrastructure of Hollywood persists in treating films as stories all contribute to our emphasis on narrative and our concomitant deemphasis on meditative reflection. Although huge money is spent on manufacturing elaborate, stunning images, they are embedded in a race for meaning and completion so that being stunned is the least we can afford. This is the case even if we consider text itself: I recall a sentence at the beginning of Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove (1902) that is fabulously labyrinthine, round yet also shapeless, throbbing and flashing, that moves back upon itself in order not to move back upon itself, that meanders but also rushes, that seems to hold time frozen like a crystal through which light shines there is no saying in how many directions, such a sentence as destroys all hope of finding a plot, such a sentence as vacates the memory—while still I remember it. This is what I mean by stunning (the reader must find this sentence and bathe in it), a moment that does not carry us, that is not intended to carry us but only to attract, only, as Forster said, to “connect.” Gazing and glancing might alternate powerfully, in movie viewing. I can recollect a personal experience: having been struck dumb in my seat in the Film Forum in 2004 by the crisp white shirt Akira Takarada wears in Honda’s Gojira (1954). The shirt called up for me not only the newly laundered starchy Hathaway shirts that were worn in the early 1960s by a man who was one of my first idols but, more specifically, and almost exactly, a photograph of a white Cardin shirt draped crisply on a hangar that the artist Hiromitsu Morimoto had showed me in the late 1970s at Westbeth. Did Morimoto the visionary somehow inhabit Gojira’s space, and was he obsessed, in his deep artistic soul, with the same urgent desire for the magnesium whiteness a shirt could manifest when the world around it was darkening, and when the vibration of heroic purity was permitted to exude in an explosive and lambent brilliance? Well, Morimoto’s white was a creamier white. But there was more: in the small

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A white shirt can strike one dumb, especially if it summons recollection of a childhood hero or a stunning work of art. Akira Takarada (1.) and Momoko Kôchi in Ishirô Honda’s Gojira (Toho, 1954). Digital frame enlargement from the restored print.

theater, the particular starched whiteness of this shirt in a crisp, newly minted fiftieth anniversary print from the original negative of this film made possible a certain stark fluorescence that shimmered from the screen and flickered in the dark air, penetrating me like so much electricity—the electricity, of course, that was being spoken of in the film even as I drew out of my reverie. In the same theater and during the same screening I was able to use the glance, however: Gojira, rampaging through Tokyo, breaks through power lines and lifts a car from an elevated train high up into the air. I followed its motion, wondered if he would chomp on it as though it were a candy bar, remembered the atrocities the monster had just been committing, and so on, all of which meant that the now-fragmented image of the lifted train was just a tiny piece of a huge continuing temporal-spatial puzzle. It is the cinemagoer’s devotion to attraction, then, not the theatrical setting in which motion pictures are shown by contrast with the home environment, that lends support for, and calls up, the viewer’s gaze. The gaze, aligned with fascination, is thus a manifestation of a kind of wonder elicited by novelty and liveness, the phantasmagorical and the sudden, surprise rather than narrative suspense. And it is related, too, to a certain “acknowledgment of the spectator” that is almost always artfully avoided in narrative cinema (Gunning,“Now”


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43). Because the spectator is dramatically present in the cinema of attractions, the attention of the spectator is both invited and responded to. When stories take over the screen, whether this happens at home through a television, VHS, or DVD; or in the theater—and certainly more grandly in the theater—the gaze is almost always, and imperceptibly, superseded by the glance. As Miriam Hansen has noted: Early cinema solicited its viewer through a variety of displays, including the display of the apparatus itself; the viewer was often acknowledged as addressee. By contrast, advocates of the classical style recognized that the specifically cinematic “impression of reality” depended upon suppressing awareness of the apparatus on the viewer’s part and, therefore, of the viewer on the part of the film. (Hansen 82)

Hansen goes on to attribute this insight to Frank Woods, who worked with Griffith on The Birth of a Nation. Woods had warned that “spectators are not part of the picture,” and that from the viewers’ point of view there was not even supposed to exist the camera that was picturing the scene (Woods quoted in Hansen 82).

The Gaze Lingers Why should it be necessary to imagine that for the cinema of narrative integration to be born, the cinema of attractions must die or be utterly transformed? Gunning suggests that attractions “find their place within” the classical paradigm, they don’t disappear (“Now” 43). But might one go even further? While the wheel transformed civilization, did it not also fail to erase the civilization that walked and crawled before? So it is that one can speed down the highway listening to The Bacchae on the car stereo system and thus adhering in modernity to the classical world. The way of viewing attractions—a power and a system of spectatorship—has not been dissolved by narrative cinema, which required whole new ways of adapting senses and expectations to the succession of images onscreen; but has persisted underneath those new talents we have had to develop and sophisticate. Not only do attractions themselves remain in cinema but our way of gazing at the screen in response to attractions has itself persisted and may at any time show itself. The fascination and regard for attractions persist in those of us who retain the capacity to strike “a childlike mood of craving marvels,” as Sebald puts it (Rings 221). The persistence of the cinema of attractions thus produces a capacity for a certain kind of responsiveness. To understand how as a cultural form the glance has striven against the gaze to command our cinematic sensibilities, it helps to consider an effect on perception and social arrangements that Wolfgang Schivelbusch has argued

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is central to the advent of railway travel. Schivelbusch’s absorbing study The Railway Journey shows that as through the later nineteenth century travel by coach on unpredictable roadways was supplanted by travel on trains, “points moved into each other’s immediate vicinity: one might say that they collided. They lost their old sense of local identity, formerly determined by the spaces between them,” a sense of identity that, with its exponentially increased speed, railway travel was systematically obliterating (38). In railway travel, the traveler experienced an organization of effects and symptoms Schivelbusch calls “panoramic perception”: Panoramic perception, in contrast to traditional perception, no longer belonged to the same space as the perceived objects: the traveler saw the objects, landscapes, etc. through the apparatus which moved him through the world. That machine and the motion it created became integrated into his visual perception: thus he could only see things in motion. (64)

Like the train, cinema itself became a mover, and thanks to cinema, from the earliest projections with the Cinématographe or viewings in the Kinetoscope, the viewer saw moving objects, landscapes, etc. through an independent movement that was structured systematically. With cinema as with train travel, we could “only see things in motion.” The landscape seen panoramically “was no longer experienced intensively, discretely (as by Ruskin, the critic of rail travel), but evanescently, impressionistically” (189). The cinema of attractions already worked through its own kind of panoramic perception, bringing to viewers a relatively new kind of delight to be obtained by “moving through the world” of the image. The image, once it thrillingly began to move, recollected its antecedents in photography that could suddenly, in retrospect, seem frozen. Certainly it was true of the panoramic view, as Boccioni wrote in his “Futurist Manifesto” in 1910, that “all things move, all things run, all things are rapidly changing. A profile is never motionless before our eyes, but it constantly appears and disappears” (150). For him, what we could see was always a “persistent symbol of universal vibration.” The early cinematic attraction was already, then, something of an impression: an object of the gaze and the glance at once. In moving toward the cinema of attractions, which reprised the development of railway travel, viewers “lost contact with the landscape” (Schivelbush, Journey 23), and indeed saw for the first time without contacting in the process. There is a kind of “annihilation of space and time” in the specific sense that the experience of confronting a cinematic attraction invoked a new “subjective perception of space-time” (36). This novelty continued and developed in classical cinema. For the protagonists traveling in John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939), space and time are coherent inside the coach even as the world outside glides by, but when we watch this coach journey, our sense of motion is buffered by the smooth


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mechanism of the camera. The camera gives us a train ride, not a coach ride. “Les films,” said Truffaut, “avançent comme un train dans la nuit.” What I have been calling the cinematic gaze, then, is already a gaze in motion, and also a gaze at motion, a gaze at glancing, the ongoingness of the narrative entirely notwithstanding. Narrative brings in yet one more kind of motion to a moving picture that does not inherently require it, adding a move to a viewing that is already on the move. The advent of cinematic narrative reflects panoramic perception in yet another way. Schivelbusch goes on to note how in the railway journey, the traveler does not simply experience the moving landscape and thus come to understand the world by means of motion; but also finds himself transported from landscape to landscape, which is to say, from one discernible visual experience by way of a second to a third. The voyage becomes a story. “The railroad choreographed the landscape,” writes he, The traveler who gazed through the compartment window at such successive scenes acquired a novel ability that [Benjamin] Gastineau calls ‘la philosophie synthéthique du coup d’eoil’ (‘the synthetic philosophy of the glance’). It was the ability to perceive the discrete, as it rolls past the window, indiscriminately. (60–61)

While the gaze of the cinema of attractions presented the viewer with a world organized through the motile agency of the cinema, the storyline of the cinema of narrative integration and the later classical cinema choreographed this opticality and operated more intensively through the glance. With early films, the viewer could not but be conscious of the artisanality of the work; with narrative film, as Belton (1985) and others have shown, the cinematic project was to disguise the artisanality of the work as much as possible so as to seduce the viewer’s complicity and engagement; further, the increasingly elaborate mechanism of studio production from 1930 onward meant that artisanality was also being hidden by—indeed, transformed into—the systematic mechanical operation of well-organized and interlocking parts. For Schivelbusch, in panoramic perception “objects were attractive in their state of dispersal” (189). Thus, any singular coup d’oeil had meaning not in and of itself but as it exploded outward into contact with others obtained at other instants. With narrative, each such moment reached backward to the memory of its antecedents and forward to the probability of its resolution. Perception itself was a probability rather than a fact. Paradoxically, panoramic perception already prepared viewers to see cinematic attractions out of the corner of the eye, and the experience of seeing this way could lead to meditation and wonder. The gaze moved and was splendid in its motion. But narrative could capitalize upon this motion, could compound and move the motion itself in a larger project that might make the wonder dissolve in

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the frenetic charge of navigation. It is not movement that dissipates the gaze and produces the glance; it is the sense of purpose, which is to say, the desire for destinations.

Vertigo Toward the end of the eighteenth century, spectators were thrilled by a device called the Phantasmagoria, in which the rear projection of lantern slides occasionally went so far as to stun by producing the sense of an object onscreen moving toward the viewer. Developed on the basis of Johann Schropfer’s smoke projections in Leipzig in the 1760s, Paul Philidor’s shows in Berlin, beginning in 1789, used a panoply of theatrical devices including controlled fire and images that appeared to move toward the audience, this accomplished by invisible motions of the projection machine, an early form of the “hidden apparatus” that so fascinated Oudart and Baudry in the 1970s (see Mannoni). Writing of the use of this device as a significant event in the history of optical culture, Gunning focuses on the “effect of confrontation, even of invasion of personal space,” noting a “contradictory kinesthetic and emotional effect” produced as viewers commenced by believing they were seeing an object heading for them and then recognized that they were safe, that “what appeared to be motion . . . was, after all, only a trick” (“Phantasmagoria” 7; see also Bottomore). This “looming effect,” Gunning tells us, is a “sensation of direct confrontation, a contradictory sense of emergence from the screen toward the viewer which is evoked but then disavowed,” and the combination of evocation and disavowal produces a “divided and vertiginous spectator.” This, for Gunning, is a principal way in which the cinema of attractions “addressed a rather different spectator from that imagined by classical film narrative,” or, perhaps, created the opportunity for a radically different kind of optical experience (that I am here calling a gaze). Amazement and disorientation at the apparent “approach” of screen images characterized the audience’s experience of the earliest cinema. Writing in 1896 about Lumière projections in Nizhni-Novgorod, for example, Maxim Gorky describes a strange world “without sound, without colour . . . Everything there . . . is dipped in monotonous grey . . . It is not life but its shadow” (“Review” 5). He goes on: When the lights go out in the room in which Lumière’s invention is shown, there suddenly appears on the screen a large grey picture, “A Street in Paris”—shadows of a bad engraving. As you gaze at it, you see carriages, buildings and people in various poses, all frozen into immobility. All this is in grey, and the sky above is also grey—you anticipate nothing new in this all too familiar scene, for you have seen pictures of Paris streets more


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than once. But suddenly a strange flicker passes through the screen and the picture stirs to life. Carriages coming from somewhere in the perspective of the picture are moving straight at you, into the darkness in which you sit; somewhere from afar people appear and loom larger as they come closer to you. (5)

But this pleasure experienced by the gazing spectator—that is, the spectator suspended before the flickering presence of the optical phantasm, and not absorbed by the development of a story and its demands on both memory and aspiration—is remarkably similar to the “panique voluptueuse” cited by Roger Caillois as the aim of vertiginous games, which are based on the pursuit of vertigo and which consist of an attempt to momentarily destroy the stability of perception and inflict a kind of voluptuous panic upon an otherwise lucid mind. In all cases, it is a question of surrendering to a kind of spasm, seizure, or shock which destroys reality with sovereign brusqueness. (Man, Play and Games 23; see also Goffman Frame Analysis 380)

Caillois cites a particular feature of vertiginous play that likens it to the cinematic gaze. It is, first, associated frequently with masks and performance: masks, “always fabricated secretly and destroyed or hidden after use” (87). (I recall that at Paramount in the 1990s, the latex masks that were fabricated for daily production on various film and television versions of the Star Trek universe—many of which were being shot simultaneously on various soundstages—had to be destroyed each night to prevent souvenir collectors from pilfering them from the garbage bins and trading them for immense profit.) In the masked world, which is surely the world of performance, we encounter what Caillois calls “an interregnum of vertigo, effervescence, and fluidity in which everything that symbolizes order in the universe is temporarily abolished so that it can later re-emerge” (87). The cinematic gaze is, likewise, an utter suspension of social order in a deeply poetic involvement of open willfulness and abandon. Further, in identifying with the masked being we come really to believe in it: performers entertaining the notion that they really are their characters while engaged in giving them play, spectators accepting wholeheartedly the fictive frenzy the masks establish (see Cortázar). I am moved to ask this question: why should the spectator’s delirium of voluptuous panic, that pleasurable vertigo, that was certainly produced in the Phantasmagoria and in early cinema because of certain technical effects these developments had made possible, be imagined only as a response to technological effects? Why might technological developments in cultural optics not trigger human responses already possible without them? Why might the ability to muster a gaze, an ability drawn upon intensively by the Phantasmagoria and

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by the cinema of attractions, even an ability upon which the cinema of attractions largely depended, not be part of the operation of playfulness and thus a reserve ready to be drawn upon, not only before cinema begins but even in later cinema? Without the assistance of either the Phantasmagoria or the cinemas of the Lumières, Edison, Porter, and others, audiences could visualize and understand Hamlet being able to “see,” to be stunned by, and to “respond to” the ghost of his dead father in 1609—that is to say, audiences of the time could have been expected by Shakespeare to grasp the meaning of the son-ghost relationship he was fabricating dramatically onstage, and thus to successfully gaze at his ghost and sympathize with Hamlet when he gazed, too. They were prepared to accept the reasonability of such an all-consuming vision; and one might argue that the Phantasmagoria and later devices worked upon this preparation. In a similar way, certain features even of narrative cinema, certain isolated moments or characteristics of what is to be seen onscreen, could function to solicit the gaze, to mobilize the viewer into a voluptuous panic. When I watch a current film, perhaps I am occasionally opened to the experience of phantasms, to the voluptuous gaze, in the same way as viewers of the cinema of attractions were opened more generally, and this state of openness reflects a playful, utterly precinematic—even, in some way, primitive, while at the same time very modern—way of using the senses and the mind. It is as though glancing alone, and for an extended period of time, leaves us hungry for the vertiginous nourishment of the gaze.

Revolutionary Cinema A kind of meditation might be framed, then, upon what it is that one senses oneself to be doing in the experience of cinema, culminating in a description of one’s own viewing practice or at least of some particular features of it. It is sensible to wonder whether, routinely, this process of “knowing” film might fit coherently, in its way, with the history of film production and exhibition, the history of attempts to put brave and wonderful visions on a screen. The possibility of such a conjunction, such a fit, would be a way of making sense in contemporary, rather than just historical, terms of the relevance of what I am calling the “voluptuous gaze.” I have certainly experienced this gaze, and I am certainly not alone. I experience it regularly—although also unpredictably. By thinking through the experience of the voluptuous gaze in this way, any viewer may witness herself standing in the company of viewers over considerable time, say, viewers of cinema since its earliest days, viewers watching Sunrise (1927) or Swing Time (1936) at their premières, viewers watching They Live by Night (1948) or The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957), Bonnie and Clyde (1967), The Godfather (1972), Empire of the Sun (1987), Sweet and Lowdown (1999), or Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl (2003), and so this is a way of


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understanding experience to be old and elemental but at the same time forward-looking and alive. The “voluptuous gaze” may be akin to certain experiences of otherworldliness and liminality that riddle the avant-garde movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As the semiology of the looming response, for example, is relatable to Futurism, with its alarming amplification of locomotive technologies and the concomitant increase in probability that objects would come hurtling toward viewers in everyday life, it is linked, too, to the psychological magnifications in which objects of charm and great endearment appear to hover and approach, to be exceptionally “real” and intense in our experience of them (see James “Perception”). Virtually any object might loom at us, then, in the simple sense that we would feel ourselves suddenly and uncontrollably being drawn to it—or sense that it was drawn to us—or that it would seize and abstract our attention, catch it absorbed in a kind of voluptuous gaze. What in a rudimentary way the Phantasmagoria, and later in a more sophisticated way the early cinema, made possible, then, was not the creation of attraction but its diffusion beyond the bounds of the personal, its extension to a public audience of incomparably different viewers (this notwithstanding that the nickelodeon was a working-class experience by and large): attraction was, as Walter Benjamin might have put it, “mechanically reproduced.” If the sensitivity required of the viewer for experiencing phantasms and other sources of voluptuous panic was a kind of disease, both in the historical sense that the nineteenth-century tubercular personality described by Susan Sontag was an epitome of it (see Illness) and in the sociological sense that sensitivity is anti-capitalist (nonproductive, even debilitating to some degree or other), then the cinema of attractions was an early system for mechanically reproducing disease. In that way, cinema was revolutionary, and classical and contemporary narrative cinema, with its perduring capacity to provoke and sustain our voluptuous gaze, if we are but willing to lose our tracks, is revolutionary still. In this book, there is what the French bravely call a “politique.” I am trying, with some passion I hope, to make a case. If our cinema is in crisis, as so many thinkers both academic and popular have intimated it is, this is perhaps not so much because of the vast emplacements of Cineplexes; the outlandish development of special effects and transparent, stupid, or cheap-thrill moviemaking (as some would have it), following from the blockbuster influence of Jaws in the epochal summer of 1975; the dearth of good, solid writing in Hollywood (in an age where slick irony replaces the depth of feeling), associated not just with the deaths of the writers of the classical age but also with encroaching cynicism and censorship; the advent of personal viewing systems, including video iPODs and Blu-Ray and DVDs and flatscreens; or the poisonous contributions of network television and the mass media’s “Entertainment” soft-news broadcasting with its harping focus on the most egregious and saleable personalities at the

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expense of serious cinematic work. While all of this is happening now, and has been happening for some time, cinema’s “crisis” lies in the failure of the viewing experience, in the casualness with which so many of us treat the films we watch. And this is due, more than to any other cause, I believe, to our addiction to verbal literacy as the only mode of philosophy, or the only important mode, our belief that the story is what counts, that anything vital is told as such, that the sequentiality of events is what we should pay attention to. We don’t look at anything onscreen very carefully, then; or carefully enough; watching our way forward as though using cinema as a new technology of locomotion. After all, when we say that the perception of film is linked to the perception produced by railway travel, we do not necessarily invoke motion pictures as vehicles, and film in general as a railway. Nor does one have to stand still and stagnate in order to gaze or meditate; and the motion involved in motion pictures does not have to propel us to a finale—except, of course, that more people will pay to see more films if they can be induced to race through them and to glean some kind of (ultimately forgettable) “message” at what can be called the “conclusion.” I write these pages in order to encourage those who love cinema, or who want to love it, to look longer, harder, more exhaustingly, more confoundingly, and more openly at the screen. Because it sees, cinema can be our profoundest philosophical vessel. Because it reconstructs and “realizes,” it can mirror the world we might not otherwise wish to watch and note. Because it has the ability to tell stories, cinema is a rich source of poetry and myth, even if the poetic and mythmaking impulse are already implicit before the story begins or progresses too far. Because it is inherently musical—Orson Welles told Peter Bogdanovich as much (Welles 255)—film can reach into our deepest past, catching our breath. It can be as articulate a form for the expression of sentiments and ideas as great literature, and can address our taste as pungently as great painting—but all at once. So we must take up the challenge to experience it as fully as possible, to appreciate everything a film can be for us. Norman O. Brown once wrote, obsessed as he was with Freud, Turning and turning in the animal belly, the mineral belly, the belly of time. To find the way out: the poem. (Body 56)

But now we live in an optical world, Debord’s “société du spectacle.” The word is picture again. Finding the “way out,” or the “way forward,” is a task we must accomplish with film. It may or may not be redemption we can seek and find, but it will be growth, it will be progress, it will be in the most literal and meaningful sense of the word, enlightenment. In every case, the image onscreen looms and seems both to expand and to disintegrate as one attempts to write about it. A vague sense of anticipation and foreboding fills the reservoir from which thoughts are composed, flooded with memories and questions, and makes the viewer continuously sensitive to,


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as Gorky put it, “vague but sinister meaning that makes your heart grow faint” (“Review” 6). One is continually forgetting where one is. “Strange imaginings invade your mind and your consciousness begins to wane and grow dim.” As with Belle and Avenant in the final shot of La Belle et la bête (1946), the story of the film, that chain which bound and almost blinded us, floats up and away, not into heaven but off the screen and into the mists that gather at the corner of the eye. Then and only then the shocking, transforming image can return to haunt.

chapter 2

˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚ The Hero in the China Sea I am accustoming my eye to blood. —Georg Büchner

Several times in the (perduringly) astonishing Rebel Without a Cause (1955) we are in a position to see what Jean-Luc Godard might have meant when he said Nicholas Ray is the cinema (44). This is a film that, when it premièred on 27 October 1955, made a splash on two counts, neither of which had much to do with the real reason to pay attention to it, which is, as Godard implied, the director himself. First, the star, James Dean, had been killed in a car accident 30 September, having been seen on screens only since early March in East of Eden. This is what the chillingly insensitive eye of Bosley Crowther saw in that earlier James Dean (whose electric presence can still be felt in every shot he made): This young actor, who is here doing his first big screen stint, is a mass of histrionic gingerbread. He scuffs his feet, he whirls, he pouts, he sputters, he leans against walls, he rolls his eyes, he swallows his words, he ambles slackkneed—all like Marlon Brando used to do. Never have we seen a performer so clearly follow another’s style. Mr. Kazan should be spanked for permitting him to do such a sophomoric thing. Whatever there might be of reasonable torment in this youngster is buried beneath the clumsy display. (New York Times, 10 March 1955)

Months later, the single-minded Crowther, still unable to purge the shade of Brando from his mind, saw Rebel Without a Cause: We do wish the young actors, including Mr. Dean, had not been so intent on imitating Marlon Brando in varying degrees. The tendency, possibly typical of the behavior of certain youths, may therefore be a subtle commentary but it grows monotonous. (New York Times, 27 October 1955)

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the hero in the china sea

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As a presence, then, and whomever he may or may not have been imitating to whatever effect, Dean in life and in death overshadowed the film, as well he might have. Crowther himself epitomizes the stunned inarticulateness of Dean’s audience, its inability to come to terms with the magnitude of his performance and the shock of his absence, together. Secondly, by the time of the release of Rebel Without a Cause, the nation had already been roused to a frenzy over juvenile delinquency as a cause of social disharmony, this in the shadow of the hearings of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary’s Estes Kefauver Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency in the United States. “Over a period of several months,” Kefauver’s report concluded, “the subcommittee has received a vast amount of mail from parents expressing concern regarding the possible deleterious effect upon their children of certain of the media of mass communication” (Comic Books and Juvenile Delinquency). In terms of its “theme,” Rebel Without a Cause rang bells that, principally because of comic books and their ostensibly “questionable aspects,” were already clanging in America, a possible reason for the filmmaker to have brought “various Juvenile Authorities, Psychologists, Social Psychologists, Psychiatrists, Analysts etc.” in for consultation “during the course of preparation of the film” (Ray to Martindale, 10 February 1961) or for him to have “convinced the studio schoolteacher assigned to the set to teach social problems that related to young people” to the actors while they were waiting for set-ups (Ray 62). And the lingering image of the martyred Dean—who had cultivated a nonconformist style that resonated with young people to such an effect that hordes tried to acquire facsimiles of the red windbreaker he wore in Rebel, or to visit the Griffith Observatory and sit in his seat, or to deny the fact that he was dead—bolstered the moral message of the film: that parents had to stop and listen to their children or the consequences, both for families and for America, would be dire. The Nicholas Ray who is the true star of Rebel Without a Cause was described by Eric Rohmer as “one of the greatest—[Jacques] Rivette would say the greatest, and I would willingly endorse that—of the new generation of American film-makers, the generation which only came on the scene after the war. . . . It isn’t problems that interest him, in the manner of a [Richard] Brooks, but human beings” (112). This is the same filmmaker who at the beginning of On Dangerous Ground (1952) had a wife tenderly help her detective husband on with his shoulder holster as he prepared to go out on a night shift. With Ray, one must always watch action, not story. Because human action is for him the greatest, most powerful, of mysteries, the cinematic frame must somehow be made equal to capturing every nuance of it. His is a hungry camera. And he never has any patience for the story, even when it is a story from his own pen. Once the film is cast, and the actors are in place, his yen is for the lines of tension between the characters’ motives, and his

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eye needs to follow the game the actors initiate in following out this tension. As though blowing a jazz riff, Ray’s actors must fully express their position at each moment, their felt and deeply known position, all with a knack for breathing and culmination, and the story must carve out the spaces in which such expression is possible. For this reason, you get nowhere with a Nick Ray film concentrating on merely what happens. Every character, at every moment, is on a beat, and it is here in this honest outing of self that the truth lies. In Rebel, for example, the plot mandates that some kids get into trouble with the police; one of them dies. Their parents learn something about their children that they did not know before. But this says nothing of what we see onscreen, or of the numerous lines of thought that are stimulated in us while we watch the numerous lines of expression the actors draw with their bodies in space, their voices opened or held, their glances across the wide chasm of the CinemaScope screen. What do I mean when I say Ray was interested in the line of an action? Not just action rather than activity, but also the line of an action? When we speak to other people we are perforce constrained by etiquette and social pressure to curtail ourselves, to contract and often abbreviate, lest we occupy too much conversational space. (Harold Garfinkel did some fascinating research on the trouble produced when people didn’t appropriately abbreviate in response to the everyday question, “How are you?” [“Studies”].) This speechful contraction is metaphoric of a more general self-negation and self-adjustment, performed in order to address the requirements of civilized life with others. We relax our inhibitions when licensed to do so, for instance by alcohol or other intoxicants (see MacAndrew and Edgerton) or by celebratory rituals (see Rothman Rouch), but our general mode of expression is one that is subject to the censorship produced by the simple gravity of the mass. We do not talk through, or act through—all the way through—an impulse in order to fulfill and release it. And Ray’s cinema repeatedly puts this self-abnegation in front of us for inspection, both by allowing characters to work their way through the impulse of a moment and letting the camera follow the expenditure of that impulse; and by showing the anxiety and pain produced when the impulse is thwarted. As the playing out or repression of an impulse are both temporal, indeed rhythmic, moving forward through successive gestures until either a resolution or an abortion of the impulse is accomplished, the film must find a way to follow. Important: this is not story, this is action. The cinematic shot can be used (and is used by many other filmmakers, from Godard to Tarantino) as a way of containing, embedding, shrinking, curtailing, or otherwise manipulating an impulse, but instead, Ray’s cinema gives the shot its full measure of potentiality to permit the development and expression of the impulse. Rather than the shot acting as a package for containment, it is made a space in which an impulse can develop and conclude.


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Ray wrote, “I cannot take it for granted that the use of the word action as a tool of the actor is understood” (62) and went on to emphasize that “every sentence, thought, or phrase that is spoken on screen must sound as though it is being spoken for the very first or very last time” (76). “You’re tearing me apart!” cries Dean at one point in Rebel. The action of the actor in the moment is the character’s felt need and impulse, which comprises the character’s entire elaborate and compacted perception and analysis of his situation and its lines of possibility, the character’s memory, the character’s line of involvement and alignment, the character’s project, as it were. Here is Ray during his professorial days (he taught at SUNY Binghamton and in New York) conversing with a student actor, “Nat,” about a scene just played: NR: What was your action here, Nat? Nat: Well, first I wanted to go to the couch. NR: Why? Nat: I wanted to kiss her. NR: Why? Are you deeply in love? Is it the first chance you’ve had to kiss her? Is it the first time you’ve seen her? Is it love at first sight? Why? Nat: None of those. NR: Was it something you planned before entering? Nat: Sort of. NR: Did you know that she would be on the couch? Nat: No. Sometimes she has been. NR: So on your way to the apartment today you were thinking, “If she is on the couch today I will close the door, go to the couch, set down my briefcase, say hello, and kiss her.” Is that what your thoughts were immediately before entering the apartment? (63)

There is clearly no doubt that “Nat” does not understand what Ray means by “Why?” or what his action in the scene is. To understand his action he needs to be the character, not pretend to be him; he needs to experience the moment existentially; he needs to want to accomplish something, for which the kiss is absolutely a necessity, and he has to be bent on this accomplishment for reasons that seem right and proper to him; he needs to move without thinking that he is moving, to do, as one might put it, what a person would really do if a person were really doing. When one speaks of a line of such action, one means to suggest that a scene or a moment may not be sufficient to realize fully the character’s way of resolving his condition, or trying to resolve his condition. A line may move through an instant, through a scene, through a sequence of scenes, or through a group of scenes that might not at first appear to be sequenced until the thrust of the action line becomes apparent as a force that joins them. “There’s no such thing,” taught Ray, “as one simple action” (99). Every action intersects with other actions; suggests vested interests; expands to

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form a social situation and then a society. Ray’s treatment of action anticipates a thought of Alexander Mackendrick’s, published fifty years later: “The spoken word is often at its most effective when the actors concentrate not on the words and their literal meaning but on the actions that underlie them, the real intentions and motivations of the characters” (Film-Making 121). In the milk bottle shot—an icon of cinema—the conflicted, tormented Jim Stark (Dean) comes home late at night and goes straight to the kitchen. He steps out into the door frame, looking haggard, his red windbreaker unzipped over a white T-shirt. In his hand, as he raises it, we see a quart of milk in a glass bottle (typical of the 1950s). Jim continues with his movement until the bottle is near his face, and then he rests it against his forehead. Ray uses the CinemaScope lens to make the hoisted bottle stretch horizontally leftward across the screen, with Jim in a tight close-up at right. Thus, the bottle and its white contents work with the red windbreaker and white T-shirt to frame the youth graphically on the large screen, to stabilize him momentarily, and the screen is composed rather like a Mondrian canvas, with an eye to weights and balances. But this usage is not an indication of Jim Stark, it is evidence of the filmic eye. A persistent plan in various drafts of the script had been to have the Starks see Jim arrive late at night and sit in his car, pulling “a container of milk” from “a paper bag” and drinking in the shadows. “Is it him?” the mother was to ask. “Yeah,” the father would warmly have answered, “He’s drinking milk. I’m not going to talk to him. I’m just going to let him sleep” (Stern “Changes”). What of motive for himself can we also find in Jim’s using that bottle to cool his forehead? We can see unconventional application of an object, a casual violation of the propriety of food usage, a forthright fixation on sensing and then acting to release the tension in his own being. His spontaneity: he feels enfevered, he gets the coolness of the bottle, he employs it. The movement from the doorway into the kitchen, then back out, and lifting the milk bottle, all amount to a single line of action that brings Jim from a moment of extreme anxiety (motivated by the death of Buzz Gunderson in the chickie run, just before) to a moment of mounting unnavigable stress (the confrontation with his parents that is about to happen), and this action with the bottle is the through line of that movement. It says that he feels himself and has a bent toward therapy. It says he knows that both his stomach and his head need nourishment, the milk and the tranquilizing coolness. Rather than being alienated from his body and self as are—we will see—the official personae of this decade, Jim is good to himself, addresses his pain directly, tries to resolve it outward into action that is always effective, but immediately and with the objects near to hand. With Buzz in the chickie run, even causing Buzz’s death in a way, he is away from the family, agonized; now he is to be with the family, agonized; and the milk bottle brings him from one position to the other, just as it connects one side of the screen with the other, the past


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with the future, Jim’s history with his fate. We must remember, in order to appreciate what Ray and Dean have accomplished here, that for Jim to fulfill the dictates of the plot and come home to confront Mr. and Mrs. Stark, no side trip to the kitchen is necessary, no milk bottle need be retrieved to be guzzled from or to be pressed against the face. The character in a Ray film has to be a person, above all, who always gets what he needs in the through-play of his action. Thus, the fulfillment of an individual’s needs takes precedence over the choreographic requirement of the social situation, which is always constraining, diluting, shaping, and negating the self through form, etiquette, social pressure, and power relations, and over the demands of the plot. The film had to be in color for this to work. Originally, it was to be shot in black and white, but on 2 April 1955 a decision was effected to switch to Warnercolor (Stacey). The color could now be used by director and actor as an agency in the performance. A spasm of motive could suddenly appear, red as pomegranates, white as milk. Color could be part of the way Jim Stark lived. But for Ray, no matter how it was effected onscreen the character’s action is always motivated in the moment, the character’s challenge always to see and to seize what is available here, now, quickly fading: to say one’s piece, to make one’s life. Here is Dean seizing a moment under Ray’s gaze: In Rebel Without a Cause, in the juvenile officer’s office, the character Jim is thrown to the floor, gets up, sits on a chair, and says he wants to hit something. Ray [Fremick] tells him: “Hit the desk.” He does. We rehearsed that scene so Jimmy would be able to hit without hurting his knuckles, but when we began to shoot, it was clear that in the intensity of the scene he was hurting himself. I resisted the temptation to cut, and he continued to play the scene. Tears came, and pain, and the scene was very intense and meaningful. We finished the shot and even changed setups before I took him to the hospital and learned he had broken a knuckle. (Ray 131)

Nor was that the limit of Dean’s physical involvement with his character. Lawrence Frascella and Al Weisel report the growing aggression between Dean and Corey Allen as they filmed the knife fight. “As they began to get into the spirit of the battle, tension mounted among the cast and crew and the gaggle of reporters that Ray had invited to witness the moment. There was a palpable sense of peril as both actors became more and more frenzied. Suddenly, Ray shouted in a frightened voice, “Cut! Get a first aid man to Jimmy on the double.” Allen had nicked Dean on the ear and a trickle of blood had begun to run down Dean’s neck” (Live Fast 115). But, completely unconcerned, Dean was “incensed at Ray”: “Goddamn it, Nick! What the fuck are you doing? Can’t you see this is a real moment? Don’t you ever cut a scene while I’m having a real moment!” (115).

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To explore Ray’s use of a character’s line of action, we can look at a number of startling little moments in this film, each in terms of the architecture of understanding, feeling, and response upon which it stands.

Judy’s Lips In the Police Juvenile Division, parole officer Ray Fremick (Edward Platt) is consulting privately in his glassed-in cubicle with Judy (Natalie Wood), one of three “delinquents” who have been dragged into the station before this opening scene of the film begins. Geoff Andrew suggests that Ray’s “use of the extra width of the ’Scope format is masterly even in this first scene,” since the filmmaker employs the glass partitions of the office “to create frames within a frame, simultaneously to separate the three strangers from one another and to connect them” (91). Fremick’s cubicle is made of wood and glass, and the chairs and desk are wooden. Judy sits in a red woolen coat, with a red woolen tie fastened at her neck, her lips painted with matching flame-red lipstick. (It is very likely that the Warnercolor negative for this film was sent to the Technicolor lab for dye-transfer printing; the Technicolor red is notably flamboyant [see Haines, 88, 119].) Judy is in anguish about her father hating her, finding her hideous, rejecting her. It is clear she is desperate for his love and acceptance, and this desperation reads in her moist eyes and strained voice. (And since she is so pleasant to look at, we must wonder about the odd judgment of this father.) She is framed in close-up on the CinemaScope screen, the red coat and red lipstick reverberating against one another powerfully in the frame. Looking at her, we have a certain curious sense of imbalance, curious because although she is perfectly framed and eloquently lit (by cinematographer Ernest Haller) yet something about her presentation gnaws at us as we regard her. Then, in the midst of the teary diatribe, and utterly without warning, she begins to talk about those lips of hers. “My father tried to wipe off my lipstick,” she wails, “and it was as though he were trying to rub away my lips.” Stewart Stern wrote this. “It was as though he were trying to rub away my lips.” At this instant, staring into her face, we realize what had been so irritating before, namely, that Judy is wearing too much lipstick. This exorbitance is dramatized to some degree by the red coat, which is exactly the same red and which fills out the frame vertically. But all along, it is now apparent, her mouth has been too significant, too much a thing while she talks and too much a creature in her moments of silence. “All I have to do is open my mouth and everybody jumps all over me,” Judy had been scripted to say (Stern screenplay, 8 February 1955), and her mother, at that point in the production a force as hostile as the father, had quipped, “Then why not try keeping it closed.” By the time the scene was shot, the mother was softened to be more sympathetic and to increase the father-daughter contrast. “And the next time wipe that junk off


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before you come to the table. It looks awful,” the father says at dinner. The redness of her lips has been a stain, and in wanting to erase it her father has deftly taken up our own point of view about this desperate girl. Judgmental and without a handkerchief, we also wished for an instant to deny and eradicate the lipstick that, too forcefully for our taste, dominated her face. In a flash it becomes apparent that the lipstick, the coat, the framing of the portrait shot, the girl’s complaint, the specific story about her father—all have been arranged to reinforce one another in such a way that here, in the first scene of the film, with one of the three major stars of the piece, we are brought to dis-identify with the character we are watching, to take a negative, even a punitive, view, as though, watching her coldly and neutrally in this official space, we are exactly the judgmental parent she so longs to be loved by and to please—longs, I must add, hopelessly. Of course, in dividing Judy off from the filmgoing audience in this way, Ray emphasizes for us the nature and degree of her isolation. If she is cut off from our feeling by virtue of her too-emblazoned face, she is also cut off from the story itself, just exactly as, in her own words, she is cut off from her father. Perhaps it will be possible to come close to Judy, to accept her, even to love her. Or, Jim will love her, and we will be able to watch him believingly. But this will take work; it’s a passage upstream. It will have to be an action. Here, now, Judy is untouchable, except to fix those lips. She never wears lipstick this way again in the film.

Buzz’s Neck Another of the troubled young people Fremick must handle in the opening scene is Jim, our protagonist. Jim lives with parents (Ann Doran, Jim Backus) who are in constant combat to direct and possess him, and a grandmother (Virginia Brissac) who resents her daughter-in-law and controls her son. Newly arrived in Los Angeles, Jim finds himself on his first school day morning, the morning after his night at the police station, in conversation with Judy, whose home, it turns out, is only a few doors away from his own. She is picked up by the gang, in a convertible driven by her boyfriend, Buzz Gunderson (Corey Allen). Buzz, we notice, wears a black leather jacket with a flashy scarlet lining, suitable to match his distinctive ego. Buzz is the life of the crowd, the prankster, and the good-looking beau all wrapped into one. In the afternoon, the kids attend a lecture in the planetarium at the Griffith Park Observatory. One can imagine them, teamed up in their racy cars, climbing up Western Avenue on this sunny, slightly hazy afternoon, turning jauntily onto Los Feliz Boulevard, then quickly swinging left up Fern Dell Drive into the shady precincts of the park, sharply U-turning left in the parking lot and swinging up into the hills on Western Canyon Drive, the warm flowery air

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tickling their senses as they snake back northward and higher still, curving and ascending and perhaps daring themselves to dodge near the precipice, then finally meeting, and mounting, East Observatory Road for the last few hundred yards that lead to the sparkling white structure itself. From the delirious view up here—on a clear day one can see the ocean—they would be captured and drawn into the dusty dark auditorium, a place of retreat, no doubt, but also a prison away from the freedom of the hills. As the lecturer (Ian Wolfe) drones on tediously about the relative insignificance of Earth in the cold universe, some members of the gang take pleasure in humorously mimicking his words. He points out the Crab Nebula, and Buzz leans across Judy, tweaks the nose of his friend Goon (Dennis Hopper), and whispers, “I’m a crab!” While the kids are frolicking, Jim feels his outsider status profoundly, so when the lecturer mentions Taurus the Bull he puts his head back and gives a long, loud “Moo,” trying by this cleverness to ingratiate himself with Buzz and the others. The effect, however, is to rouse the group’s resentment of his presumption of place. They decide to attack him outside, and when the lecture is concluded Buzz in fact goads Jim into a knife fight in the parking lot. A word about this fight, and its nigh-lethal implications for the success of the film: Because of the Kefauver hearings, America was especially tender, one might well say morally panicked, about juvenile crime and violence at the time of production (see Desjardins). Thus, a central issue for Warner Bros. was the possibility that various exhibition venues might be closed to the film if it depicted youth violence realistically, as it did, this notwithstanding Jack Warner’s barbed and “ill-received” suggestion to the committee that “the film highlighted ‘the juvenile delinquency of parents’” (DeAngelis 32). “Drastic cuts must be made in the sequences covering the baiting of Jim outside the planetarium, and the ensuing fight,” one internal letter concerned about censorship in the United Kingdom read, for instance, “only the barest amount of footage necessary to maintain the continuity of the story should be left of the invitation to the fight and the fight itself” (Watkins to Abeles, 17 October 1955). This queasy author went further: if the fight could be removed altogether, and if the preliminary barbs from the gang to Jim could lead directly to the chickie run scene, “there would be a much better prospect of our eventually being able to pass the film.” Cuts in the knife fight, including a moment I am about to discuss, where Jim has his knife at Buzz’s throat, were effected in advance of screenings in Chicago (Lefko to Howson, 26 October 1955). The Motion Picture Committee in nearby Milwaukee initially considered the Chicago version unsatisfactory and wanted all scenes showing knives to be eliminated, even though admittedly they were acting “with no defined standard and no recognized authority” (Keane to Perkins, 26 October 1955). Acting for Warner Bros., Steven Keane had an impulse (that in fact he restrained) to contend with these chaste citizens, convinced


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that Milwaukee ordinances forbidding lewd, obscene, and immoral films would not be violated by Rebel Without a Cause, and thus that any attempt to block its exhibition “would constitute a violation of the United States Constitution”; further, that an attempt by the Committee to revoke or cancel the Warner Theatre license “because of the showing of this film . . . would constitute a violation of due process of law.” As the Milwaukee censors were less stringent than they might have proved to be, the lawyer found himself, in the end, “disappointed because I believe this would have been an excellent opportunity to establish that the actions of the movie commission and the Police force when they follow the movie commission are unconstitutional. The next time one of these censorship cases comes up we may not have a picture which we may be as proud of.” By inter-office communication on 2 November 1955, it was made clear that what Chicago and Milwaukee would need was cutting all knife fighting to a minimum and elimination of a scene showing Jim “with knife held at ‘Buzz’s’ throat” (Howson to Spray et al., 2 November 1955). In addition, as Daniel Biltereyst methodically shows, the film met hostile censors in France, Germany, Italy, and Sweden, some of whom were interested in limiting the age of potential viewers. “In France,” Biltereyst reports, “it would take nearly two decades before Rebel would be open to the general public” (21–22), a continental reflection, perhaps, of the rejection that had earlier been evident in England, where, soured by the “ineffectual adults” portrayed in the film the censors ruled it “rubbish for adults but poisonous stuff for the teddy inclined adolescent” (19). In the unexpurgated fight as screened elsewhere, it looks for some while as though Buzz is going to utterly dominate, and perhaps even seriously wound, Jim. But in a climactic flourish, Jim flicks the knife out of Buzz’s hand, pounces on him, and puts his knifepoint at Buzz’s throat. Buzz is thrown back against a cement parapet. “Have you had enough or do you want more?” Jim barks at his astonished and suddenly terrified victim. And now suddenly, we see that blood is streaming out of Buzz’s neck, entirely covering his pale cream-colored shirt. Jim has—probably inadvertently— nicked Buzz’s throat, but too close to an artery! (As Rohmer reminds us, these “men-children” lack virginity [112], and “the harshness and the beauty of the landscape against which [this fight] is projected make us forget that it is only a children’s game” [113].) Out of nowhere, in an escalation of emotion and tenor that are unprecedented and utterly irrational, what began as a silly word game inside the theater has progressed, almost instantaneously, into a thoroughly mortal moment. Buzz will bleed out. A beautiful tension is created by this movement of Jim’s. Is he clumsy with the knife, in fact exactly the “chicken” he despairs of being called, unable to discipline himself in such a way as to produce a threat without producing an act? Since the film began we have been rooting for Jim, siding with him

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as he fights against his own history, which is the history of the loser who is always called “chicken” by other kids. We want him to triumph over Buzz and the gang, and yet somehow also to join them, so that he is integrated in his selfhood with their joyous community. This integration of self is the principal action in which Jim Stark is engaged in the film. If he has inadvertently wounded Buzz, he doesn’t belong—just as the other gang members tauntingly imply. Or, on the contrary, did Jim in fact stab Buzz in the neck intentionally? Did he decide that here, now, in this instant, was the time to show power, and is he a considerably more brutal fellow than we supposed? Between these two possibilities, Jim’s clumsiness and Jim’s brutality, there is a gulf, an abyss the depth of which we feel palpably as we watch frozen, quite as though Nick Ray had held up a camera to our necks and pushed too hard, by accident or at will. (Thanks to intervention by Geoffrey Shurlock at the Production Code Administration, an early idea that Jim aggressively “pricks Buzz again and again” was cut from the script [see Frascella and Weisel 114].) Revealed here, too, is a tension between competence and urgency. Since Jim appears to have produced a massive wound merely by lifting the knife—in production, a real knife (Frascella and Weisel 114)—up toward Buzz’s neck, he may well be using a weapon with which he is scarcely skilled; or worse—a weapon in the use of which he has too much skill altogether. His need to be expressive with the knife and his technical know-how either do not match or match too brilliantly, we cannot tell: and either way, there is cause for alarm. In passing a knife over to Jim, so that the two of them can have a proper brawl, Buzz is similarly caught between an urgent feeling and a social incompetence, between gallantry and self-destruction: Jim, after all, shy or terrified as he might seem to be, is ultimately capable of taking that knife and using it, as now we know. These fighters, therefore, are just the children Rohmer calls them, their fighting a somewhat unguided and urgent form of play, such as we see between D’Artagnan, Athos, Porthos, and Aramis in the early scenes of The Three Musketeers. Buzz does not seem to have anticipated for an instant that in provoking and entering a knife fight he might conceivably be wounded, and now, suddenly, the bloody redness is like a veritable stream upon his chest. But as Jim pulls his knife back and Buzz stands up, we see that Buzz is in fact not wounded at all, has not in fact even been touched. It wasn’t blood. It was the scarlet lining of his leather jacket that we saw gleaming in the sunlight! Another tension is invoked, then. On one side, Buzz is vulnerable, a target for our sympathy and patience—if you prick him, does he not bleed?! Or, Buzz is aloof and untouchable, a cold-hearted narcissist who badly needs a pricking. When, too soon later, he lies dead at the bottom of the Millertown Bluffs, do we come away from the moment agonized for him, because he was always vulnerable; or do we think, “Yes, he asked for it.” Back on the platform outside the Planetarium, Jim Stark knows, of course, that he hasn’t really stabbed Buzz in


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the neck, but he also knows how easy it would have been for him to do it; and when he comes away from the Bluffs, he is in mourning, genuinely. (Even the briefest fragment of a moment may inspire a gaze. This “stab” lasts less than a second; and can indeed be rationalized away by our plodding recollection that Buzz “bleeds” from the side of his neck away from the knife point. But in the instant, as we experience the sudden redness onscreen, we understand differently, and more potently, that mortality has brusquely intruded.) Here with the knife on the parapet, once again, we are participating in the action. Jim is noble and sweet, and is threatened by the egotistical and arrogant Buzz. We don’t want to see Jim hurt, and we don’t want to think of him as incapable of defending himself with a knife, yet, too, we don’t want to imagine that he can be vicious; so that when he finally begins to use the weapon we are relieved at his ability, until the moment when it seems he has used it too well. Here, we project ourselves so forcefully into his presence that we imagine a stunning victory far beyond the proportions of the stalemate he actually effects. Left to our own intents and imaginations, we might (as we imagine he has done) slit Buzz’s throat. Ray knows this, and the scarlet lining of the jacket, far from being merely a symbol of Buzz’s outlandishness, is a safeguard for us, a technical preparation anticipated long before it was needed. It makes possible a stabbing that is not a stabbing, blood that is not blood, a symbolic relief instead of a killing. Thanks to the jacket lining, we can have the thrill of drawing blood in our imagination but then safely recoil from it, perhaps out of fear. It is not fear that moves Jim Stark, however. It is compassion.

Inversion In a scene that has been much celebrated, Jim confronts his parents in the living room of their home directly after Buzz dies at the Bluffs. He has been part of this death—at least because he knows how easily it could have been his own; or because he remembers the Planetarium and how easily he might have produced that death or any other—and he needs to know how to be a man in confronting himself in the face of Justice. He comes quietly into the house. His father is half awake in front of the television, which has terminated programming and is showing static (or what at the time people called “snow”). Jim takes that quart of milk and puts it to his forehead to cool himself a little, then stretches out, upside-down, in his red jacket, upon the red sofa, the sofa that is not quite the same red as the red jacket (and so anticipates Cyd Charisse in a red dress stretching herself out on a red sofa in Ray’s Party Girl [1958]), his head dangling off and his eyes waiting patiently. His mother comes downstairs in her bathrobe to confront Jim—“She is a coward, afraid to face messy situations, but she rules imperiously at home,” writes Claudia Springer (40)—and as she descends, the camera with its anamorphic lens is rotated through 180

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degrees to simulate the youth turning to follow her. She steps directly up to him in a movement that is like an eagle’s approach to land. By the end of the shot, the camera is fully rotated and Mrs. Stark stands before the lens, right side up and utterly distraught. If, as she claims in this scene, she “almost died giving birth” to him, it would appear by her drawn features that she is “dying” a second “death” seeing Jim here, now. The coupling of the camera rotation with her movement as she descends the staircase produces a sense of vertigo, or at least painful imbalance, as we try to fix the image of Mrs. Stark. This slightly nauseating perspective is informing about Jim’s anxious relationship with his parents, his mother in particular. More than merely throwing her out of perspective, confusing his view of her, disorienting him in the face of her entrance and in the face of his culpability in Buzz’s death, the rotating anamorphic shot exemplifies Jim’s overall confusion, moral disorientation, and sense of displacement in the family. While the logic of these feelings is associated with Jim, the feelings of disorientation and vertigo are experienced by us (since it is the camera that produces them). And therefore the shot has as its major effect linking Jim with the film viewer, putting the viewer in Jim’s place, so to speak, drawing in the viewer’s situated, actual engagement to match Jim’s fictive one. So, at least, goes the conventional interpretation of this shot. However, in the immediately succeeding shot, from Mrs. Stark’s point of view once she has come up to the sofa, we look down and see upside-down Jim slowly pick himself up, turn himself around, and orient himself normally to face his mother. If the former anamorphic rotation shot was to have been “seen” from Jim’s point of view; and if we were linking to Jim’s point of view by seeing its twisting form; then, given that the shot concludes with a normal orientation of Mrs. Stark before the lens, this succeeding shot should show Jim already sitting upright, having turned himself around during the rotation shot and out of our eyesight (that is, beyond the frame proposed by this shot). The rotation shot is meant to be Jim swiveling around. (We should feel that, having been upside-down with him, we, too, have turned and are now upright—before the shot from Mrs. Stark’s point of view, this making a nice example, perhaps, of thorough involvement with and investment into the actions of a character who fascinates us. Goffman writes about onlookers “projecting their musculature and sensibilities sympathetically into” the movement of such a central personnage [Analysis 381].) How can we account for the rotation shot as a point-ofview shot for Jim, in the face of the succeeding shot, where still Jim is clearly shown rotating? The only way is to claim that the subjective rotation shot is only some fantasy of his, rather than a “perceived direct reality” (a specious claim, since there are no such fantasy shots in this film or, generally, in Ray’s work); or else


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to point to a serious continuity fault on the part of the director. As to continuity faults: early in the film, Ray gives a startling display of his prodigious skill at continuity matching. Judy, questioned by Ray Fremick, suddenly hears a police siren and swivels her head to gaze through the plate glass that is separating the interrogation booth from the waiting room outside. What she sees, and we see from behind her, in a long-focus shot, is Jim sitting up on a ledge out there, his head thrown back and his body posture frozen. The siren seems to have frozen him, swiftly passing by—as we take it to be—outside in the nocturnal street. Then, in a jump cut to a reverse angle, Ray shoots directly onto Jim from inside the waiting room. There is a siren in the street, not at all nearby, but the siren sound Judy has been hearing is coming from Jim’s mouth as he imitates it. Still his body is frozen in position. From the previous shot it was impossible to know that the sound was coming from that still body, and the only way we can know it in the portrait shot of Jim is because of the sonic intensity and because of a reaction he now makes to his own playful performance. The continuity between Judy’s view of Jim and our view now, with the siren sound bridging the cut, is flawless, and this is a technical matter of precisely matching the angles and directions of two independent shots. Here, in my view, is reason enough to argue that the apparent discontinuity in the Stark living room is no discontinuity at all. And so we must move to what seems to me a deeper—and the only possible—explanation. The Jim who turns himself in the (second) mother’s point-of-view shot is not the viewer of the (first) rotating anamorphic. We have not entered Jim’s position in that first shot, and therefore we are not “seeing this as he sees it.” Who, then, we must ask, if not Jim, is the “viewer” of that first point-of-view shot? With whom are we identifying? Who is nauseated as Mrs. Stark comes down the stairs, that is, sufficiently affiliated with Jim to have turned upside-down yet also sufficiently terrified of being caught upside-down to turn around (as the rotating anamorphic indicates) even while Mrs. Stark is coming down the stairs? (Jim, we must remember, turns around only after she has come up to the couch. We witness this.) Her husband is surely terrified, but he is in his chair, to the side, and has never inverted himself. While she is moving toward him, Jim has inverted himself, but has not yet turned around. Most viewers of Rebel Without a Cause were not teenagers like the protagonists the film pictures. Most viewers were the parents of those children, adults who rather than investing themselves in the personalities and musculature of their children looked ceaselessly for ways to rationalize their own decisions, decisiveness, and helplessness as parents in the face of widespread uninformed concern about juvenile delinquency and a consumer economy that was putting new powers of independence in their teenagers’ hands. (Around eight weeks before Rebel premiered, “Colonel” Tom Parker became Elvis Presley’s manager, and within weeks after the première Elvis had signed with RCA.) These adults

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were perhaps intrigued by adolescence at the time, but not wholeheartedly invested in its subjectivities. (Typically, for instance, the protagonists of films and television series in 1955 were adults, not teenagers as they are today: “Gunsmoke” and “The Lawrence Welk Show” started this year.) While for his own part Jim does give a patent demonstration that in general he prefers to take, and maintain, an upside-down view in his parents’ home; and while he here does accept the position accorded to him by the camera; he resolves his orientation only after the shot has played itself languidly out and has been brought to a comfortable conclusion with the maternal confrontation. In short, he does not swivel to sit up respectfully in his mother’s face. But nervous adults viewing the film, Ray knew, thrown upside-down by his camera position at first, because Jim is nothing if not a curiosity into whose musculature they might wish to project themselves, would not easily bond with this boy, symbol as he was of every free sentiment that threatened bourgeois value. They would immediately move to escape him, to undo their awkward position and right themselves. The viewer, therefore, does not merely accomplish a movement that Jim is willing to forestall, leading him, as it were, or jumping ahead of him; the viewer, having tasted his youthful and bizarre point of view from a safe distance, proceeds to accomplish a motion that Jim is quite incapable of performing, a quick, even sociable turnaround to identify with Mrs. Stark’s “responsible” position in life. Were Jim similarly capable of moving and repositioning himself into alignment with the dominant forces in the corrective, enforcement-obsessed social structure—represented by his mother—he would already be found to be oriented as we are when the shot—a kind of “objective correlative” of that structure—is done. He would be already upright, and uptight, not still upsidedown and ready to go into action only “on his own.” Through his use of the camera and his choreography of the actors, then, Ray has produced an eloquent visual equivalent of the brutalizing social relationship in which adults can have agency of their own accord but from which young people must alienate themselves in order to act. He has made a space in which Jim’s action of stalling and rebelling can physically occur. To emphasize Jim’s alienation even further, Ray has him storm out of the house after his argument with his parents, and on his way he puts his foot through a painted portrait of the grandmother that is standing on the floor. This, and only this, is when the line of his action is complete.

Puppets On the sunny morning after Jim’s confrontation at the Juvenile Division, he is looking forward to his first day at school. He collects the thermos of orange juice “and some applesauce cake to go with it” that his mother has prepared for him—with the reproof of her mother-in-law: “And I baked it!”: since the two


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women are in competition for the role of nourisher and creator—and leaves. In the street outside we see Judy, walking down to the corner to catch her daily ride to school with the gang. She is wearing a green dress, the green of fresh shoots coming up in the spring, and behind her is a whitewashed wooden fence about five or six feet high. Suddenly we see a jack-in-the-box springing up from behind this fence, his head and torso sailing into the air so he can say “Hi.” It is, of course, Jim, reprising now, acrobatically, the capacity for bodily performance he put on display last night by pretending to be a police car. “You live here?” he asks Judy, coming up beside her. “Who lives?” says she, sardonically yet pleasantly enough. These shots were made in Baldwin Hills, 9 and 10 May 1955. In an early version of the script, from 31 January, Judy is calling to her young brother, Beau, when Jim appears, and there is no fencing. “Jim comes out of his house, slamming the screen door behind him. He is neatly dressed in tie, tweed jacket and slacks . . . he comes out of the shadow into the early sunshine. He blinks, pauses and sees Judy” (Stern screenplay, 31 January, 17). By mid-March, assistant director Don Page was reporting that the cameraman suggested “building a low picketed fence” in the back of Judy’s house (Page to Stacey, 17 March 1955), this although two script revisions at roughly the same time again lacked indications that Jim should be bouncing when he met Judy (Stern screenplay, 18 March, 25 March). The fence was for realism, possibly for aesthetic effect. But for an actor—indeed, “a brilliant actor,” as Ray called Dean—a picket fence is an invitation. “His imagination was fresh as a new day” (106). Jim’s bounciness, his verticality, directly indicates a certain freshness, a ready energy, an optimism, and a disconnection from the adult world of diffuse fear and impotence that dominates his home. Jim’s disconnection is spelled out in terms of embodied energy, drive, even eros, qualities he emphatically does not share with his parents. Mr. and Mrs. Stark are anxious, brittle, high-strung in their hyper-competitive, fallout-threatened, consumerist nonutopia. The mother is too anxious to focus her energy expressively, except in outbursts of grief, hysteria, or vituperation: “Do you want to kill your own father?” The father is overweight, pudgy, feminized, receptive, not athletic and expressive. These two understand themselves and their son in terms proposed by the grandmother, who speaks for another era. The grandmother wants Jim to have some of the special cake she has baked for him, not the peanut butter sandwich: in short, she has a formal outlook, and does not recognize his need for quick supplies of lasting energy. Her idea of eating is sedentary, and to mock her, but also to take advantage of her hospitality, Jim later grabs a piece of that cake before leaving for the Bluffs; he does this by taking a bread knife, hacking off a wedge, and walking out with it half in his mouth. What Jim’s bouncing up over the fence says about life in his house and in his parents’ world, then, is that he is abstracted from it. He is only nominally of his parents, and he does

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not see the present or the future the way they do or find himself crippled by the limitations of feeling to which they have surrendered. Like the grandmother—too like the grandmother, in fact, since they are a generation younger than she—the Starks are not in any way as green and fresh as Judy seems to be in her handsome dress; or as Jim seems to be, bounding up like a sprout toward the sky. Judy has explained to Fremick in our presence that her “problem” stems from her father’s rejection of her. Soon we learn what she means by this. In a draft of the scene, which was extended and enriched in the final script, the father (William Hopper) is seated at the head of the dining table and she leans over to kiss him. He roughly pushes her away: Father: For God’s sake, Judy! It isn’t normal! Can’t you see I’m tired! Judy (fighting tears, loud ): It’s not normal to love your father? Since when? Since I got to be sixteen? Suddenly the father slaps her. Judy looks at him—stunned. The mother stops eating. The father controls himself, butters a piece of bread. Father (ashamed ): I’ll teach you what’s normal, young lady. (Stern screenplay, 8 February 1955, 48)

Stunned, she runs out, claiming this is not her home. If Jim’s problem with his parents is that they are too far removed from his sense of life, too much like his grandmother in modeling a world entirely unrelated to his own, Judy’s problem is that she has a father who imagines himself her peer, at least to the degree that it seems conceivable to him there is sexual motive behind her kiss. Judy has nothing of the sort in mind, of course, but her father, unable to see that she is in another generation, cannot imagine this. He threatens her from proximity exactly as much as Jim’s parents threaten him from distance. Jim, at any rate, wishes to leap up into life somehow and this is what he does behind the fence near Judy’s house when he greets her in the morning. His tactic is clever from another point of view. He’s had plenty of experiences in other cities with kids who don’t like or accept him, and so, admiring Judy as he does, he approaches with a certain trepidation, knowing that he has little to say. The very brief appearance of his head above the fence is precisely of a length to support the entirety of his speech of the moment: “Hi.” The jumping works to safeguard him from being trapped for an opening conversational gambit in a physical arrangement of face-to-face proximity his conversation cannot fully support. But later in the film, all of this is turned somewhat on its head as Jim’s action finds its completion. To escape members of the gang who are coming after them in order to avenge Buzz’s death, Jim, Judy, and their friend Plato (Sal Mineo) hide themselves in an abandoned mansion not far from the Observatory (the actual location until 1957, on Irving Blvd. between West 6th and


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Wilshire, wasn’t near the Observatory at all). Jim and Judy retire to explore the rooms upstairs and subsequently Plato, threatened by the arrival of the gang, races away and hides himself under the grand piano. Soon, in a confrontation on the stairwell, he shoots one of the boys with the gun he has brought from under the pillow in his mother’s bedroom. Now the police are on his tail. He must scramble away through the bushes, up toward the (diegetically adjacent) Observatory, fearful now that Jim and Judy cannot be trusted to protect him. Jim follows with Judy, substitute parents, and Jim slides into the Observatory while the police are training their klieg lights on the door. He steps into the planetarium theater, where earlier the class guffawed while the elderly lecturer spoke of the end of the earth and of human life as we know it, in a blinding explosion. Jim calls out for Plato, to no avail. The theater is silent, full of shadows and forebodings. Jim faces the camera, calling out for Plato again, then turns, and slowly, behind his back, from behind the low wall closing off the projection apparatus, up rises Plato to say a timid hello. This choreography is an analogue to Jim’s fence-hopping behind Judy: Plato is positioned behind Jim as Jim was behind Judy, earlier. Plato’s rise is slower, more definitive, less hesitant. He is not planning to lower himself again, is not subject to gravity in the same way. If Plato is to answer Jim’s call in the planetarium, why in accomplishing the move does Ray have him mirror the courting gesture Jim made earlier? Ray improvised on set here—in the final shooting script, the direction was different: “Plato rises from behind a row [of seats]” (Stern final script, 114 [shot 291]). Plato, who certainly has a crush on him, knows it won’t work if he openly woos Jim (just as Jim knew it wouldn’t work if he openly wooed Judy [who carried herself with certain airs and, although he didn’t know it yet, was hanging out with the gang]). By simulating Jim’s move, does Plato show that in many ways he is Jim, and thus lead us to understand a few moments later, as Plato is gunned down by police—there was a plan for an “alternate” shot in which it would be “indicated that Plato is still alive” (Weisbart)—that something in Jim himself has been killed by the forces of authority that night? Is Jim able to get into that car with his parents in the finale, and ride off toward his future, only because something is gone that was alive in him before, and has Ray established an architecture whereby Plato stands for that something and must die in order that Jim may lose himself, and then find himself again? Jim leaping up from behind the fence and Plato rising up from behind the projection barrier both seem a little like hand puppets—Jim, of course, more briefly than Plato, but then Jim makes all his moves in a flash. They are hand puppets on a giant stage, manipulated by some unseen puppeteer: not Nicholas Ray, who has taken the point of view from which it is possible to show this state of affairs, but a controlling geist of urban modernism, the spirit that declares children cannot inherit the world of their parents; that the world is broken; that, as Alexander Herzen once warned, “Each generation

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must find its own fullness.” Also, when we see Plato rise up we can appreciate in a flash that he is completing a gesture, a line of action, that Jim earlier began; completing for Jim a gesture belonging not to Jim or Plato personally, but to their generation. In the completion, the two boys are one. Quite another ending had been envisioned—something more spectacular, to be sure, and more definitive, yet at the same time a vision that had to be discarded if Ray was to maintain his focus on Jim and Plato as persons rather than archetypes, singularities of feeling and method, desperate each in his own way to reach a better state of affairs and obstructed each by forces that acted in a personal, limited way. The plan had called for Plato to run, not outside the front door of the planetarium, but up to the roof, and then to climb on a curved ladder up the outside of the dome (rather as in the finale of Hitchcock’s Blackmail [1930]) with police spotlights following him, to gain the summit and be seen in extreme long shot as a tiny figure atop the stunning architecture. Jim climbs the ladder to approach him as Plato in fact reaches out to hand him the gun. “Can we have breakfast at my house?” asks Plato in Stern’s script, and Jim responds, “Sure we can. Anything” (Stern final script). Way down on the ground the police commander gives the order for a sniper to shoot. Labelled “302C. FULL SHOT DOME,” a pencil storyboard sketch by Ray gives over a galvanizing sense of the CinemaScope screen ratio and a dramatic angle, low to the ground, looking up at the sniper aiming at the minuscule figure in the far distance at the top of the screen (Ray storyboard). A succeeding shot was to have shown Plato plummeting down the dome, again seen from a long way off, so that his figure was diminished to apparent insignificance. Then Ray would have cut to a close shot with Plato, upside-down at screen right, as he “plummets down past jim,” who hangs from the ladder with a look of penetrating angst marking his face. Ray has drawn Plato as a dark mass, with a hand stretched open helplessly; and Jim turning his head sharply over his shoulder, his eyes like burning coals. “Go to parents reaction,” the filmmaker scribbled. Soon later, in a medium shot, the camera is low to the ground as “jim holds plato’s body.” Jim is holding the dead Plato, in fact, in an embrace, his arm slung over Plato’s chest as in a life-saving maneuver, and his head tilted to nuzzle against Plato’s. “Plato?” the script originally had Jim say, “Plato. Hey, Jerkpot!” (Stern final script). The feet of Jim’s father coming in to stand above were to have been visible at right. The presentational style that each boy uses in popping up from behind a blind bespeaks itself: it says for him, “I show myself because, and when, I want to. I make a picture of myself for you to absorb. Do not be misled into thinking I am anything but an appearance of myself.” This is a vital theme to Ray because somehow he needs to invoke the dynamism of the view: not in the sense that his camera is creating a view of the story and that he wishes us to be aware of his own technique, but in the sense that the adolescents we are


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watching are being watched by others, too; and these others establish a view that determines the adolescents’ lives. What we are watching when we watch Rebel Without a Cause is the act of watching, itself, a systematic and controlling generalized state of surveillance. Every moment in the film is either one in which the kids are being judged and defined by an adult gaze, or one in which they have escaped into a privacy that is obscure or invisible. At one point Jim’s father hears strange noises and opens the front door. The gang has hung a chicken upside-down from the door frame to taunt Jim. But then we cut to a reverse shot from behind a tree in the front yard to see that mockingly and silently a few of the boys are watching the front door, watching the old man’s aghast response when the dead chicken is staring him in the face. They have taken to watching adults the way adults usually watch them. Lest it be imagined surveillance is applied only to Ray’s characters here, we should know that Dean himself was treated by Warner Bros. as something of a juvenile problem and relentlessly spied upon while making this film, and East of Eden before it. In the case of Eden, he had taken to sleeping in his dressing room, since a delicious solitude was afforded him by the fact that, as Ray put it, “He could leave, but nobody else could come in. He shied away from manners and social convention because they suggested disguise. He wanted his self to be naked” (107). Citing safety regulations, Warner Bros. locked him out and he vowed “never to make a film there again” (108). Ray, having earned his respect and befriended him, became someone he wished to work with, however, and Rebel was made. Not long after, in the middle of shooting Giant (1956), he moved to Sherman Oaks from his white adobe house high in the hills at 1541 Sunset Plaza Drive, eluding the studio watchdogs: Hinkle, a friend of his who teaches everybody how to talk the Texas lingo, had a pickup truck to move his car from the old residence to the new residence in the Valley, it seems. This morning, our second assistant Meeks called Dean’s message service, and the message service called Dean at 8:00am and 8:15am, Meeks was put through to Dean and Dean told Meeks he would be in the studio right away. Tried to get him again at 8:35am and so far there has been no answer. Casting got hold of his agent, Dick Clayton. Clayton could not get Dean on the phone; Clayton then talked to Dean’s neighbors who told him they say [sic] Dean leave, and Clayton assumed Dean was on his way to the studio—this was approximately around 10:00am. Clayton then went over to Dean’s house but he wasn’t there and Clayton then went over to his new home but he wasn’t there either. ... Asked Stevens if he wanted to go to Blayney Matthews and have a search started but Stevens said no, it might result in some unfortunate publicity; if the story appeared in the papers it might give Dean a big head. . . . (Andre)

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The calling, the visiting, the trailing—the memorandum continued to stipulate Dean’s message service phone number and license plate number (470214)—put him in the monitor’s eye much as teenagers were, generally, in those days. From the studio’s point of view, he was one more kid.

Pink The four examples I have given—Judy’s lips that her father tried to rub away; Jim’s knife on Buzz’s neck, apparently drawing the blood; the rotation of perspective in the Stark living room, a technique allowing Jim to split off from his mother-watcher; and the hand-puppet pop-ups of Jim and Plato, that create temporal parentheses in which they can speak themselves—all make use of camera, script, performance, choreography, lighting, costume, color, movement, and tone in order to convey what they convey, and so they are richly eloquent and wholly filmic. Each is a striking moment in which some felt line of action is carried through, rounded out, concluded with pregnant meaning for the story and the sensibility of the film. A fifth moment is worth some consideration, too. Plato has driven home on his scooter, shaken after the Bluffs scene, with his little scarlet address book (containing the treasure, Jim’s [“Jamie’s”] address) in his pocket. Three boys from the gang are waiting for him, we learn, because as soon as he stops the bike next to a short hedgerow that decorates the house in which he lives, one of them (Dennis Hopper) leaps up from the shrubbery, yet another jack-in-the-box, and pounces on him, immediately to be joined by his two buddies. They corner Plato on his doorstep, tumble with him roughly so that he loses a shoe, and steal the notebook with the sacred address before the maid (Marietta Canty) can open the door and put them to flight. Embarrassed by her maternal protectiveness now, humiliated by his victimization, Plato races past her into the house, up the stairs, and into a bedroom. From near the bed we watch as he runs in, leaps onto the coverlet, and comes close to the camera in order to fish in a drawer of the bedside table. The table, like a matching one on the far side of the bed, is equipped with an ornate lamp adorned with cupids in plasterwork. Framed pictures hang upon the walls, which are all lavender pink, the same color as the bedspread. The window in the rear of the shot is dressed with pink swag curtains. This room is intensively decorated, lavishly appointed, lushly colored, and immediately suggests with its shining surfaces and seductive color a boudoir world of sensitivity, passion, femininity. What Plato finds in the drawer is a check for $687.50 from his father, for child support, attached to a memorandum slip that has been carefully but coldly typewritten: a reaction close-up emphasizes his despair and resentment at being cast off by this father, yet at the same time draws attention to his full, pouting lips and long eyelashes (a Sal Mineo


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Linkages between a character’s demeanor and the character of a place are clues as to identity, action, meaning. Plato (Sal Mineo) at home in Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause (Warner Bros., 1955). Digital frame enlargement.

trademark). If the cold personality behind the check is incompatible with the hot décor of this room, Plato, in some curious way, is totally at home here. Whose room is this? It is a curious and delicious fact that the film never addresses this question explicitly (it being hidden from the viewer that in the script it is described as “Bedroom of Plato’s Mother, a lacy affair with imported dolls on the pillows”), while still Ray persists in framing the question poignantly and thoroughly so as to force us to watch the linkages between Plato’s demeanor and the decoration of the place for clues as to the relation between the space and the boy. Because of its capaciousness and its refinement, its sensuality and its lushness, the room invites the reading that it belongs or belonged to Plato’s parents, wherever they are. The father has left and is sending regular, if unaffectionate, child payments. The mother has been replaced by the maternal maid—corpulent and dark, a traditional symbol in America of protection, wisdom, and warmth—and we are given no idea as to her present location. A child-support check might find its way to the bedside table of a single mother. A teenage boy might run into his mother’s bedroom for emotional support in a moment of crisis. A maid might enter to calm the boy, treating the room as though it belonged to her employer. Yet what is wrong with this picture? That Plato literally leaps onto the bed, less like a little boy attacking his parents’ haven than like the teenager he is, taking over his own space. Has he moved into this room? The proprietorship is somehow emphasized by the bright red and blue socks he is wearing: these splashes of color—especially the more visible red sock—identify the person with the place, establish what Kenneth Burke called an actor-scene ratio (Grammar). Certainly, the proposition that this is Plato’s bedroom allows us to imagine him as a pampered child, a much too pampered child. Pampering has

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led to his crystalline beauty, the extreme smoothness of his skin, the moist huge eyes that have not yet learned to squint in self-protection. “The more beautiful the boy the less likely he is to survive,” Germaine Greer tells us of the history of Western art (196). The scene is designed in order to produce a particular tension in our viewing: this is at once the bedroom of a soft boy whose world has been meticulously, too meticulously, designed and enriched—designed and enriched, that is, far beyond the limits of what he himself would wish and need; and also a parents’ bedroom, now become a deserted mother’s bedroom, in which a lonely boy can return (over and over, we may presume) to find solace in the soothing, erotic colors and the sumptuous bourgeois décor that were intended to please (perhaps even to stimulate) someone else. Plato is a boy inside a maternal shell; and he is also a young man whose sensibilities have been taken over by a mother. Two earlier resonant moments may be recalled. In the high school corridor, when first he set eyes on Jim Stark, Plato was combing his hair in the mirror affixed to his locker door next to a photograph of Alan Ladd. It was in the mirror, and against the shining image of Ladd, that he first saw Jim’s face. Ladd is pictured, if not exactly in character for George Stevens’s Shane (1953), then in a publicity portrait taken at the time of the film, with wavy blond hair and true blue, frank eyes. While it is conventional in reading Rebel Without a Cause to point out that Plato is probably homosexual or bisexual and probably hot on Jim, the fact that it is Alan Ladd in (or in association with) Shane that is pictured here, rather than just any handsome leading man, suggests something else. For Shane is a mobile father-figure, a decent man who rides into a strange and difficult situation and, having resolved the problems there, rides out again at the end. In that film there is another boy with something of an “absent” father, Joey (Brandon De Wilde). While Joe Starrett (Van Heflin) is on the premises of Joey’s farmhouse world, a world shaped largely by the presence of the mother (Jean Arthur) and populated by little more than a friendly deer, something of his way of being there suggests that a directness and strength provided by the stranger Shane is missing from his own demeanor as parent; he is more like Joey’s big brother than like the father Joey needs and Shane might have become. In Rebel, Plato is something of a Joey looking to Jim to be the Shane of his life; and so homoeroticism, powerful an attractive force as it may be, is hardly the only, or even the central, binding agent in the relationship he forms with Jim. While he is on the mauve bed, then, Plato may well be recalling Shane, specifically a boy’s long prison sentence in his mother’s world and his longing for a shining father who can redeem him. To the extent that Jim is an idealized father for Plato, a characterization Plato has dreamed up in some unshown fantasy version of his own life (Dean was twenty-four when he shot his scenes with Mineo; Mineo, who lived in a pretty home in North Hollywood, was sixteen), he is extended out of the


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bounds of social reality into a poetic, purely fabular world of a boy’s design. This special world of interiority and imagination, of brilliant color and heroic exploits, of passionate feeling and untrammeled loyalties, is essential in the film as the foundation upon which the architecture of adult provisionality and contingency stands. It is not the adult point of view the filmmaker ultimately wishes us to take with regard to these artful children; it is their point of view we are to take with regard to adults. In the mansion, Jim has spread himself on a divan, his head upon Judy’s lap. Plato sits on the ground beneath, his head happily resting on Jim’s arm. “Plato’s pliant position on the floor is already psychologically loaded,” write Frascella and Weisel, “as is the look in his eyes” (164). It is a configuration out of Guercino or Girodet: Judy: Plato, where’s your father now? Plato: Oh, he’s dead. He was a hero in the China Sea. Jim (laughing): You told me he was a big wheel in New York. Plato: I did? Oh, what’s the difference. He might as well be dead anyway.

As the father Plato would prefer to have, can imagine having, desires to have, Jim is the hero in the China Sea.

Puppies A second moment we may recall is our first introduction to Plato, as, captive in the Juvenile Division, he is asked by an officer why he “shot those puppies.” As the maid remonstrates that he’s a “good boy,” we come to see a very particular instance of this character type, which is to say, a rich kid: one who easily brutalizes and dominates the helpless. This is the same person who confides to Judy with a blushing thrill that Jim lets him call him Jamie, something of a claim that for him, relationships are more important than power. His proximity to Jim is a source not of status but of energy. And like Plato, puppies are soft, big-eyed, emotionally evocative, and in a more or less constant bubble of maternal protection. What happened to the puppies in a moment when the mother was away is pretty much what happens to Plato in this film: he is shot like a puppy. The bedroom scene, then, establishes for audiences of teenagers and adults alike—“The film . . . had an obvious appeal to adolescent audiences,” writes Robert Tanitch; “an actor had portrayed a teenager with whom other teenagers the world over could identify. ‘Take both your parents to see it,’ advised one newspaper’s headline” (Tanitch 13)—that the Plato who is gunned down in the film’s finale is no mere teenage hoodlum with a gun who has shot another boy and must be hunted. He is established here as a “puppy”—a youngster being coddled and shaped for adults’ use—brutalized by a gunwielding masculine authority, such as he has, by comparison, only pretended

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to be until now. And his affiliation with Jim and Judy, more than providing emotional support for him and grounding him in their friendship, goes so far as to link them with his unprotected powerlessness and tenderness in the face of the adult authority of the time. The same can be said for the other kids, too. Puppies are invoked again at the mansion temporarily inhabited by Jim, Judy, and Plato. Playing at being newlyweds thinking of renting this establishment by the month, Jim and Judy allow Plato, playing the rental agent with candelabrum in hand, to escort them around. The topic of having children comes up: Plato: See, we really don’t encourage them. They’re so noisy and troublesome. Don’t you agree? Judy: Oh yes, yes. And so terribly annoying when they cry. Oh, yes, I don’t know what to do when they cry, do you, dear? Jim (growling): Heh. Drown them like puppies! Heh. (They come to the empty swimming pool.) Plato: As you see, the nursery is far away from the rest of the house . . . Jim: Hey, you forgot to wind your sun-dial. Plato: . . . and if you have children, you’ll find that this is a wonderful arrangement. They can carry on and you’ll never even notice. Jim: Ohhh, a sunken nursery! Plato: In fact, if you lock them in you’ll never have to see them again. Jim: Much less, talk to them. Judy: Talk to them! Plato: Yes. Jim: Nobody talks to children. Judy: They just tell them.

Now Jim, reflecting his spontaneity and liveness to the moment, wavering on the diving board and calling out, “Quick, fill the pool!” jumps in and stretches out on the bottom, filling the CinemaScope screen. “Hey let’s see how long I can stay under,” he giggles. But Judy one-ups him. She has a pail of water at poolside, and douses him with it: “You can’t talk under water!” Now Jim has become one of those puppies, reprimanded by the “mother” figure and artfully “drowned.” There is a single line of action, then, that runs from Plato in the police station, demeaned as a shooter of puppies, through Plato’s puppy-pouting and fawning adoration of Jim and Judy, through Jim and Judy’s pretendparenting and invocation of drowning puppies, then Jim’s puppying in the pool and being “drowned,” and ending with the shooting of puppy Plato at the Observatory. The mansion sequence, with Jim and Judy playing around, is a parenthetical action line inside the broader, longer one that isolates Plato and sacrifices him by the end of the film.


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Suddenly, we can actually see the relationship between the blood-red sock Plato is wearing—in the finale Jim and Judy notice his mismatched socks, a detail Ray “doubt[ed] if I noted” (Ray to Martindale)—and in which he goes racing out into the night; and the lavender pink of that bedroom. Pink is the faded color that comes of bloodstains long, long, long scrubbed, but tenacious. The pink room is all blood, but blood from the past, now reconfigured as stylish design. It is an iconic color of adulthood (it being understood that the bedroom has been decorated by an adult hand), a color without the sort of erotic urgency signaled by the red sock, a subdued and controlling, if still passionate, color. Plato’s natural heat is being dampened by the faded damask rose of this bedroom, his animal smell clouded over by the dense musky perfume we cannot avoid imagining has been sprayed here again and again. In this strange and wonderful film, Jim Stark’s overall line of action is to become a man. But much of what the film presents, including the internal and parenthetical action lines I have discussed here—Jim’s crusade to rescue Judy from domination, Jim’s relation to Plato, the problem of youthful violence, society’s more general problem with youth—and other lines as well, amounts to a serious and, at the time, largely unremarked obstruction to his continuity. Finally, “reconciled” with his parents, who are entirely obtuse and profoundly disengaged from the truths of his life, Jim may well be on the road to becoming only so much a personality as his father is, now that his attempt to make a family has been exploded by officials. Social—that is, adult—constraints, not personal ones, have blocked him, as they curtailed Plato’s life and as they more generally interfere with young people everywhere in America at this time, in a thousand ways. Rebel Without a Cause thus turns out to be a film in which Nicholas Ray takes his stand with another generation. Its narrative turn has police, who will shoot a tender victim at night, interrogating that tender victim at night about why he has shot some tender victims (as though, hardly more than a child, he can be taken to be responsible for what he does). For Ray, and for us, the police themselves are the perpetrators they are seeking to lock up here. What accords them power, and the adults who legitimize them, is only that they are no longer young. Unlike Jim and Judy and Plato, and all the members of the “gang” of American youth, these grownups have accustomed themselves to blood.

chapter 3

˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚ A Great Face La peur d’Hitchcock de se couper de la réalité le pousse, en effet, à calquer le mode de son cinéma sur le mode de la civilization qu’il peint. [Hitchcock’s fear of being cut off from reality pushed him in his cinematic style to copy the style of the civilization he portrayed.] —Jean Douchet

What we witness, we also do. —Joseph Chaikin

What a Monument Is Alfred Hitchcock has often been misunderstood in the United States as nothing more than a great showman, that plump fellow who hardly ever smiles but has a macabre, even utterly morbid, sense of reality, whose productions, crammed full of marvels and myriad intoxicating details of characterization and design, are executed with meticulous craft but little true feeling; a man, in other words, whose major predilection it was only to make money by darkly entertaining. A great national anti-intellectual prejudice of long standing has led lay viewers and critics alike to a certain blindness about the relation between showmanship and philosophy in this artist (not to say in any other) as though Hitchcock or any filmmaker who got rich making films (Hitchcock got very rich) cannot possibly have had a rhetorical or pedagogical motive in making the entertainments he made; as though pleasure and feeling must always be entirely separate from serious thought. Further, frequently serious scholars and critics have found political and intellectual treasures in Hitchcock but have deemed it necessary to frame their discoveries as sober readings of his texts (the language we hear uttered by his characters) rather than as appreciations of the visual structures he has knowingly built. Moreover, even for those who take Hitchcock “seriously,” it has become a safety mechanism 62

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to think of his “serious” intents in terms of the well-worn cultural themes to which seriousness has been attached for centuries: religion, the meaning of truth, man’s fallibilities, the nature of evil. There is, therefore, hardly a shortage of critiques about Hitchcock’s Catholicism, Hitchcock’s moralism, Hitchcock’s view of mankind. The result of this casual or easy attention (as I would call it) on the part of critics and viewers, with very few exceptions, has been a focus on only some of Hitchcock’s films, a sententious analysis of these that highlights only some (canonical) dramatic moments and leaves others entirely in shadow, and, by contradiction, a persisting tendency to gloss over some of his screen situations as though they constitute nothing more substantial than frivolities. Standing out from the mass of such criticism is the affecting work by William Rothman, in Hitchcock—The Murderous Gaze; and the intensive analysis, grounded in Hitchcock’s filmmaking practice, of Bill Krohn in Hitchcock at Work. In another context, I have written about what we can learn by carefully watching the Hitchcockian screen (Pomerance Eye), for example the much heralded cornfield sequence from North by Northwest (1959) (41ff). There is certainly so much here from which to take pleasure (as we learn from virtually all who take note of this sequence): Cary Grant in his steel gray business suit racing down the road and hurling himself among the stalks of corn; the crash of the cropduster into the oil tanker truck; Grant’s insouciance and innocence as, in the guise of Thornhill, he purloins a pickup truck and steals away. Hitchcock’s intent was to place his hero in a situation where he was utterly without protection, and thus, perhaps, to draw our attention to the precariousness that underlies the social lives we lead, perhaps even to awaken our awareness to the vulnerability we experience as we watch this on a screen. “How easy it would be to find oneself vulnerable, out in the open, laid bare!” we must be reminded, sitting, as we believe, so safely in the theatrical dark. Yet the cornfield scene is also a good example of the way Hitchcock’s constructions are far from effortless. Once the location had been found near Bakersfield, California (not far from designer Robert Boyle’s hometown), arrangements (and payments) had to be made for delaying the location owner’s plan to build a foreman’s house; for purchasing approximately two acres of corn, cutting it, and delivering it to the site; for preparing the ground for the “planting” of the corn, actually “planting” it, and plowing some other areas for effect (inter-office communication from Howard Horton to Herbert Coleman, 19 August 1958). In short, what we see in Hitchcock is more elaborate, more intensively reflective, and more visually and dramatically complex than has typically been shown. The difficult, clearly focused swish pans at the side of the road are sufficient indication of detailed attention and craft, but so are the beautifully matched medium shots of Roger and the stranger as Roger crosses the highway thinking to meet George Kaplan. The cornfield location has the effect of not only

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making Thornhill stand alone in the countryside but also making Cary Grant stand alone in a carefully prepared setting, forcing him to produce Roger O. Thornhill spontaneously out of himself without benefit of props or supporting cast. We see as the shots progress the process of constructing a place out of a space, the formation of geographical and social boundaries, and a full range of stationary and mobile emplacements. The vast space apparent all around, the arability of the land, the sense both of ownership and potential acquisition of territory, all signal the vast promise of America proper, so that the fields around Roger, empty and also not empty, ordered and yet open to ordering, stand reasonably for America itself, and Roger and his stranger friend for the urban and pastoral types who define America in the modern age. This scene is not just about showmanship and entertainment. Although Hitchcock’s films have long been the object of considerable critical admiration, much of this flowing from the respect openly expressed by François Truffaut, it remains the case that considerable critical work on Hitchcock, elaborate and arcane as it may be, and even when it is profoundly revealing, theoretically informed, and inventive, doesn’t but gloss the films themselves, as the canonical treatments of the cornfield scene show. But in all the legacy of glosses inspired by his films, none is more outstanding, or more fascinating, than the Mount Rushmore chase sequence that concludes North by Northwest. The conventional approach to looking at this stunning finale has been to quote or paraphrase one of its creators, the screenwriter Ernest Lehman, to the effect that his intention from the start had been to write a quintessentially “Hitchcockian” film, this constituting, in his view, an onscreen telling of a story that moves some innocent protagonist into a situation of threat and ostensible culpability—action too often narrowly misunderstood as being especially pertinent to, or reflective of, a Cold War aesthetic rather than to the human condition more generally—and that races from one fabulous setting to another across a vast environment. Lehman came up with the idea of moving from midtown New York all the way to Rapid City, South Dakota, in pursuit of a man whom everyone seems to think a spy; everyone, that is, but the man himself. (The idea of a “fake masterspy” had been suggested to Hitchcock in the fall of 1957 by his friend Otis Guernsey Jr., and handed over in writing, “blithely and with best wishes” [Guernsey to Hitchcock, 14 October 1957]. In lieu of screen credit, Hitchcock arranged for Guernsey to receive a thousand dollars [Hitchcock to Kenneth McKenna, 26 September 1957].) In this context, the presidential monument at Mount Rushmore is nothing if not a breathtaking and topical locale, the terminus of an arduous and exciting voyage a long, long way from its point of origin, as well as both a fabulous physical location in terms of its optical quality and its symbolic resonance with American democracy and a precarious perch from which our two heroes (Cary Grant and Eva

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Marie Saint) can be made excitingly to dangle on pain of death before a final coup brings the film happily to a close. Hitchcock’s use of Mount Rushmore as a setting for the conclusion of the film is by no means required by the superficial pathways of the plot. Yet, as we shall see, Hitchcock had a deeply felt need to use this place, indeed, to use it against considerable odds, for just as the Mount Rushmore setting was highly desirable and thus worth the expenditure of considerable effort toward finding a method for shooting complicated action there, it was also a topography zealously guarded by the National Park Service of the Bureau of the Interior, through the monument’s supervisor as pre-production wore on, Charles E. Humberger. Considerable discussion of this sequence has mentioned, broadly, the difficulty Hitchcock had in obtaining permission to shoot there. The details of the relevant correspondence give some illumination to his persistence and vision, and are worth some attention. The shoot was initially planned to take place completely on location, 15–20 September 1958. Roger Thornhill (Grant) and Eve Kendall (Saint), having fled from the pursuit of his henchmen through the woods near the villain’s retreat, find themselves atop the monument—“they SEE the back of the Mt. Rushmore Monument,” reads a script from 6 October 1958. “The heads of the presidents are moonlit. Beyond is yawning space, and beyond that, the distant horizon” (169)—and must scramble for their lives while the killers (Valerian [Adam Williams] and Leonard [Martin Landau]) race to seize a valuable piece of microfilm from them and toss them to their deaths. On 4 August, a few weeks before shooting was to begin, Rudolf Monta of the MGM Legal Department expressed his concerns to Lehman, Hitchcock, the film’s producer Herbert Coleman, and others that Washington might bring pressure upon Humberger “over a possible misuse of this National Memorial, which Mr. Homberger [sic] and his associates consider to be sacred.” He solicited language from Lehman that would help “convey the thought that our leading characters place their lives in jeopardy by pursuing subversive enemy elements” and thereby persuade the government “that we felt it to be symbolic in our story that they achieve their aim against the background of the monuments of the great Presidents of our country who have given this country its ideals.” Further, Monta wanted to be able to affirm explicitly in his application for permission that “although our characters will slide between the monuments of the various Presidents, such characters will use the crevices between the monuments, and at no time will any of the characters tread on the very faces of the Presidents” (memorandum, 4 August 1958). The lawyer’s demureness moved Lehman to respond the following day giving a more precise stipulation of the plot, in which he indicated that the protagonists of the film, subjected to pursuit, “escape in a direction which leads them ultimately to the top of the Mt. Rushmore Monument. Their position seems hopeless. There

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is no escape. They will be assassinated by their pursuers. But the Monument saves them. The enemies of this country move down to the talus slope through the area between the Washington and Jefferson heads where they meet their deaths by stones in a landslide.” Thus, concluded Lehman, “it will be symbolically and dramatically satisfying to the people of the United States that this great National Memorial, standing there in all its granite glory, becomes the very stumbling block to those who would undermine our country. In the end, the enemies of democracy are defeated by the Shrine of Democracy itself” (memorandum, 5 August 1958). The presidential heads, in any event, would not be trod upon. Based on this set of claims, MGM applied to the National Park Service on 12 September, paying a bond of five hundred dollars and guaranteeing that the memorial would be treated “with the utmost respect” (memorandum from Charles Coleman, 12 August 1958). Three days later, Monta wrote advising Hitchcock to remove from scene 241, on page 176 of the current script, dialogue about “sliding down Lincoln’s nose” (memorandum, 15 August 1958). The press, meanwhile, had been repeatedly reporting on Hitchcock’s intention to use the monument, and in this way the plan had come to the attention of Lincoln Borglum, son of the sculptor who had created it (or most of it, since Gutzon Borglum died before he could finish his task). “I am concerned that whatever use you make of the Memorial be in keeping with its concept,” wrote the son, “This Memorial is dedicated to the growth and development of our country; and it has become a symbol of democracy. It is not a Memorial to those four men, but to the progress they represent in history” (letter, Lincoln Borglum to Hitchcock, 27 August 1958). On the same day, the National Park Service responded with permission for characters to move about upon the faces (in his cutting notes on 11 March 1959, Hitchcock dictated that “Leonard must go underneath the beard on Mount Rushmore— not above”), but proceeded to express what seemed an insurmountable objection. Location manager Charles Coleman reported the government’s alarm about “acts of violence committed in front of National Monuments,” a concern that interestingly centers not so much on the fear of violence directed at such monuments as on the perceived problem of using a setting already deemed symbolic by the multitude for a dramatic purpose that might invoke a contradictory symbolism. “They therefore request that we try to have our villains killed at some other location” (memorandum, 27 August 1958). Even many of Hitchcock’s fans, including François Truffaut, in rhapsodizing about his flair for the use of settings to assist in the dramatization of exciting events, neglect to note how this strength and aptitude—or at least this predilection for using settings dramatically, which Hitchcock indeed exemplified magnificently—is generally widespread in a culture of the visual, where

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background in its relation to focal action is typically extremely visible: the National Park Service, too, could get into the act! Hitchcock, clearly, had intended that his villains would die upon the monument, and that against that thrilling backdrop his heroes would be saved. But the formal letter of permission from Humberger explicitly mandated: “No scene of violence will be filmed near the sculpture, on the talus slopes below the sculpture, on any simulation or mock-up of the sculpture or talus slope, or in any public-use area of Mount Rushmore National Memorial or simulated or mock-up public use area. . . . No scene of violence is to show the sculpture or talus slope in the background.” The intent here was expressly to forbid Hitchcock from filming a death by stones in a landslide on the monument, and ironically—given MGM’s patriotic proclamations earlier—to “eliminate the thought that the ‘enemies of democracy are defeated by the Shrine of Democracy itself ’” (letter, Humberger to Charles Coleman, 12 September 1958). By 13 October, the diligent Monta had noticed that the script still contained a death scene on the monument and instructed Hitchcock to make a revision. Two weeks later to the day, Hitchcock was visited in Hollywood by Humberger and his replacement, Don Spaulding (both of these gentlemen traveling at government expense), to whom he made explicit assurances that “no scene of violence would take place where any of the white granite of the monument would show in the background.” The government spokesmen allowed that “it would be permissible to pan . . . characters from the white granite portion to the black rock formation adjacent, or anything else that is adjacent that does not show the white granite. . . . Mr. Hitchcock assured the gentlemen that on any ‘up’ shots where the fight is staged, only sky would be shown in the background” (memo from Howard Horton, 27 October 1958). If the legal personnel at MGM were feeling constrained, nervous, and especially watchful in these circumstances, Hitchcock himself was not. He wrote his friend Harold Cail at the Portland Press Herald, “The chase on Mount Rushmore will be around and not over it—too many sensitive souls about” (letter, Hitchcock to Cail, 19 September 1958), and soon later was charmed by a postcard from his friend Alex Ardrey in New York, depicting the monument under construction, with his own bowler-topped and rather clairvoyant face supplanting that of George Washington. To Ardrey he wrote back, “I feel the improvement over Washington is beyond question a most significant one, but I am not forwarding the suggestion onto the Secretary because I think the idea of the substitution is far too good for them” (letter, Hitchcock to Ardrey, 28 October 1958). On 3 March 1959, he calmly ordered a “shot of the revolving figure of Valerian falling”—a down shot, not an up shot—from process photographer John Fulton (who was working at Paramount), thus fulfilling his word

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that at the moment of violence, the monument would be invisible (Hitchcock notes, 3 March 1959).1 But according to Hitchcock biographer Donald Spoto, trouble was still brewing after the Humberger/Spaulding visit. After a local South Dakotan journalist published a sketch by Hitchcock showing the sequence as he planned it, the Department of the Interior wrote the filmmaker, “revoking the permit for the use of the monument because of ‘patent desecration.’ This news reached the national press at once, and one irate editor suggested that ‘Mr. Hitchcock go back home to England and draw people scampering on the Queen’s face’” (Spoto 441). Nor would Hitchcock’s former British citizenship be a basis for only this editor’s criticism: watching the final film, Allen Henderson of Detroit was moved to write to the filmmaker, “I resented watching a group of transplanted, pseudo, or just plain callous ‘Americans’ crawling over a great national shrine on a ‘hitchcock Holiday.’ I would like to see Americans frolicking over a similar shrine in merry old England with such commercial abandon!” (letter, Henderson to Hitchcock, 23 July 1959). Restraint was supplied, in any event. “Due to the objection of the government,” Spoto quotes Hitchcock, “we weren’t allowed to have any of the figures on the faces even in the interior studio shots. . . . We were told very definitely that we could only have the figures slide down between the heads of the presidents. They said that after all, this is the shrine of democracy” (Spoto 442). That the government, in Hitchcock’s recollection, took pains to invoke the “shrine of democracy” in putting Hitchcock off is, of course, irony supreme. With designer Robert Boyle’s help, Hitchcock prepared the visual design of the film in such a way that nothing seemed sacrificed. “No director I’ve worked with knew as much about films as he did,” according to Boyle. “A lot of directors I worked with knew a great deal, but they didn’t have his technical skill. . . . He was always trying to make the visual statement, and there was no such thing as a throwaway shot.” The last ten minutes of the film comprise one of the most famous set pieces in

1. The down-shot is as terrifying and as violent as anything in Hitchcock: as Valerian, Adam Williams has pounced on Grant but while they wrestle he is hurled over the precipice. We see him fall to his death in a craggy chasm as trees spread at the margins; and in the preparatory shot, he and Grant fought against a vast panorama of evergreen forest stretching for miles below. All the scenery for these two juxtaposed shots, chillingly real for viewers who have trouble with heights, was not photographed as a background plate in South Dakota, was not, indeed, photographed in nature at all, but was painted on a backdrop as flat as can be. So, Hitchcock was honoring the spirit of his agreement not to film violence against the monument itself. Somewhat earlier in the sequence, several shots make use of a darkly lit, very large painted drop ninety feet long and thirty feet high, showing the monument from the side. (Conversation with Lynne M. Coakley, J. C. Backings, Culver City, Calif., 2 November 2007.)

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Hitchcock’s career—the realization of a longtime desire. He had at last celebrated the giant, impassive faces. (Spoto 442)

As Boyle remembers, the government “gave an edict that we would have no [motion picture] camera, but they would allow us still photography there. . . . It did seem at first that if we couldn’t get on the statues at all, that it was going to be very difficult” (Boyle 176). It would be December before the Mount Rushmore material was shot. Boyle made an arrangement to bring a team to Rapid City, with a view to working even on short days with a small window for good exposure. In a way, his experience repeated that of the man who had made the sculptures: You had to climb up by rope, it was really a mountain-climbing situation, to get to the top of the heads. On each head there’s a big iron ring, and there was a coil of old cable up there and a boswain’s chair, which was used to lower people down with a winch to clean the facades or to repair [them]. It had been used by Borglum, the sculptor who did the faces, also to anchor his sort of winch chair that took him from down below, at his headquarters, up to work on the statues. When we got up there, nobody wanted to go off on these rusty cables. But the things that we do in this business are crazy anyway, and I said, “Well, somebody’s got to go over and see if this thing works.” So I got in the boswain’s chair and they winched me over the head of Lincoln, I think it was, who had a massive forehead. It was fine as long as I could touch his forehead, but when we got down a certain way, I was hanging free, and the cable had been so twisted that it started now to untwist and I was twirling around in the middle of the air. . . . So on each head we made photographs with a four-by-five camera, every ten feet. Every angle, every ten feet, down each head, which gave us a background that we could then rear-project with what we called then stereopticon slides. The stereopticon slide was used to get more light. (Boyle 176–77)

As the slides were to be projected in the MGM studio at Culver City, behind action to be filmed along with fake rocks and angled pieces of the sculpture, it was necessary that they should be adequately bright, and for this purpose the artists made use of a technique that had been devised in the early 1930s by Farciot Edouart working at Paramount, namely, to make multiple copies of each slide and project them on top of one another as a way of increasing the saturation and brightness of the background image. While Edouart had used a triple background “plate” with film—not still—images, and had invented a triple-head projector to run it in 1933, Boyle and his team used the slides in pairs. These Rushmore “exteriors,” using Boyle’s stereo plates from the crisp fine-grain four-by-fives made at the monument, were shot on the 134- by 237-foot Stage 27

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at MGM from the fourth to the sixteenth of December 1958, at the east end, eighty feet high, with Saul Gorss standing in as Grant’s stunt double (at a salary of $345.00 per week, with a one-week guarantee) and Marilyn Molloy as Saint’s (at the same salary) (inter-office communication, 5 December 1958). (Miss Saint herself was getting $10,000 a week with ten weeks guaranteed [inter-office communication, 4 November 1958]; Mr. Grant, in a complex arrangement, $300,000 and a percentage of the gross, paid over ten years [inter-office communication, 17 October 1958].) For the composite photography in studio, a 50 mm lens was used to provide a sense of unaltered, direct, real perception of a scene—the 50 mm mimics unadulterated natural vision—and an 85B filter compensated for the blue-cast daylight lighting of the stereos on the tungsten-based color film stock, so that the film would not turn out too blue (as in day-for-night). Two months later, Hitchcock suggested retakes of some shots, indeed, to correct a color imbalance between the background plates and the foreground photography (Hitchcock cutting notes, 25 February 1959); perhaps this was in response to the same problem detected by Ernest Lehman who saw the material a few days later and complained that “a shot of Valerian on top of the Monument . . . is very daylight” (Lehman’s thoughts, 3 March 1959), but even early in May, Hitchcock thought “the group shot [of Vandamm under arrest] must be redone [presumably because of overfiltration]. The figures look as though they are lit by flames. Cut down on the red and accentuate the blue and green” (Hitchcock’s notes on matte shots, 6 May 1959). By choosing an aperture of f8 or f9, cinematographer Robert Burks was able to give sufficient depth of field to provide for the illusion of reality without falling into the trap of losing focus on the background or else providing so much focus that the flatness of the still images might become evident. In general, this sequence is a brilliant example of the dramatic realism that could be created by mixing skillfully prepared matte shots with studio composite photography taken against stereo backgrounds. Accomplished here in a chain of deftly edited shots is an array of technical feats: balanced twilight color in both still-photographed exteriors and matching tungsten-lit studio interior work; tautly choreographed principal and stunt player action; a legal virtuosity of showing the Mount Rushmore setting without violating any of the stringent regulations imposed by the government; highly effective medium and close-up framings for exhibiting key action fragments (Eve’s lost shoe, for example), possible only under controlled studio conditions; as well as the more often celebrated integration of this action sequence into the narrative flow of the (already very exciting) film. Studio photography of this sequence, largely a business of moving “rocks” (the cost for constructing these for one scene was $67.62), changing camera angles and actor footings, lining up the stereos with front action (the camera must always be absolutely perpendicular to the rear-projection screen),

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color-adjusting the stereo plate effect by filtering or correcting studio lighting methodically day after day, and spray-painting rocks effected a wholly believable cinematic chase in forbidding territory and against the threat of gravity, one, indeed, which has both thrilled and tickled viewers, critical and lay, around the world. “Hitchcock describes his own expertise in constructing chase sequences,” Peter Wollen writes, “as the result of combining what he had learned from literary sources, which fleshed out the basic chase motif with careful plotting and characterization, together with D. W. Griffith’s pioneering cinematic use of the chase . . . as a physical event . . . in which the spectator’s reactions are manipulated by the technique of cross-cutting combined with an ever-accelerating tempo, while the spectator is kept aware of the dreadful threat which still hangs over the potential victim” (268). I can still remember my shock seeing this film at the time of its first release, age thirteen and gripping my armrests, unable to imagine how they had been able to actually film upon the monument and unable, too, to keep my stomach down at every glimpse of the height. Happy and utterly contented with the thrill of this chase, I did not wonder then, as I do today, why this particular race course was so important to Hitchcock. Nor could I suspect that most adult watchers of this filmmaker’s work were bringing the excited sensibility of a thirteen-year-old to their ruminations, entirely satisfied to be thrilled by Hitchcock’s screen action and entirely uncurious about his methods and motives. But watching in awe, I could begin to understand and sympathize with an observation Geoffrey Hartman would not make for almost forty years, that “every spot within the reach of ‘camera reality’ is either monumental or ominous” (104). This sequence on the monument was entirely monumental and entirely ominous, but not in its own unique way, I dimly grasped: it partook of the ominous monumentality of the film as a whole—of all the films I had ever seen and been profoundly touched by.

A Jolly Roger For Robin Wood, the “Mount Rushmore climax” is “played out on and around the imperturbable stone faces of the Presidents, with their suggestion of stability and order forming a background to Thornhill’s desperate struggle to save himself and Eve for life” (140). And given that their conversation there, in “total absurdity,” is about Roger’s previous marriages—“My mis-spent youth is catching up with me,” Lehman suggested Roger could pant, with Eve rejoining over her shoulder, “That isn’t all that’s catching up with you” (memo from Lehman, 15 October 1958)—the threatening rock ledge where we leave Eve clinging to Roger becomes a setting where “the struggle for life against the destructive elements (the spies) is thus combined with the cementing of the relationship, the sealing off of the past” (141). For William Rothman,

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Hitchcock’s association of Cary Grant with the faces on Mount Rushmore is a proclamation that he is “an authentic American hero” (244); the faces constitute a kind of currency in which his Americanism can be counted. Stanley Cavell is interested to illuminate the fact that the Mount Rushmore sequence begins with a shot of the presidential faces through a telescope, to which view we have cut from a close-up of Grant’s face at Midway Airport. “We are being told,” Cavell tells us, “that this face belongs to just one person on earth and that we are going to have to think about what that means” (163). And: “A question is thus raised about what Grant is (made of), about what it means that he has become a national monument, and hence about what a monument is.”2 Revealing and rich as these lines of thought are, they leave many questions unanswered about the Mount Rushmore sequence, not the least of which is why, if Hitchcock simply wanted to align Grant with a monument, he could not have found one in Chicago or New York. These critical approaches (as informing as they are) also constitute a kind of retrospective analysis of Hitchcock: given the film exactly as he made it, they sensibly ask what Mount Rushmore can be taken, as we look back at it, to mean. But the deeper meaning of Hitchcock lies in relation to his logical need to make a film the way he makes it, and thus anticipates the story that we see. Mount Rushmore, after all, was the solution to a problem, not the axiom on which the problem was based. We must begin not by accepting Mount Rushmore as the site of an exciting chase but by wondering why, if a chase was in the cards, Hitchcock could have seen the sense in situating it there, indeed felt it imperative to do so. Robert Boyle had confronted Hitchcock, in fact: I went to Hitch and said, “Hitch, you know, the picture’s really over at this time. It’s just a matter of finding another climax. Couldn’t we find another place where we could do a similar thing?” And Hitch looked at me as if I’d hit him in the stomach, and he said, “Bob, that’s the only reason I’m doing the movie!” (Boyle 176)

2. What a monument is, at least in part, is the look of a monument—at least that is what a monument is in film. The Mount Rushmore sculpture is not actually seen by either the Professor or Roger through that telescope: what the scope—mounted on a low scenic studio wall next to a piece of set construction mocking up the visitors’ center—is pointed at is a painted backdrop of the four presidents, forty feet wide and twenty-nine feet two inches high, still available for rental. It was one of many backdrops used for shooting, another being a ninety-by-thirty-foot side angle showing Jefferson, Roosevelt, and Lincoln; this drop was painted with an afternoon sunlight effect but shot through blue filtration to produce a considerably darker twilight aura in a number of wide shots (some involving painted “rocks”) in the sequence. It is conventional in studio filmmaking to make drops intended for general use with a “daylight” effect, since it is easier to darken these for “night” shots than to lighten drops painted originally for night. (Conversations with Lynne M. Coakley, J. C. Backings, Culver City, Calif., 2 November and 20 November 2007.)

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Cavell’s speculation about what it might mean that Cary Grant has become a national monument is surely not more interesting than the thought that any of the subjects of Gutzon Borglum’s massive sculptures are also individuals with particular faces, each belonging to just one person on earth; individuals, further, who have become monumentalized in American culture. If we wonder, looking at Cary Grant, what a monument is, may we not also wonder, gazing at the embodiments of Theodore Roosevelt, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and George Washington, the same thing? It may be worthwhile to reconsider the Mount Rushmore chase on the basis of the assumption that it is not merely a virtuoso flourish to end a bravura motion picture, nor merely a fictional “event” that somehow “happened” in front of Hitchcock’s camera, nor merely Hitchcock’s personal fancy, but rather a story element that was intensively and carefully imagined as capable of rounding out a certain pictorial and philosophical expression, then devotedly plotted and, finally, very intentionally directed so that in finished form it would fit into the film in a particular way. The Mount Rushmore sequence has intrinsic value, then. It is entertainment, it is spectacle, but it is also something more. And so we might wonder not only why Hitchcock felt it necessary to weather political storms and engineer his shoot so that it would cost no sacrifices, why it was necessary to ask the studio for the sets he finally got, but why the presidential monument was conceived in the first place as a background for Grant and Saint’s ultimate unification. After all, Roger and Eve could discuss marriage and confront the possibility of death while clinging to any sufficiently precarious mountain ledge, looking over any shocking precipice. There are other mountains even more north-northwest of Manhattan. And any rock sculpture, or for that matter, any sculpture at all, intercut with Cary Grant’s face, can establish him as an American hero. Could not other mountainous boulders have sufficed, if it was a mountainous clime Hitchcock wanted? Could not other giant, impassive faces have done the trick for him, and indeed, in Saboteur, had not a giant, impassive face already been used (and made this point)? Why was it necessary to have Grant—and, after all, not only Grant but also Saint—meander over not just faces but, presidential faces? While one could begin to frame an answer to this question by carefully examining Mount Rushmore as a geological topos, or by carefully examining the personality type embodied by Cary Grant, it is possible instead to carefully examine the face of the typical American president on the supposition that it is the “giant presidential face,” densely and substantially available in this sculpture, indeed the idea of presidential gigantism, which attracted Hitchcock’s attention originally. As Cavell remarks, the scale of the Borglum monument renders Grant sliding down the cheek roughly analogous to the tiny razor—which he has borrowed from Eve Kendall—sliding down his own face in the men’s room of Chicago’s Union Station. Those rocky faces

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Was it only a mountainous clime that Hitchcock wanted, only any-monumentwhatever? “The National Monument at Mount Rushmore” seen by Roger O. Thornhill from the “Visitors’ Center” in Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (MGM, 1959). Digital frame enlargement.

are therefore, by analogy, his face; and Grant’s Thornhill has, therefore, a presidential face, himself (one that he describes, while nuzzling with Eve, as “nice”). It is hardly necessary to give consideration to any particular presidential face—the face of Teddy Roosevelt, the face of Jimmy Carter. We need not consider the idiographic biology as it manifests itself in a development of the flesh, the deployment of characteristic and recognizable features, the telltale expression of single and induplicable personality. Enough is to consider the face as a presidential attribute: and thus, the face of any president, certainly the face of any president in the modern eye, taken and investigated as such, and given its ubiquity, is a token and guarantor of the president’s authority in office. The president is the presidential face. The presidential face is the face of the nation. Cary Grant is neither Teddy Roosevelt (who is “trying to warn” him not “to go ahead with this hare-brained scheme”) nor Abraham Lincoln, and yet the analogy with the mountain suggests that he has taken upon his own features the same grave mantle of responsibility that was theirs; no particular president, he is yet presidential. Oddly, Thornhill opens the Mount Rushmore sequence by gazing at Roosevelt through mounted binoculars, and in a chapter entitled, of all things, “Improved Binoculars,” Northrop Frye writes, “A coherent environment is a cultural necessity” (Modern 55). Earlier in the same book, he says this about the illusions that surround power: “The absurdity of power is clearer in a democratic society, where we are deprived of the comforting illusions that surround

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royalty. In a democracy no one pretends to identify the real form of society either with the machinery of business or with the machinery of government” (46). In democracy, then, the status of the leader is an ostensible construct. We might ask, however, whether it is true in the act that in America we are “deprived” of the “comforting illusions that surround royalty,” given the particular fondness for royalty and its trappings that is to be found in the United States and the regal nature of the treatment accorded the rich and powerful there, notwithstanding the public affirmation of the revolutionary impulse in official cant. Is not the president in fact regarded not as the mere figurehead of society, not only as the singular force heading up a vast bureaucracy, but as a monarch, the country’s principal operating motive, its wellspring? Is it not in fact only a very tiny minority (including Frye) that holds off from pretending the “real form of society” is to be found in the “machinery of government” that the president operates, energizes, shapes, and symbolizes? Indeed, can we not read American culture as deeply indebted and loyal to personality, as exhibiting a mania and a zeal that extend quite beyond the oval office and into the streets where each citizen’s sovereign power is taken to reside and fulminate inside the individual breast and to be indicated perduringly by the identifiable, expressive, aestheticized face? Is the individual face not apotheosized in this country, spotlit, magnified, glorified, and made transcendent?

The Face We Don’t See No less a critic than Leslie A. Fiedler once obsessed about the apotheosis that is that face. He called it, originally, the “Montana Face,” a face that was “the visible sign of an inner inarticulateness,” a face “par excellence, the face in the Garden that was made in God’s image,” a face that could reasonably be called, indeed, the “Gary Cooper face,” a face “starved of richness and subtlety of experience” and “proud of it!” (“Montana” 142). Of what garden is that face the telltale face? Of “God’s own garden,” as early photographers working for the Farm Security Administration called the undeveloped rocky sweetlands of the American West, the territory untrammeled before the railroad engineers blasted lines of sight and access through it; of God’s garden, out of which Borglum fashioned the quartet on Mount Rushmore through fourteen years of blasting and honeycombing and pointing and without finishing—so that his son had to take over and even then the job, so overwhelming and immense, was never completed. This is the Western face, which in the end is the American face since America was the fruit of a great journey westward, an unfinished journey toward a great society never completed. This is a version of the face that the narcoleptic Mike (River Phoenix) sees in the horizon in My Own Private Idaho (1991). This is Buster Keaton’s—the Great Stone Face’s—face. This is the face apotheosized by the stony presidents and by the movie star in

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one and the same way: so that it is Gary Cooper’s and at the same time Cary Grant’s and still again Abraham Lincoln’s and Teddy Roosevelt’s, the face that stands for any man, the “any man” that is the American par excellence, the face that any man can identify with while still retaining “an inner inarticulateness.” Certainly it is not that Roger O. Thornhill is “starved of richness and subtlety of experience”—to the contrary. But his experience and his richness are not expressed on his face; his face marshals experience but does not give it out. The persona residing in the face is starved. This quality of composure, let us call it, is what is missing in James Stewart, and is the principal reason why Stewart could not have played in North by Northwest. Recall the panic on Stewart’s face as he is threatened (by the stuffed animals) in Ambrose Chappell the taxidermist’s shop in The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), or by the drowned body of Ben Vandergroat (Robert Ryan) in The Naked Spur (1953), or by Dave Waggoman (Alex Nicol) and his ranch hands in The Man from Laramie (1955). Grant evades the cropduster’s strafing with none of the same grimacing or anxiety; he preserves the anonymous dignity, the blank ambiguity, of the advertising man and politician. Stewart’s face registers subtlety of experience radiantly, and so it is a moving face, a face always inspiring and in motion, a face that contacts things, a dirty face if a noble one. But the presidential face that is Thornhill’s face that is Grant’s face: this face is always clean. Lest we doubt, he is not only always clean-shaven; we watch him shaving, all lathered with a beautifully disguising foam of purity. And that face is always on show. Every man who has it wears it to proclaim himself to the world, and so every man can be president. “The authority of a President,” writes Max Lerner, reflecting on our capacities for reflection, for making impression, for influencing, for modeling, for standing to utterance, is even more important than his power, because it is the authority that shapes and decides what the power shall be. I use “authority” in the sense of the President’s habitual command of popular consent. The sources of the President’s authority are subjective—flowing from his personality, his political style, his conduct of the office, his impact on the people—rather than being objective and forever imbedded in a constitutional document. If he has grasp, contagion, political artistry, and a mastery of his purposes and methods, then he will carry authority no matter what powers he claims or forsakes, and his authority will work magic to bolster the claims he stakes out. (373–74)

The grasp, contagion, artistry, and mastery are not inner qualities insofar as others perceive and interpret them; they are textures of the surface, a map of intuitions and forces as yet undeclared. They are a face. What Frye calls the “machinery of government” is not a room or building but a system, built of offices and roles, conventions of behavior and

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interrelationship, record-keeping protocols, protective cloaking strategies, self-replenishment and self-evaluation routines, statements of purpose, not to mention tactics, operations, and designs. This system is the United States of America, politically speaking, and it is both immense and shapeless, extensive and always moving, a creation that feeds upon humans but that, not human itself, is grander than human in scale. No one person is, or symbolizes, that system accurately; it is not a personality, not a private motive, not a conspiracy, not a localizable energy. To understand American government—and certainly America—one requires sociology and history. One must read Crèvecoeur and Tocqueville and Carson McCullers and Carlos Chavez and Carl Sandburg and H. L. Mencken and Eldridge Cleaver, and one must listen to 50 Cent and also Janis Joplin, Aaron Copland and Woody Guthrie, Diana Ross and Tony Bennett, and one must look at Robert Rauschenberg and Ben Shahn and Norman Rockwell and Edward Steichen and William Wegman—and Alfred Hitchcock. However, the current popular belief, cultured and fostered in the American system and munificently capitalized by the mass media, is that America is the soul and personality of its leader; that it is an army led by its principal warrior and philosopher-king. This has been true since at least FDR. The president is seen as the controlling force, not the mere figurehead, of a complex system; and the face of the president is the embodiment of that force, its only agency of connection to the people, the world, and the moment. If the English monarch is stamped upon the coin, the American leader is stamped upon the transmogrifying coinage of the American imagination. The American infatuation with the individuality of the president is not just attraction and obsession but a cult of personality, that aggrandizing concentration of interest upon the soul of the “remarkable” individual that after the death of Josef Stalin his critics identified as a hallmark of his black regime. “Every time I have found myself in his presence,” wrote A. O. Avdienko of the charming tyrant, “I have been subjugated by his strength, his charm, his grandeur. I have experienced a great desire to sing, to cry out, to shout with joy and happiness. And now see me—me!—on the same platform where the Great Stalin stood a year ago. In what country, in what part of the world could such a thing happen.” And the answer is, of course, America, where else? Bill Clinton is accused—even on “The News Hour with Jim Lehrer” (27 February 1997)—of “selling” nights in the Lincoln Bedroom for campaign funds: if he is selling, there are potential buyers, eager to stand where greatness stood and snore where it slept. Here, for example, is Theodore Sorenson recounting his introduction to an “extraordinarily ordinary” soon-to-be employer: “The truly extraordinary man,” it has been written, “is truly the ordinary man.” The first time I met John Kennedy I was immediately impressed by his ordinary demeanor—a quality that in itself is extraordinary among

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the horse w ho dr a nk the sk y politicians. He spoke easily but almost shyly, without the customary verbosity and pomposity. The tailor-made suit that clothed a tall, lean frame was quite stylish. A thatch of chestnut hair was not as bushy as cartoonists had portrayed it. He did not try to impress me as office-holders so often do on first meetings, with the strength of his handshake, or with the importance of his office, or with the sounds of his voice. (11)

Has not Roger O. Thornhill, like Sorenson, been offered a close view of hair and personal features on the strength of which to adulate—perhaps not a Shakespearean thatch, capping a rose-covered cottage of a face, but certainly Big Hair—has he not been given a way to share the same platform as presidents? Indeed, is his rapture not expressed directly upon their sincere, American, adulating faces, and is not his own presidential face, and that of the actor who produces him, equal in measure to the faces of these grandiose forms? If Roger and Eve, scrambling over the surface of Mount Rushmore, are too harried, too awkward, too full of adrenaline to sing or shout with joy and happiness, surely it is one of the triumphs of this piece of film that it fills the audience with exactly this desire; the desire, as it were, to project one’s body into the flesh onscreen and cry out with delight, “Look at me! Look where I am!” (“King of the world!”) Gary Morecambe and Martin Sterling claim, somewhat hyperbolically, that “the savage wit of the director was given its freest rein” in this finale, “by having the greatest American screen icon scrambling over the nation’s most revered monument,” a process that led Grant himself later to boast, “I heroically hung both up and down on replicas of sections of Mount Rushmore, rafter-high on the tallest stage of Hollywood. I’ve always felt queasily uncertain whether or not Hitchcock was pleased at seeing me survive each day’s work” (237). In An Eye for Hitchcock, indeed, I suggest that part of what is being experienced by Roger as he comes with Eve out of the forest clearing onto the top of the sculpture, by twilight, is his shocked awareness that he is now the focus of exactly the kind of attention he was earlier devoting to Roosevelt through the telescope. “Look at me!” and also, “I am especially one who deserves to be looked at.” James Naremore puts it succinctly. North by Northwest, he says, “seems to be constructed around Grant (whose salary and profits were greater than Hitchcock’s own), and once the initial excitement of the plot is over, each additional viewing allows us to become more aware of the star as spectacle” (Acting 214). Leslie Fiedler had originally described the “Montana Face” in 1949: What I had been expecting I do not clearly know; zest, I suppose, naïveté, a ruddy and straightforward kind of vigor—perhaps even honest brutality. What I found seemed, at first glance, reticent, sullen, weary—full of self-sufficient stupidity; a little later it appeared simply inarticulate, with all the dumb pathos of what cannot declare itself: a face developed not for

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sociability or feeling, but for facing into the weather. It said friendly things to be sure, and meant them; but it had no adequate physical expressions even for friendliness, and the muscles around the mouth and eyes were obviously unprepared to cope with the demands of any more complicated emotion. I felt a kind of innocence behind it, but an innocence difficult to distinguish from simple ignorance. (End 134–35)

It was always and inevitably, for Fiedler, even at first sighting, a face that those who possess it and wear it “don’t believe in, don’t see,” just in the way, I suppose, that Americans don’t believe in and don’t see—bluntly (and blatantly) resent—the comparison between the presidential hero and the dictator Stalin, although it is manifestly true that we have conspired to reshape our Hero in the guise of “The Personality,” that we have become a worshipping cult obsessed with the thought that the Hero’s energies and talents spring from within, that his powers are natural to his embodiment, that it is talent and not agency that brings him to the top of the pinnacle and affords him a superior view of the world. How alarming it is to think that this “Montana Face,” this essence of the “Personality,” should so forcefully resemble the faces on Borglum’s sculpture, or Cary Grant’s peculiarly handsome face. Grant, like the Roosevelt who fascinates Thornhill as he stands with the Professor, does not quite seem to express friendliness (not ever, in any film), and has that strange innocence, and seems always to be facing into the weather. (In the cropduster sequence, as he stands by the side of Route 41 and dust blows against his cheeks, he analogizes the sculpted heads even more than when he is shaving.) One of the riddles of Rushmore is that those faces, so exquisitely perched in front of the eyes, so open to sight as to the wind, should in a critical respect also be faces we don’t quite completely see. That Grant has such a face, too, one that we accept so fully it is invisible, is a lesson of this sequence, one that we learn as he scampers along the roughened cement in his roughed-up cement gray suit.

Cracked In September 2005, after the devastating Hurricane Katrina had withdrawn from New Orleans leaving hundreds dead and hundreds of thousands homeless, a furor arose as to the culpability in this great human disaster of the president of the United States. The response of the federal government, it was fairly generally concluded, had been too little and far too late, ill-conceived, sloppy, jerry-rigged haphazardly upon an utter vacancy of decent emergency planning. “After Katrina Fiasco, Time for Bush to Go,” wrote Gordon Adams on 8 September in the Baltimore Sun: “The disastrous federal response to Katrina exposes a record of incompetence, misjudgment and ideological blinders that should lead to serious doubts that the Bush administration should be allowed

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to continue in office.” Cited in Adams’s rather sober diatribe is the expenditure of some two hundred billions of dollars for “homeland security” while the Federal Emergency Management Agency could do nothing in New Orleans for days; the repeated cutting of funds for water works and levees in the gulf region; the misdirection of medical and rescue squads; and more. Writing in the New Yorker 12 September, David Remnick concluded that “Bush’s mettle was tested—and he failed in almost every respect.” A special condemnation is reserved for the administration’s mismanagement of funding in the face of repeated requests from the gulf region for environmental bolstering. “In an era of tax cuts for the wealthy, Bush consistently slashed the Army Corps of Engineers’ funding requests to improve the levees holding back Lake Pontchartrain. This year, he asked for $3.9 million, $23 million less than the Corps requested. In the end, Bush reluctantly agreed to $5.7 million, delaying seven contracts, including one to enlarge the New Orleans levees” (36). And by 16 September, with Bush making repeated visits to New Orleans and the city by and large still under water, under water, that is, now seriously polluted and beginning to be a playground for alligators, it was an easy matter to find faced upon the magazine shelves of bookshops and kiosks around America and Canada the November-December issue of Adbusters magazine, prepared for press long before Katrina was even born. “A Crack in the Façade” read the bold yellow type on what looked very much like a cover for Time magazine, and underneath these words, occupying the entire surface of the cover, was a head-and-shoulders photograph of George W. Bush. He looked up a little, and off to the left, while from the right of the frame two wellmanicured female hands touched him. One, palm open, caressed his cheek and seemed to support his chin, caressed him, I should add with the same delicate touch Eve Kendall uses on Roger Thornhill’s “nice” face. The other hand, with a make-up pad, daubed at his forehead. He was being prepared for a television press conference, for a presentation of the presidential self to the viewing audience that perpetually defines and acknowledges it—much, indeed, as Roger defines and acknowledges the presidents he sees gazing at him from Mount Rushmore. In this not quite “man of the year” pose on this not quite Time cover that Adbusters had so artfully (and, it seemed, presciently) concocted, Bush was the epitome of the “personality” whose cult has come, the essence of power, prestige, and privilege, not to say trustworthiness and can-do, expressed and embodied in a human face. From Adbusters’ point of view, of course, it was less a face than a façade, a superficial mask, and, indeed, a façade with a telltale fissure. Yet so also was Mount Rushmore a cracked façade, and it remains so, repaired regularly with silicone sealant. But what does it mean to say that the center of a personality cult, the American as Great Personality, is hardly more than a mask? The ultimate critique of Bush is surely to avow that rather than

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being the Personality he had long claimed so artfully to be, this president is a hollow man only pretending. Presumably, the tone of the Adbusters critique is meant to imply that Bush’s façade is cracked because it was never genuine. With Mount Rushmore, on the other hand, the cracks appear over time as a result of the impingement of weather, the erosion of nature, the essential, and authentic, process of aging. A crack in the façade of Rushmore, then, means exactly the opposite to what a crack in Bush’s façade means. It attests fully to the cult of the important personality as truly embodied in the rock face, and we may presume that were cracks to appear also in the façade of Roger O. Thornhill, or at least in the façade of Cary Grant, they would be taken to mean much the same thing—that in Grant/Thornhill’s being there somehow rested the truly meritorious and courageous leader, the original and authentic American in spirit. Bush has a “crack in the façade” exactly because he boasted of becoming, yet has failed to become, what Roger O. Thornhill promises to be, and then is: a true American in the tradition of Lincoln, Washington, Jefferson, and Teddy Roosevelt. Bush is the president who is not presidential, even as Thornhill is the presidential man who hasn’t yet run for office. But why is it that Hitchcock wishes to invoke this noble façade, and the theme of the American Face, in North by Northwest? While it is surely true that South Dakota represents a dramatically convenient position north-northwest of Manhattan, where the story begins, Rapid City can hardly be imagined as the only such point in America, and Roger cannot be thought unable to head in a north-northwesterly direction without coming to rest in this, of all places. The dictum repeated often by Hitchcock to Truffaut about Secret Agent (1936) (and considerably repeated in critical texts), that one should use one’s setting (“I said to myself, ‘What do they have in Switzerland?’ They have milk chocolate, they have the Alps, they have village dances, and they have lakes. All of these national ingredients were woven into the picture” [Truffaut 106]), is hardly sufficient reason: what do we have in Rapid City, indeed? Mount Rushmore. Yet, why do we need to go to Rapid City? We must ask whether the cult of personality might also have been on Hitchcock’s mind, and whether in having Roger slipping and sliding over the rocky presidential faces he might not have been expressing himself regarding the presidency, regarding the theory of the Great Man, and regarding the place of the commanding personality in American culture—not a particular commanding personality, but personality in general, the recognizable individual human (the celebrity) as a dominating social force.

The Pinnacle and the Precipice I write in An Eye for Hitchcock that Roger Thornhill is quite mistaken in denying, as he does throughout North by Northwest (to our great pleasure), that he

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is the American agent, George Kaplan. It is, after all, because henchmen of the villain take him to be Kaplan that they presume to take him away; and it is this villain’s persistent conviction that he is Kaplan that motivates attempts upon Roger’s life and the principal line of movement of the story. My argument (I speak from within the diegesis, as it were) is that Kaplan is not a person but a role: not a diegetic “person” but a diegetic “role”: that, in other words, the role of Kaplan in this Hitchcock film is itself a “role” in yet another drama, one being produced and carefully staged by a team of intelligence agents under the direction of an unnamed man (“the Professor”) (Leo G. Carroll). And given that the performance of roles is not always and unequivocally undertaken willfully or consciously; given that we can be seen and evaluated according to terms that have not been established by ourselves; then it makes sense to realize that as much as anybody is “George Kaplan,” Roger Thornhill is, and indeed, as we discover through the agency of Hitchcock’s story, Roger is the only “flesh and blood” actor who has ever taken up this role! For the Professor, Thornhill as Kaplan is a kind of casting director’s wildest dream. Given that Thornhill is Kaplan (exactly as Cary Grant is Roger O. Thornhill), the central issue in the film is not that an innocent man has been placed in circumstances in which he is endangered, but that a man comes to realize how little control he has over the appearance others witness from him. It seems reasonable to suspect, however, that Roger’s innocence as to his position in life as the embodier of a role being scripted from beyond his purview is only one of his weaknesses, only one of the cracks in his façade. More salient—and, for most viewers of the film, I think, more entertaining through most of it—is Roger’s self-confidence in his self-knowledge, his utter freedom from doubt in the very throes of vulnerability. This is a man with absolutely no lack of conviction as to his position in life, his powers, his history and motive, his pedigree. We might look closely, for example, at the Lester Townsend episode. Roger, kidnapped, finds himself a guest in the Old Westbury, Long Island, mansion of Townsend, a diplomat at the United Nations. In this circumstance, he is introduced to a dignified and self-possessed man (James Mason) who presents himself as Townsend but is later discredited; in short: Roger meets an impostor, who jokes with him, ironically and chillingly enough, about playing roles and how dangerous that practice can be. While the fact that the man posing as Townsend is not Townsend in truth surely moves the story forward, and even gives it a rich decoration, any element at all might be a dramatic motor element here and any story element might decorate nicely. We must still ask, why would Hitchcock have found it useful to introduce Thornhill to a fake Townsend? (Why does the villainous Vandamm need to masquerade?) And one answer, simple but useful, presents itself: in order to provide as a background for our esteemed Mr. Thornhill a case study of a man who is patently not what he claims to be, a man who has a crack in his mask. At

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the very least, this might reasonably inspire us to wonder what makes Roger so very certain about himself, certain, for instance, in a way that he is not not certain about Mr. Townsend? Given the impostor’s easy ability and resources, and his talent for mobilizing these to make performance, what, as Roger sees it, blocks him from doing the same himself? As Roger sees it, nothing but that “nice” presidential face he is wearing, in which he has complete faith, as do we: that face of “truth.” Vandamm’s performance is emphasized so astutely by Hitchcock so that we may view it as performance and see Roger by its light, Roger, I should note, who in the Shaw and Oppenheim auction gallery gives every evidence of being a brilliant performer and who still refuses to acknowledge the actor in himself. Roger, certainly, not only takes himself seriously as Roger but gives the appearance of doing so, and it is principally this appearance that is convincing. Recall that with Eve at dinner on the Twentieth Century Limited he played at giving a show, at being Jack Phillips of Kingby Electronics, and accepted with profound ease Eve’s rebuttal that he was Roger Thornhill whose face was on every newspaper in America. Invested in his own authenticity is Roger. But, playing Townsend, Vandamm with the same aplomb gives the appearance, before an undetecting Roger, of taking himself seriously as Townsend. Since Roger eventually sees that Vandamm was performing, why can he not see that he also may be performing? Why can he not see—and why can we not see—his systematic and ongoing performance in the role of the pedigreed Roger O. Thornhill as merely a put-on, a brilliant put-on but no less a put-on than Vandamm’s? And the answer can only be his sincerity, or, as Erving Goffman has it, his belief in the impression fostered by his own performance (Presentation 15). Odd for Roger, actually: since in his professional work (he is a kingpin of Madison Avenue) he surely does not believe the impressions he creates—the little staged manipulations he contrives to sell things to people who mightn’t otherwise buy them. His advertisements, he knows, are lies; but he, the man making these advertisements, is for real. Hitchcock, I believe, could see this brazen sincerity—Roger’s utter disbelief that he could be as disingenuous as his nefarious counterpart—as Roger’s great façade, as the personality that could center a posse of attractions. Further, he could see it as Roger’s innocence, even as an “innocence difficult to distinguish from simple ignorance.” Roger is the “great personality” of North by Northwest, and all of the attributions toward, and deferences to, his indisputable selfness—Eve’s skepticism and playfulness, and finally her love; his mother’s doting; the Professor’s attentiveness—constitute his personality cult. He is no less a great personality, no less an inflation, than the figures on Mount Rushmore, and when he scrambles down their faces he is glossing the surface of himself. In the cornfield scene, he is nonplussed and stymied: why on earth would anybody be trying to gun down Roger O. Thornhill? Indeed, why? Why

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would anybody looking at this man see anything beyond what this man sees in the mirror? And the answer, painfully simple, is that somebody is trying to kill George Kaplan, and George Kaplan is what they see when they look at this man. Vandamm is not an antitype in his falseness; he is a personification of the human spirit, a perfect foil for Roger. When Roger can see that he and Vandamm are at the same business—that they are competitors but equally professional, equally masked; when he can accept that even as Roger Thornhill he is not without pretense and charade; when he can accept that all of the most sincere devotions do not equal a sharp recognition in someone else’s eye; he will be ready to stop believing that we actually are what the face reveals. He will see that the great face is only a great mask, not a presentation of spirit. It is less the president as a figure of government who can be seen quadrupled upon Mount Rushmore than the president as a Great American, the president as the man who knows too much. Mount Rushmore is America’s National Monument to Personality, to the face that is so pervasive and influential it cannot be seen. In this monument is the American of the modern age, not an idiosyncratist, an individual whose character is founded upon station and taste, but an all-powerful much-recognized agent of a faceless bureaucracy. If Roger begins by admiring this monument, and then continues by resembling this monument, reaches an apotheosis by being a monument himself, he surely concludes by depending upon this monument (literally) and then by separating himself from it as a waifling who is subject to its gravity, unable to gain a purchase in its crevices, suspended over the abysm which is the residuum of its loftiness and purity, dwarfed by its sheer magnitude and openness to the sky. Finally—and only finally—he takes on the proportions of a man, and is monumental no more. At the same time, he ceases being a corporate man and is reborn in the image of the private spirit, who is not to be categorized. Significantly it is for the first time in the film that, at the very end, Roger and Eve, with the train that carries them, are borne into darkness, where all faces are lost. That train was not, according to his assistant Peggy Robertson, at the heart of Hitchcock’s truest desire: “At the end, Hitch wanted originally, Cary curled up in one of the President’s noses, and we got the word back, “No, no, no.” So they devised this other ending. . . . It wasn’t going to be undignified. He was just going to be curled up and maybe sneeze” (185; 189). But the train it was, moving inexorably—many say laughably—into darkness. Even on the treacherous road by the sea where Roger, intoxicated, almost drives to his death, and on the nocturnal airstrip outside Vandamm’s house, there is not exactly darkness. Night, yes, but only night—in which one can still see nocturnally. The face as Roger used it was, of course, also a ladder, a way of climbing to the pinnacle and the precipice. Because of that face he would be in danger

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of falling to his death, and because of that face he would also be puissant and glorious. But in that final darkness provided by the train inside the tunnel there is hope that he might finally sigh, with Yeats, I must lie down where all the ladders start In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.

chapter 4

˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚ The Smoke and the Knife Like cigarettes, all things are brief in a useless life. —From a song of the Bousingos, ca. 1830

The Order As Fritz Lang’s M (1931) begins, an unknown killer has been kidnapping and murdering little girls, and the citizens of the city are broiling in a state of precipitous panic. They have been reading the newspaper accounts and hearing newsboys chanting the gruesome headlines on the streets, unaware, perhaps, that, as Walter Benjamin had it, “impatience is the state of mind of the newspaper reader. And this impatience is not just that of the politician expecting information, or of the speculator looking for a stock tip; behind it smolders the impatience of people who are excluded and who think they have the right to see their own interests expressed” (“Newspaper” 741). Well before we see—and in some limited way come to know—Hans Beckert (Peter Lorre), the depraved psychopathic villain himself, we are given to observe a number of features of the urban environment in which he skulks and attacks. First among these is the natural morbidity of children there (since the city is also in nature), “natural” because it is announced, with no precursor, even behind the dark screen which is the first thing we see: a group of youngsters are playing a circle game in the courtyard of an apartment block, in which the leader uses a rhythmic incantation to eliminate them from play, one by one. It is an incantation about a “nasty man in black” who will come to chop them up: in short, a direct invocation of death, yet arranged in the spirit and form of play to satisfy deep—one might say, aboriginal—desires. The very creepiness of this game is sensed and reacted to by a woman who is watching from a high balcony with a heavy load of laundry in her arms. She leans over and shrieks that they should stop “that awful song,” a look of revulsion on her face, coupled with the sharpness in her voice, making it clear that she does not harbor a generalized affection for children even as she looks to protect them; that she finds the thought of children dying terrifying and shocking, as do all mothers and potential mothers (Gunning has 86

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suggested she is pregnant [Lang 166]), who tend to “proclaim a concrete, deep, overwhelming proximity” (Dadoun 14; translation mine). This woman, this disaffected observer, is a little too poor and too disenfranchised to be one of the modern women of the Weimar era described so brilliantly by Patrice Petro in Joyless Streets. She is no “demonic female figure” and no “adolescent” whose image describes “the curious mixture of old and new in the city” (42). Nor in her frenzied avidity is she exactly, as a female viewer, “that spectator who is not only willingly duped by the image, but also most easily deceived by its lies” (45). Peter Gay writes of Weimar that “everyone was armed, everyone was irritable and unwilling to accept frustration” (13), a perfect description of this woman’s attitude toward the children and the noisy image they are producing. Once, in an imperial age, a girl, she is a girl no longer in an age of girl culture where “the emancipated single young woman became an icon of the international zeitgeist” (Schivelbusch, Culture 274). The children she is berating are about to pass into that girl culture, as are the intended victims of the killer, one by one: emancipation is dangerous, in that Mother is left behind. Already, indeed, for her, these little girls anticipate “the androgynous look of the flappers” who “paraded the gender-equalizing role of the war as well as the subsequent leap into modern-day equality of the sexes” (274). Implicit already in the children’s happy invocation of death and the woman’s distraught reaction to it is “a pernicious femininity, unloosed from all restraints” (272) at the edge of what Schivelbusch calls “an abyss of amorality” (270)—a femininity pernicious, that is, to those who would curb and chop it, as watchful mothers know. Early in this film we also witness the extraordinary moral sanctimony of the bourgeoisie, the brittle, strident attitude and posture of a kind of generalized sortie against what Schivelbusch describes as “the idea of an internal enemy lying in wait to overthrow the rule of law, an enemy against whom it was legitimate to employ any and all means of defense” (105). We see gentlemen squabbling across a card table as one of them vituperatively fingers his erstwhile friend as the killer. On the sidewalk another brave citizen gauchely interferes with a man’s perfect sociability toward a little girl. The police, for their part, are robotically procedural, “drawing themselves up toward abstraction and transcendence” (Dadoun 14), and take off after the invisible killer using all the modern means of scanning and detection (on detection see Gunning “Phantasmagoria”), in the dramatic replication of which Lang had advice from the actual police (Grant, Lang 34). The chief of police (Ernst Stahl-Nachbaur) is full of pompous rhetoric and the wily and blustering Inspector Lohmann (Otto Wernicke) smugly confident that arrest is just around the corner, even though in scene after scene he moans and sighs with the “predominance of egotism” linked to a “feeling of impotence” that characterized a broadly diffused physical exhaustion (Friedrich Altrichter, quoted in Schivelbusch, Culture 212) in

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Weimar Berlin. As Roger Dadoun suggests, there is an “astonishingly similar morphology in M and Inspector Lohmann, who look like stout, honest, burghers” (14).1 The newest of the victims is little Elsie Beckmann (Inge Landgut), visible as she crosses a street with a uniformed police guard and disappears down the sidewalk. The killer, giving “mute expression to his compulsive urges” (Fritz Lang, quoted in Grant 35) by whistling his trademark bit of Grieg (“In the Hall of the Mountain King” from Peer Gynt, op. 23), and seen only obliquely, his face obscured, admires her large rubber ball and offers to buy her a fancy balloon from a blind panhandler (Georg John). Soon later, as back at the apartment block her mother fruitlessly calls out for Elsie, we see the empty stairwell, then laundry hanging to dry in an attic room, then Elsie’s empty place at the lunch table, then her ball rolling into a woodland clearing, and finally that balloon trapped in—the telltale sign of domesticated modernity—some electric wires. Beckert has killed Beckmann. In German, Das Becken is the pelvis: has there also been a rape? Die Becken are a pair of cymbals: does Elsie “cymbalize” or “beckon” the image of Weimar frenzy in vitro and Beckert its corruption, its retention and rejection of a Wilhelminian past? Writes Thierry Kuntzel, “The void displaced from the stairway into the kitchen (where Mrs. Beckmann [Ellen Widmann] continues to wait for a possible return), is now extended to the exterior (where Elsie was) in a rigorous progression of a form which— alone—constitutes the drama” (“Film-Work” 59). Obsessed with their own organization and talent for being systematic, the police proceed to conduct raids, in particular upon a speakeasy where numerous members of the underworld are engaged in illicit activities. Soon, we are privy to a secret meeting of leaders of this underworld, what Mary McIntosh, writing more generally, calls “a defensive organization” (110). Under the leadership of bowler-hatted Schränker (Gustaf Gründgens), they confabulate about the obstructive police behavior, its interference in their everyday affairs; and in particular about the invisible killer who is so relentlessly invoking it. “It is only in more complex societies that crime emerges as a full-time occupation for some people,” writes McIntosh, “and it becomes possible to distinguish between these—the professional criminals—and the amateur or casual criminals and delinquents” (98). Our confabulators are professionals. Schränker convinces his colleagues that the killer, exactly one of those detestable amateurs, must be found and rubbed out. “Members of the craft underworld,” McIntosh writes, “are all in the same boat and have no secrets from one another” (126). This meeting or summit, among four or five desperate men, each representing a different criminal union, takes place in a room with the curtains carefully drawn, the smoke from their cigarettes thickening in the air around their heads until 1. I am grateful to Bill Krohn for this translation.

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it becomes a fog that obscures their identities. A similar cloud appears in a second chamber, again produced by the exhalations of men who are desperate and who express their frustration by smoking furiously; this is at police headquarters, and various officers and experts are arranged around a table staking out a strategy for capturing the serial killer. In a lengthy sequence of matching intercuts between the two smoky back rooms, between the two crowds of powerful men planning how to cover a city in order to find the unfindable, we learn that the police and legal authorities on one hand, and the criminal underworld on the other, are equally and similarly committed to the same crusade, to be undertaken with the same ferocity and determination and carried to the same fateful end: the murderer must be found and dealt with. “The thick cigarette or cigar smoke,” writes Dadoun, “prevents us from distinguishing the Police from the gangsters” (16), a thought to which we will return. Lang admits that he crafted his sound track to reflect the ongoing relation between these two dramatic spaces and the characters who populate them: The dialogue of two contrapuntal scenes (the questioning of the gang members with the aim of finding the child murderer, and the questioning of the detectives assembled in the police station for the very same purpose) was handled in such a way that the entire dialogue forms, to a certain extent, a whole. That is to say, for example, one of the criminals starts a sentence, and one of the detectives is shown finishing a sentence, and both parts make sense. (Grant 36)

Each team acts for its own compelling reasons, in a pattern and with a memory that is logical unto itself even if it competes with the pattern and logic of the other. Like police work, crime is socially organized. “Professional criminals follow the rules and customs of their work much as other workers do” (McIntosh 98). To be explicit about these differing reasons: the police need to produce an indelible impression upon the citizenry that they are successfully maintaining law and order (successfully enough that they deserve to continue to exist, and with substantial fiscal and moral support), that they are reliable in times of emergency for protecting the sacred interests of the state, and that they have this horrible situation under control to such a degree that the wanton murder of innocent children is not likely to continue and the machinery of society— labor and production in the name of great ideals; obedience to authority; eager reproduction of the working population and its education through happy family life—may continue to operate in safety. The slight pomposity and bluster of Lohmann are thus not personality traits but professional postures on his part, intended to broadcast a stance of indomitability, dogged wiliness, and purity of intent. On the criminals’ part, their passion to nab the murderer is based in the practical necessities of their precarious business enterprises, which, in

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the context of Weimar Berlin early in the 1930s, amount to what McIntosh calls “craft thieving.” “The distinctive feature of craft thieving,” she writes, “is that it establishes a modus vivendi with the forces of social control such that overt conflict is at a minimum” (114). In order to continue with moneymaking activities that fruitfully engage the interests of their many members (and support these members’ families, to boot), the leaders of the criminal gangs have to ensure a certain invisibility from the police—a principal one of those agencies “whose specific task is the enforcement of the law” and also, with urbanization and societal complexity, “catching criminals and punishing them” (114); they must maintain a peaceful zone in which members can work without being interrupted by agents whose official moral stance is antithetical to their intent. These men, too, are interested in prosperity, health, knowledge, growth, happiness, loyalty to truths, and, above all, learning: the underworld “provides a group within which the new recruit can gain the skills, information and attitudes that are necessary to the successful pursuit of crime” (109). The fact that the activities criminals know how to undertake (in order to assure success and continuity of their values) are viewed as problematic by the police merely renders the police an obstruction to their ongoing work. By summoning the force of the police in this particularly grandiose, organized, and thorough manner—by inspiring a dragnet—the murderer has constituted himself as a threat of the very worst kind. As M unfolds, therefore, we see two matched and equal dances of pursuit, one played out by the police using bureaucratic methods, technology of communication, and scientific logic; the other performed by agents of the underworld, emphasizing physical facility, passionate devotion of energy, desperation, and ferocity of movement. Literally configured as dances, the first might seem balletic while the second would have many of the telltale qualities of modern dance—rapid shifts of temperament and angle, what Prokofiev (characterizing his own music) called a thrusting “motor element,” force exerted against the orderly social world and its apparently elemental “nature.” That the police manhunt is emphatically systematic reveals two aspects of the serial killings currently evolving. First, the institution through which the hunt is being managed, the “Alex”—from the street, the Alexanderplatz, where its headquarters was located—is designed to handle criminal matters such as these serial murders in a perfectly routine way. It is not only equipped for any contingency, it specializes particularly in handling contingencies, and therefore responds even more adeptly to them than to the banalities of the everyday. In the end, we have in the Alex a notably efficient, even magnificent, protective mechanism that should give a sure sense of tranquility to the citizens it protects. Secondly, Beckert, for all his psychotic individuality, for all his eccentricity (his whistling Grieg as preparation for every murder, his sweetly cajoling voice by which he seduces the little girls), for all his idiosyncratic ugliness,


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is hardly the singular monster our deepest fears would conceive. He can be understood instead as just one more node in an enormous wave of criminality all of which is being measured, described, categorized, and analyzed by an institution capable of profoundly comprehending and also arresting any deviant behavior at all. Not only are the police expert—and domineeringly so—in what they do; but the criminal is always typical, not original. The method of the detective is thereby shown to be essentially Darwinian, to seize the specimen as a part of a more generalized protocol for viewing, calibrating, comparing, naming, and thus mastering the genus, in this case criminality. A belief in science and progress is sufficient to attribute to this restrictive but coherent methodology an aura of wonder and delight. Through the very method they employ to carry it out—rigorous and substantial—the police gain for their project the approval and admiration of a public already addicted to science and its contributions. In a sequence of tableaux the police operation is detailed for us as one that is not only methodical and relentless, as we might well expect it to be, but also brutally optical in its fundamental organization, this notwithstanding the decline of the ancient scopic régime and the general questioning of the premises of ocularcentrism that Martin Jay notes as following the First World War (211–12). In this film, the police scan the environment for telltale visible signs of a criminality that is, beyond its superficial signification, hidden and implicit. Further, the police are shown to be a vertically aligned and authoritarian hierarchy, and this state of affairs guarantees that the greatest pressure will always, continuingly, be brought to bear upon those at the bottom, in the street. As a locus of procedure and rationality, the police are impersonal. They do not pick and choose objects of interest—say, aesthetic or erotic interest (as does the orb in Georges Bataille’s L’Histoire de l’oeil [1927], for instance, relentlessly seeking the darkest holes of its culture (see Jay 219ff.)—but on the contrary devote themselves to sweeping over a space with a neutral and even-handed application of inquisitory force. “The police must follow every clue,” one of Lang’s detectives explains. “Any man in the street could be the guilty one.” (Two years earlier, and with a bevy of photographic albums, Alfred Hitchcock had made a demonstration of systematic police technique in Blackmail.) The follow-up of clues must also be eternal, since it is impossible to predict the moment at which a giveaway sign will be manifested by a murderer who generally behaves in a completely civilized fashion. The actual murderer, then, if a hero unto himself, or at least a neurotic and notable personality, is to the institution that seeks him as ordinary as can be, a man who can easily disappear into the populace, a character with markings that can carefully be detected and discerned only when the proper light is turned upon them. This can surely be interpreted to mean any one of us might become a murderer and must take pains to shape himself toward orderliness; or else, even as idiosyncratic a human being as a

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child killer has the capacity to seem normal, to perform normality, and must be caught out from beneath the skin of his own performance. The police must use a patient, wide-ranging, homogeneous regard. Just as the line is uttered—“Any man on the street could be the guilty one”—we are presented, indeed, with an aged citizen in a dark overcoat and top hat, reading the disturbing headlines of yet another child murder as he proceeds down a sidewalk. Our view is from above him and across the street, yet near enough that it might represent what could be seen through a surveiller’s binoculars: we have established a point of view ideal for the maximally precise perception of all movement within a particular field (rather as a police agent might do) and this gentleman has meandered into our focus, perhaps wending his way homeward and lost in reflection. (With—and by—our view we are certainly predisposed toward diagnosis, a “theoretical commitment in which curiosity is limited by what the investigator regards as possible” [Miller 84].) The man has no inkling that his every step is being seen and recorded, that his clothing is being treated as a costume that helps typify him, that his action in devouring the news is open to being coded as potential evidence: the murderer, after all, has sent a letter to the authorities—has it been published, he might wish to know, and can it be read in these pages? The act of reading a newspaper thus becomes a sign. Is this not, in fact, the guilty party, we can openly wonder, since at this point in the film the villainous Beckert has not yet been presented face-on? Suddenly a tiny girl rushes up on a scooter. “Can you tell me what time it is?” she begs, in all naturalness and innocence—that is, without the slightest hesitation or self-consciousness. “Jah, mein Kind,” the man says gently enough, as we cut to two women eyeing him very suspiciously. A large fellow emerges from a bar next to them and catches sight of what the women are catching sight of. We cut back to the man in his bowler and the child, as he tells her to go home and asks where she lives. The large fellow steps up: “What’s it to you where the kid lives?” We look down at the man now as though from the giant’s perspective, his perfunctory round eyeglasses, rounded collar, neat necktie, and slightly frumpy coat indicating a clerk or some low-level bureaucrat—neither wealthy nor disrespectable, but also, given that he is perfectly composed, not above using perfect composure as a mask behind which to stow a deeper malevolence. A crowd quickly gathers (as malicious, but not as large, as the crowd in the finale of Hitchcock’s The Lodger [1927], where the theme of inappropriate accusation had already been forcefully played). The big man grabs the older one, who shrieks that this is an outrage. “You wanted to get her alone, didn’t you!” Yes, it’s the murderer, the crowd decides, rather peremptorily, calling loudly for the police as the man struggles. We cut to a pair of policemen descending from the upper level of an autobus, presumably to intervene in this situation or else arrest the bureaucrat; but no: Lang has jumped to another location altogether, and the two policemen have a quite different man


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in tow, this one with a thick jacket and cap, as people in a quite different crowd eagerly gather around to shout “Kinder Mörder!” The men in this second crowd fight for the captive, seize him, begin to pound on him. Not only might any single man be the killer, then. Any man anywhere is theoretically culpable; and so it is that in practical fact, two men in two different situations may be accosted at one and the same time. The killer is anywhere, and therefore he is everywhere. (If he is everywhere, it makes sense to have a large police force in constant operation; and so the idea contained in the line, “Any man in the street—” is one that supports an aggrandizement of the police function. It is an apotheosis of moral panic.)2 In a lengthy shot we next see the front page of that newspaper the gentleman had been reading, with the murderer’s handwritten note printed in a box: “The reader,” pronounced Benjamin, “is at all times ready to become a writer” (“Newspaper” 741). But now it turns out this paper is not being shown so that we may inspect the note; it is being shown because someone else is already inspecting it, and since the newspaper is open before this other person, he has become a stand-in for the film viewer, who has an impatient “longing for daily nourishment” (741) much in the way that newspaper readers do. This diegetic viewer surrogate is a governmental minister (Franz Stein), sitting crankily at an elegant desk with the newspaper under his hands, and vociferating on the telephone to the police chief about how serious and scandalous this business is. The chief rationalizes the criminal as a man who wants attention and therefore wrote to the newspaper: the letter, he assures us, is in the possession of the police and is being studied in the laboratory. “Of course, you can’t get good fingerprints from a postcard,” he continues, looking down at the fingerprint record of a Richard Ernst that an assistant has slipped in front of him. “We’ll compare the results with our archives.” In another location, a technician is shown from behind, seated at a desk with a magnifying glass in hand and a document at his fingertips. In front of him, on a huge screen, a single fingerprint has been projected in immense magnification, roughly six feet wide. On the projection, numerals identify specific whorls. The technician’s set-up is elaborate and, we may imagine, expensive—this although it is evidently true that one “can’t get good fingerprints.”3 The police are therefore equipped to the full, even for situations in which very little outcome can reasonably be expected. In voiceover, the chief tells his displeased interlocutor that soon the killer’s letter will be sent to a graphologist. Various scientific disciplines are therefore interlinked in police procedure, in order that a single task may be accomplished through the relationship of many forms of labor, the police 2. For a masterful allegory in the same key, with a medical rather than a criminal nub, see Elia Kazan’s Panic in the Streets (1950). 3. Emil Hasler’s original design had a slightly smaller screen (Hasler M design file).

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illustrating what Emile Durkheim called “organic solidarity”: no one branch of the department is fully able to perform all the activities necessary to smoke out the criminal, but the many departments working together present together a multidimensional force, a capability that leads in many contrasting directions, and points in many ways, at once. “The very particular shape of the letters indicates in this man a very strong and pathological sexuality,” intones the graphologist in the following shot. This slightly stooped man is pacing back and forth in a large bureau with the offensive letter in his hand, a stenographer copying his every word in the foreground. Behind him, and filling the screen from left to right and from bottom to top, is a vast array of little drawers, which, we may felicitously presume, contain a library of similarly problematic or suspicious documents filed according to some arcane principle known only to experts.4 “Some of the broken letters,” the graphologist continues, “reveal an actor’s personality” (we see a section of the correspondence in macro close-up). If no more illuminating clue is given by this expert as to the link between acting and breaking one’s letters, he would seem to know his business because in the ensuing shot Beckert, now introduced visually for the first time, gazes closely at his reflection in the mirror of his dresser, rather the way an actor does before going onstage. His eyelids are heavy, half-closed. His mouth opens in a flat unexpressive maw, between thick lips. His face is pallid, flat—something, in fact, of a screen. Just when he is described in voiceover by the handwriting expert as “indolent, even lazy,” we see him form a delicate little sneer. “The handwriting shows clear signs of insanity,” intones the expert: Beckert pulls the corners of his mouth down and opens his eyes ghoulishly, as if to mock. Is he hearing what is being said about him, in a room on the other side of the city? Or is he saying it about himself, knowing that this is exactly the sort of thing that gets said about a man who slays little children? The minister is still on the phone demanding results—“Re-sul-tat!!”—with the police chief demurring that his men get only twelve hours’ sleep a week. We see detectives and uniformed officers pacing in their rooms or sitting bent over paperwork, exhausted and depressed since their success rate is so low. They are searching, says the chief, for any clue: “Minister, consider their findings on the scene of the crime”—to which locus we now shift through the magic of a cut. From above we see a garden divided by an L-shaped path, with police squatting, bending, and probing with sticks, photographing, finding

4. For a reprise of the wall filled rationally with filing drawers, see Ingmar Bergman’s The Passion of Anna (1969), where the prominent architect Elis Vergerus (Erland Josephson) has a little sanctum all of the walls of which are designed this way: he files not criminal records per se, but photographs of every aspect of the world: which amount to roughly the same thing.


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behind a bush a tiny white paper bag marked “Confiserie” that “clearly” held the candy with which the poor little innocent was lured to her death. In a corner of it are some sugar grains. The police, says the chief, searched within a two-kilometer radius to find a candy shop that might have sold this particular sweet (on a map we see a circle being drawn with a compass), but in vain; every day, the chief says, the search widens (from a higher point of vantage we see a larger circle being drawn on the same map—this is something, surely, of an homage to Hitchcock, who in The Lodger caused his murder map to be inscribed with triangles). Inspectors are shown actually questioning employees in various candy shops. To the minister’s getting more and more furious and more and more exasperated—because the police are getting nowhere— the chief remonstrates that dozens of conflicting testimonies are obtained on the path the child took home from school. We cut to an interrogation office where an inspector has two gentlemen who cannot agree whether Elsie Beckmann was wearing a red or a green hat when they saw her. “It was red!” “It was green!” “It was red!” “It was green!” His police, the chief assures his superior, have examined 1,500 clues that fill sixty volumes, and have combed all the adjoining areas (we see a line of uniformed officers combing through a forest area, beating the leaves for clues). Police dogs are shown on the trail, and we see inspectors busting into flop-houses and checking the identity of the vagrants, staking out the railway station. In one dingy little thoroughfare, glistening wet after rain, an underground hangout is raided by night, the police portrayed as mechanical and systematic as they carry out their scathing work, the denizens of the hangout looking frantic and disorganized. Inspector Karl Lohmann heads this operation, strutting around somewhat majestically, calling for identification papers and finding a reason to have all of the arrested thugs sent down to the police station. The officers comb through the hangout and find “incriminating evidence” that is handily described by Tom Gunning: An etui as carefully arranged as a surgeon’s, holding every sort of burglary tool. The following shot pans across an extraordinary display of objects, the detritus of the raid, a hand enters placing new finds into precisely sorted categories: first, tools: a power drill, hammers, saws; then, weapons: automatics, revolvers, brass knuckles and knives; next, objects of value, presumably stolen: cigarette cases, spectacle frames, silverware, watches and jewellery, purses and wallets, furs. What is striking in this shot is not simply the accumulation of goods, but their artistic arrangement into symmetrical rows and stacks—hardly the sort of placement likely to result from a police raid. (Lang 183)

The arrangement is perhaps not only artistic but also methodical from the point of view of the problem of cataloging, measuring, enumerating, tabulating,

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and recording in the Darwinian fashion. At once we can see not only that the police are relentless and greedy in their urgency to obtain materiel from which information may later be extracted, but also that the criminals who have been gathering in this spot have been running a rather lucrative operation, and for some time. The police are an optical/prehensile presence, but the criminals have successfully constituted an anti-bourgeoisie. The police have much to gain through their method; the criminals, attacked in this way, have much to lose.

The Smoke After the police procedure is well under way, we are treated to a brilliantly intercut pair of scenes, as I have suggested. The heads of the five organizations in the criminal union meet in an apartment behind closed shutters, under Schränker’s leadership. The union is disturbed because the police are looking for the criminal in their ranks. Since “members have to carry on business without being handicapped by nervous policemen,” action must be taken to find the deviant, who is inspiring daily police raids of the sort we have just seen. Meanwhile, heads of the police meet in a conference room. While the police argue that they must be allowed to search every house, the criminal leaders want spies who can inform them about the police. They wish to use newspaper contacts to inform the world that they “condemn the bastard, too.” A psychologist informs the police leaders that the killer might seem on the surface to be a normal man living an ordinary life, and Lohmann, for his part, complains that help from the public brings no clues since people cannot recognize anyone. The criminal leaders think a telepath might help. At police headquarters, the idea of offering a reward is broached. The criminals decide they cannot wait for the police to be successful in their hunt. Meanwhile, an expert leans over the table to tell the police that the difficulty with crimes like this is that the victim and killer are unconnected. The two scenes themselves—in the criminals’ apartment and at police headquarters—are not at all unconnected, revealing, as they do, both shared motive and shared concern about social control. The police evidently presume to lord it in this urban scene, but, as Anton Kaes has suggested, criminals, too, “lorded over Weimar Berlin’s world-famous decadent nightlife, a huge industry” (50). It is worth pointing out that in both the criminal union meeting in the shuttered apartment and the police meeting in the conference room, virtually everyone is smoking, and smoking furiously, their puffing on the cigars and cigarettes being an overt indication of a process of deliberation and worry that is purely internal. As again and again we see smoke flowing from the mouths and nostrils of desperately tired and hard-working men, we are reminded that it comes out of their insides, out of the boilers of their consciousness, will, and trepidation. The smoke is the swirling passion of the inner lives of these men


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of the law, since both cops and criminals are indeed men of the law: some on one side of it, some on the other. Smoke fills the two chambers, quite equally. In a summary shot at the union meeting, two men sit at the round table under the fringed hanging lamp, their heads bowed in thought; two men stride around the table on opposite sides, smoking, and a third stands with one hand on his knee, a lit cigarette in the other; smoke tumbles across the room. This cuts to a shot at police headquarters, where men sit and puzzle, elbows on the table, hands to the cheek, or stand against the wall, virtually every one of them smoking furiously. The smoke drifts and lifts in thick streams all the length of the room. Cutting back to the union, we see even more smoke now, as the leader proclaims, “We’ll have to catch him ourselves.” What, we may reasonably ask, is the significance of all the smoke in these two rooms since, among other things, it works to block vision—the characters’ and ours? The art director’s original design for the police meeting showed an austere, dark, perfectly rectilinear chamber in which every line, every surface

The smoke drifts and lifts in thick streams, not only among the criminals but among the police—where every line, every surface was to be exceedingly visible. Fritz Lang’s M (Nero-Film AG, 1931). Digital frame enlargement.

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was sharply delineated and exceedingly visible (Hasler M design file). It can be argued that the function of the smoke is to help in rendering the operation of the police and the strategy of the criminal organization as realistically as possible, that these institutions are populated mostly by men, and that men, when they are under stress, smoke a great deal. These men, indeed, produce darkness (smoke) when they aim to illuminate, like all men, who are prey to their own limitations when they try to see. But the same idea could have been conveyed if only a few smokers were prominently shown in both locales. What we have instead is a most flagrant portrayal of smoke-filled rooms, of smoke itself, as though the wafting white fumes were more important than the men blowing them out. By the end of the sequence, it is true that more than figures, what we see are the dim outlines of men in a fog of cigarette and cigar smoke that hovers before our eyes like an ethereal cloud out of which phantoms rise. What might this smoke be? It is the cloud of obfuscation that hides the identity and motive of the killer, that makes it possible for a human being to commit an atrocity against other, weaker, vulnerable human beings, safe in the security of not being seen or understood. It is the mask behind which crime hides, so that it might not be brought to the light of justice. Further, as where there is smoke there is fire, it is the evidence of some buried passion, some conflict, that is powerful enough to engender Beckert’s miserable crimes: that the society represses sexual expression, for example, or that children are obliged so early in life to pretend (seductively) at being adults. It is certainly also a smoke that betokens expressly rational thought. In a culture permeated by nervousness, Schivelbusch suggests pregnantly, the nose is “the direct path—a sort of mouth—to the brain. . . . The eighteenth century regarded the nose not as an organ of ‘basest’ sense but rather as the organ of reason” (Tastes 146). And surely the nose plays a double role in this sequence: deeply, both the police and the underworld bosses are “sniffing out” the killer, using every “scent” at their disposal; and on the surface, the preponderance of smoke in the two rooms suggests smoky atmospheres: the brains of the criminal and police leaders are tasting the smoke of burning tobacco, a substance that since the seventeenth century had been used toward “the reorientation of the human organism to the primacy of mental labor” (Tastes 110). These intercut scenes therefore play out a kind of collaborative drama of brainwork, a mental ballet, which is also a testament to the bourgeois triumph that characterized modernity in general and the setting of this film in particular. “The brain,” Schivelbusch reminds us, “is the part of the human body of greatest concern to bourgeois civilization” (Tastes 110). But it is always a fault of theory to gravitate toward its own reflection, in this case toward its own form of logic. Cinema scholarship, rational and pedagogical, therefore persistently looks for rational and pedagogical explanations for what is on the screen, explanations that illuminate the wellsprings of the story


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by pointing out aspects of character or action that might otherwise go unnoticed. The project is to create a thorough and seamless account of screen events, a kind of grounds for happening. There always also exists, however, a dramaturgical problem for cinema, specifically that the image onscreen must be constructed so as to make especially visible the information viewers must own in order to follow the continuity. Sometimes, therefore, the construction of the screen is undertaken with dramaturgical, not dramatic, necessity in mind; sometimes the filmmaker wants to offer not a statement about the action of the story but a direction to the viewer’s need for orientation, context, and form. A story has its logic, but only if we can make it out. If we look to see whether there might be a dramaturgical reason for all the smoke—a reason, that is, consistent with the filmmaker’s needs as he shoots and chains scenes together rather than with the motives of his characters; if we ask why Lang might have needed the smoke, rather than why Lohmann and his men did; we can see that it functions simply and beautifully to say something about itself: namely, that the smoke in the police station and the smoke in the criminal underworld are one and the same smoke. To extrapolate: the movement of the smoke in the air is the same movement, the masking effect in both places is the same masking effect, the burning urgency of the smoking men in the one place is of the same intensity as the burning urgency in the other, and the men who are smoking are the same sorts of men in both places, smoking for the same reasons and in the same way (and, probably, smoking the same brand of cigarettes and cigars!). Through the agency of the smoke, then, and therefore without any special use of dialogue in order to achieve this, Lang is able to demonstrate that the police and the criminals are of one species. In saying that the smoke makes it impossible for us to tell the gangsters and the policemen apart, Dadoun makes a presumption of some elemental difference between these types that the smoke obscures and thus himself “blows smoke” over a more fundamental and more important state of affairs: that there is no difference at all. The police are like the criminals; the criminals are like the police. (It is like thugs that the police make their arrests; it is like scientists or like hierarchically organized quasi-military personnel that the criminals strategize and carry out their operations.) Thus is changed the moral field in which the story blossoms, and our attention is directed not to a moral superiority of the bourgeois order but to its equivalence to the criminal order it represses. With this in mind it is worthwhile to take a careful look at a much later, and much celebrated, sequence in the film. Lohmann and his men have unearthed Beckert’s lair, and have begun to track him. But the criminals, having put the street beggars to work for them, have been able to go a little further. One young gamin accosts Beckert in the street and manages to imprint a chalk “M” on the back of his shoulder, so that the killer (Der Mörder) can be identified, isolated, and tracked. The criminal agents now manage to follow him to

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an office building where, after the workers go home, he secretes himself. The building is entered and completely penetrated, room by room, in an exhaustive and increasingly frenetic sequence, and finally Beckert is found, trapped in a storage locker. He is dragged away to a secret location, a massive chamber that seems to be in a basement, perhaps a basement of a large warehouse, and here, in front of a gathering of hundreds of criminals who sit glaring silently at him, he is subjected to a trial. A few characteristics of this procedure should be set forth. There is a dominating “president,” the chief of the criminal union, who is eager to press forward and do the “business” of trying and dispensing with Beckert. There is a defense attorney, dragooned out of the crowd—a man who drinks too much, perhaps, but who devotes himself in a passionate speech to articulating a case for leaving Beckert with his life. The “jury” is the multitude of observers, who are nothing if not hostile to begin with, eager to find Beckert guilty, eager to put him to death, eager to terminate the aggravation he has been producing for their careers underground. The members of this crowd, sometimes isolated, do not hesitate to reflect morally upon the accused, grimacing at him and bemoaning his notable depravity. The interaction in this scene is cast with far more overt passion than one usually sees in movie courtrooms, and this passion is demonstrated clearly through character portraits—often facial portraits—taken at an angle and in which each subject gesticulates or gestures rather wildly while denouncing Beckert. As to the seriousness and gravity of the situation, it is established unequivocally by a large number of reaction shots from Beckert, who at one juncture attempts to run away and at another to make a plea for his life with a long, panting, almost delirious declaration of his own torments (a speech, indeed, that in its own right established Peter Lorre as a major screen talent). The criminals’ court is a setting for a rational process, and also for a dispensation of power upon the lowly, shivering Beckert. But, Gunning suggests, there is also something theatrical about it: “A long pan over the grotesque faces of the convicts sitting in judgement underscores the parodic tone, the almost carnivalesque inversion of a criminal court” (Lang 194). I think it possible that a phrase like “theatrical performance” might come to possess a slightly pejorative cast of meaning for some students of the film, to the extent that they might view the “performance” in this “kangaroo court,” as many call it, as either disingenuous or improper, unreal or inauthentic, meretricious or even, to a degree, comic; whereas “theatrical performance” certainly also indicates a situation in which deliberate staging, externalizing, alignment, and management of secrecy play a vital role. Do the faces in this cellar really seem “grotesque” when they are considered in light of the equality that is implied in the matched, joined scenes of the smoke-filled rooms, rather than in light of a kind of takenfor-granted superiority of the police as official agents of the justice system, over those criminal elements they are “reasonably” aimed to supervise and control?


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If we can see and accept that in this film the criminals and the official agents of justice are completely comparable, do not the faces of the criminals, perhaps, become intensely expressive and emotional, say, convicted of belief, just in the same way that the faces of officials did, earlier? The perception of grotesquerie is a by-product of a certain set of assumptions about a “normality” that escapes examination. The minister who instructs the chief of police gesticulates wildly, for example. So does Lohmann, shifting a cigar around his mouth as though it is a monkey wrench. What, exactly, makes the criminals especially “grotesque” in their gesticulations by comparison, beyond their officially designated status as inferior beings in this society where the government and their agents, the police, “naturally” hold sway? The trial scene is notably expressive, and even passionate, but it does seem real. The denizens of the underworld certainly make use of weapons and use aggressive violence in an everyday manner. They have access to, and trade in, drugs. And they infuse themselves into every niche where society busies itself with commercial transactions, spreading into all the interstices of the social structure. But do not official agents of the law do the same? (Do they not produce the same amount of smoke?) Police make use of weapons, under an arbitrary structure of law that gives them exclusive right to do this. If not police, then surely the official agents of social control legislate, trade, and even traffic in drugs of various kinds, which are called pharmaceuticals, caffeine, codeine, and so on. Through a system of licenses and contracts they arrogate to themselves exclusive right to do this. And it can hardly be questioned that every single part of the social fabric in which any commerce takes place is surveilled and guided by the hegemony of the state. The criminals do what the government does, but in the name of a profit that does not fall to the ruling elite, indeed in the name of a profit that is not taxed. Speaking morally, then, can we honestly say that the motives of the underworld are wholly, categorically, and universally inferior? Do the criminals here not strive and struggle to maintain their existence, just as ordinary law-abiding people do? (Only two and a half years earlier, Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s Die Dreigroschenoper had posed the same question before enthusiastic audiences at the Schiffbauerdamm in Berlin: “You see the ones in brightness/ Those in darkness drop from sight” [trans. Guy Stern].) 5 As an argument for this moral reading, we may take, first, Lang’s careful depiction of Beckert as a threat to the underworld no less than to the social order; and secondly, the biographical details given in Beckert’s frantic plea for his life, in which he makes it clear that he is also an ordinary human being subject to forces over which he has no control. The tone of his voice in 5. Nancy Agli has pointed out a remarkable but unverified similarity between Brecht and one of the “criminals” shot in close-up in the trial scene. As he was a colleague of Lang’s, it does not seem unthinkable that the playwright might have visited the set.

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that plea, and the tone of Frau Beckmann’s voice at the beginning of the film, as she calls frantically for Elsie, are comparable. The criminal court scene seems to draw our attention to the actions of the criminal world as a legitimate business quite comparable with the actions of the state that we may already have been privileging in our deeper consciousness. But to go further: the “parody” is in fact far too detailed, and the action of Schränker and the others in condemning Beckert in that cellar far too eloquent and passionately felt. Rather than seeing the trial as carnivalesque and parodic—two terms that I think subtly favor the status quo against which both parody and carnival are aimed—it makes sense to see the concluding trial straightforwardly as a businesslike staging of justice. When Schränker gives instructions as to how the trial will be conducted, he summarizes the moral status of those who have assembled to make judgment: “We are all experts on the law here: from six weeks in Tegel to fifteen years in Brandenberg.” It is a staging, however, that is not allowed to reach a finale. “Kill him. Crush him,” the crowd cries, and they move to do so, with Beckert attempting to run off; but suddenly every person halts silently in place, staring offscreen at a force that trumps their motives and their moves. “In the name of the Law,” we hear. We then see a “real” courtroom with three judges “really” passing sentence, and the story of Beckert is done. The film ends with Frau Beckmann looking into the camera and advising us that “we, too, should keep closer watch on our children.”

The Knife M resolves, then, by means of two powerful configurations, or “gestures,” of the screen, both of which, in their ways, depend upon the furling smoke that with equanimity and touching vagueness in the same way fills two purportedly very different rooms, populated with two purportedly very different sorts of men: Lohmann’s repeatedly demonstrating investigatory expertise in company with his weary but dogged subordinates and Schränker’s manhunt, culminating in his perfunctorily and matter-of-factly stating that those gathered in the cellar for Beckert’s trial are “all experts in the law.” There is a similitude, professionally speaking, yet perhaps also morally, between Lohmann and Schränker, between the police and the underworld; between the hunters and the hunted. Then, sharply, we have a disruption of this state of balance and equipoise by the summative interruption of the police at the culmination of Beckert’s trial. The police and the underworld have been competing to lay hands on Beckert all through the film; the police win. Although the film does not explicitly state this fact, it is important to note that nowhere in the action are the police defined as being superior to the thieves except in this finale, which emphasizes that they act with the backing of the state. Technologically,


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intellectually, and psychologically, the efforts on both sides are equated and energetic, but the police action trumps the criminal action in the end. As a matching gesture, we have the “confession” of the mothers sitting outside the court of justice—there are three of them, like three dejected muses—and the admonitory declaration on the part of Frau Beckmann that she was a failure in watching out for her child. Out of a condition of smoky uniformity a dominant police force and a dominant male-controlled morality—both supported by the bourgeoisie—emerge. Of Frau Beckmann’s confession Lotte Eisner has a quite different reading: What [Lang] wanted to say was that the ultimate reason for the murders is the unequal distribution of wealth. Frau Beckmann is forever at the tub; hence she has no time to look after Elsie properly, or to fetch her from school. So the film ends as it began: with the misery of the backyard amid the dustbins where children have to play in the dreariness and hopelessness of working-class life. (Lang 128)

Perhaps Eisner is stretching, because her interpretation necessitates that we take Frau Beckmann’s line, “We, too, should keep closer watch on our children” actually to mean, “We should be in a position to keep closer watch.” That is, in a condition of social equality, all women would be equally poised for childcare. Yet the expression of the moment and the lighting both contribute toward a sense of self-reproach rather than social accusation in Frau Beckmann. Why, we must ask, are “we” all to be women at all, if children are society’s treasure? Further, one need not take children playing “amid the dustbins” as feeling deprived because of their locale—Eisner’s implication; the dustbins and croquet pitches of playing children, impoverished and gentrified, are transformed by play into secret worlds. M, I would argue, can as well be understood as referencing a guilt felt by women, and how it comes to be that such guilt is felt under such circumstances by women and women alone. Men, too, failed little Elsie. Lohmann failed her. Schränker did, too. And the police. And the judges on their bench. But just as it seems natural to blame the mother for having failed in her duty as a protector of her children—just as it seems proper that she should indict herself, in fact—men are absolved of responsibility. The same kind of moral order that liberates men in this way also, and generally, inhibits the enemies of bourgeois domination, the criminals. Women are locked up the way criminals are, bound by responsibilities that fall only to them under the rationale that such an arrangement is sanctioned by “nature” (an agent that does not speak in contradiction). But the bourgeois male is not generically pure: Lohmann is no less capable than Schränker of underhanded behavior, Schränker a man who can act, just as Lohmann is expected to do, with reason and honor. If, as in virtually all other films about police and crime, the moral and technical superiority of the police

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is simply a given, here, by virtue of the “automatic” appearance of the police as superior inside a neutral field, it is shown to have also been constructed as “natural,” to have been “naturalized,” made to seem part of the order of the cosmos even in the face of its arbitrary constitution. In such an arrangement, morality no longer resides in the purity of a consciousness or an action but is instantly and automatically presumed to adhere to the surface of any character who wears the correct uniform (or gender). Lang is pointedly questioning this naturalization by structuring his film in such a way that the superiority of the police emerges with distinct arbitrariness out of a very clear presentation of moral and technical equality with other, unofficial men. It is because the police work with a stacked deck, then, and not because they are populated by the noblest of persons, that they can win this “game.” The government bureaucracy supports them. They have a license to shoot. They can summon virtually numberless reserves; they are expensively equipped, and also affiliated with the scientific establishment that is itself lavishly funded; they are justified by law and cheered on by popular sentiment. In M the story does not end with the arbitrary—rather than the truly natural—superiority of the police. This “superiority,” as it were, symbolizes and invokes a broader state of affairs, a cultural consensus that privileges some particular values and alignments. In this case, one value the Weimar state appears to project relates to life, the young, age, and responsibility and is based in a double sentiment: that children are especially vulnerable and urgently to be protected and that it is automatically and unreservedly the task of women to do this protecting. “Automatically the task of women,” because no other options fall into the light here. (Even that masculine giant who accosts the newspaper reader speaking to the little girl seems to be interfering on behalf of, and in the name of, the protective women who dare not address a possibly hostile man.) “Unreservedly women’s task,” because of the way, as Eisner demonstrates, Frau Beckmann never seems to cease her toils of domesticity. The film shows a relationship between zealously guarded children and women’s domestication. And because it is the police who win out in the end, the police who stand for the state; because immediately we are transferred to the state’s courtroom where justice is pronounced; we can take it that it is the state pronouncing this sentence—not a sentence upon Beckert, because we do not at this point see Beckert, but a sentence upon the true criminal, Frau Beckmann, who neglected her state-appointed, state-legitimated, and state-monitored duty. The sentence pronounced in the end by Frau Beckmann—pronounced, indeed, upon herself—comes under the aegis of the state. The true deviant selfinscribes, self-labels, self-punishes. In order to see the implications of this broader, deeper sentence, this sentence of responsibility that falls upon Frau Beckmann and that makes Beckert’s punishment, whatever it is, disappear into the air (as if by magic, given that


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until now the thrust of the entire film has been to highlight his deeds and his character), let us look at this depiction of a society that wishes to cloister its children to the degree that they cannot possibly fall prey to a Beckert (for, surely, Lang was depicting in rather mythical terms a society that was contemporary at the time of the filming; and he frequently attributed his interest in a story such as this to the actual arrests of serial killers such as Haarmann, Grossmann, Kürten, and Denke [Gandert 33]). Writing of German Expressionism, J. P. Telotte notes that its flowering involved a rejection not only of much that was associated with the wartime status quo, but also of an aesthetic that supported the familiar world, the naturalist assumption that the ‘real’ could be conventionally depicted. As a result, expressionist art in practically every way seemed to suggest a protest against the norm: the extremes of language in the plays and manifestos, the alienating and menacing cityscapes of the graphic art, the grotesque and caricatured figures of paintings, the sinister shadows and unbalanced images of the films, and the recurring themes of madness, duplicity and alienation. (15–16)

But surely in M, where only the criminals are rejected, there is something of a reaffirmation, not a rejection, of the wartime status quo. The world of the film is anti-expressionist. Those who do not behave themselves normatively are open to censure. We see, with the man on the street who is attacked for interesting himself in the safety of the little girl, instances in which hypernormativity is in practice, where the slightest deviation from what is considered safe and normal can produce the most dire results. In many ways the film is a call to turn away from liberal government, Marxist ideology, and “general rejection of the past that had precipitated the horrors of the First World War” (Telotte 15), all qualities that Telotte says typified the Weimar era. What is needed is tight surveillance on children, so tight, indeed, that they do not have the space in which to grow up with independence. While it is deplorable that little Elsie Beckmann was murdered, it is noble, not problematic, that her mother gave her enough freedom to meet the world. This very mother, who was attempting at once to protect and to nourish her child, both to shelter her and to allow her to enjoy experience, finds herself, at the end of the film, articulating the mantra of the state: Watch More Closely. Presumably all citizens should be watched more closely, and it becomes a naturalized function of motherhood to ensure this at the family level in order that the state may be taken as benevolent—as maternal—when ensuring it more broadly. The society we are watching here, then, is one in which the coddling of the young goes hand in hand with their desecration and destruction, in which containment and repression are the mates of licentiousness and havoc. It is a place ripe for totalitarian control, for vastly potent instrumentalities of

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surveillance, for the release of pent-up furies and daemons (as we see in the restaurant when a man begins to accuse his table mate of being the killer and the two erupt upon one another like ravenous beasts who have never known a moment of civil interaction together). There is a hankering for unity underlying this social plan, a thoroughly romantic conception of all the world being harmonious and pure. Frau Beckmann’s call at the end of the film, albeit one in which she seems to speak in a rather hypnotic, perhaps not altogether committed, fashion, is a harbinger of this romantic world, a summons to return to a state of affairs in which everyone is “one of us,” everyone is here. In such a world, the daemons who call upon us are spirits of the general, spirits to whom every being is responsive in a similar way. These spirits invoke a widespread brutality, suggesting that each of us is much less than a soul in order that the state should in itself become spiritual. And the state in its immaculate purity hears the harmonic music of a profound inner brutality. We are ready at the end of M for the Nuremberg rally, for Kristallnacht, for the annexation of Europe, for Auschwitz and Dachau. There are three stunning portrait shots of Beckert that precede his trial. In each, we see a man possessed by daemons, a man floating in a kind of eudaimonia, and also unaware that in this he is cut off from the rest of the world, unaware that he is something that other people are fundamentally not. (Thus, momentarily he is Everyman.) He floats as everyone can be taken to float—possessed, despiritualized, face to face with a dominating state. The first portrait is the mirror shot, photographed so that we may see the distinctness of the subject but also see that he does not see it; he is enmeshed with his mirror image. In the second, a little girl he has taken and whom he plans shortly to kill graciously looks up at him and announces that he has an “M” on his back; he turns to look over his shoulder with the frightened gaze of a hunted animal, but also as though the voice warning him that he has been marked is emanating from deep within him; he does not recognize the child as another being, as someone who has reached out to be helpful, and therefore as a model of the untrammeled innocence and sociability of children in general. The third shot occurs when Beckert stops to stare at the display window of a Henckels store, where a glittering array of knives has been arranged in the shape of a huge diamond. He gazes around the window lazily, eating a piece of fruit, but is suddenly stunned by a vision. In reverse shot, we see that he is looking at a little girl who is watching him from behind. Her reflection is carefully framed, in an inquisitive posture, by the diamond of knives; he rubs his mouth, and then it is Beckert neatly framed in the diamond, breathing in and out as though in some kind of internal struggle. While the distinctive plurality of knives might clearly suggest that he has been sliced off from society, that he is a paragon and a pariah, instead for Beckert they seem like the shining jewels of some inner treasure cave to which we all properly have access in the


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same way: the knives are a uniform code. When he turns to walk away from the window he is reflected in it and it is the reflection in the glass that Lang brings into crisp focus; it is through this reflected, this “other” Beckert, that we see his sullen determination, now that the daemon has him in its control. Whistling his Grieg theme, he follows the girl past Von Berg’s bookshop, where in the vitrine a bobbing arrow and a spinning spiral seduce the girl’s attention as well as our own. Up-down, up-down, says the one; in, in, in, says the second. This is a call to sexuality, certainly, but far more: it evokes the fundamental play with orientation that anticipates our socialization, thus bringing back the earliest childhood. And, turning to look into this window, the little girl suddenly ceases to be a child; she is a young woman, fashionably dressed, going back for a moment into childhood. “Bilder + Bucher + Plastik” reads the sign next to this window, “Pictures + Books + Sculptures.” Here again, we can see both the romantic precivilized gesture and the civilized monument facing one another as antinomies: to daub, to scrawl, to shape on the one hand; to draw, to write, to sculpt on the other. An early design by the art director, Emil Hasler, had this window filled with cardboard cutouts of animated animal figures (Hasler M design file). The blade is the first tool of civilization. It is by means of the knife or protoknife that we foraged and hunted, that we bring division into the world: Here is the fall: the distinction between “good” and “bad,” between “mine” and “thine,” between “me” and “thee” (or “it”), come all together—boundaries between persons; boundaries between properties; and the polarity of love and hate. (Brown, Body 143)

If the romantic yearning for prelapsarian unity and its concomitant mechanism of brutal control signal an uncut world, they also represent an aboriginal state of being and at the same time an erasure of the mistakes and miscalculations of civilization, a hunger for a “general rejection” of a great, even boundless past. The past was to be rejected in the name of an ever earlier past; all beginnings to be overtaken by a First Beginning. And so it was that when the Nazis came to power there was an invocation of a new creation, a new world—not only a world that could supercede previous and incomplete worlds but one that would obliterate all history. Most elementally, the knife rejects this romanticization and unification by severing and making multiplicity. Indeed, it is by means of the knife in the cutting room that Lang is able to provide us with enough different viewpoints that we have the ability not merely to experience a situation but also to view ourselves having that experience; and thereby come to consciousness. For his part, Beckert is at a distance from the knives, unconscious. The Henckels store is not merely a convenient symbol—convenient because knives made by that company are easy to find in Germany—but also a telling

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one: the Henckels knife is the very best knife one can get, exquisitely balanced as well as durable in its retention of an edge. It is the knife to be used by those who wish to dissect and examine, to artfully prepare—it is the epitome of the knife for civilization, not brutality. Beckert has a knife but it seems only for brutality, certainly only for use in a world that is indistinguishable from his solipsistic self: as though masturbating, he fiddles in his pocket in a close-up just after buying candy for the little girl he plans to kill just before he is labeled, withdrawing a switchblade, which gleams, when he opens it with what we can easily read as a delicious malevolence. But surprisingly, then, he uses the knife with great skill to peel an orange. For Beckert, that skill is not a mark of civilization but the brittle control that masks the buried desire; as much as the desire is unconscious in Beckert, so is the control, and the cuts he makes on the orange seem to flow out of him without a hesitation or a thought. When in the trial Beckert pronounces that he is subject to a daemonic voice, it is in an unconscious fashion that he speaks, and this only after he has betrayed his real position by demanding to be handed over to the police. He sees himself as being above these lowly criminals, who are “proud of breaking safes or cheating at cards.” Beckert epitomizes the repressive state in being meticulous and obedient to law, except when the dark forces overtake him. The criminals, for him, have simply not bothered to “learn a proper trade,” and “could keep their hands off” criminal activities if they wished. Yet he is already and always subject to the force of the daemon, which can flare up at any moment without warning. “But I . . . I can’t help myself! I have no control over this . . . this evil thing inside me, the fire, the voices, the torment!” If Schränker and Lohmann are one and the same, Beckert—“effeminate, childlike and diminutive” in Kaes’s description (57)—is the state, desperate to control a torment that monstrously overtakes it. That is why the society being ravaged by the killer in this film is not a utopia but instead a place of deeply buried corruption and darkness, a place where enormous pressures must be exerted from outside and above in order to keep the daemon at bay. What could save Germany, this film might be seen to suggest, is that Schränker and his criminals took precedence in the conclusion. No matter which side finally punished Beckert, after all, the killings would be resolved; but if Schränker and his forces prevailed we would not see the guilt-ridden call for unity that brings Frau Beckmann—and by extension, her little Elsie—into alignment with the grand forces of the state. Much, much earlier in the film, when Elsie has gone missing, as Frau Beckmann is calling her name with increasing hopelessness, one single shot reveals the lunch table where the little girl was to have sat for her midday meal: a bowl, a napkin rolled in a holder, a decorated mug, and a spoon; no knife. In Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) there is a moment when a mother must cut her ten-year-old son’s dinner meat for him; again, the child is not ready for the knife, but the knife is in his world, something he is


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anticipating to use through the invocation of his mother’s help. For Elsie Beckmann as for her mother as for the state that will dominate this film, the knife is always only daemonic. And now we can hear again, but perhaps with a more ominous ring, the little song the children sing in their play as M begins: Just you wait a little while The nasty man in black will come, With his little chopper He will chop you up!

chapter 5

˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚ A Call from Everywhere . . . a silence still darker than that darkness the telephone pours into the eye of his ear. —Julio Cortázar, “All Fires the Fire”

Exhaustion In Stanley Kramer’s On the Beach (1959), there is a shocking acoustic moment that must be seen to be heard . . . A third world war, in 1964, having utterly destroyed the Northern Hemisphere, a single American submarine, the USS Sawfish, captained by Gregory Peck, sets out to Australia to reconnoiter. But it is soon evident the fallout is heading southward and will wipe out everything within a year, Australian society thus modeling the mass behavior of human beings on the crest of extinction. The sub heads back to the United States, in desperate hope that someone somewhere may still be alive. Indeed, the radio operator has been receiving garbled signals. “Gibberish . . . can’t make out a thing . . . I don’t know what the hell it is . . . Gotta be somebody.” The boat halts off San Francisco, where it seems that everyone is dead. Through the periscope we make a slow pan across the waterfront and up empty streets in which there is no sign of movement, no sign of life and civilization at all. Curiosity and anticipation mount among the crew, along with a conviction that the sounds must be coming from San Diego way. “They never went to radio school, those spooks, that’s for sure.” Soon, off San Diego, with the sounds amplified, the radioman is sent ashore to follow the signal to its source. In a starch-white radiation suit, he rows off toward the bleached wasteland of a vast oil refinery (the film is shot [by Giuseppe Rotunno] in overexposed black-and-white to accentuate the highlights: the sun is pounding mercilessly on this dead environment). As we see his rubber life raft moving toward the pier, the sound track picks up the telegraph signal as a series of trumpet notes—dash dash dot dot dot . . . dot . . . dash . . . dash dash dot dot dot . . . dot . . . dash . . . —a weird code hauntingly discernible against the utter absence of sound in this profound valley of death. Down the pier goes the radioman, 110

a ca l l from ev ery w her e

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past a diner—hot lunch—into the power plant where all the machines are still humming, out again and down a street and into a laboratory where the sound is notably louder. dash dash dot dot. . . . A dead oscilloscope—then nothing. A second room, lined with computers. Slowly, he scans the space. The sound is coming from over there . . . he turns, and moves toward a window. dash dot dot. Dot dot dot dash dot . . . Sunlight is streaming in. No one is here. The pull cord of a window blind is looped around a partly full Coke bottle, the neck of which sits on an open telegraph key. The breeze is sending the signal. dash dot dot dot dot dot dot dot. . . . . . . The radioman muses for a moment—did someone arrange this?—then disentangles the Coke bottle and sits at the key. His message, “Wind. Window shade tugging on a Coke bottle,” makes the captain smile ruefully and prepare to turn the sub back to Australia. This sound was recorded by Hans Wetzel.

Nausea In 1986, in an interview I conducted by telephone for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Mercedes McCambridge told me about the technique she used to produce the voice of the Devil emerging from the body of twelve-yearold Linda Blair in William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973). She said she told the sound man (I suspect it was Bob Fine) to get his microphones and recording tape ready, which he did. She said to start rolling. He did. She took an apple that she had been saving for this occasion for several weeks, and that was now thoroughly rotting, and she ate it. And just as she swallowed, and felt the disgusting object literally going down her throat, she quickly turned into the microphone and belched out the sounds as half enunciation, half regurgitation. No other effects, no altering of the tape. What emission of the mouth, after all, is more diabolical than food desanctified as matter? By the time this infernal voice is associated with the face of this little girl, that face is no longer as sweet and delightful as it had been, but is full of lines and grimaces, bulging eyes, green bruises, pussy boils, point-blank hideousness. Without the voice, however, the face could seem to be signaling distress and pain, and might elicit our sympathy. Now, instead, we recoil in terror to hear the growling, raspy, fractured, inchoate, and inhuman sounds of the invisible Thing that is, as we take it, inhabiting this victimized body.

The Acousmatic Problem The story that we see realized onscreen in a film is often called the diegesis, and any sound that is to be understood as emerging directly from the world of the

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story—sound that the characters of the story are logically placed to hear (even if it is narratively out of earshot for them but accessible to us as part of their world)—is called diegetic sound. When music is played from a source within the story, for instance, it is diegetic: the marching band tootling “Seventy-six Trombones” in The Music Man (1962): the sound of the song is meant to be taken by us as emanating from the swaying brass instruments parading toward our eyes (when, of course, actually, it is not); the 33 1/3 rpm phonograph recording of Arthur Benjamin’s “Storm Clouds” Cantata being used to rehearse an assassin’s labor in The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), as we see it turning on the record player and hear the beautiful chords; the songs of Bette Midler in The Rose (1979) as they seem to come out of her glorious mouth, and of Johnnie Ray in There’s No Business Like Show Business (1954) crooning, “If you believe that there are angels/ Then there are angels, if you believe,” and of Fred Astaire in Top Hat (1935), warbling “I’m fancy free and free for anything fancy,” and so on ad infinitum; the orchestra, populated exclusively by a magically transforming and multiplying Oscar Levant, playing Gershwin’s Concerto in F in An American in Paris (1951). Music can be nondiegetic, too, as when it accompanies a film, emerging from behind or off: the brazen theme we hear as the opening credit scrawl slides off into the distance in Star Wars (1977): we hear this music, but the inhabitants of the Imperial Destroyer that now drops into the screen do not. In Rear Window (1954), Hitchcock plays a fascinating joke as regards diegetic and nondiegetic music, since one of his characters, a popular composer (Ross Bagdasarian), is busy throughout the entire film writing a melody that in the conclusion—because in truth it has been created by the film’s composer, Franz Waxman—becomes the nondiegetic finale music played by the invisible orchestra that has been accompanying our voyage through this film! Beyond music, any and all sounds may be interpreted as diegetic or nondiegetic, depending on the circumstance. And to say sound is diegetic, emerging from the world of the story, is not to say that it necessarily has its source in the image we are watching at the time. The French critic and theorist Michel Chion has helped us understand that one peculiar and delirious kind of diegetic sound approaches us from offscreen. This he calls acousmatic sound, and its source the acousmêtre: Acousmatic, specifies an old dictionary, “is said of a sound that is heard without its cause or source being seen.” We can never praise Pierre Schaeffer enough for having unearthed this arcane word in the 1950s. . . . Let us go back to the original meaning of the word acousmatic. This was apparently the name assigned to a Pythagorean sect whose followers would listen to their Master speak behind a curtain, as the story goes, so that the sight of the speaker wouldn’t distract them from the message. . . . When the acousmatic


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presence is a voice, and especially when this voice has not yet been visualized—that is, when we cannot yet connect it to a face—we get a special being, a kind of talking and acting shadow to which we attach the name acousmêtre. (Voice 18–19; 21)

This “special being,” needless to say, can be very powerful, even overwhelming, producing in a cinematic moment a sense of being surrounded by a presence that cannot be identified or grappled with in any way. The acousmêtre isn’t quite the same on the radio, Chion notes. “It should be evident that the radio is acousmatic by nature. People speaking on the radio are acousmêtres in that there’s no possibility of seeing them; this is the essential difference between them and the filmic acousmêtre. In radio one cannot play with showing, partially showing, and not showing” (Voice 21). When we speak on the telephone the voice we hear sometimes belongs to someone we can picture (or at least we think it does!) and sometimes is emphatically acousmatic, similar to what we hear on the radio, this condition exaggerated and emphasized in the age of cellular communication: with radio we typically know, or presume, a geographical point of source even if we do not see the speaker, while with telephones the call may be coming from virtually anywhere. Further, the technology of voice reproduction and transmission on the telephone often tends to mask character and personality. As Hitchcock films people holding a telephone, often our sense is that the voice they are hearing at the other “end” is chillingly acousmatic, since it is distanced in various and peculiar ways from us and from the diegetic listeners even when they know it well: consider Jo and Ben McKenna hearing the tinny whine of their kidnapped son by phone in The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956). I want to explore a few cases of acousmatic sound in cinema, and afterward proceed to consider one particular sharp little screen moment toward which I should prefer to move by indirection and patient degrees. The first of these moments is the tapping of that window-blind cord upon the open telegraph key in On the Beach, a sound the origin of which begins as an acousmêtre that by the end of the sequence is brutally rationalized as a simple diegetic prop. It is this brutal rationalization that is worth our attention. “Everything,” writes Chion, “hangs on whether or not the acousmêtre has been seen. In the case where it remains not-yet-seen, even an insignificant acousmatic voice becomes invested with magical powers as soon as it is involved, however slightly, in the image” (Voice 23). As acousmêtre, the Coke bottle, while still unseen and unimagined, possessed enormous “magical” power, sufficient in fact to redirect a submarine and its crew (not to say the hopes of the human race). At the moment when the bottle is actually seen, and before it is transformed into a tedious object of the everyday, there is a sharp instant in which it has the power to stun us by virtue of its very mundanity—a moment in which we can feel the

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excruciating irony of a thing standing in for a person, an insensate object having given the impression of possessing consciousness. But there is more. On the Beach is a film that invokes and also examines despair, the despair that comes with the awareness that life—all human life—is nearly at an end (measurably so, because there is a known velocity at which the radiation is spreading from continent to continent), and this because of human folly and ignorance rather than because of any especially honorable or noble attempt to accomplish, to prevail, to ascend. All of the northern world is dead, all of the southern world is dying, and neither indomitable courage nor the urgency of movement nor the intoxication of love are sufficient to stem the encroaching tide of mortality. The sun is everywhere lambent, horrifyingly so, with the result that an oasis of shadow is hard to find. The submarine is only damply dark inside, a cloister cell, not really of the world but only a depressing simulacrum. All of this constitutes a situation in which we hope madly for any shred of life, any optimistic reason to believe it is not All Over. Faced with a vast horizon of vacancy and decay, with morbidity and suffering, with fear and hopelessness in all directions as far as the eye can see, we pray for any tiny glimmer of promise, some unresolved possibility, reason to make our imagination of tomorrow concrete enough to position us again in time—since the totality of destruction has, in a way, made time stop. And suddenly, as we are in this frame of mind, we hear the tap, tap, tapping. From where is it coming? From offscreen, which is to say, out there. “San Diego.” From the world beyond the submarine, which is, at the moment, our center of life and consciousness. From the land of the dead. From the great unimaginable complexity which is the surround. We wish for life so fervently, and so perversely is our wish exacerbated, fed, by this sound, that we begin to form and define it, to give it a name: a secret code coming from an unknown location somewhere in the boundless cityscape. More: a code being sent by someone, someone trying hard to make connection, someone near the end of his tether, someone to whom we must reach out. A survivor is out there sending this code, Dash dot dot dash. More still: this code is indecipherable to us, which is to say, an indefinable someone who understands this code that we cannot understand is out there in a location we cannot fix, trying to connect. Tap tap. Or trying to confound. Along with the radioman we dog the streets, progressively sharpening our imagination. A person, perhaps a wounded person, a lone escapee from the holocaust, a reason for faith. And then, just at the point that the source of the sound stops being acousmatic and becomes plainly visible, we see that there is in fact no reason to hope at all. We are being mocked in our hunger and in our humanity. The sound, swooping into our vision through a zoom toward the window, is a pure nothing, a little mechanism that constitutes an abyss. It fills the screen both sonically and optically with its pregnant nothingness.


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In the case of this film, then, the acousmatic sound motivates a wellspring of positive feeling that surrounds an oceanic and limitless void of visible pathos. We may recall pathetically optimistic Vladimir in Waiting for Godot, asking Estragon, “Do you not recognize the place?” and Estragon answering, “All my lousy life I’ve crawled about in the mud! And you talk to me about scenery! Look at this muckheap! I’ve never stirred from it!” Somehow around this Estragonian negativity is a fount of joy—or at least, as we think it, the possibility of joy—that urges us forward, that brings us to the point of wanting to see what is beyond, that tells us he is only a limited character with a limited character’s limited point of view and beyond his “muckheap” there must be something wonderful and as yet undiscovered. Estragon, like the captain of our submarine, is interesting, but he is not a man who understands everything. His immediate surround only seems to be limited. There is more to the world than he proposes, more and merrier—outside, beyond this circumference, on the other side of the sea. The sense that there is more, that something good is out there and waiting, “something due any day,” as Stephen Sondheim had Tony sing it in West Side Story, is what the acousmatic tapping provides for us in On the Beach: the world that appears to have been destroyed has not actually been destroyed. Life is still happening. Perhaps society. Perhaps love. Perhaps movies. (Maybe not here, but somewhere. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of your life.) This going-to-the-movies that we are doing as paying spectators while we watch these scenes is not itself part of the world depicted in this film: it is not our world that is gone. We are here. We are alive. We will walk out into the streets and not find there the bleak and horrible banner—there is still time—that ends On the Beach. Tap tap tap is in secret code, but the message for us is: “Life happens.” All this so that when we discover what the tapping actually is, when we see that hideous contraption, our sense of being alive can, at least for a moment, be suspended. It is a very brief moment, a flash, but in that flash we understand the sadness and vacancy of death, the perfunctoriness of death, the quotidian quality of death with its gravity and its objectivity, the sunlight, the cord of the blind, the glass of the window, the Coke bottle partly full of Coke, tap tap tap, and all this, quite specifically, as the resolution of a dream in which we hoped for and believed in . . . More. That there is only This. Perhaps just as no one is here making this sound, we are not here watching its making. The world is all but a hideous contraption in which observation, hearing, reception are only implications, only possibilities to be addressed by the omnipresent signal that comes from no signaler: dash, dot dot dot dot, dash, dot dot dot dot. . . . The power of the sequence lies in the expanding, developing imagination we have of the source of that signal, and this depends on our needing to imagine, on imagination being the only way out of a living hell, rather than on our being

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able simply to direct our regard and then have a perfunctory knowledge. Here, acousmatic sound is not merely the source or focus of our imagination, then; it is the reason for it, the occasion. While the acousmêtre is operating, there is a benign force surrounding us; when the acousmêtre is replaced by onscreen sound, that force dissipates. Now, swiftly, we revisit the story and ask ourselves, if the radioman had not suited up and gone marching to San Diego, if he had stayed on the submarine, if no answer had been forthcoming to the riddle of the origin of that sound, if, in short, the sound’s origin had not so bluntly confirmed the pervasive absence of life all around, might the world somehow not have ended? “I sometimes think I see,” wrote Norman O. Brown, “that civilizations originate in the disclosure of some mystery, some secret; and expand with the progressive publication of their secret; and end in exhaustion when there is no longer any secret, when the mystery has been divulged, that is to say, profaned” (Apocalypse 4).

Cynicism The acousmêtre is briefly present in The Wizard of Oz (1939), at a moment beloved to whole generations. Having been instructed by the Wizard to fetch him the broomstick of the Wicked Witch of the West, Dorothy and her chums trounce off into a dark and exciting adventure that ends with the Witch dying by water: “I’m MEL-ting!” Now they are back in the great resonant green throne room, and the bellicose fire-breathing lunar face of the Wizard is radiantly bellowing on the wall before them. But curious little Toto scampers off and tugs aside a green curtain that has been covering—we now see—a timid man frantically operating a colossal gizmo: wheels, levers, blinky lights, dials, an immense microphone. From across the years, as though at the end of a long corridor, one can still hear his voice: “Do you presume to criticize the great Oz, you ungrateful creatures! Think yourselves lucky that I’m giving you audience tomorrow, instead of twenty years from now!” Seeing that his curtain has been opened, and then realizing that he has been espied, the man stammers a timid “Oh!” into Dorothy’s face, but then quickly turns his back again and intones into the microphone, “The great Oz has spoken!” Still flubbing his moves, trying desperately to look away and yet not look away at the same time, he draws the curtain closed, bellowing, “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!! The great Oz has SPOKEN!!!” As Dorothy, stepping forward, herself pulls the curtain back to confront this odd fellow, and as he turns to look into her face with the very last syllables of his utterance, we can actually see that his lips are not moving. This is therefore a quintessentially acousmatic resolution of a scene in which the acousmêtre is present, then absent, then present again. A more careful look:


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The voice of that moony head on the wall, coming from behind the curtain of flame, may appear at first glance to be acousmatic. The mouth’s movements, for example, seem off-synch with, or unmatched to, the syllables it utters. And yet we have no trouble actually associating the voice of “Oz” with this head, assuming we have the ability to believe that Oz is what everybody in the movie claims he is, an all-powerful magician who does not typically appear before his subjects (because he does not typically permit them access to the throne room in which he appears). The image of “Oz,” then, does seem to be presented to us at the moment that the voice of “Oz” is enunciated, and so this is no acousmêtre. The man behind the curtain, the “real Oz,” may, once we have first seen him, come to seem like the true origin of the voice that seemed to be emanating from the great face: a hidden puppeteer. But if we choose to see him as such a con artist, carefully manipulating a contrivance from his control panel, his voice both is and is not acousmatic: first, we do not see speech actually coming from his mouth, except the bumbling “Oh!” that he exclaims when, turning, he sees Dorothy and her friends. We see him leaning into a microphone and we can make the assumption that he is using that technology to project a voice, but in this way he is no more acousmatic than the face on the wall—since we believe we are seeing him originate a voice. Yet secondly, because the voice booms through the room and we actually do not see directly the source of its production in this man’s action, that voice is acousmatic, too. It matters. When we are hearing diegetic sound and not seeing the source of its production we must imaginatively project that source into a surround, something like an oceanic world-envelope (the noösphere coined by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a surface of sorts encompassing the globe and containing all human knowledge and its artifacts: which is to say, the power of speech). “Is the difference between auditory and visual transcription a function of the fact that we are fully accustomed to hearing things that are invisible, not present to us, not present with us?” asks Stanley Cavell: We would be in trouble if we weren’t so accustomed, because it is the nature of hearing that what is heard comes from someplace, whereas what you can see you can look at. It is why sounds are warnings, or calls; it is why our access to another world is normally through voices from it; and why a man can be spoken to by God and survive, but not if he sees God, in which case he is no longer in this world. (World Viewed 18)

The idea of sound being vectored, located, placed, is elaborated by Michel Chion. “Human vision, like that of cinema, is partial and directional,” he writes: Hearing, though, is omnidirectional. We cannot see what is behind us, but we can hear all around. Of all the senses hearing is probably the earliest to

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occur. The fetus takes in the mother’s voice, and will recognize it after birth. Sight comes into play only after birth, but at least in our culture, it becomes the most highly structured sense. . . . The sense of hearing is as subtle as it is archaic. We most often relegate it to the limbo of the unnamed . . . the olfactory and vocal continuum, and frequently tactile contact as well, maintain the mother’s presence when she can no longer be seen. (Voice 17)

The acousmatic voice is cosmic, universal, surrounding, protecting—but also threatening, the voice of and from an utter darkness where localization in the “highly structured sense” that vision makes possible (17), identity, and knowledge in the strictest sense, are impossible. The Wizard of Oz permits the cynical viewer to ground his suspicions regularly and continually in the idea of “Oz” as a con artist who has built an elaborate machine to dupe the citizens of the Emerald City. But a very careful viewing of the film can return us to the childlike wonder in which we confronted the world (and this film) in early days: as we do not actually see the source of that comment, “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!” or of that final statement, “The great Oz has spoken!” we can easily see, suspending suspicion and doubt, that the voice comes from everywhere and nowhere, that it lingers in the deepest recesses of our wonderment and memory. There is a man—indescribable—behind a curtain, and while we know that he is there, and even know him as a man, yet we must not pay him any attention, must not look. There, over there: do not see! This frisson of amazement is possible, of course, only for a brief moment in actual screen time, although the intensity of involvement it produces can seem to stretch. Too quickly (perhaps), Dorothy enters with her shocked and reproachful disbelief, and we follow her lead. Ironically (perhaps), wallowing in cynicism, Dorothy prepares the way for being sent back home to Kansas, and we, eager for a resolution that will bring us out of the movie theater and back to the street, gladly accompany her in both attitude and conviction. Oz was a dream, pretty and pleasant but, ultimately, a distraction, a shtick. Erving Goffman points to our active responsibility here: “We willingly sought out the circumstances in which we could be temporarily deceived or at least kept in the dark, in brief, transformed into collaborators in unreality” (Frame Analysis 136). “Temporarily” deceived: heading off to see The Wizard of Oz with Dorothy and friends, what we intended was a bounded voyage, one that would end with a finalizing return to where we started, which is to say, the land of non-make believe and unsuspended disbelief in which we were theatergoers, not onlookers to a drama. In the same way, Dorothy and her companions made a voyage, fully intending always to depart the Oz that they would find, once they had found it, and come back again to some Kansas or other. This is why at the end of the film we discover, perhaps to our chagrin, that the


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Lion, the Tin Man, and the Scarecrow were all along “actually” farmhands who worked for Uncle Henry and Auntie Em, creatures no more committed to remaining in Oz than Dorothy (although it is only Dorothy who makes the explicit reservation to return home). The resolution of the acousmatic voice into something quotidian—and in this case venal—is a requirement if we are to leave the wonder dome of fantasy and make a landing in reality once again. (How often do we voyage into fantasy just in order to have an excuse to be reembedded in the real, a return to the everyday being the true thrill!) What is especially fascinating about The Wizard of Oz, in this light, is that the transformation out of its acousmatic status is not accomplished by the voice itself but is produced by Dorothy’s calculating judgment, her arch supposition, her fierce will not to believe. For all we can actually see and hear, she is wrong about the fuddy-duddy behind the curtain: this man is just a button pusher. The real “great Oz” is still somewhere else, quite alive, very much in business.

An Acousmêtre for the Eye In a substantial discussion of the nineteenth-century parlor, Tom Gunning shows how the intérieur could manage to be, as Walter Benjamin claimed, a “space of universal representation” in which the outside world intruded by means of pictorializations, mirrorings, framings, and other “optical devices” (“Exterior” 107). One can visualize the wall-mounted gilt-framed landscape or the artfully placed reflective surface incorporating into this “space cut off from the world,” as Gunning puts it, a talisman of the glittering corpus from which it has been severed. Given, however, that the optical representation exists for the most part in the intérieur without the original of which it is a copy, an original we can only remember or imagine, it constitutes a kind of visual analogue of the acousmêtre, an analogue of which the “origin” is unrevealed and whose “origin,” indeed, is explicitly contradicted by the very intensification of design that pulls the intérieur away from society in general. Another intérieur, equally vital to experience, is the dream state, which Gunning recalls by invoking Benjamin’s discussion of Proust’s Swann’s Way. The attempt by the dreamer upon awakening “to reconstruct both the structure of his own body and the shape and arrangement of the furniture in his bedroom” (“Exterior” 107) is work toward exteriorizing the felt intérieur of the dream, transforming the condensed and displaced representation of waking life that appears in that mental sanctum into its rigid origin in the real world. This is a visual analogue for de-acousmatization: the unrealized and indefinable is slowly transposed as geography and form. A similar refiguration of the self takes place with de-acousmatization, as when, suddenly aware of the source of a sound that had presented itself suspended and disconnected from a visible origin, we recognize ourselves in a fixed rather than an indeterminate

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space. Awaking from a dream is like suddenly seeing the subtending world, just as seeing the source of sound is like suddenly positioning oneself in relation to voices, objects, vibrations. In Fellini’s chilling E la nave va (And the Ship Sails On [1983]), the great diva Tetua has died and her ashes are being transported for burial at sea off the island of her birth. Floating securely upon the great oceanic exterior, the liner on which she travels also bears her greatest fans, her critics, high society, the humble masses, the workers in the boiler room who adore opera, the competitive tenors from La Scala, the lover, the prince: it is an intérieur, the deck of which is rather like the Benjaminian arcade (“an exterior conceived as an intérieur [Gunning, “Exterior” 106]). At the funeral, as the mourners assemble on deck the island, swathed in mist, is in the distance. One gentleman says, “One day she told me this: ‘You always talk of my voice, but sometimes I’m almost sure it’s not really mine. I’m a voice, a diaphragm, breathing. I don’t know where the voice comes from. I’m just an instrument, a simple girl who’s even been afraid of this voice that all my life forced me to do what it wanted.’” The ashes are poured from the urn onto a cushion that rests upon the gunwale. A sailor operates a gramophone—it is 1914—and this disembodied voice, this voice that had always been disembodied even when the singer lived, moves through the ship, along the deck, like a spirit. As the wind gently blows, mimicking Tetua’s breath in her phrasing of “Va, Pensiero” from Nabucco, the ashes blow out to sea. The ashes are the real remains of a creature from the everyday world, a “simple girl,” brought in their decorative urn to intrude meaningfully upon this magnificent intérieur, and lying upon their dark cushion they are like a portrait of an unseen, unknown, unimaginable being. When the ashes blow off, the being “wakes” into its reality, which is Death. Thus, all life is emblematized as an intérieur, a dream, in which forms, shapes, sounds, colors, faces are unknown even as they are experienced. As to the sound, it begins diegetically, as we witness the tone arm moving onto the recording, but as the voice emerges from the magical machine we recall that the singer did not feel she possessed that voice, that she was a “diaphragm, breathing,” mechanically, in exactly the way that the phonograph mechanically produces the replication of her sound. The voice had its own existence, its own motility. And now as it moves among the mourners the camera slowly pans, so that as the playback machine is lost the sound becomes acousmatized. The voice is here, but we cannot see it. At this funeral, then, we experience the essence of what it is to be alive. In one of the most beautiful scenes in all of Hitchcock, a similar transformation occurs. Jo McKenna (Doris Day) is singing “Que Sera, Sera” at a grand piano in a foreign embassy in London in the conclusion of The Man Who Knew Too Much, hoping that her young son, who is held captive somewhere in the building, will hear her voice. The camera dollies out of the crowded room, across the empty marbled lobby set with huge bouquets, to the marble stairs,


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then up the stairs, then slowly turns and moves up another flight of stairs, past opulence and emptiness, as the voice becomes smaller and somehow clearer, more pregnant, more present. The singer at the piano has vanished. The voice has its own life, its own consciousness, and is hauntingly invisible. Jo’s husband, Ben (James Stewart), climbing after that voice, has now followed it along an upstairs corridor. We stop in front of a door. We examine the doorknob. A hand reaches out to turn it, at once Ben’s hand and the hand of the voice that we do not see.

The Acousmatic Moment The acousmatic moment is almost always short-lived. As Chion has it, “the acousmêtre is everywhere . . . the acousmêtre is all-seeing . . . the acousmêtre knows all . . . the acousmêtre has complete power” (Voice 24), just as we might surmise about a presence that is an absence, an absence that is a totality, a totality that is everything but a silence, a plenitude that is indistinct, an indistinctness that is sharp, a sharpness that is without point, a pointlessness that is a meaning. But typically it is all of this only for a flash, or the extension of a flash, and then it is resolved, “de-acousmatized,” in Chion’s words. In the resolution of the acousmatic moment, both the filmgoer and the filmmaker participate, since on one side the film provides a means of resolution and a pretext to account for it; while on the other, the filmgoer willfully leaps out of his experience to logically map and index the acousmatic sound within a context that is pragmatic, narratively sensible, and banal. Mary Ann Doane discusses the case of the “voice-off”: “Voice-off” refers to instances in which we hear the voice of a character who is not visible within the frame. Yet the film establishes, by means of previous shots or other contextual determinants, the character’s “presence” in the space of the scene, in the diegesis. He/she is “just over there,” “just beyond the frameline,” in a space which “exists” but which the camera does not choose to show. (“Voice in the Cinema” 165)

Indeed—and this is the point to which I would wish to draw the most engaged attention—narration itself seduces us into the reality that results from our rational calculation. I do not mean to imply by this a particular case of narration, although all particular cases of narration work handsomely to this effect: I mean narration as such, and for itself, regardless of specific content; narration as the formula for motivation; narration as the extension in time and the desire to look forward for development and ongoingness; narration as the faith that an explanation will arise later for what mystifies us now. Narration—that train of eventualities beyond acousmatization—seduces us to remember, to project, to account for, to measure and then fill lacunae,

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to wonder about only what can be deduced through some diegetic logic. In the acousmatic moment, however, we escape narrative and experience the stunned sensation of meeting a ghost, and so the use of the acousmêtre—like the trick photography of Méliès, but sonically—is a way for us to watch cinema as a powerful, even otherworldly, manifestation, a play of (and with) light. A blatant and extreme case of narration is this: the integration, rationalization, extenuation, and prolongation of the optical frisson by Guy Debord as a “society of the spectacle” when spectacle itself is momentary, situated, stunning, just as the acousmatic voice is. Further: for Doane, “the voice-off is always [as Pascal Bonitzer says] ‘submitted to the destiny of the body’ because it belongs to a character who is confined to the space of the diegesis, if not to the visible space of the screen” (“Voice in the Cinema” 167). But this voice that belongs to a body is the resolved, “de-acousmatized” residue of the acousmêtre’s original contribution, a contribution that is not embodied at all and thus not subject to the body’s destiny. That is why hearing this voice is uplifting, immortalizing. The acousmêtre not subject to the body’s destiny: let us revisit that nauseating voice of the Devil in The Exorcist: is it not an acousmêtre if we allow it to be? But as acousmêtre such a voice brings its own challenges. Surely, if it is not acousmatic, the situation is far from grave. We may believe the little girl to have been infiltrated by the presence of Satan, so that Satan is actually within her. In such an eventuality, we hear this hideous voice coming out of this innocent body, such a credence being possible only because we have already accepted the postulate that the Devil is a being who can actually enter human flesh, a carnal being. To be “possessed by” the Devil is to be invaded. Now, if this is the case, he can be fought. Just as Tetua had been invaded by her voice, which forced her “to do what it wanted,” Regan MacNeil (Linda Blair) has been converted into a device that mechanizes the expression of a voice, interior to her and operating against her will. Dorothy required a balloon ascension for her return to a sane reality in Kansas. Tetua could be free only in death, as the body floats into the air and the voice remains on board the ship. Regan requires an exorcism, a mechanical suction of sorts, performed, of course, by a holy hero. But if this diabolical voice is acousmatic, it is not so easily resolved as inhering in Regan, even though it operates her like a ventriloquist’s dummy to express itself. If it is not inside this girl, if she is merely the unwilling dupe who is manipulated by a force beyond her control, if her lips match its utterance but only by contrivance, then clearly it is not really Regan we hear speaking, not this innocent, and she is under the absolute control of a force that cannot be seen, a malevolent force of great ugliness and power that has no visible tangent. To believe the voice has merely invaded her is to pave the way for a clean return—direct if not exactly easy—to the sacred precincts of the everyday: the exorcist will enter, a rite will be performed, she will twist and writhe as the


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creature is seized and then seduced out of her; it will depart, she will be whole again, the film will end, we will comfortably leave the theater. But in our experience of watching Regan, for at least a moment when the nauseating speech starts, we have to wonder whether the voice is not, perhaps, here, there, and everywhere, since the voice fills the room, fills the screen, seems to come even from behind her. If it is here, there, and everywhere, if it is acousmatic, there is no clear line of demarcation between Regan and the evil surrounding her, or, for that matter, between the film and the world in which we live, and the story will never come to a neat conclusion since there is no corpse to enter, no residing voice to seize. We are in a shell and we will never get out. Tetua’s is such a voice in E la nave va, a voice that is here, there, and everywhere, but it is associated with beauty, refinement, grace, or, as Matthew Arnold held, sweetness and light. To the disembodied, dire voice of the shadowy world that Regan knows, we must be shown some alternative, some (relaxing) reason for hope, in order that as a commercial experience, at least, The Exorcist can end. Therefore we see the afflicted girl turn her eyes upward and outward spastically, and see her face passively disfigured, so that gradually she ceases to be the perfect little innocent whose presentation is incompatible with an ugly voice we are to take as emerging from within. As she seems more and more to appear like a monster, it becomes easier and easier for us to accept an inner monstrosity in her. In this purely nonvocal way we are led to read Regan’s vocality as intrinsic, which is to say, non-acousmatic; and thus to find our way back to the “truth.” This “truth” is, of course, no real truth, but only a provision, a transitory rigging. A particular effect results from the power of narrative to de-acousmatize. We are grounded, and therefore drawn away from an aura that commanded and enchanted us. But most importantly, we are made to lose sight of the fact that the chilling and entrancing effect of the acousmatic moment was intense, and perhaps life altering, even in its brevity: made to lose sight because drawn swiftly and rationally away in the direction of a culmination. Addiction to the story tends to make the viewer discount the brief momentary flash, no matter how pregnant it might seem at the time, in favor of an ongoing development—even a development that is monstrously silly or tedious or trivial. We are caught upon our susceptibility to that peculiar curiosity that continually searches for outcomes, any outcomes whatever, and so the feeling of need to hurtle onward can be in direct conflict with the feeling of need to drink in all of what a single moment offers. All of what a single moment offers: • The Devil’s voice: we may crave to know what is being said in this unearthly garble, what its implication, what will result from this ugly

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speechfulness, what will happen to Regan MacNeil who is pure but yet contaminated, whether the Devil, whom we take to be inside her, will remain there and thwart the team of exorcists, how the world will be affected, how this voice will penetrate the world? Yet before and beyond all this, the power of the voice itself is oceanic, electrifying. The quality and presence of the voice come before its consequences. An altogether less unpleasant voice, but also one that overpowers us by its register and its breath, is the faun’s in Guillermo del Toro’s El Laberinto del Fauno (Pan’s Labyrinth [2006]), especially when, as he speaks to the little girl he believes to be the lost princess of a fairy kingdom, he pronounces the more or less sacred word, “Altessa.” • The man at the microphone: we may crave to know, how did he become the Wizard of Oz, is his reign finished, what will happen to him, why is he so terrified of—so anxious around—Dorothy, what will she demand, how will he fulfill her, must Oz disappear in order for the story to end? Yet even as this man may not be the Wizard, there may be a wizard we have not met, and what if there is? What if, contrary to every rational speculation, there really is a presence dominating this green city (the true green city, which is our green world)? What if that penetrating voice is coming from beyond everything we can see (and everything dear Toto can nibble)? If the acousmêtre comes from “behind the curtain,” after all, we must ask, “What curtain?” The curtain we see onscreen in Wizard is perhaps too obvious a choice. • The Coke bottle upon the telegraph: we may ask, who put this bottle here, who decided to send this signal, how did they die, what were their last thoughts, how might this help our heroes survive, is survival possible? Yet here, even before we know what is causing it and therefore that it is the last sound in the northern world, meaning floats upon a sea of meaninglessness; here is principle—not a particular principle but Principle itself; here is purpose staring into the face of fear and emptiness. The purpose of life, wrote Kenneth Burke, is purpose (Permanence). • The voice at the funeral: we may dream that all is as insubstantial as this voice, that this disembodied voice is no more ethereal than the expressions on the face, the transitory breaths, the lifting and falling of the ship in the sea (Fellini has built the ship of plywood, the sea of lit plastic), the peregrinations of the aristocracy, the provisional dignities that attach to a social status, a uniform, a title that can be lost. Yet, hearing the sound (from a recorded version) we can know quite alarmingly that it does not remind us of anything, that it is as it was, alone and unique (even if there are many copies of this recording of uniqueness). • “Que Sera, Sera”: we may tell ourselves that a singer is singing a song, that a child recognizes it, that the music is only a kind of mechanical device


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and the musician something of a music box. Yet, hearing this sound as we move smoothly across the empty lobby and up the empty staircase, surrounded by chandeliers and flowers, marble and broadloom, by the long, soothing, metrical spaces of Georgian architecture; and moving further from it, ever further, although we do not see where it is; we sense that the voice is the building itself, is possibility, is lost unity, is prayer. The silence of great houses suggests the passage of time, societies lost and buried, yet like a telegraph the singing voice persists, urging us to hope. If we open a door while this voice sings, will the room be empty? That cinema is continually unspooling, continually and smoothly moving onward, may lead us to think of it as a medium that favors the spelling out of narratives, which also have a tendency to move relentlessly forward from incident to incident. Thus, it is easy to think of a film’s narrative as its heart. If we do this, we may come to treat idiosyncratic, particular moments onscreen not fully and deeply in terms of what they avow, suggest, or hint but as mere parts of a story, mere and fragmentary elements in a long narrative chain that is the real meat of the film. The cinematic moment is thus very often accounted for in terms of its placement and function in a diegesis; and all moments become potentially or actually diegetic, linked backward to setups, sentimentalities, and causes and forward to anticipated outcomes and resolutions. But cinema does not only unspool. It also illuminates and makes possible the conjunction of picture and sound—one such conjunction being the acousmatic moment. Here is a strange and beautiful moment that Chion finds in Jacques Tati’s Trafic (1971): The Altra truck (the little car company for which M. Hulot works) has broken down on the way to Amsterdam, where it is to deliver a model camping car for the company showroom. The driver, a plump, timid little French fellow—something of a whiner—had to spend an uncomfortable night in a garage shed right in the middle of the countryside. He walks out in the morning, with the door squeaking and having had a bad sleep, yawns in the sunlight as though astonished to find himself there, and turns his head. And what does he see, through an opening in a clump of trees, all the way at the extreme back of the frame, happily positioned in the grass? A cow, an actual, little, postcard or coloring-book cow, unreal because of the very way it’s so perfectly posed in the picture. No sooner has he glanced at the animal and turned his head back—he hardly looked at it, didn’t really see—when a sonorous “Moo” makes him turn his head again, and it’s only now, we might say, that he realizes the presence of this cow, now become silent. Moreover, the animal is too far off for one to actually see it moo. It’s the sound alone that informs us. That’s it, it’s so small, it’s like a little satori. (Art sonore 171; translation mine)

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The magnificent, surreal cow . . . the cow in the field . . . the cow’s blunt reality, thus the field’s reality, too . . . standing nearby . . . being awake . . . proceeding with the story. Perhaps the relation between the cinematic moment and the cinematic story is the opposite of what I have just suggested. Could not the entire narrative of a film also be understood as a ligature or scaffold for the suspension and illumination of a single particular moment? Could cinema itself not be a moment? To put this mathematically: why must a movie be only the integration of its events, when it can also be an event that is the derivation of its continuity? An especially telling case is provided by a particular, and particularly shocking, acousmatic moment, the narrative resolution of which is typically misread in such a way as to discharge it. Alfred Hitchcock’s Stage Fright (1950) begins with Jonathan Cooper (Richard Todd) and Eve Gill (Jane Wyman) racing across London in her sports car as she assists him to escape the police, who are, he assures her, after him because he is involved in something horrible with the music hall star, Charlotte Inwood. In flashback we see his story. He is interrupted at his flat one day by Charlotte (Marlene Dietrich), with whom, having performed as one of her dancers, he is now having a love affair. “Johnny, you love me,” she says upon his doorstep, “Say that you love me! You do love me, don’t you?” She is mortified with fear, and we can see that the front of her dress is smeared with blood. “I think he’s dead. I’m sure he’s dead. I didn’t mean it.” She and her husband “had a terrible quarrel” about Johnny. “He was vile . . . He started to hit me. . . . I grabbed something. . . . I was out of my mind with fear!” Johnny suspects that the husband may not be dead. “He was an abominable man,” she says. “Oh, why do women marry abominable men?” Utterly distraught, she is convinced she cannot go onstage tonight, but he convinces her that above all things she must, “as if nothing had happened.” To help her substantiate an alibi—that from a sojourn in the countryside she drove straight to the theater—he agrees to go and fetch from her dressing cabinet the blue dress she wishes to wear. “Are you sure the servants aren’t back yet?” She insists that he hurry. We watch as Jonathan draws up in front of her house on a street where offscreen hurdy-gurdy music can be heard. He emerges from his car, shutting its door with a definitive clunk, and uses the key she has given him to let himself in by the front door, then closes it somewhat loudly behind him. He looks around the vestibule and proceeds up the staircase. Suddenly a sound of another closing door seems to come from behind—behind Jonathan and behind us. He twists around to look. The sound is not as loud as either the sound of the closing front door or the sound of his car door shutting earlier, but its thudding character recollects the car. Is it the sound of a door in this house somewhere, immediately behind him (as though to signal that he is


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being sharply cut off from the everyday world of his life by making this little journey into Charlotte’s world), or just something quotidian and random from the world outside, another person’s car door closing in the middle of another adventure? Jonathan’s response (by the line of his gaze) rather clearly locates the sound, and rationalizes its presence, outside; and so the intrusion is acousmatic in only the most conventional way, referring casually to something just beyond a character’s perceptual boundary in a part of the world we may take for granted as presently existing even though the camera does not show it. It is not a sound coming from beyond the diegesis. Having paused, but also demonstrably seeing nothing to concern him, Jonathan continues resolutely on his way. At the top of the stairs he looks carefully to find the correct door, walking past a portrait of Charlotte. In the front room a tracking camera follows his gaze down to the floor, across the hearthrug to the poker Charlotte has used, then over to the body sprawled in front of the dressing cabinet doors. He carefully replaces the poker in its holder, pries open one of the cabinet doors, and withdraws the blue dress, which he folds up. But the adjoining room is a study, and seeing it he decides to go in there. With a brass sculpture from the desk he carefully breaks a pane of glass in the French door that leads outside, then deranges objects on the desktop and strews paper from the drawers in order to give the impression of a break-in. One of the objects he yanks out of the desk and drops on top is a photograph and now, noticing it, he picks it up and gives it a once-over. We cut to a close-up of the eight-by-ten glossy in Johnny’s gloved hands. It is a professional group shot. Six dancers in tuxedos are flanking Charlotte in an elaborate gown. They are in top hats with sticks and white gloves; she has her arms through those of two of the men, and one of these is Johnny. In a macro-close shot we now see Johnny and Charlotte enlarged from this photograph, he gazing sideways at her in a mask of perfect adoration, she with a rigid performer’s smile staring out (with cold and unfeeling eyes) at her audience. As we look, the carnival music continues far in the background. But suddenly there is a hideous scream. (Our instinct is to quickly check the lips of Charlotte in the photograph, lest it was her! But it is a photograph!) This is a scream that has been built, to some degree, on its predecessors in Blackmail (1929) and The 39 Steps (1935), films I discuss in a later chapter. In profile now, we see the Johnny who has “burgled” the room look up in shock, staring hotly off-left. A nondiegetic music cue in the brass signals his alarm. We are given a matching shot, from Johnny’s position looking back into the sitting room where a woman is standing next to the husband’s body and then looking into the camera. She turns face-on in alarm, and Johnny takes the moment to bolt, wrapping the dress under his jacket. Down the stairway he flies, as the woman emerges from the sitting room to look down upon him.

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A photograph being examined by an intruder. Charlotte Inwood (Marlene Dietrich) is pictured at center, her lover Jonathan Cooper (Richard Todd) to her immediate left, in Alfred Hitchcock’s Stage Fright (Warner Bros., 1950). The fingers at the edge of the frame—are they not Johnny’s, too? Digital frame enlargement.

Back in his flat he says to Charlotte, with some desperation, “It was your maid, Nellie . . .”1 Two acousmatic moments, then: the sound Johnny hears on the staircase, and the scream. The first is a sound we devoutly wish to rationalize and dispense with, since it is interrupting Johnny on his urgent and gallant task of racing to save Charlotte from infamy. To repeat (because the sound itself leads to repetition, and strikes one, already, as a strangely repeated modern gesture), his instant thought is that someone has come into the house immediately behind him, and his turning back to verify actually introduces the possibility to us and simultaneously negates it. We can understand the sound as produced by typical anonymous urban activity, the kind of happening that is ubiquitous in the city. This is one of a thousand similar sounds every city 1. On 11 May 1949, Kay Walsh received at her Fulham residence an invitation from the film’s casting director, Robert Lennard, to read the role of “‘NELLIE,’ the Maid,” with an assurance that the production was being directed by Hitchcock at the new Elstree Studios and would find release in both America and the United Kingdom. Walsh was informed as well of the participation of Jane Wyman and Marlene Dietrich in the project (Lennard to Walsh).


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dweller hears every day in the modern world, where strangers continually on the move are crowded nearby in every direction. Johnny reasonably disattends it as insignificant to his proper concentration. A less frantically rationalized approach would open the possibility of reading the sound as a resolute closure, a shutting in. Oddly, although any shutting in may also be a shutting out, this sound does not strike us that way. Is Johnny being shut into Charlotte’s house, her web, her life, by virtue of the action he is undertaking in stepping up these stairs? Is this the sound of the gavel dropping, the trap opening? Or the sound of the cell closing? Or the sound of a large safety curtain dropping in a theater auditorium not so far away? But the scream: First, it is not so difficult to see how we might rationalize, how we might de-acousmatize that scream. Most improbably, and hilariously, we could recall that Dietrich was far from delighted making this film 2 and thus invent her as the screamer, bemoaning her condition from the abject confinement of the character: Let me tell you about Hitchcock! A strange little man. I don’t like him. Why they all think he is so great, I don’t know. The film is bad—maybe in the cutting he does all his famous ‘suspense,’ but he certainly didn’t do it in the shooting. Richard Todd is nice but nothing there. You know the kind of Englishman who has those thick white ankles? Also the hands? Todd’s fingers are like little uncooked sausages and he’s engaged! Jane Wyman, she is very sweet. Michael Wilding? Oh, a British version of Stewart. He mumbles, is ever so shy, and being English, gets through the film on charm. The best thing in the film is me doing ‘la Vie en rose.’ . . . The hair is very

2. Albeit she did so with consummate acumen. “She was such a professional,” recollected Hitchcock’s assistant Peggy Robertson. “Dietrich came on the set, and this woman was such a professional, I saw her when we called her for her first shot, how she looked around. She looked where every lamp was and every light, saw it was placed there, one was placed there, the one for her face was placed there, and she checked them all. She didn’t say anything, just looked around. And then said something like, ‘Could my key light, do you think, darling, be a little lower?’ “Well, judging by the reaction, none of the people, the cameramen or the electricians had ever heard of a key light! ‘What’d she say? Key light? What’s a key light?’ . . . “Then she saw dailies the next day. And then she said, a little more strongly, ‘What about putting that lamp there? What about putting it there?’ So she lit her shots, practically. Did her makeup. When she came on the set, she had a thin white line down the center of her nose, like that. Very thin. And this was her own . . . It was her own technique. She had a rather broad nose, and this white line took away the breadth, for some reason. She knew everything about herself. What she should wear. She would drive the wardrobe department absolutely bonkers. She would take four hours to fit a suit. We got her stuff from Dior in Paris, he was the most sort of celebrated one, and she had a woman fly over from Paris who fitted her. And she just drove them mad, because she was so right” (Robertson 116–117).

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bad—the whole picture—too ‘old lady little curls.’ I always have said that the British can’t make women’s films—I should have listened to myself. (Riva 602, 607)

But of course, even beset by Hitchcock’s “strangeness,” it is not Dietrich screaming. We could ask ourselves, quite sensibly, how this distinctly female shriek could have been produced, and why. Where, after all, is it coming from? It sounds very near. It must be inside this house. Someone is inside this house with us, and is screaming. Who would that be? Charlotte is back in Johnny’s flat, so it must be someone else, and there is only one other woman who has been invoked for us at all, and obliquely, namely, Charlotte’s maid. Could the maid somehow be here, watching? Yes, it is conceivable. We should look. Johnny’s looking up helps us see. And there—: yes, a woman dressed in clothing that befits a maid, turned away from a corpse and watching like a hawk, panicked out of her mind. It is the worst thing in the world now to be seen, by this maid or by anybody, so we flee, and soon enough we find ourselves safely back with Charlotte, able to tell her that her maid saw everything. Let me try to suggest why this reading—this not inaccurate reading, as it turns out, in a certain way—entirely fails to supply all that we need for appreciating this Hitchcockian moment. Why not follow the maid as she enters the flat, climb with her as she mounts the stairs, enter the sitting room and accompany her as she discovers her master’s body, cut to the look of astonishment and fright on her face—quite natural!—have her step back right in front of our eyes and see the intruder in the other room? Why should we not be standing next to Nellie as she screams, indeed, if the signal point here is to place Nellie in the scene as she makes a horrifically awkward expression of shock and revulsion? Even if this is Johnny’s flashback, it could focus more on the maid if she were really so important. But at any rate, the scream assaults us and dwells within us before Nellie is introduced. Or else, why not have Johnny finish looking at the photograph and put it down, then look up again as he prepares to walk out. Now he sees the maid. And she sees him. We cut to his face, a look of terror and panic. Back to her, and she hideously screams—because, what is this man doing in this place! Why not this, if the signal point is to show us a confrontation between Johnny and the maid? Or to position, and rationalize, the maid as the source of the scream? Why an acousmatic scream, a scream that is cued while we are looking at the photograph? The screenplay for this film, written by Alma Reville (Mrs. Hitchcock) and Whitfield Cook, details this moment clearly, and in fact, in one version, gives us reason for attaching the scream to the woman in the photograph:


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15. int. inwood’s room afternoon medium close shot As Jonathon3 comes to the half open door of this adjoining room we see the room beyond him—it is a man’s bedroom. There is a writing desk, walls lined with books, a small table for drinks and in the far wall two French windows which lead onto a small balcony. Jonathon crosses the room quickly—laying the dress on a nearby chair. He goes to the windows, camera with him, opens one of them. He looks around, sees a paper-weight on the desk, picks it up and holding his gloved hand on the inside of the pane, he knocks out a small hole near the handle. He closes the door again and drops the piece of glass at his feet. He now moves over to the desk, takes the lamp and lays it on the floor, opens drawers and scatters papers—creating the impression of a robbery. He sharply glances at a silver-framed photograph standing on the desk. 16. close up The photograph shows Charlotte in a scene from some Musical Comedy or Revue; she is reclining on a settee with six silk-hatted chorus men bending over her. The nearest one to her is Jonathon himself. camera moves in until Charlotte’s smiling face fills the screen—suddenly over it we hear a woman’s piercing scream. 17. close up Jonathon turns his head swiftly in the direction of the other bedroom. 18. int. charlotte’s bedroom afternoon long shot A woman is standing over the dead body of Inwood. She wears an inexpensive coat and hat and obviously has just entered the house. She turns away from the body and looks about her wildly. (Reville and Cook, Script draft of 9 April 1949, 7)

In the filming, a different photograph was used, with Charlotte and the men all standing, and the camera did not move in so far as to isolate Charlotte,

3. I retain in quotations from Alma Reville and Whitfield Cook’s script their original spelling of the character’s given name, Jonathon, a common and familiar spelling in London of 1950. Jonathan Cooper is printed onscreen in the end credit list, but there are numerous legal reasons why a spelling might have been altered from script to screen, including the possible existence in the London audience of a real Jonathon Cooper of sufficient standing to bring difficulties to the producers should they have retained his name as that of a cold-hearted murderer. Nigel Morris has suggested to me that Jonathon might have been a more refined spelling, and the script thus have contained an indication of the character’s class, an idea that seems intriguing in light of Hitchcock’s more general interests in, and knowledge about, social class but that is not substantiated by any documents I have found. There is, however, a casting advice form dated 13 June 1949 in which Richard Todd is set for twenty-five days of shooting, 13 June through 13 August, in the role of “Jonathan Penrose.”

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nor so far as to give viewers a moment of confusion as to whether they were regarding a still photograph or, equally black-and-white, an isolated moment of the “actual” star herself. Oddly, too, in this script, while the scream is virtually identified in print to aid the production, the woman seen in the next room is not! This section of the draft is reproduced verbatim in versions dated 11 May 1949, 9 June 1949, and later. A dialogue transcript much later credited the scream to Nellie. Hitchcock had given notes to production manager Fred Ahern as early as 23 March detailing the need for meticulous construction of the upstairs rooms of Charlotte’s house (“very similar to the one we had in [The] Paradine [Case]”), specifying particularly that “what is important for our action is that she, Nellie, appears in Charlotte’s room in the front while Jonathan is is [sic] in the back faking the burglary” [notes to Ahern 2]). The screamer would also be a watcher: Hitchcock directed that a platform be built so that the camera could shoot down upon Nellie watching Jonathan escaping by way of the stairs. All of this shows the intentions and concentrations of those who made the film, and the details of which they would have to have been conscious in order to choreograph the action for the camera in cooperation with one another. But our experience at the hysterical moment described by the film is altogether broader and more chilling than the script makes it seem, perhaps exactly because certain information is carefully withheld: we are privy only to what appears on, what sounds emanate from, the screen, at a key moment unfolding from other moments for which we could have no full preparation. It is only back in Jonathan’s flat, for instance, that Nellie is named for us, and thus rationalized. But when we are regarding that photograph with Jonathan and hear that scream, the experience is not rational at all. What is produced by that scream? For a brief few seconds we are presented with a divided world, a world, in fact, that seems deeply, brutally torn. First, there is a perspective of performance, costume and surface, staging, posture, music, and gesture (frozen by this act of photography), all this the quintessence of show business, which, seen from within, is warmth and security, albeit, as we come later to learn, false and contrived. While we see evidence of this in a full photograph we recognize that photograph as a tightly bounded vision—tidily framed, indeed, and nicely printed. But we do know that there exist thousands of performing acts just like this one (just as there are countless copies of this photograph), that all the earth is a show of such shows (and not only such shows), that Charlotte Inwood and her gracile dancers are replicated exactly this way in countries on every continent. There is thus an expansiveness about the picture, a sense in which it reaches out to extend its entertaining umbrella over us no matter where we may go. (We may attend to it exclusively of any consideration of the space in which we presently find ourselves; we may disregard the exterior


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conditions that subtend the image as a prelude to affixing ourselves to its content and form.) When we cut into the extreme close shot (the magnification), the boundaries between this theatrical world and the reality outside it are in fact confounded (confounded because at once lost, as the edges of the image dissolve away, and intensified as we gaze at Inwood’s insincere and stagey gaze), and we swim in the relationship between the Johnny-as-pictured and the Charlotte-as-pictured. We are engaged fully by his adoration of her, yet also by the realization that it is a staged adoration, a posture for which he is paid; engaged, too, then, by the supposition that he may be a man of complex sensibilities and desires who does not always want what he seems to, or who is at least capable of artfully donning the mask of desire. And we see Inwood’s aloofness, her fascination with and devotion to the audience that is paying her. This pairing represents a coarse, even debased human relation: the man yearning for the woman who is really focusing on a client somewhere else. We can universalize this as a deplorable human condition in which women must slavishly sell their attention and focus, and in which men both worship and control them. Every woman seems to be Charlotte; every man Jonathan. And all of this swoon of powerlessness and desire springs from a pointed focus, the line of gaze between Jonathan and Charlotte in this image. Focused as we are on this gaze we can see nothing else, and in fact there is nothing else to see: this gaze is the universe. But at the same time there is a piercing call that comes from anywhere but this image. It comes from outside and all around, from beyond the theatrical world implied within the image, beyond the image as a construct, beyond the room, beyond the diegesis. It is the painful frightened call of the world-voice, the voice that is there outside of the bubble of our present experience and that was therefore present before. It is the maternal, the indistinct, the historical, the special—in the exact sense of being of and from the species, but also in the sense of being marked, set apart, distinct: special, writes John Le Carré, is “a word with many meanings, none good. One day I will read you The Count of Monte Cristo . . . It’s about the most special prisoner of them all” (330). Not a relationship and not even a person but a disembodied song, a pure enunciation, a pointing, a pointing away from, a field instead of a point. Just as the photographic image is first a point and then a bounded set of points, the voice is pointless and enveloping. Between the photograph and the voice is a gap such as can be found between the center and the circumference of a circle. This is an infinite gap, a gap, that is, which is not finite, in the sense that to move to the circumference is to abandon the center, and thus to relinquish the position from which the circumference is inscribed. Yet to remain at the center is to be reduced always to the experience of a point, and only a point. At every moment in a film, we stand at a point, and yet we project ourselves to the circumferential awareness of a story.

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Who is shrieking here and why? The sound, as we hear it, does not signify that Jonathan is in Charlotte’s apartment: that fact, as a motive, is something we discover only a moment later. But now, here, in front of this image, this gazing pair, these lovers or posturers, who is shrieking and why? Who is shrieking to see this photograph . . . to bend over and see it more closely? Charlotte’s lips are sealed in the image; it is not she. Could it be Eve, (circumferentially) driving Jonathan across (the diameter of) London and hearing about all this as she navigates the East End streets? All of this is, after all, a flashback. Is Eve put off by Jonathan’s connection with Charlotte? Has Jonathan, sitting in the roadster and racing away from the police, described to Eve, as part of his recounting, the qualities of the photograph that we see in this scene? Surely he has, because it is only in Jonathan’s report to Eve that our present vision takes place. Has he given Eve the details that are available to us in the close view?—his dancer’s eager, adoring face? If it is not yet the maid Nellie—of whose existence in Charlotte’s home we still know nothing—and if it is not Eve; if it is not Charlotte; what female could be screaming in this way? Let me suggest a roundabout way of getting to an answer. Let us conceive to ourselves that what Hitchcock wanted to provide his viewers with was a double experience, or an experience in two parts (split, as I have said, by a schism). He wanted them to see this photograph—that is to say, a photograph—in detail. He wanted them to hear a scream of alarm. He wanted them, then, to both acclimatize themselves to, and be shocked by, a single image. He wanted to suggest two ways of relating to an image, one after another. Certainly the presentation of the photograph and the transition to a close view of it suffice to provide occasion for acclimatization; and the piercing interruption of the scream works to shock. The question then becomes, why of all sounds would he have chosen a female scream? A fundamental, generic, dislocated, decontextualized female scream? If we can tell well enough that none of the females we have met could be the source of this enunciation, and if therefore it stands to reason that the scream comes from a figuration that is generic and unidentified—if it comes from such a figuration exactly when we are hearing it—why is its gender female? Is it the maternal scream, the scream of putting a vision into the world? Is it a world scream, the scream of sight? “Oh, my God!” “Oh, no!” “Oh, yes!” We may be buoyed to realize the link between the Jonathan in the photograph and the Jonathan holding the photograph: the one is apparently a straightforward, simple enough bloke—insofar as, in Eve’s roadster and his own apartment, we have yet met him. He tries to be helpful, he is under Charlotte’s power (she bullies him into going for the dress). He seems practical and cautious and methodical. The other is debonair and polished, a man who


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knows how to move rhythmically and in synchrony, a man who “makes moves” and who knows how to rehearse and repeat moves, in short someone with profound self-consciousness (knowing what he looks like in this photograph even as he is posing for this photograph). Because that Jonathan is so aware of himself, this Jonathan (in the roadster) regarding (recalling) him is not really regarding him; he does not have to be. He knows exactly what he looks like in costume; and this knowledge is part of his equipment as a show business personality. Perhaps he wants to see what inner secrets are being revealed to any devoted inspector by the small nuances of expression evident on his, or Charlotte’s, face. Perhaps the shock for Jonathan (cued by the shocked tone of the scream) is the mechanical coldness on Charlotte’s face, especially in her eyes and mouth. Perhaps he is suddenly seeing again the Charlotte he left back in his flat, the coldness of her eyes and mouth. Is it a scream deep within Jonathan that we are hearing, then? For all his debonair masculinity in the photograph, could Jonathan have been invaded by a hysterical female who is now screaming? Since this acousmatic moment is very shortly to be resolved (when he looks up and sees the maid), perhaps it is sufficient to suggest that we are pricked by a single sensation, and that is enough: that inside this Jonathan whom we have met and are looking at exists someone else. This Jonathan is not what he seems. That the someone else is in deep and unmodulated panic. That and nothing more. As an invisible “inner” presence, such a female scream is the datum at the greatest distance from the characterization he has been putting on, the fact most salient and dissonant at the same time. It is the alarm that will make us look twice at him. As the story spills on, it turns out that looking twice at Jonathan will hardly be enough for capturing all his masks and underpinnings. We do move on into the story, at any rate, trumping this moment and giving ourselves license to forget or repress it. But instantly we are presented with another version of the split: Jonathan is back in his flat, Charlotte climbing into that blue dress he brought her while he stands at the window behind, answering her questions and looking vaguely into the street. Instead of making a two-shot, with Dietrich in the foreground and Todd in the background, seen from a single camera position, Hitchcock arranges for Charlotte to be shot in extreme closeup and then matted in against a shot of Jonathan at the window. According to Bill Krohn, the head of the Production Code Administration, Joseph I. Breen, had been getting irritated about some of Hitchcock’s intentions in the film to show actors in less than full dress, and thus it came about that “Hitchcock was also obliged to rethink another scene that Breen warned against, where Dietrich takes off a bloodstained dress in front of Todd, but he had fun doing it as a special effect.” For Krohn, “the artifice of this shot subliminally hints that the flashback is a fabrication” (111). Yet, more is achieved. The distance

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between Jonathan and Charlotte seems unbridgeable at this moment (even though the sound is recorded to perfectly match the qualities of their two voices in a single acoustical space), quite as though they are the centers of two circles that will never intersect. Then she asks for her belt and in a two-shot he brings it and helps her put it on as she says, concerned, “Oh Johnny, what have I done to you!” She has done a lot, perhaps, but far less than Hitchcock has done to us. The most profound, and directly accessible, effect of the acousmatic scream is that it produces a schism, a severing, in our experience. What our eyes see is split from what our ears hear. Asking, then, where this voice is coming from in a literal sense is a way of missing the point that its presence affects us by splitting our experience. We may surely think of Stage Fright as a film about split experience, experience divided and sundered; and as a film that invokes the theater as a locus of such sundered experience, as well. We may engage some thoughts about film itself as a form that can split our experience, about Hitchcock as a filmmaker intensely interested in exploring this possibility (see Pomerance “Finding”). Splitting our experience is not his ultimate goal, however. He aims to bring us together. Fully to appreciate Hitchcock’s use of sound to sever us from the world and then join us to it, I must leap to the last moments of the film. Not to give too much away, Eve, having fallen in love with a police inspector (Michael Wilding), has managed to trap a killer in the orchestra pit of a theater. The man, glistening with sweat and fear, climbs onstage. The police are closing in. Someone calls to a stagehand to drop the safety curtain to “cut him off,” meaning to lock him on the stage proper. But the fugitive slips and falls on his back at the lip of the stage just as the mechanism releases the steel curtain and it rumbles down. We see the victim’s terrified rictus as he looks up at his fate. Rather than show the victim dissected by this search for “safety,” however, Hitchcock now cuts away to Eve entering the space with her inspector friend. The lighting favors her over the cop. In one fluid shot, her hands come up over her gaping mouth; her eyes open in horror; the inspector draws her head into his shoulder and covers it protectively with his hand. This shot is made, as used to be said in the early days of sound, “m.o.s.” (Mit out sound). That is, there was no sound recording on the set: Eve’s silent scream is so massive and overwhelming that it infects the film itself, with the result that not only she but also the film is silent at this point. “In Hitchcock’s world,” writes Elisabeth Weis, “reticence at its extreme is emotional paralysis, a psychological state indicated by total silence” (154); but I think this “scream” is not a character’s reticence at all, not, for instance, the silent, mouth-open gape of Jessica Tandy in The Birds, which is like the hollow scream of Edvard Munch’s famous painting. The fallen safety curtain would seem to have rendered us all “safe,” by cutting us off


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from the acoustic experience. We are not really safe, of course. We have been subjected to the most abject and profound of terrors, to see without being able to hear—our disability effected not by Eve’s modesty or reserve or even by the muffling (muting) capacity of the detective’s body but by the sudden muteness of the dramatic world. Chion: In Littré’s dictionary of the French language, one of many definitions of “muet” reads: “a person in the service of sultans who, while not prevented from speaking, expresses himself exclusively through sign language. The sultan sent him mutes, who strangled him.” (Voice 99)

Is this mute Eve Gill the opposite of the acousmêtre who screams while Jonathan is regarding his photograph, the voiceless body as contradistinguished from the disembodied voice (as Chion puts it)? Or was that (acousmatic) scream actually also this scream? Is this the embodiment of that scream? The sound comes first, and much later, after all of the story of Stage Fright has been spelled out, we see the image of its production. The acousmêtre is a harbinger, a prophet, an announcement of what we should know, that the filmmaker does know, that in truth we also do know, that we cannot say or see. “How awful it is, looking so!” we may think of the photograph of Charlotte onstage. But to show us the way; not only to reveal to us that this photograph reveals a horror but to point sharply to what that horror is, Hitchcock puts things in reverse. For him the voice is so urgent that it escapes the body—comes out of the body even before the body is prepared to emit it. The voice has its own presence, and the vocalizing frame of flesh can only race to catch up. The voice without a body invokes the body without a voice, that must be its servant. A final thought about the acousmatic voice: The acousmêtre is a voice that surrounds, a voice that nourishes, a voice that recalls a history to which we were not directly privy and a wholeness from which we were severed at birth. The boundary line that delimits our knowledge and recognition does not mark only the history of our lives, however, and what lies outside our view is not only the aboriginal source to which we cannot return. Outside what we can see and recognize also lies what we do not yet know and have not yet encountered, both the afterlife and those aspects of the greater life that do not fill the spaces into which we have traveled. What Spiritualism offered in the late nineteenth century, what photography offered, what cinema promised to offer and then made manifest through its devious and wondrous tricks and illuminations, a fount of experience that could be subsumed if by anything only by occult practices and theories, what chills us because we cannot yet understand it: all this is offered by the acousmatic voice.

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It calls our attention to the cinema of which it is a part not merely as a mode of explication but more profoundly as an intimation and a haunting. “Look!” it says, from a position we cannot identify in a space with which we are not intimate, so that, looking, we seem to experience more than the eye can see in a moment that is transformed into ecstasy. For nothing can be sole or whole That has not been rent. (Yeats)

chapter 6

˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚ As Time Goes By “I must always hide myself.” —Orson Welles to André Bazin

The Sound of Day for Night Before the intensive development of computer-generated imagery for film in the 1990s, the convention for making a scene that would appear to take place at night but which producers preferred, for purposes of technical efficiency, to shoot in broad daylight was to use gels or matte techniques to blue-tint the image; as well as overexposing the film by as many as four f-stops and in general refraining from pointing the camera at the sky (where the sun would appear far too bright). This day-for-night technique, or, as it is called in France, la nuit américaine, served to produce a sense of eerie, moony darkness without requiring filmmakers to address the exigencies of actually shooting by the light of the moon (that is, importing illumination and the electricity to power it, since for cameras as not for lovers, the moon doesn’t glow enough). With the use of day-for-night photography, diegetic movement from a nocturnal to a diurnal scene was as easy as lifting away a filter and changing the exposure. Needless to say, such a transition was typically made through the editing together—off-camera—of two scenes shot in these different ways. But at a wonderful moment in Blow-Up (1966), his first film to gain a major American audience, Michelangelo Antonioni, who does not here avail himself of this conventional day-for-night technique, makes a transition from a night sequence to a diurnal one on camera, using not image but sound. A randy young British photographer (David Hemmings) whose anxieties we have been following must locate his agent, Ron, who has gone off to a pot party. The scene is in a brick mansion behind an iron gate, with dozens of well-to-do and smooth-skinned young folk spread around the cushioned puddles of halflight in various states of transcendence. Chatter, indistinct and energized, fills the air on all sides. Ron and his client have their tête-à-tête but soon Ron, fed 139

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up with the obsessive practicality of this ambitious youth at a time when he and his friends are letting go in a hazy drug-induced dream, grasps the photographer by the collar and gently leads him into the den of iniquity. We see the two of them vanish through a doorway to a back room. The door is framed in the center of the shot. To the left, upon a plinth, is an ornate, painted bust of a bearded man. The loud jabber of partygoers lost in abandon is all around, heightened and softened by the warm colors of the wall and the bust. The party is a cocoon of safety, remote from the real world, and the nocturnal envelope that swathes this house is hinted at in the sexy, quiet rhythms of the off-camera jabber. Now that the men are gone, however, the camera does not budge. The sculpture of the old man waits with us as slowly the voices dim and dissolve, and then completely evaporate. The light does not change. There is silence. It is morning. We cut to the photographer coming awake on top of a bed in another room. Narratively this is a significant transition, because now the photographer will confront the light of day as someone for whom the strange, quasi-hallucinogenic visions of night have magically disappeared: it is not so much that his dreams have dissolved and he must face practical reality as that practical reality has dissolved and he must face the fact that he dreams. He is confronted with doubts about the relationship between what he remembers and what he perceives, about mortality, about the evidence available to us for substantiating “facts.” As a photographer, he tends to believe what he sees. Yet because he failed to carry a camera at a key moment—a moment possibly involving a fantasy but also possibly involving a murder—he has no photographic trace to make his experience come real, precise, clear, definitive, and thus entirely present. Antonioni’s shift from the bacchantes’ delirium at night to the morning sobriety afterward is produced without visual transition, but with acoustic modulation. A similarly acoustic transitional sequence, something of a citation of this one and less pure—since a change of lighting follows the sound cues—can be seen in Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), as Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss), exhausted from sculpting a model of some kind of indeterminate mountain out of plasticine, and worn thin from a fight with his wife over his increasing alienation, collapses at his work table in the family den. The camera shot is static, but the sound changes as off-camera the television voices of Daffy Duck and Marvin the Martian begin to be heard and morning light creeps in and fills the space. Soon he will have a revelation about his “mountain,” and soon after that, Neary will journey all the way to the stars. More in the Antonioni than in the Spielberg, yet in both, it is the sound that seems to change the picture and with the picture, the reality. Those “white wings of time passing” to which Ezra Pound referred: we hear them. The dying voices of Antonioni’s partygoers linger in our memory, so that the following silence indicates emphatically that “the chatter was then.” For Spielberg, the

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Duck and the Martian, epitomes of Saturday morning cartoons, replace that silence, sharply invoking another world, domestic and matinal. What is significant about these Antonioni and Spielberg transitions is the sustained visual image, the emphatic statement that time passes here rather than in a movement from this to another space. Usually, of course, motion picture transitions work obversely to this: the sound continues and the picture changes. As Michael J. Arlen once wrote about the production of TV commercials, “What you definitely didn’t do was jump from one scene to another. When you had a cut, you made sure the music carried the cut—signaled that a cut was coming, signaled that a cut was taking place, and signaled that now a new scene was starting” (Thirty Seconds 180). The maintenance of sound as a fixed, sustained background over which one image is cut to another has been a longstanding practice in film editing. Traditionally, this is called sound overlap and is done as frequently with onscreen diegetic sound as with music: the voice or diegetic sound in shot A continues briefly into shot B, to “cover” or smooth the transition. The legato movement through space suggested by a sound overlap is effective in “creat[ing] the illusion of having more than one camera,” as well (videoforums.co.uk). Nor is the overlap functional only between shots: WRS Motion Picture and Video Laboratory specifies that “in 35mm prints, sound overlaps are required at the roll changeover in theatrical projection. (Ref: ANSI PH 22.55). Whenever composite prints are made in multiple reels, where these reels might be spliced together for projection, a sound overlap is required of the print at the end of the reel being spliced onto the head of the next reel. This overlap contains the sound information in advance of the next reel (26 frames in 16mm and 20 frames in 35mm)” (wrslabs.com). Not only does sound overlapping effect a fluidity in transition through space or time, it yields a sense of propulsion that accentuates the rhythm of cinema. Overlap became especially important in North American cinema after filmmakers and editors had been influenced, by the jump cutting of the French New Wave in the 1950s, to reduce their dependency on dissolves, which had a built-in visual smoothness. The sound overlap works in editing whether or not there is visual or narrative discontinuity between the images in a cut, simply by masking over the change from one shot to another. But when there is in fact a profound visual or narrative discontinuity, a sound overlap can effect a stunning visual metaphor, bridging seamlessly between two elements that might seem unconnectable otherwise. One of the most memorable examples of the simple sound overlap as visual metaphor is the edit in David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia (1962) where Lawrence (Peter O’Toole) blows out a match in macro close-up and the sound of his breath is carried across to a shot of the sun slowly rising over the desert. Here the metaphor suggests that the breath of this individual man upon this tiny fire is also capable of becoming the cosmic wind of the universe upon the

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great fire of the sun, a force that spins planets; and since Lawrence’s intention is to move whole nations into a new and hitherto unimagined alignment with one another, it is indeed a personal force of vast, universal dimension that is required of him—just such as is here suggested. In general in cinema, as in all theatrical endeavors, the smooth and uninterrupted engagement of the audience is facilitated by an enforced absence of detectable clues about construction. Thus, typically, in cinema the lights and sound recording equipment, the camera and dolly, the crew and dressing rooms, the contracts and agents, the technical personnel, the writers and director, the make-up team and set builders, etc., are all carefully sequestered behind the lens or beyond sight lines, as are cue cards, catering vehicles, medical and insurance teams, publicity agents, and members of the public eager to catch a view of other people’s working routine.1 As for audiences typically, the words uttered by characters do not invoke thoughts of a script in which they have been inscribed, those characters do not call up the actors who are getting paid for playing them. The smooth edit is part of this concealment apparatus, something that helps viewers commit to the fantasy that they benefit from the presence of an omnipotent eye that never pauses in its deliciously relentless seeing of the relevant and smoothly ongoing world.

Twitterings of the Future However, a radically different possibility exists for the use of sound in transition, quite beyond the straight overlap. Anne V. Coates, who made the matchto-sunrise edit in Lawrence, also made there one of the very first examples of a form that she called “pre-sound,” and that has come to be known as the sound “pre-lap”: the destination image, rather than the origin, is home to the edit sound. Thus, we hear in advance a sound from a location to which we have not yet been introduced (not necessarily recognizing it as such), and we position it imaginatively in the present cinematic context we are inhabiting before a transition is made (a transition, further, that the presence of the sound alone does not typically indicate or give us reason to prepare for). In The Passenger (1975), for example, Antonioni and Franco Arcalli produce a stunning acoustic effect with an offscreen knock upon a door. David Locke

1. Such observers are not always automatically excluded from participating in at least the spirit of what is being filmed. Late in the evening of July 20, 2007, a crowd of eager pedestrians was gathered on East Wacker Place in Chicago while Batman: The Dark Knight was being filmed nearby. A tall building at the corner of North Macchesney Court was being illuminated by a spotlight rigged high up in a crane, and the spot left a circular pool of light around one of the windows. Everybody wondered where Batman was (that is, the actor Christian Bale performing as Batman), and whether he might be up there, precisely in the spirit of the sort of “pedestrians” typified in classic Batman cartoon literature.

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(Jack Nicholson), a reporter at the end of his rope morally, spiritually, and professionally, is searching out the roots of a story in Africa. His attempts to make contacts there fail. Ready to surrender even his life (so desperate and hopeless is he), he happens to find in his hotel the body of a man named Robertson (Chuck Mulvehill). Pondering for some while, he makes the decision to “kill” David Locke and to become Robertson instead. As he sits bathed in sweat at a little table examining the two passports, he suddenly hears a knock on the door and looks up cautiously. Then he hears his own voice saying, “Come in,” and we understand that he has been transported to a memory of an earlier event. But the camera holds on him “listening.” As he and Robertson converse off-camera (located in his memory), we watch him switching the photographs in the passports in two extended close shots that occupy in total fifty-one seconds of screen time before, as we cut, we discover a Uher tape recorder on a chair and realize that it is not only in Locke/Robertson’s memory that this conversation is taking place but here in this very room and now, on a tape that is playing as he works. Experiencing this, one is displaced and disjoined temporally, at once. In Blackmail (1929), Alfred Hitchcock and his editor Emile de Ruelle had experimented in a rudimentary overlap of this type on two separate occasions, one perhaps more distinctive, certainly more ostentatious, than the other. Having been pursued and attacked by—and then finally having knifed to death—a sly sexual predator (Cyril Ritchard), Alice (Anny Ondra) stares fixedly at his dead hand emerging from his bedsheets; soon later, walking the streets, she comes upon a sleeping tramp, whose arm is extended in exactly the same way. The similitude disorients and terrifies her and she shrieks, but in a swift cut we see that the shriek is “also” coming from the lips of the predator’s elderly landlady, who, in another place, either later on or at the same moment we cannot be sure, is discovering his body. Also later in the film, the very troubled Alice is sitting in her parents’ parlor as in the little tobacco shop adjoining it the door keeps opening for customers and a little bell sounds; at one point, as we stare at her beleaguered face—she is afraid her boyfriend, the police inspector on the case, will tumble her as the murderess—a loud clang seems to pronounce the agony of her unconscious, but a quick cut to the shop shows that it was really (only) the doorbell once again. These are prototypical pre-lap cuts, both: in the second case, the shop where the bell is “really” sounding is very near the head of Alice, where we imagine it, and so we don’t really accomplish a major spatial transition, but the sound is coming from the upcoming shot; and in the first, we clearly see the scream in both parts of the cut, so rather than only thinking we are hearing Alice scream while “really” it is the landlady, in fact we can tell that both women are in agony, and, indeed, for the same reason. A similar precursor, again based upon a woman’s scream, occurs as Richard Hannay

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(Robert Donat) makes his escape from London on The Flying Scotsman in The 39 Steps (1935).2 Coates’s remarkable pre-lap in Lawrence of Arabia is a full-fledged example of the form, made by a very young editor who thought that “to be cutting for David [Lean] who was known to be one of the greatest editors ever was nervethreatening” (Oldham 158). It goes like this: Outside the town of Akaba, we are at an encampment where the combined (and mutually distrusting) armies of Auda abu Tayi (Anthony Quinn) and Sherif Ali (Omar Sharif) wait to mount a collaborative invasion. It is evening. Suddenly a shot rings out and we see that a man—one of Auda’s tribe—has been murdered, and the murderer caught and bound. Auda demands his instant death. In order to placate Auda’s Bedu, but in such a way that no member of their tribe should harm one of Ali’s men and thus precipitate a civil war on the very cusp of the battle, Lawrence proclaims that he himself will perform the execution. He takes Ali’s revolver and coldly shoots the man—who lifts his head at the last moment and makes himself visible as a friend, earlier saved by Lawrence from a blistering death in the desert. Despondent now at his own ugly brutality, staring into the blue moonlight, Lawrence throws his gun away (and a horde of eager Bedouin scramble to retrieve it as a token). “You did the right thing,” Ali comforts him, but Lawrence is lost in agony. The camera swoops into his face as he stares off vacantly. A siren bell is clanging in his mind to announce the sharp remonstration of his consciousness and responsibility, the torment of having to endure every exigency that being committed to a cause implies. Sharply, however, we cut to an aerial view of Akaba the following morning, with a man on a parapet in the center of the frame ringing the alarm bell to warn the populace that an attacking force has been spotted. As the camera pans left we see the joint army in full charge. This prelap carries us forward across the jump cut, from a stable take-off point in one shot—Lawrence’s agonized gaze—to a precisely located and unshifting, albeit conceptually and geographically distant, landing point in another: “We used direct cuts in the film,” said Coates, “which [Lean] hadn’t done very much. In the script it said dissolve, but I’d been to the French cinema quite a bit, and they were doing a lot of direct cutting. Opticals were becoming old-fashioned” (LoBrutto 66). After the cut, we find ourselves induced to reconceive Lawrence as a man who was cold-heartedly concentrating on Akaba all the time, preplanning it by moonlight. While the trend of direct cutting was not especially long-lived—David Cook suggests that it “began in the 1960s under the influence of the French New Wave” but “reached its zenith in 1976” and was soon “largely abandoned as a 2. William Rothman has kindly directed my lapsed attention to this film and its significance as an early, or prototypical, case of the pre-lap.

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means of scenic transition” (395)—its effect in American film was immensely powerful, and the sound pre-lap that often accompanied the jump cut made possible cinematic moments of a peculiar and haunting quality. Clearly, too, for audiences being introduced to the pre-lap by a cut such as this one by Coates, the technique made possible a delightful kind of play of consciousness that had not been possible before, a perception through metaphor. The likeness between two disparate images was palpably constructed through the sound element they shared. Cinema could transport us from place to place not only through our eyes but also through our ears, and so the ear came alive in a new way as an agency of cinematic experience. If before this, in grasping and analyzing what people onscreen said, or in acoustically bathing in the music that gave away their emotional state of affairs, the ear had merely followed the eye as a passive retainer, now it could act, could leap, could touch the fictional world directly. In the typical version of the pre-lap technique, the camera pans slowly over, or lingers within, a scene (A) as we hear a voice or two uttering significant dialogue, or else a significant sound effect, off-camera (apparently also in A). The recording is managed on location or in studio so that the sounds we hear in scene A seem very proximal even if unidentified onscreen, as though just off the edge of the picture frame, perhaps immediately behind us. In this scene, in short, the sound seems to fit presently. In a moment, we expect, the camera will discover the source of it here, and thus the shot will be unified and completed. But instead we cut: not to another angle here and now but to another scene altogether, one made perhaps in another location entirely; or perhaps right here at another time; or perhaps somewhere else at another time, and discover that it is in this other, distal location, scene B, that the sound is diegetically rooted. The sound in the first shot was—we only now understand—an overlap, specifically a pre-lap, an anticipation of this future or this replay of a memory or daydream that takes place elsewhere. Since we must travel to arrive at the second shot we need a pathway, and that pathway, the link between the two shots, is the sound. It is as though our present anticipation of the future and our future memory of the past engage us—here and now—as sounds and voices before materializing into images. Very like the world into which we were born, first hearing much and seeing nothing, the scape of the past or future is one to which we migrate along a dark canal in which we can hear but not see. A softer version of this edit uses a musical track for continuity, rather than dialogue. Often, what seems to be a nondiegetic background theme in the first shot turns out to be diegetic sound coming from a specific source in the second: a car radio, a dance band. The pre-lap that Coates manufactured for Lean was so powerful as to be paralyzing, in the specific sense that viewers, caught unawares rather like the

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Akaban citizens they were watching under attack, were thought to require the pan shot to establish the military charge. But the pre-lap can also be—as Stephen Prince suggested to me—“ostentatious,” not only working to achieve an artistic effect with great economy and power but also boldly announcing itself as doing so. A good example, Prince suggested, is a double transition in Mike Nichols’s The Graduate (1967). Having just finished college, Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) is still sexually rather innocent, and has fallen under the spell of his girlfriend’s mother, Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft). Mortified by her generally, but especially fearful of her avowed interest in sleeping with him, he flees an attempted seduction. We see him leaving the Robinson house late one night, hopping into his new Alfa Romeo. Ben is drowning in anticipation, insecurity, and self-consciousness, the target of his parents’ overweening hopes. His father’s voice is in his mind, urging, selling, spieling, pressuring: “Ladies and gentlemen, your attention please, uh, for this afternoon’s feature attraction . . .” When we cut, however, Mr. Braddock (William Daniels) is in sunglasses, cabana hat, and bathing outfit at poolside, some time later, as friends have been gathered for a barbecue. Ben, who really is the afternoon’s featured attraction, has been pressured by his father to parade around in a scuba wetsuit, replete with fins, mask, and harpoon, and is now urged to get into the swimming pool. We cut to his angle, looking up through the goggles at the parents bending over at poolside and the father’s hand pushing him underwater. He stands at the bottom of the pool, and the camera slowly withdraws as we hear the rhythmic bubbling sound of his exhalations—the backward movement continues for a full thirty seconds. Then, from within his deep consciousness, we hear Benjamin asking Mrs. Robinson whether in fact they might meet up somewhere. We are still underwater, moving away from the now tiny Benjamin, for a full additional thirteen seconds listening to these two speaking before we cut to the young man nervous in a telephone booth and realize that the sound of the conversation is coming not from his febrile imagination underwater but from a diegetically “real” situation later, on land. Not only is the conversational sound geographically removed from the swimming pool, but half of it, Mrs. Robinson’s part, is removed doubly, since she is not even visually present in the second shot as she speaks over the line. The length of the pre-lap and the play with Mrs. Robinson’s acoustic distance even when the pre-lap is resolved contribute to the ostentatiousness of the edit, to its distinctness for viewers as a feature of the film to be enjoyed and recognized for its own sake. Always in a pre-lap it is necessary that the ultimate sound be sensible in the context of the originating shot, where it does not belong but where we will first hear it: as to this edit, Sam O’Steen, who made it, commented, “Well, he was drowning and desperate, so that gave him the impetus to call Mrs. Robinson” (60).

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An interesting variant on the pre-lap one might term a “faux pre-lap”: the cut is not between two scenes but between two angles of the same scene, the second unpredicted from the first. Again “ostentatious,” because similarly a play upon the technique, is a faux pre-lap by O’Steen in Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974). The private detective J. J. Gittes (Jack Nicholson) has driven up to visit the Los Angeles water manager, Hollis Mulwray, at his home in Pasadena. Offscreen, birds are twittering. He rings the doorbell. A butler (James Hong) answers coldly, looks at his business card, and wordlessly closes the door in his face. Offscreen now, as Gittes continues to stare at the door, and mixed with the twittering birds, we hear very high-pitched, and modulated, squealing sounds: a female is being attacked or someone is in the throes of ecstasy, or an animal is being tortured, it is impossible to tell. Gittes also hears these sounds, and looks off-camera, as if to peg them. Reverse shot: Mulwray’s banana-yellow Packard convertible coupe, parked on gravel in a puddle of dappled sunshine. The sound must be coming from within this vehicle—from the back seat, we tell ourselves. It is undoubtedly the sound of sex. But suddenly from behind the car a chauffeur emerges backing up and bent over, cap on head and an apron covering his torso. He is using a sponge to scrub the car, squee squee squee. The sound wasn’t coming from here, in the car but from there, behind it. In Sydney Pollack’s Three Days of the Condor (1974), a young CIA researcher (Robert Redford), code-named Condor, returns from a lunch break to find every member of his Manhattan work station brutally slain. He runs for his life, slowly picking up clues that suggest someone—perhaps someone within the Company—is out to terminate him. On the point of exhaustion, he kidnaps a photographer (Faye Dunaway) and forces her to give him shelter overnight so that he can rest and think. He brings her to the bed and pinions her next to himself. “Couldn’t you let me stay in the other room?” she begs, “I believe what you told me.” But “No you don’t,” says he; “I don’t know if I do.” A disembodied voice in his head, just as he drifts off, now intones—rather as though on a distant radio—“That includes Condor, of course.” We cut and see two men walking down a street, one of whom was the chief assassin earlier. They are negotiating a deal to have Condor eliminated. In the previous scene, the phrase “That includes Condor, of course,” is a direct reference to yet one more thing—a code name and a code system, indeed a self—Condor is finding it difficult to accept and believe, now that his world has been turned upside-down. The plotters plot, but Condor is dreaming of himself. Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974) is the tale of how a surveillance engineer, Harry Caul (Gene Hackman), is caught up in a brutal murder scheme derived from his clandestine recording of a conversation between a young man and woman in San Francisco’s Union Square. At a key point in the film, having completed his complex edit of the recording yet being innocent of its deeper content, and having failed in an attempt to deliver the package to the

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man who commissioned it, Caul is riding the elevator out of an office building with the tape in his hand. All of a sudden the girl from Union Square steps on, and he withdraws to a corner, aware now that, one of the subjects whose voice “stars” on his tape, she is closer than he had thought to the man who paid him to record her—working, in fact, in the same building. As, quite oblivious, she looks down, and he remembers her with her friend of Union Square, we hear the birds’ high-pitched twittering that was initially in the park background as the recording was being made of the two young people plotting. But now the sound becomes louder and less birdlike, more mechanical, and suddenly we cut to a macro close-up of audio tape rewinding through Caul’s machine in his studio. “In truth,” he is at work listening to that conversation again, undoubtedly even remembering the elevator ride, and ready to hear now, for the first time, a malicious edge to the recorded conversation that had not caught his attention before. This pre-lap, by Walter Murch, has the delicious effect of mixing the innocent twittering of birds in a public park at noon—while jazz musicians are happily playing—with the harsh, anxiety-producing sound of the whirring tape machine from the bowels of which will soon issue the information that tells Caul he is in the middle of an assassination plot. Our own credulity in the elevator shot, our interpretation of the sound in benign terms, is an index of our defensiveness against the idea that these two young conversants might be harboring deep malevolence. We are in a position to project that defensiveness onto Caul, as well—and to the extent that we succeed, we are buffered against the darker reading of the story that will inevitably break through and overwhelm us dramatically nearer the end.

Gasp and Turn Two comments about the pre-lap as a fixed-sound transition: Upholstery. First, since the mechanism operates by bringing us to a place we do not exactly anticipate as a destination, and since a certain amount of shock is therefore conceivable for viewers unless somehow their move is buffered, the pre-lap functions as a kind of upholstery to soften the shock of the voyage. Schivelbusch informs us that upholstery began, in fact, on nineteenthcentury trains, traveling on which the bourgeois passenger “saw and felt his own body being transformed into an object of production” (Journey 122). In the “voyage” of the pre-lap, the “upholstering” buffer is a particular nuance in the sound as it occurs in the first shot, one that makes it seem, somehow, obscurely and dimly, not only logical and appropriate but also, and at the same time, wrong.3 The sound is here, and we can understand that it is here, and yet as much as it fits it should also not be here. This is a very subtle way of 3. I am grateful to R. Bruce Elder for this insight.

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signaling a voyage. Perhaps this “voice” seems to emanate from a source just a little too close by, closer than such a voice could be in a space such as the one that is being described. Perhaps it is pitched differently than other voices we have heard here, or cast with a different timbre, as though subject to the pressure of a different atmosphere. Perhaps what it says isn’t entirely sensible in this context. When the transition is resolved, we have a feeling of release and coherence: yes, here is where that voice truly belongs. This is why we are neither exasperated nor utterly confused when the cut occurs, nor displeased, even though we have been, as it were, ripped away from an integrated whole of picture and sound only to have our world displaced by a temporary transition that may well seem, as it is occurring, relatively loose-jointed and incomprehensible. Although it makes a certain amount of sense that we should hear the sound as we do at first, enough sense that our tendency is to localize the sound in the present space, something about it is insufficient; its true sensibility comes later. In a good pre-lap the slightest nuance of dislocation is all that is required, and a considerably bolder misfit, something conducive to a sense of lack, produces a different experience altogether, an eeriness or haunting quality that is appropriate for suspense. In the typical pre-lap one does not wish to edit in such a way that the audience senses a lack, only a marginal strangeness. The swimming pool shot of The Graduate is a good example. When Benjamin is underwater, the voice we hear him use seems to be speaking on dry land at the same time as it seems, in its slight echo, to traverse a space just such as the watery one we see. We wish—and presumably he does, too—that he were on dry land, and so the landedness, the territoriality, of the voice addresses our desire, if not our real condition or Benjamin’s. Obviously, filmmakers have the option of infusing a transition with irony by making the voice appear to be appropriate—even entirely appropriate—in the first setting and thus in fact playing upon the shock that is created when the scene shifts to a grounding in different, presumably heightened, appropriateness. In such a case, the transition, rather than being an upholstered voyage, is deliberately made a little uncomfortable, rather like a joy ride in an amusement park. “Heavens! It is here and not there that the voice belongs!!” one thinks when the transition is done, “not there, where I had such certainty of its appropriateness! I have been duped. I was sure it belonged there (because the displacement, the wrongness, was so subtle, if indeed present at all, that I did not or could not pick it up)!” In Chinatown, the dismaying look on the inhospitable butler’s face gives us reason to believe something illicit or extreme is happening inside the house, so we are surprised when the camera turns around; then, the Mulwray house already having been set up for us as questionable morally, the car becomes a secondary setting in which illicit activity could be undertaken. Since neither the house nor the car seem “wrong” as locations for the squealing sound—this exactly because nefarious happenings often take place in secluded

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bourgeois interiors or the vehicles that are their substitutes—the presentation of the chauffeur with his sponge is utterly ironic and comic. The comedy inheres not so much in the discrete character of this chauffeur as in the ability of the sound of the action of a sponge upon a car so faithfully to replicate human squeals. The sponge itself is a comedian. There is of course no formal requirement that the sound effect in a pre-lap be a vocal or a musical one. A door opening or closing, a telephone ringing, a police siren, the sound of a tree falling in the woods, an audience applauding, and so on: any of these will do handsomely. I call this sound a “voice” because it is the voice of the scene. The acousmêtre passé. In pre-laps the scenic transition occurred before we recognized it. Looking back—that is, finally knowledgeable—we can say that we heard the transition before we saw it, but usually in the pre-lap our initial hearing isn’t taken as recognition of a transition, at all. We associate the sound of the new scene, that we are hearing now before being carried there, with some anchorage in this first locale. Actually, the pre-lapped sound indicated a moment of scenic transition that occurred outside our consciousness. When first we hear the “voice,” and consciously affix it to the spatial play of the first shot, it is already coming from somewhere else, although upon the instant we do not know this. It has a limited acousmatic effect: the voice is an acousmêtre passé masquerading as an off-camera present voice, as it were. While we are hearing it, it is coming from anywhere, but in our innocent belief that it belongs in, or near, the present scene we de-acousmatize it. Although we think it to be grounded here, yet off-camera, it is really there, in a place to which (or back to which) we have not yet traveled (and do not recognize ourselves as being on the brink of traveling). It may well be in a space we have never seen and cannot imagine. In Lawrence of Arabia, when we hear the bell tolling we are content to associate it with the anxiously gazing Lawrence, and do not take it as a harbinger of our voyage into Akaba in the morning. The apparently present acousmêtre stands, we believe, for his deep unconscious, his feeling, some acoustic gravitas that even if outside the boundary of the screen nevertheless touches upon what the screen shows. Once the second shot is projected, if we think back we can see that the ringing “voice” we now hear as present (“present” in the Akaba that is, of course, factually absent from the movie theater even as it is narratively “alive” for us), and that we once heard as present before, was in fact absent before, not a voice off-camera but a voice utterly beyond the scene and floating without location. Yet, so fervent is the desire to rationalize, to de-acousmatize, that voice by identifying it in the second shot that one does not usually think back to this great absence at all. One accepts the voice as belonging here, now, as being fixed to our present ongoing experience. This acousmêtre passé, an acousmêtre fully sensed only in retrospect, is therefore, for the most part, also

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an inaudible acousmêtre, inaudible as an acousmêtre, at least in that we do not presently tend to recollect what it was that we took this voice for before it carried us here. Editor Peter Hunt and director Terence Young effected what amounts to a proto-pre-lap with From Russia with Love in 1962, but in this case the “surprise” of the transition is built into the premises of the narrative, which involves espionage and interpersonal trickery. The filmmaker behaves toward his audience rather in the way that his characters do toward one another. James Bond (Sean Connery) returns to his hotel room, steps into the bathroom, turns on the bath water very hot. We see the steam puffing up from the tub as methodically he strips (mostly just out of camera range). But he hears something in the bedroom, so furtively he wraps himself in a towel, takes his Walther PPK securely in hand, checks the safety catch, and tiptoes outside onto the balcony and thence into the adjoining bedroom. Someone is in his bed (shades of Goldilocks), the beautiful blond Russian spy Tatiana Romanova (Daniela Bianchi), her lips all persimmon red and her eyes blinking remorselessly. They introduce themselves and he leans close to her. She feels his back for the telltale scar that identifies him as 007, and he tells her he wants the secret code machine, but in the morning. As they prepare for what we can happily imagine to be a long night of relentlessly athletic lovemaking together—Spy v. Spy!—we hear the gentle sound of film running through a projector, the pre-lap ostentatiously introducing itself! We are in a position to expect a transition to a briefing room the next day, where one or the other of them is being shown a film. But instead, our camera eye moves up to the wall behind their bed and then cuts into a room behind that wall, where here and now an observation team is filming the two lovers for later blackmail. The cut isn’t to a there but to another version of here, and the sound isn’t leading us forward in time at all, at least not forward to a new scene. We seem to move forward to another and quite differently organized spate of activity, an appreciation of which is diluted unless we have apprehended, first, what that activity is oriented toward. So, if the photographers are at work—diegetically speaking—simultaneously with the lovemakers, our apprehension must grasp the lovemaking before the photography team and its work make any sense at all. The ironic revelation that Tatiana is not there to play with Bond, but has been directed to seduce him for a camera, produces some excitement, but our experience is dampened a little when we realize that the sound of the projector has been recorded to favor our hearing it over Bond’s. That is, it doesn’t sound exactly as it would in the bedroom space, else hearing would be impossible for us; it sounds just loud enough to draw our attention, while not being loud enough, presumably, to draw his. What is interesting now about this transition, for audiences who can continue to watch the film at home on DVD and who are well educated as to the premises and operations of the pre-lap—the 1970s and 1980s being long gone

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and the conventions of earlier cinema more and more rapidly being learned and digested all the time by viewers always eager for fresh treats and novel narrative techniques—is that it can surprise precisely by not being what viewers expect. We read this scene from Russia as a kind of stalled pre-lap, even though it was never intended to function that way and did not do so for its 1960s audiences. What it was at the time was an acoustic compromise. But film can go further. Not only can contemporary audiences look back on earlier films and be shocked not to find transitions they have learned how to enjoy, but once the audience can be counted on to know and expect the delights of the pre-lap it is possible to take the further step of intimating or setting up a pre-lap that doesn’t take place. Essentially, the filmmaker constructs exactly the sort of scene that audiences in the know have learned to interpret as the launching pad for a pre-lap, a scene very like any of the “scenes A” I have discussed above, but the transition out of it is a straight one, to someplace not so very far away—physically or conceptually—at all. Some fine examples can be found in Doug Liman’s The Bourne Identity (2002), a film that appealed to a sophisticated viewership who were prepared for slick editing and strange narrative transitions. In one scene, Marie Kreutz (Franka Potente), a German tourist who has helped the amnesiac American intelligence operative Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) escape from Switzerland and has become his traveling companion and lover, is shown slowly coming awake in a Parisian hotel room. As she lies with her eyes closed, she hears Jason’s voice softly, and somewhat distantly, saying, “Hey.” Twenty-first-century viewers cued to the fast-paced editing and frequent transitions of action film fully expect a (by now conventionally) sly shift to another scene, where he is talking to her intimately as they are engaged in some interesting activity, but instead the camera offers a reverse shot of him sitting patiently at the foot of her bed, now. The moments between these two, we learn, are weighted in the present. They have no past. They anticipate no future. Soon later, as Jason is on the run with her out of Paris, now aware that he was an assassin, we watch the CIA handlers in Washington exasperated at the French police having let them slip. The high-level supervisor Abbott (Brian Cox) is seen storming down a hallway at night, his trenchcoat still on. “You said twenty-four hours,” we hear him say impatiently. “He’s still not back.” It is easy enough to read this as Abbott rehearsing the reprimand he is about to deliver to his subordinate Conklin (Chris Cooper). Conklin agonizes alone in his office (worried about what is to come) and mutters apologetically, “We’ve got a good idea where he is.” Back to the fast-pacing Abbott, now swerving around a corner. “You’ve got a black ops agent who’s off the reservation . . .” Back to the stewing Conklin. Then and only then we see that the conversation we are hearing is taking place between the two of them in Conklin’s office diegetically prior to the shots we have just watched. It is from Conklin’s office

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that Abbott has been storming away, and it is with the memory of him storming out that Conklin has been stewing in that office. Rather than the offscreen sound bridging us forward to a scene we cannot anticipate, as in the traditional pre-lap, it is bridging us backward to a scene we were never privileged to watch (because of the filmmaker’s arbitrary, and now evident, choices). While there are many possibilities and formulae for secretly not taking the audience on a voyage, or at least not taking them on the voyage they expect— perhaps not bringing them forward or backward in diegetic time or across diegetic space in a surprising way, given that the “surprise” of the pre-lap has now been conventionalized and lost its bite; or bringing them backward when they expect to go forward—any technique for accomplishing this still raises the issue of escaping the flow of diegetic time as consciously tracked by the viewer, escaping quite differently than cinema always already permits. What cinema always already permits is the peculiar plasticity that is possible when we can select significant nodes or events from a systematic flow and elide anything and everything that occurs between them. All narrative art, it could be argued, aims in some way to do this: to choose (or to permit or goad the viewer to choose) the “important” events and perspectives and weave them into a tapestry that seems coherent in its own way. Mary Ann Doane writes of the simultaneous continuity and discontinuity of cinema, for example, the form in which “any-instant-whatever” becomes a proper topic (Emergence 173–74; 180). The surprise temporal edit, however, makes us explicitly conscious of this more general state of affairs by performing and transgressing it openly and for dramatic effect. We not only escape from the contingencies of non-narrative, “real” time; we escape from the very escape methods that otherwise often free us. As we watch, we distinctly feel ourselves to be in the power of a navigator who is avowedly picking the exposures to which we will be subject, who is openly playing with our passage through diegetic time. We could say that our breathing is interrupted, since breath and its partner, the heartbeat, constitute the inner metronome of our expectation, experience, and embodied temporal knowledge. The pre-lap edit produces something like a diegetic gasp. Quite another possibility occurs, equally fascinating but structurally inverted. This I might call the diegetic “turn.” In the turn, when we move from shot A to shot B we do not make a surprising leap either spatially or temporally, although often we do move through space or time. The change we are meant to notice—that is, to be stunned by to some degree, to acclimatize ourselves toward, and thus to self-consciously learn—is attitudinal, political, or philosophical, and thus, eventually, orientational, and is, whether surprising or not, within the character we are following rather than outside in the world as we and the character know it. In the turn, the character realizes something so central and important that all of experience will now be different. In addressing the turn, I have in mind not the myriad ways in which

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a director can openly indicate such a character change, because the drama of film almost inevitably requires this: immobilized “Jeff ” Jefferies recoiling in horror as, in Rear Window, he realizes his girlfriend is about to be attacked by a vicious murderer (a camera placement coupled with an actor’s move); perky Tracy Lord suddenly knowing, at the end of The Philadelphia Story, that she still does love C. K. Dexter Haven (an actor’s facial expression coupled with a line of dialogue)—but ways in which the medium of cinema can be used more subtly to transfer such a change to the viewing audience so that the audience can feel the orientational shift internally. The audience participates in the change, just as, in cases of the diegetic gasp, the audience participates in a spatial or temporal surprise—indeed, is subjected to one the characters typically do not feel themselves. Let us consider as one beautiful example of the turn a subtle moment in John Badham’s Saturday Night Fever (1977). This film, wildly popular at the time of its release (in part because of the affecting musical track by the BeeGees), and responsible more than any other single motion picture for the career of John Travolta, tells the story of a young man named Tony Manero, a Brooklyn adolescent who spends his weekdays slaving in a hardware store but on Saturday nights becomes the de facto king of a dance club subculture. Tony, middle child in a working-class Italian family, is a dancer with prodigious talent, and wishes to extend his abilities to their limit. Accordingly, he partners with a young woman, Stephanie Mangano (Karen Lynn Gorney), who differs from him in being WASP and therefore less controlled by family and ethnic passion and more committed to climbing the social ladder; in being older and therefore both more sophisticated and less idealistic; and in holding down a secretarial job in Manhattan. If he is striving, she has “made it.” She represents to him not only a focus for love but also a model of a possible future. Thriving in Brooklyn with his gang, Tony is also imprisoned, and if he can just find a way to cross the river and follow in Stephanie’s footsteps, perhaps he can become something in life (like his brother, who is a priest [but who, to the consternation of Mr. and Mrs. Manero, is on the verge of giving up the cloth]). In the culminating dance contest at the club, Tony and Stephanie beat out a Puerto Rican couple and take first place. Stephanie, for whom the long escapade of rehearsing with Tony and slumming in his world has been a taxing entertainment, is ecstatic with triumph and the feeling of completion; but Tony is bitter and shocked, because skill on the dance floor means more to him than anything in life and he saw quite plainly that the other couple gave a superior performance. “Stephanie, it’s fixed!” he tells her, giving over the prize to the shocked Puerto Ricans. He leads her outside to his car for a ritual sexual domination, standard practice in his gang on Saturday nights, but she resists angrily and runs off. Now, inebriated, the gang proceeds to the Verrazano Narrows Bridge—an enormous eerily lit silver thread spanning the darkness at Brooklyn’s end—

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where one of the boys, Bobby C. (Barry Miller), trying to confront Tony over not caring for him enough, accidentally slips to his death. At the end of the scene, as he stands beneath the bridge, Tony’s Brooklyn world is dissolving around him. Sure-handed mastery of the dance floor has become, in his view, merely something others needed to accord him for their own benefit, not something he can be certain he possesses. His relationship with Stephanie, slowly warming from its original stiff professionalism into a possible friendship, has been compromised by his arrogance and aggression. And he has been shown the crippling gap between his own inflated self and the awkward Bobby, who adored him and looked to him as a paragon but who was wounded by his casual inattention and is now lost forever. It is the dead of night beside the Narrows. “Anybody think he killed himself?” a detective too casually asks Tony and his friends. “There are ways,” says Tony, “of killin’ yourself without killin’ yourself.” The kids are dismissed, as a cop comes up and says they aren’t going to find anything out there tonight. “Shit,” says Tony, turning to go. But go where? His parents, now absorbed with his brother, will not understand. The boys in the gang have been conning him, without knowing it. There is only Stephanie, whom he has alienated, perhaps permanently. He paces off under the glare of a street light in his white dance suit, as a nondiegetic beat fades up. From a subway platform he gets onto an empty train, then transfers. On the second train he settles into a graffiti-filled corner, full of bloody reds and oranges, the sound of the BeeGees’ haunting “How Deep Is Your Love” creeping up slowly on the sound track. The subway sounds are virtually suspended now, as though Tony, buried in his thoughts, is cut off completely from the world. With a cigarette in his mouth he is staring into space. In a dissolve (with the sound of a passing subway on the track), he is on a third train, sitting alone in the middle of the brightly lit car. We look down the length of the space, as seven shiny poles measure a kind of neutral, hypothetical distance that he is not traveling. The music comes up—that sweet, high-pitched, youthful male voice saying that he knows “your eyes” in the morning sun, and “wants to feel you” in his arms again—as we cut to a close shot of Tony leaning his head back, and as the light in the car goes out for a moment. Seen face-on now, he has realized that he loves Stephanie and that he needs her. It becomes possible for us to imagine that the “me” in the lyric—“you come to me on a summer breeze”—is Tony himself, and that the voice represents his own thought of a blissful reunion with Stephanie. But in the succeeding two shots something especially interesting begins to happen, as the BeeGees sing, “Keep me warm in your love/ Then you softly leave . . .” The first shot is made with a long lens from one end of the subway platform where Tony gets off. He is walking toward us, not quite exhausted, still not quite purposeful, yet on the very edge of purposefulness, as though working out his purpose. The second shot is an optical blow-up of the first, so that Tony

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Not quite purposeful, yet on the edge of purposefulness, Tony Manero (John Travolta) approaches the camera in John Badham’s Saturday Night Fever (Robert Stigwood Organization/Paramount, 1977). Digital frame enlargement.

appears to be closer to us on the platform but at the same time (because of the optical process) grainier, thus, less distinctly present. He is moving forward without giving an absolute sense of moving forward, and so we are caught in his perfect mixture of indecisiveness and yearning. As he walks in these two shots, his feet in the first and the shuffling of his torso in the second catch exactly the tempo of the BeeGees’ beat as they sing. Travolta, who is an accomplished dancer, did all his own dance work in the film, and established early on that Tony moves with his body as a unified whole. There is a rhythmic relationship between the movement of his legs and the matching shifts of his torso, shoulders, and hips. He appears to move here, at any rate, under the sway of the music, following it but not yet leading it. It is something of a myth to which he is subscribing, not one he is writing. As the verse culminates with “And it’s me you need to show how deep is your love,” we see lower Manhattan as a silhouette at sunrise in a time-lapse shot (Tony has been walking all night, and as the clouds scud swiftly across the sky the sun is now peeking above the buildings and enflaming the East River). The next shot is stunning, especially because it is so mundane and so true. The music continues with the chorus, “—is your love, how deep is your love, I really need to learn . . .” We are looking from a second-story window down at the sidewalk in front of Stephanie’s Manhattan brownstone. It is morning. Cars are parked on the street, a sapling stands bordered by a tiny white iron fence. Tony moves into the shot from left, stopping at one stoop, but then stepping onto this building and walking up. As he entered the shot and headed

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toward that first building, his legs were still exactly on the beat, picking up the choreographic relation between screen movement and nondiegetic sound that preceded this. (All through the film we have seen Tony walking, strutting, posturing, dancing to a beat.) But suddenly, as he sees Stephanie’s address something transforms Tony. He begins to pace not on the beat but in syncopation, stepping down halfway through each beat the way a trained dancer would do. Until now, he has been marching to a voice many have heard before, but now he is moving with his own energy to a voice that is his own. And it is in syncopation—perfect syncopation—that he bounds up the steps to her place so that he can apologize to her sincerely and confide in her what his future is going to be: he’s going to get his own place, move to Manhattan, get a job. “I’m not goin’ back there, they’re assholes.” There is a frequently employed but rarely stated assumption in theorizing about film, that if the essence of the cinematic does not lie naturally and exclusively in matters directly related to the action of the camera, it can be associated instead with some grandiloquent operation of the performer, some bizarre characterization or extremity of expression, some vocal tone, some light in the eyes, some magnetism—something, at any rate, exceedingly perceptible. The composition of a frame by cropping and lens selection or by camera movement and placement; the texture and luminosity, or color, of an image derivable from film stock and exposure; the mise-en-scène of an elaborate action; the raging of a furious personality; the smooth placidity of a receptive body—all of these, as compositional elements, are typical and visible. What this little sequence from Saturday Night Fever suggests, however, is that an actor’s tiniest gesture (masquerading as a character’s move) can be as powerful an agent of the cinematic effect as any other; can, indeed, turn the film. Surely, and evidently, we have been regaled countless times by an actor’s behavior, which is something else entirely: Brando as Stanley Kowalski, bellowing “Stella!”; John Wayne ratcheting, “That’s . . . what I . . . mean”; Elizabeth Taylor bellowing, “What a dump!” in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1966). And if we have been caught up with, and have long remembered, a facial expression (Cary Grant confronted by Katharine Hepburn), a posture (Marilyn Monroe, in bifocals, putting on her makeup in How to Marry a Millionaire [1953]), a line of dialogue (“I coulda beena contender”), a kiss (James Stewart and Kim Novak in Vertigo [1958]), whatever . . . these have all been contained within, viewed as the subject matter of, a scene. As an epitome, we could reflect on the meeting (at Kate Mantilini on Wilshire Blvd.) between Al Pacino and Robert De Niro in Michael Mann’s Heat (1995), this single occurrence in film to date of an onscreen confrontation between these two powerhouses of screen acting of the 1980s, and note how we can remember always, once we have seen it, the blunt fact that they sit calmly face to face, and that with extreme politeness and even affability they mortally threaten one another: this is a scene out of Shakespeare or Dumas. But this

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confrontation is the content of the scene, after all, not the scene itself. The scene itself is the package that contains this action. In Saturday Night Fever, however, all of the dance set-up at the beginning of the film—Tony prancing down the street with his paint cans to the sound of “Stayin’ Alive”; Tony rehearsing by himself and with Stephanie; Tony performing—is a way of assuring us of the kinds of movement this youth makes, a way of reading him in movement. In the subway, as he walks to the beat of the song, we use that knowledge to read his relationship to this music and to music in general—all music, the music of history, the music of contemporaneous experience, the music of relationship, the music of breath. And in the sidewalk shot, we look down from above not because Badham’s camera is placed arbitrarily but in order to get an unobstructed view of Tony’s feet shifting into syncopation. We must see the entire space in which he enters, approaches, hesitates, and then decides and changes, yet it must be a simple enough space, practical, real—like a Manhattan sidewalk. Nor is there a special extra-diegetic pointer to the shift—a musical jolt, a lighting kick, a flash of colored clothing. After all, this is a movie about a dancer, and all of it is an elaboration of his dance, so we can be presumed to be always concentrating on the way Tony moves. He is always moving musically, and now we have an opportunity to see a slight musical alteration as a signal of a change of fate. The performance of the actor here—Tony’s way of walking—is crafted significantly by the film editor who chooses the frame on which to cut into the shot; and significantly, too, by the actor with a little shift in his movement; and rather than being an object contained within the frame of the film it is the whole meaning of the film at this moment. Indeed, it is not really possible to claim of Saturday Night Fever that as a filmic structure it contains the characterization of Tony Manero; rather, Tony Manero and his experience are the film itself, and therefore the cinema to which we are exposed at this moment is a symbiosis of editor David Rawlins and actor John Travolta. Very like the diegetic gasps I discussed above, however, the diegetic turn of Tony Manero’s fortune is a mechanism of cinematic surprise, because Tony has arrived at his new frame of reference in life before we know it. We do not launch into syncopation with him, having had no cue; we look down impassively as, before our eyes, he switches from stepping on to stepping off the beat. When he switches and we catch on—as, if we are watching carefully, we should—we wonder, what has just happened? and this tiny shudder of inquisitiveness flows exactly from the fact that we are not quite equipped or motivated to join him in his dance. The technique of the forward or backward “gasp,” then, and the technique of the “turn” may both involve surprising the watcher as to location, whether that location is spatial, temporal, philosophical, or motivational. The transition, or edit, works by leaving us a little confused as to where we are, and then

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resolving that confusion pleasurably. In the confusion—which is as brief as it is potent—we find that cinema moves around us without absolutely clear definition; that we are engaged with it wholly; that there seems no world outside of it, no space outside of screen space; that time does not appear to lapse in our watching; that the screen is wholly, and purely, as it was in the earliest days of cinema, alluring. While, to stress a point, not all editing in cinema works this way, there are several notable instances where it does, and with a quite particular effect. To take one more step: for the most part, this “editing by surprise” began in the 1970s, and almost every example I have explored here either takes place squarely during that decade or immediately anticipates it. What, then, we may wonder, is it about that period that should have produced an inspiration and a motivation for editing by surprise?

Moving Without Seeing The pre-lap and what I am calling “the turn” and “the gasp,” editing strategies we find somewhat densely in use during the 1970s and later, all effect a state of affairs in which the filmmaker appears to address the audience directly: “You thought you knew where you were (but I have demonstrated that you were mistaken).” Earlier forms of editing—some of it magisterial and artistic—certainly played with the temporal or spatial positioning of story material: in Citizen Kane, for instance, editor Robert Wise and filmmaker Orson Welles often use shock, such as the white cockatiel screaming in the extreme foreground of a shot, to awaken the viewer and produce an excited entry into a scene. In noir, it was not at all uncommon for the story to move forward or backward to sites that would seem strange by comparison with where we had just been, and indeed, a “complex chronological order” is noted by at least one esteemed reader of noir as a central feature of the genre (Schrader 236). But in general, filmmakers before the 1970s, while they manipulated their audiences’ sense of presence in space or time, did not explicitly address the fact that they were doing this: they did not inform their audiences of the fact that temporal, motivational, and spatial transitions were in play to effect surprise. Filmmakers did not tend to speak in a voice that enunciated this formula: “I am about to move you in such a way that you will become lost.” Or, “I have just moved you in such a way that you did become lost, but now you are settled again.” While at the moment of a transition we might have wondered, “What was that?!” or “Where is that?!” or “When is that?!” our implicit query was instantly addressed with resolving information and therefore, broadly speaking, our wonder was not suspended, thus not itself part of the filmic structure, part of the material that called for our attention. Indeed, in earlier cinema, transitional dislocation had to be recognized and quickly resolved lest

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it creep in and assume its own form. John Carey gives a masterful analysis of traditional techniques for providing this quick address, so that temporal and spatial transitions could be effected with maximal diegetic effect and minimal dislocation for the audience (“Transitions”). By the era of the gesture of dislocative editing, then, the wonderment of the audience had become a formal part of the picture process. How did this come to be? Two changes in filmmaking prominent during the 1970s played a role in editing changes: the presence of new, young, university-educated filmmakers and cinematographers, and new advances in camera and sound technology. Interestingly, in his extensive elaboration of technical advancements during this decade, David Cook gives no attention to the way these specifically affected the editing of film (355–96). New People. The young filmmakers of the 1970s (Steven Spielberg released Sugarland Express in 1974, Jaws in 1975; George Lucas released THX 1138 in 1971, American Graffiti in 1973, Star Wars in 1977; Francis Ford Coppola released The Rain People in 1969, The Godfather in 1972, The Godfather: Part II in 1974; The Conversation in 1974; John Badham did Saturday Night Fever in 1977; John G. Avildsen did Rocky in 1976) were out to establish styles and reputations in the face of two daunting realities. First, they had a double audience: middle-class and middle-aged viewers who had grown up with the movies of the great classical filmmakers of the 1940s and 1950s—Howard Hawks, John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, John Huston, Richard Brooks, Sam Fuller, Ida Lupino, and so on—and whose expectations therefore constituted something of a challenge; and a new generation of viewers raised on, and hardly yet weaned from, television as a principal source of visual entertainment (for their parents, television was distinctly secondary to motion pictures). Television was all about abrupt transitions, discontinuities, and short attention spans, and indeed many of the young filmmakers whose work came to prominence in the 1970s had begun their careers shooting for television. The audience, then, either thought it already knew what a good film was, or wanted a film to look roughly like a television broadcast. The filmmakers and cinematographers faced something in themselves, too, however: by and large, they were people who had benefited from a healthy dose of 1960s-style liberal arts education. It wasn’t only the realities of working and social life that grounded their aesthetic sensibility, it was the literature they had studied and critiqued. And for some of them, it was film, because some had gone to film school where the very motion pictures that lingered in the memories of their older viewers had been dissected and examined in light of a larger historical process. Even in social science or humanities classes, instructors sometimes thrillingly showed and discussed motion pictures as illustrative texts. The people putting the images onscreen in the 1970s therefore knew enough about film, or about literary theory, to understand that emulating television was

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too simplistic a venture; and enough about the history of film to see that they had to contradict it in some appealing and effective way in order to stand out as filmmakers with personality and vision for people who knew their way around movies. New Technology. Youth and daring have something to do with the choices involved in innovations like the pre-lap: for example, Anne Coates was thirtyseven when she edited Lawrence. And if at Christmas 1975, many of the new filmmaking talents were just coming into their thirties and beginning to make their statements on film—Spielberg was twenty-nine, Lucas thirty-one, editor Walter Murch thirty-two, Badham thirty-six, cinematographer Allen Daviau thirty-three—they were coming of age as artists, too, at a time when technology was significantly changing. Cameras were becoming generally smaller and lighter, and were equipped with new, faster lenses that made it possible to shoot in available light more easily. Coupled with this development, new and less cumbersome lighting units and reflectors were developed, so that when intensive lighting was required—as was less and less frequently the case—it could be provided “on the run.” These developments were happening at the same time as, and in some ways flowing from, the dissolution of the studios. Location shooting increased significantly, and directors and cinematographers tended to hunt for, and prefer, live locations over studio soundstages. What all of this meant in terms of the kinds of final edits people could see onscreen was that crews could go anywhere and everywhere to pick up shots, and in any location the lighter cameras made for an opportunity to shoot from strange new angles, using smaller (and less expensive) crews. Just one example to which Cook (374ff.) accords substantial treatment in terms of the fluidity of shooting was the invention by Garrett Brown of the Steadicam system (and its proprietary counterpart, the Panaglide). Here, with a “gimbal-jointed camera mount” in a body harness worn by an athletic specialist who sighted through a video hookup that was detached from the camera, shots could be made literally on the run, moving at all angles through complex and cramped territory. Early cinematic work that established a grounding for this possibility included the cinema-vérité moving camera techniques of Richard Leacock and D. A. Pennebaker, which were themselves influenced by Jean Rouch’s innovative technique of “walking with the camera” (Rothman, communication); indeed, in some native cultures, cinema and walking are virtually indistinguishable (see the account of the Navajo in Worth and Adair). Bertrand Tavernier’s Death Watch (La Mort en direct [1980]), shot by Pierre-William Glenn, includes a sensational sequence-shot of great length and arabesque beauty involving a Steadicam, where one character leads another on a labyrinthine chase through a public market near a waterfront, twisting and turning among stalls and crowds of people yet always clearly in view. “The vibration-free quality of the Steadicam . . . was a function of both its shock-absorbing harness and its video

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viewfinder”; Cook quotes Haskell Wexler, an early user of the system, who eagerly noted that “since the viewing system on the camera is video, your eye does not have to be to the camera” (376). The 1970s could therefore see the birth of the “darting camera,” the “eye” that moved or wove from spot to spot with all the spontaneity of a fleeting impulse. In editing, one jumped from a stable here to a surprising “anywhere,” then, partly because it was eminently possible, even delightful, to do so. Unpredicted or surprising movement was the key. The camera, whether it was a Steadicam or not, could become Brownian, moving through narrative space like a particle of dust in the air. Wexler’s comment is revelatory. As an epitome of the advancement of camera technology, the Steadicam actually made it possible for a cinematographer to make a shot without looking; to feel his way through a shot, or indeed locomote as a way of taking an image. Moving replaced seeing. In such a development, two advantages are gained. First, cinema in general goes well beyond either displaying its penchant for locomotion through a content that is based on filmed action; or even displaying the affinity between motion and its own mechanism: a camera through which film moves. Both of these principles had guided moving pictures from their earliest days and had, early on, produced a substantial amount of wonderment. Now, the camera also gains a new personality as a moving functionary, a kind of jittery, anxious, or curious witness fundamentally discontented with the stationary position and eager to run through the world it sees, or, eager to see by running. This is like Schivelbusch’s “panoramic perception,” due strictly to the smooth movement of the railway car along its tracks at what was felt in the nineteenth century to be great speed. After the Steadicam, and with the advent of new cranes (such as the Louma), dolly tracks, camera dollies, not to mention the lighter cameras (such as the Aaton), there was a tendency for film, and the filmed story, to move panoramically. And central to railway travel was a structured incapacity: the traveler could not see where he or she was going, but was drawn along on a trajectory planned and executed, as it were, from the outside. The train passenger was in the (more or less capable) hands of the engineer, himself less an agent than a functionary: thus, the passenger was being driven by a system, through its factotum; was embraced by and absorbed into industrialization, as Schivelbusch puts it (Railway 122). The urge toward movement that the Steadicam satisfied, and the ability of film crews to light and stage in virtually any geographical location, made for a vastly increased opportunity to leave one’s present position, and also the very ideas of presence and position, behind. Film, which had always been in motion, about motion, and for motion, now accelerated. Travel to unanticipated locations was almost always the order of the day in practice, and so it is not surprising that the idea of traveling to an unanticipated location might itself have become embedded in (or flown about) the film editing practice of the time.

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Concomitantly, the film viewer in motion was in the hands of someone whose expertise had to be trusted. Paradoxically, this meant the experience of shocking transitions was the less shocking for one’s reliance upon a director’s personality or style, and directors and cinematographers were always fighting to escape not only the ruts of cinematic tradition with new and surprising approaches to movement but also the ruts of their own reputations. A good example of a filmmaker at war with himself to bring not only his cinema but also his act of filmmaking into a state of continuous (and continuously surprising) motion was Stanley Kubrick, what some viewers have deemed the often jejune or reactionary quality of his films’ content notwithstanding (see Sharrett). If cinematography was less rigidly systematized than railway travel, if, for example, the “tracks” of a system—even dolly tracks!—were not as globalized beyond the boundaries of the actual viewing experience as were the parts of the railway (that had to contend with geography and politics, with the engineering of iron, with the forces of static physics), nevertheless this new translocational, or impressionistic, cinema, in which movement was the order of the day, organized through its technology the day-to-day activities of even the most creative and ingenious film artists: cinematographers such as Nestor Almendros, John Alonzo, Allen Daviau, Sven Nykvist, Miroslav Ondrícek, Gordon Willis, and Vilmos Zsigmond, and directors such as Hal Ashby, Francis Ford Coppola, Alan Pakula, and, later, Steven Spielberg and his coterie. Here, and in a wholly new way than ever before in film, were the drivers of the vehicle in which audiences experienced motion pictures. These artists, with more technology at their fingertips all the time, had to strive even harder to distinguish themselves from their technology, to make the products of their own art stand out from the products that anyone could obtain with this wondrous equipment. Since it was in accelerated movement that the new cinema announced itself, it was in the construction of transitions that film artistry spoke loudest. Film stories, to repeat, had always moved, and audiences had long been in the hands of filmmakers, but unconsciously, as it were: without their dependency being shown to them as part of the work at hand. In a similar way, the drivers of the carriages in which men and women had ridden before the advent of the railway also controlled the experience of travel, yet so responsively and interactionally that the rider did not experience locomotion as being taken for a ride by someone else who was in control. As the railway had in the nineteenth century, film form after the mid-1960s took us for a ride—nor did the Watergate fiasco of the early 1970s fail to do the same, making irony popular as a mode of everyday—hence also artistic—expression. If we consider so alarming and dislocating a motion picture as Psycho (1960), we find that the shocks are in the way the narrative moves, not in the way the film does as it plays out that narrative. The film’s spatial/temporal transitions are almost always rather conventional

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(the eye-and-bathtub drain shot being a notable exception), but Hitchcock has the genius to embed utterly unconventional narrative developments within this rather well-known structure. We find conventional transitions, by and large, structuring a profoundly unconventional film. Between the 1930s and the 1960s, film transitions moved toward the use of the cut. John Carey studied a selection of adventure/science fiction, drama, and comedy films for four decades beginning with the 1930s, in terms of the mechanisms utilized within them for making spatial and temporal transitions. He found the fade in use in 46 percent of 1930s films; the dissolve in 64 percent of 1940s films; the dissolve, again, in 66 percent of 1950s films; but the cut in 58 percent of 1960s films (46). By the 1960s, in other words, the cut had become the mechanism of preference; it moved audiences more quickly across space and time, thus heightening the adventure of the transition and the surprise of the arrival. In this particular sense, the transition from fades and dissolves to cuts, which leads in the direction of panoramic editing, is one early step in the growth of what David Bordwell calls “intensified continuity,” a visual style incorporating distinctively lower average shot lengths and greater lens variations for the construction of narrative sequences that jar and thrill audiences in new and challenging ways. The “gasp-and-turn” editing styles are compatible with intensified continuity, and one way to examine their use in the 1970s is to see them as a forerunner of more far-ranging techniques that would follow. As Bordwell puts it, relating intensified continuity to the demands of an audience for visual animation, “television, usually watched in a distracting environment, needs to hold the viewer’s attention by a constantly changing visual display—if not cuts, then camera movements” (22). When the cameraman sees without looking, he is also replicating the viewing habit of the television fan, for whom the search for constant distraction provides a constant stream of surprising transitions. “TV cutting accelerated over the same years that film cutting did,” writes Bordwell (22). The cameraman who did not have to look in order to see was able to do something else, too. He could with his body enunciate the prayer of William Blake: Twofold always. May God us keep From single vision and Newton’s sleep

by seeing, at one and the same time, two visions. He could see where he was, and he could see where he was going, or at least rapidly alternate between the two, thus in a way effectively negating the stricture of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. If you could see without looking, you could see while looking elsewhere. And so once again the structure of camera usage under these new dispensations bred a new myth of vision, a new way of imagining seeing and showing that could involve leaping from one reality to another. I have elsewhere

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suggested some of the ramifications of this “vision by leaps and bounds” in narrative structure of the 1990s and beyond, where the idea of surprising movement between two positions is actually developed as the pillar of a (vertically arranged) narrative construct I call the “elevator film” (“Neither Here”). There is certainly a kind of impressionism involved in seeing this way, seeing, that is, in full knowledge of the power to move (anywhere), and Cook effectively quotes Nestor Almendros as to the relation between the new film technologies of the 1970s and the impressionist painter’s ability to rely on the new pre-mixed paint in tubes, that made possible the moving painter (355ff). It was not only the cameraman’s imagination that could now be doubled. The sound recordist, too, heard a double world. Developed at the same time was the new Dolby-encoded stereo optical recording/playback sound system, known now as Dolby Sound. Even in the 1970s, many celebrated sound tracks were recorded for strictly monaural playback in theaters, writes Cook (387). Dolby stereo optical sound made it possible for listeners in the theater to hear two distinct tracks, in short, to divide themselves acoustically and experience a universe in which doubling played a fundamental role in acoustic perception. Cook notes, “Stereo could have a defamiliarizing effect on movie audiences” and quotes John Belton to the effect that audiences in earlier decades were “distracted by the practice of ‘voice-panning’ whereby dialogue would travel from one speaker to another behind the screen to represent the movement of action across the frame” (387). How much more “distracting” and “defamiliarizing,” then, could stereo be when the listener recognized that he was taking in two distinct sources of sound, or even two groups of sources, simultaneously: that he was both here and there, at once, this notwithstanding viewers’ later abilities to take stereo sound in stride and hear it as a singularity protruding from “everywhere.” Stereo sound began as the acoustic equivalent of panoramic perception, forcing film viewers to leave behind forever the conceit of focusing on a single narrative element in its sacred space. And as we watched film from the 1970s onward, our watching became what it is today, a form of mobility itself. Being securely placed with a stable and constant perspective is an idea that seems remote now, dreamlike, certainly archaic, and that carries with it a delicious aura of musty privilege and eerie tranquility. As to seeing the screen and meditating upon its content, we must do that now, as we do almost everything else, in flight.

chapter 7

˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚ The Speaking Eye The moment you feel secure, of course, is the moment you can be diddled. —Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis

Medusa and the Speaking Eye “To speak, to name things,” writes Jean Starobinski, “tends to prolong (if not complete) the work of safekeeping that in the gaze remains forever incomplete and precarious” (5). We may ask, as well: why should that gaze fail to utterly gather and retain? Why is it precarious and incomplete in holding? Or else, might the word that completes and releases the gaze by extending it not also be adopted by the gaze as one of its own felicities, one of its talents, but as a new form, without linear meaning, free from syntax? Might the gaze not speak, and, speaking, wrap into itself the fullness of the world? What kind of language is it, we may wonder, that is wholly and purely for the eye? One may write of cinema, for instance, not always as a way of filling out gaps in what can “only” be seen but also in order to open seeing itself to a new capability, as though a vision is not deficient, is not waiting for a pronouncement to make it full. The eye, once mute, can finally speak and name things for itself. In a metamorphosis, the eye can become the voice. And obversely, a statement can be a vision. Contradicting this assertion, or this aspiration, the suture theory of JeanPierre Oudart diminishes the eye into a passive and speechless dupe, confounded and waylaid by a dominating system that at once informs, shapes, dictates, and paralyzes. The visible world becomes a Medusa, stunning and beautiful, perhaps, in some aboriginal state long abandoned or curtailed, but now hideous in its power and forthrightness, not to say multifaceted and omnidimensional, protruding, encapsulating, destructive, and ultimately blinding. “I laugh,” writes Georges Bataille, “when I think that my eyes persist in demanding objects that do not destroy them” (quoted in Jay 217). As we are sutured, every glimpse is a stitch in a binding protocol that penetrates our sovereignty and produces a relentless, overwhelming education. The way 166

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a violator’s crime is stitched into him by a gigantic machine in Kafka’s Penal Colony, its needle of instruction whirling around and around until there remains no body to acknowledge the violation (or to commit violation again), the crime of not having understood is pressed into the visual system by the apparatus of cinema, again and again until there is no perceiver left. This kind of approach to seeing film, as William Rothman writes, was, at a critical period of cinematic history, a theoretical “higher authority” that established legitimacy. Under the reign of “theory,” Students were taught that, to think seriously about film, they first had to break their attachments to the films they loved. It was an unquestioned doctrine within the field that movies were pernicious ideological representations to be resisted and decoded, not treated with the respect that is due to works of art capable of instructing us how to think about them. (“I” xii)

Suture theory in particular leaves no room for the eye to see or to speak—to see plainly and openly; to speak by its act of seeing—but on the contrary instructs it relentlessly in a kind of scriptural obsession. Martin Jay reads Freud’s commentary on the desire for knowledge: “Rather than being innocent, [it] was itself ultimately derived from an infantile desire to see, which had sexual origins. Sexuality, mastery, and vision were thus intricately intertwined in ways that could produce problematic as well as ‘healthy’ effects” (332). The cupidinous eyes of Norman Bates pulling aside Thomas Rowlandson’s Susannah and the Elders to stare through his peephole at Marion Bates stripping in the bathroom.1 The beleaguered eyes of Dixon Steele defending himself from the perils of watching his friends in In a Lonely Place (1950). The sharp, shrewish eyes of Ward Bond dissecting the slovenly Charles Kemper in Wagon Master (1950). If the world is a Medusa, looking upon it fully we are crippled only by the plethora of its protruberances and availabilities, its transparent and reflecting surfaces (as Janet Ward reminds us, in an artful study of Weimar Germany [2001]), its copious articulations threatening to make such profound impressions upon our corpus—as we stare at and measure them—that no corpus will be left behind. Vision is possible, then, only by turning away, by gazing, as Perseus did, into the obfuscating glare of Athena’s polished shield, which later becomes the concavity of Plato’s shadow theater. This optical rejection is accomplished as a subject/ground division, a careful distinction between center and margin. In any vision, and especially as we watch motion pictures, we choose to concentrate on some objects as dominant (and beautiful) while reducing others to insignificance and even transforming them, diluting their color, muting their evocativeness. 1. I am grateful for a communication from Bill Krohn on Hitchcock’s art collection.

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But the eye that speaks of the screen may retain and express all of what is retained and expressed there, and therefore resemble the impressionistic eye described by Ortega: Instead of fixing a proximate object, let the eye, passive but free, prolong its line of vision to the limit of the visual field. What do we find then? The structure of our hierarchized elements disappears. The ocular field is homogeneous; we do not see one thing clearly and the rest confusedly, for all are submerged in an optical democracy. Nothing possesses a sharp profile; everything is background, confused, almost formless. On the other hand, the duality of proximate vision is succeeded by a perfect unity of the whole visual field. (110)

The duality of proximate vision: in a much earlier stage of visual organization, the discriminatory eye of the Quattrocento isolated the figure from its field, concentrated upon a “luminous hero, a protagonist standing out” from “a ‘mass,’ a visual plebs” (110). Perhaps in the same way that Ortega’s proximal vision took historically situated turns and became the distal vision of the twentieth century, there exists a historical sequence in cinematic criticism and scholarship, whereby an optical rejection of the screen by way of proximal division, by way of finding the heroic figure and dismissing the plebian mass or ground, by way of a turning away that is also a silence, leads the way to a fully vocative optical embrace. The tyranny of the luminous hero, its capacity to brutally define our attention and thus form the lance point of the apparatus’s great thrust at our consciousness and sense of reality, is converted into an optical democracy where “everything is background,” where everything speaks. Now the eye must search and find, always moving, always hungry: “stirred, the eye seizes/ for the first time—The eye awake!—/ anything” (William Carlos Williams, “Sour Grapes”). When the “age of theory” is passed, we are finally ready to say what the screen is for us, but only as a result of a careful and exigent devotion.

A Marginal Dog Most viewers of motion pictures in the early days of the twenty-first century, I would argue, continue to scan the screen for the heroes it contains. As in 1931 we focused on Wallace Beery’s Champ to the exclusion of his surround; in 1941 ogled the puissant self-congratulatory Charles Foster Kane blotting out the exquisite frames that conveyed and contained him (until such aficionados as Pauline Kael insisted on “opening” our “eyes”); in 1950 were riveted to the peripatetic, obsessive Clinton Reed (Richard Widmark) of Panic in the Streets without calculating the balance between his actions and his situation; in 1967 watched stunned as Bonnie and Clyde passionately rampaged through Texas,

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without especially noting the innocence of their victims; so we have continued to find merit in flashing central presences of the screen, from Tobey Maguire’s Spider-Man to Jake Gyllenhaal’s Donnie Darko, from Johnny Depp’s Cap’n Jack Sparrow to Forest Whitaker’s Idi Amin, from Helen Mirren’s Queen of England to Judi Dench’s hideous Barbara Covett in Notes on a Scandal (2006). Most cinematic scholarship and criticism operates in a similar way, finding it utterly unproblematic to isolate and extract a central storyline, to discriminate between star and subordinate players, to focus attention on such central themes as surveillance, incest, brutality, restoration, apocalyptic horror, or familial dysfunction while regarding what is not “central”—marginal decoration—without urgency. In the quick of it, however, no element of a film, no performance, no spectacular view or object, is the substance of itself, but all are substantiated by what stands under and around—the accompanying performances and gestures of reality accomplished through all of the means available to cinema. Orson Welles’s Kane, like Forest Whitaker’s Amin, is derived in part from the knowledge, personality, embodiment, and skill of the actor; in part from what other actors do all around; in part from the lighting, from the coloration, from the lens, from the dialogue, from the tradition in which the film positions itself and that lends the audience a set of ready-made expectations against which to estimate the “central” performance. What “centralizing” perception easily allows for, of course, is publicity and mass marketing, and also the processes of typification, matching, and historiographical patterning, approaches that are made more complicated, even utterly obstructed, when such perception is abandoned in favor of a devotion to all of what is available onscreen. Formerly, the “remote horizon—a tree, a castle, a mountain range” had been wont to “acquire the half-unreal aspect of ghostly apparitions” (Ortega 111), but let us wonder if perhaps in a domain where “everything is background” we can begin to find a greater, and more useful, truth in such ostensibly “little things” of cinema. Steven Spielberg’s Jaws was released, to thunderous delight (and not a little genuine surprise, since no one expected it to be much of anything), 20 June 1975. Like the best-selling novel by Peter Benchley on which it is based, it tells the story of a summertime shark attack in the bucolic little town of Amity, Long Island (Amity is in fact Amagansett, where Benchley lived at the time, although the film was shot on Martha’s Vineyard). An adolescent girl’s mangled body is found on the morning tide. The new police chief, Martin Brody (Roy Scheider), a man pathologically afraid of water, boats, swimming, the whole shebang, puts himself to handle the situation, the good Boy Scout. The local mayor (Murray Hamilton) is a craven fool who insists that the beaches not be closed for the Fourth of July, and when a few eager locals kill and drag in a shark he is none too eager to have a field day with the press and consider the affair happily closed. Matt Hooper, a visiting young oceanographer (Richard Dreyfuss),

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is convinced that this is a far more pernicious problem than anyone thinks it is, however: the captured shark has no body contents in its belly, and the autopsy of the dead girl has revealed that by comparison the maw of the killer beast was considerably larger. He suspects nothing less than a rogue Great White, one of the truly terrifying creatures of the sea. Since the tone and style of the film recapitulate that of the old sea-monster genre, it is hardly surprising when Quint (Robert Shaw) comes on the scene, an alcoholic old shark killer with sea chanteys and greenbacks on the brain. For ten thousand dollars he’ll catch it and dispense with it, although, to his regret, he is forced by the Town Board to bring the terrified Brody and the canny Hooper along with him. The shark villain of this film is indeed a Great White, and a particularly vicious and enormous one at that. It not only devours and mangles, it stares, it plots, outmaneuvers, has a temper tantrum, and eats a boat. Indeed, one rather expects it to start laughing maniacally. In the end, apocalypse is averted, happiness reigns where we feel it must, and the sun is fully prepared to set beautifully in the west. Before that, we are treated to plenty of bubbly underwater adventure, which I forbear to describe in detail so as not to steal from any who have not yet had the pleasure of seeing this accomplished film. Instead, back to Chief Brody’s house well before all the mechanisms of the plot are geared together. He and his wife, Ellen (Lorraine Gary), are nestled in a corner nook, beside a pair of windows that look out onto the water, as, filled with concern and professional in mien, he reads about the biology of sharks. The scene begins, as a matter of fact, with a macro-close shot of a drawing that we are to discover him studying: a shark’s “vibration detector,” the lateral sensory system, is picking up “erratic impulses” from a nearby “fish in distress.” We cut to a shot of Brody at his roll-top desk reading by the protective light of a lamp. Ellen comes up silently and sits behind him on the arm of a chair, reading over his shoulder. In front of him, on top of the desk, are two piles of books—books, we presume, about sharks, that he has suddenly bought or borrowed from the library in his newfound desperation for knowledge. Suddenly aware of a presence at his back he turns, spooked, and the two stare into one another’s faces. “Oh God, you scared me,” she gasps, embracing him. “You know,” says he softly, closing his book and opening a second one, “People don’t even know how old sharks are. I mean if they’ve lived two, three thousand years . . .” She gently takes the book out of his hands. “Enough, enough. You’re not even going to be able to go to sleep tonight.” And putting a glass of Scotch—a substantial glass of Scotch—in his hand, she plants herself between his legs and leans back against his chest as he closes his eyes and drinks it. This is a charming, quiet, safe little domestic scene. Through the windows under a late afternoon overcast sky the waters are calm and gray, and somewhere in them, we may choose to imagine, a shark is roaming. Here indoors, under the warm glow of the reading lamp, the two old buddies cuddling close with that inviting glass of liquor seem to gather security,


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boundary, civilization, nutrition, love, and timelessness. The books on the desk, even closed, lend to our sense of familiarity and familiality a taste culled from the long records of human scholarship, itself a practice conducted in quiet safe rooms like this one, under lamps, by people who, like Brody, wear eyeglasses and think in rational sentences (and, as they ascend through the brittle ranks of the scholarly community, slowly acquire single malts to sip while reading). (Since the film begins with a shark attack and the hysteria that mounts in Chief Brody afterward, this peaceful moment is blissfully reassuring. The rational mentality it celebrates is the very antithesis of the powerfully pulsive, emotionally unleashed tenor the film will soon adopt.) But something else is here (the shot is made in the anamorphic process, for a screen format not quite but almost as wide as that of CinemaScope, in this case 2.35:1). Martin and Ellen are in the center, the desk is just right of center, and the windows span the entire width of the screen. But at the left extremity of the screen, through the entire shot, is the Brodys’ quiet little cocker spaniel. As Ellen enters from left, the dog looks up and follows her movement into the shot. As she sits down and startles Martin, the dog looks down and then bends to lick its paws. As Martin starts to talk about sharks, the dog sits up, licks its chops, and looks offscreen left (presumably at an assistant director or trainer). As Ellen warns Martin that he won’t sleep tonight, the dog tucks itself into a ball and starts peacefully dozing. “Hey, wanna get drunk and fool around?” she teases, sipping her Scotch, and the dog, only half visible, slumbers. This is a shot in the middle of one of the greatest cinematic blockbusters of all time, a film that took only seventy-eight days to replace The Godfather as the highest grossing movie of all time. . . . Jaws became the first movie to crack the

Chief Brody’s cocker spaniel in Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (Universal/Zanuck-Brown, 1975), with Ellen Brody (Lorraine Gary) and his master (Roy Scheider). Digital frame enlargement.

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hundred-million-dollar mark and spawned the biggest merchandizing frenzy since the Davy Crockett fad of the mid 1950s. It inspired themepark rides and political cartoons, its box-office success changed the way studios marketed and distributed their products, and it jump-started the summer-movie phenomenon. (Friedman 161)

How may we understand the presence of this dog onscreen? He is not a reiteration of Asta from the Thin Man series, the perky and faithful interloper who steals every scene. Yet he is stealing this one. He is scene stealing, in fact, where every scene, every moment, throbs with some degree of tension and is rich with visual information. Why? Accident. The most obvious address to this question, if also the least rewarding and realistic, is to suggest that the dog is really not meant to be there; that it belonged to someone and walked into the shot; or that Spielberg was entirely unaware of it. Or else, in the same vein, that the dog is mere set decoration, there to establish the flavor of the Brody marriage and the Brody home. None of these explanations makes any real sense. No filmmaker capable of the delicate pictorial constructions and swift rhythms of Jaws could be unaware of the dog, nor would a dog happen to be on the set. Nor does the perfectly appropriate set design by Joe Alves Jr., or the exact set decoration by John M. Dwyer, require the presence of the animal in order to directly convey the nature of Brody’s home life, the quality of his mental state at the moment. And the dog is lit so that its movements read in the scene, read as much as the human actors’ movements do. Moviegoer Tension: Most obtrusive is the brief moment when the dog seems to be attending to someone offscreen. Who can this someone be? One of the Brody children, possibly, standing back from their parents as their parents enjoy privacy together. Yet as there is no invocation of children in this scene—until the end, when we learn that they are outside in a dinghy (a fact Ellen knew but the nervous Martin did not)—it seems more probably to be a member of the film crew, and the dog’s off-camera regard to be an example of one of those instances of staged activity when a fiction temporarily collapses, giving the viewer a sudden view of an aspect of the screened reality that had hitherto been carefully masked. Seeing “backstage,” as it were, may provide additional pleasures for the moviegoer, but it also produces an important tension. Moviegoers normally make a transition into the status of onlookers when they become engaged in the fictional worlds of films, leaving behind, in any way that does not relate to the demands of the ongoing present fiction, all of these: the architectural limits of the building in which they are watching, the economic structure of film exhibition through which they have paid for a ticket, the facts of production life that include paid actors only pretending to be characters, and the business of life in the world outside. As onlookers, we


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can be transported without effort to any location in any time frame, thus being positioned to observe relations playing out that might in actual life be guarded from our sight. In this scene, the dog may make us briefly aware that we are not really onlookers at all, but only moviegoers who had agreed to be converted and been converted in fact. Our surround might become instantaneously more sensible to us, our condition as members of an audience more palpable (for a discussion of onlooking more generally, see Erving Goffman’s study of the theatrical frame [1974]). Most problematic for this film is the possibility that as the “Brody dog” is transformed into a trained spaniel posed before a camera, posed and then briefly losing his cue, Martin and Ellen might be transformed into Roy Scheider and Lorraine Gary doing a take for Steven Spielberg and working hard not to lose theirs. The tension in watchers of films between their status as moviegoers and their status as onlookers is a delicate one, usually successfully maintained in balance by the adroitness of the filmmaking team. But here, now, adorable at the frame edge, may be a puncturer of the bubble of belief, a weight that throws the balance of the tension off. This apparent character “dog” may be nothing more than a real dog, in other words: hungry for attention and affection, aware of his surround, curious about the interesting—but to us unseen—people offscreen. I will return to this thought, but first, in what other way may the Brody dog’s presence be understood? Doggy Dogs: The Brody dog is evidently loyal to his masters, and wishes to be near them while they cuddle at home. In an earlier shot, we saw the dog perched happily on their bed. This is (what many, at least, would call) proper doglike behavior, that is to say, unsurprising behavior from a dog, so in general in this scene we may observe that as an actor the dog has been well directed to behave credibly in character. (In his Day for Night [1973], Truffaut has a charming little scene meant to be set in a film-within-the-film [and referencing, in fact, a scene he had shot earlier in his career in The Soft Skin (1964)] where a little kitten noticeably fails to behave like a little kitten by not quite ravenously enough moving up to drink milk out of a saucer: not everything an animal does may seem proper and characteristic in front of a camera [see Pomerance “Animal Actors”].) The dog’s dogginess may call our attention briefly to other performances in Jaws. The young woman who goes swimming at night and is ravaged by a shark: does this actress give a convincing, a realistic performance? Does she seem swimmerly? Does she seem victimized? Most viewers are unfamiliar with the true nature of shark attacks, and so, as Spielberg well knew while shooting this scene, the performance needed only to hit the mark inscribed in the viewer’s fearful consciousness. To be authentically swimmerly, one need only be in the water and appear to move with a certain grace focused on the arms and head. To be attacked by a shark? What are we afraid a shark attack would look like? Our fearful image may have little in common

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with the real thing, but Spielberg is always careful in this film never to bring reality and imagination side by side for comparison. Brody’s reading material, for instance, includes a book with full-color photographs of victims who have survived shark attacks with enormous and aesthetically repulsive scars, wounds, and deformations—photographs that seem realistic but that we view at a distance and entirely independently of the more imaginary cartoon drawing of the “vibration detector.” Brody glimpses these photographic images and turns away in terror, away, that is, from reality. It is the medical profession that pays studious attention to images such as these, and Brody is no doctor, he is a watcher, as we are. Hooper is the sort of person who would understand these, especially in one scene, where he performs an autopsy on the remains of the ravaged girl. While we see the photographs that Brody sees, we are meticulously prevented from seeing the body that Hooper is staring down at, as he comes to the conclusion that “this was no boating accident.” We are thus forced to imagine a match between the sorts of wounds evident in the photographs and what cannot be seen in the autopsy, to imagine a way of placing the real photographs (the information they convey) in a real narrative world. Murray Hamilton performs as a panicking mayor, his most telling screen moments occurring in one-on-one murmured conversations with Brody shot up close. A relatively small percentage of the several hundred million people who have seen this film are mayors of small towns, and the rest of us, who may live in such places or visit them, do not typically get to snuggle close to the mayor when he has one-on-one conversations with his chief of police. In short, Hamilton’s performance need match only our imagination of the panicky mayor, not such a personage in real social fact. We could go through the cast, and if we did we would find in the case of character after character what one finds in any motion picture, the resemblance to a typification rather than to a reality. In film, typification works better than realism, this at least in the sense that audiences can never be predicted to have the experience that might ground a realistic appraisal of what they see. In an outtake of a scene at the Brody dinner table, for example, Lorraine Gary improvised a long speech about her children wanting to adopt a baby otter whose mother had been brutally slaughtered. This story had come from her real experience, and as she told it to Hooper, with her “husband” listening at the head of the table, her voice cracked several times and she stammered considerably. The problem with this presumably authentic, even hyper-authentic, performance was exactly that it seemed raw and unaffected, subject to natural flaws, and therefore stridently out of tune with the rather polished character of the rest of the film and of Ellen Brody in all her appearances as a typical small-town sheriff’s wife. If our expectation of film performance is that it will strike a chord in the imagination, the dog in this scene transcends performance in exactly the way


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that the actor Lorraine Gary did in her otter outtake, achieving a display not of what we imagine or wish dogs to be like (our personification of dogs) but of what they are like in fact. Dogs, we sharply remember, as this one looks offscreen, can only do what they do, whereas humans can do what they imagine humans to do. (When humans play at being dogs, as in Marc Forster’s Finding Neverland [2004], they can do what they imagine dogs do; whereas when dogs are dressed as humans, for example in the photographs of William Wegman, they do what dogs do but in human garb.) Even in the dog’s way of being on camera when he is gazing at the Brodys, then, he exemplifies his natural and ineluctable dogginess, but the image must be constructed, shaped, shot and reshot, in order that this ineluctable dogginess should seem like dogginess in this movie. Actually invoked onscreen as we watch this shot, then, and very briefly, is unperformed presence, thus, action out of control. Any actor might for a fraction of an instant, visibly or not, fall out of a role (although the process of making a film tends seriously to cover or elide such tumbles). But here, it is the dog, not the people, who wavers, and the wavering is there for us to see (and admire). A Working Shark: The Laurent Bouzereau documentary The Making of “Jaws” makes it abundantly clear that a recurring headache on the shoot was getting believable footage of the shark. As composer John Williams put it, what they were after was “the mindless attack of the shark. It’s all instinct. There’s no intelligence behind it.” No intelligence: no contrivance. Robert Mattey and his team had conceived, designed, and built a number of automated sharks, some in full form, some heads only, one to be shot right-to-left, one for left-toright, one only fins on a track. The complex pneumatics could make the maw open and close, and the rigging beneath could raise the head out of the water at various angles. But for months on end, the shark wasn’t properly operative. “The shark is not working . . . the shark is not working,” was heard all over Martha’s Vineyard, Richard Dreyfuss recollected. This was all euphemistic, of course, since there was no shark; yet, abiding by the metafiction that guides performance structures, even members of the crew and cast came to think of the robot as the shark it was wired to seem to be. The plastic and tubing “was” the shark performer. In much the same way as the “shark actor” was in fact a mechanical device worked by technicians, the Brody dog could be understood as “working for” the trainer or the producer, and yet “working” is a human construct and the dog was merely behaving in a repetitive and controlled fashion to suit someone else’s needs. Being more alive than the robot shark, the dog was no less passive in its commitments, and thus occupied a status between the shark and the living performers of the film. A central technical problem for the filmmakers was convincing the audience that this was a real shark; that is, appealing to the audience’s imagination of a

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shark in reality, as opposed to their knowledge and imagination of a mechanical construct. Crucial to the film was success in engendering the belief that this thing was in fact a living entity hungry for human flesh, a being who might believably savage and devour any person in its path. In a memorable scene, Brody is at the stern of Quint’s boat tossing chum into the water. He is bored and fed up. He turns away from the sea and into the camera, looking up at Quint and Hooper. “Come on down and chum some of this shit.” Behind him, the shark emerges from the water not inches from his still-outstretched hand, its huge maw gaping, a dull cold feelingless hunger in its giant eyes. Brody turns back again and sees it. He yanks his hand back and springs away. “You’re gonna need a bigger boat,” Scheider improvised. But what drama remains in the scene if we are intensely aware that it is “only” a robot pretending to be a maneating shark that is emerging too close to Brody? Part of the problem of maintenance of the audience’s engagement against corruption involves prevention of status mixing. For example, audiences would be able to tolerate a mechanical device guised to look like a shark emerging from the water and coming near an actor named Roy Scheider, working a long day on a boat under contract to Universal Pictures. This would be plausible in a documentary about acting or filmmaking, the “making-of” situation. The difficulty is produced exactly by Scheider’s immersion in the role of Brody being incompatible with the machine’s possible failure to be immersed in the role of the shark. Brody can encounter a shark, a machine can encounter the actor Scheider, but Brody cannot believably encounter a machine pretending to be a dangerous beast. There does remain one possibility for our pleasure, improbable in this age when reality is a fundamental focus of piety: a very great thrill, such a thrill as is ours to experience when we look at a painted portrait, is offered when we know we are looking at a device. That an image of life can resemble life, while yet not being life itself, has long been a crux of fascination. Cézanne’s apples look good enough to eat, but they are not apples; and so they draw our attention to the pleasure of looking. We do not admire them because we actually believe they are edible; we admire them because they look edible. Long after we have seen Jaws, then, and learned that the shark is not real, we are still capable of deriving immense pleasure from its every appearance, the realism of the construction easily and deliciously replacing reality. But one may argue that even in realism, a basic requirement is the viewer’s belief in some occasional apparent confrontation with reality: the shark in Jaws does not have to be real when it attacks the female swimmer and kills her, or when it attacks and kills little Alex Kintner at the beach, and in fact we would prefer that in these instances it only seem to be real. But when it comes out of the water next to Brody, the shark should be as real as can be. (Cézanne’s apples being unreal, we do wish to believe that he was real in making them, that


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once in a while he ate one of those apples.) The dangers our characters cannot escape should evoke reality; but the dangers they do escape should apparently constitute reality. Thus, the mechanical shark had to seem real, even though, for long periods, and to the filmmaking team’s enduring consternation, it wasn’t working properly. And one way to help achieve this “realism” is to insinuate into the film another nonhuman creature whose reality is entirely unquestioned, and whose behavior might be seen to be no less awkward or “self-conscious,” no less contrived, than that of the mechanical shark. In this way, “reality” and “contrivance” can be merged and the apparent contradiction between them either significantly diminished or nullified. If the reality of the dog can be assured, even when it looks off-camera for a cue—if in a flash, as the creature settles into the scene, we slide back to accepting it as the Brodys’ real diegetic dog—then perhaps later, in its shot with Brody, the “shark” can borrow some of this reality for itself. The presence of the dog can thus be seen as part of a much larger architecture, involving the structuring of our belief. The spaniel is preparation for something that will come later, and a kind of perception test for the viewer. He is one of the reasons we believe in the shark’s palpable and present threat. If it seems clear when we watch it that the shark is out of character just a little—a little rigid, a little unexpressive, perhaps part of the mechanism of the camera—we can remind ourselves that this is just the way living animals often are in front of a camera; that one puts up with it in order to have the gist of their performance. If dogs will be dogs (a little curious or disobedient), sharks will be sharks (a little mechanical and brutish). In Gregory LaCava’s My Man Godfrey (1936), we are treated (regally) to the antics of the hilarious but utterly mad Bullock family. Beautiful Irene (Carole Lombard) is lying on the sofa, whining hysterically, while her hysterical mother (Alice Brady) screams melodiously at her to stop. “Carlo will help. Carlo, imitate a gorilla,” she commands, and her protégé (Mischa Auer), a spindly virtuoso sponge stuffed into a tuxedo and who doesn’t like doing a jot of work, stuffs a piece of orange under his lip, musses his long hair, and starts leaping around the room and crawling “wildly” over the furniture. The utterly exasperated patriarch (Eugene Pallette) stands watching in a transport of silent surrender, but finally the shrieking wife, and the growling, gesticulating, swinging, creeping Carlo are more than he can take. “Why don’t you stop imitating a gorilla,” he barks, “and imitate a man?” Given that he is a hopeless failure at the styles of masculinity exemplified in the film by old Bullock, who presumably worked his way into wealth; and by the new butler, Godfrey (William Powell), whom we take to be a derelict trying to earn his way into good standing, Carlo really isn’t yet a man, and the old man’s reproof is barbed. While he is never so believable as a gorilla that we forget he is human, the imitation, while it lasts, is utterly captivating. Indeed, as he apes around

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he is exactly the kind of person that apes may seem to be so similar to when we admire their similarity to us. We may well imagine that part of what is upsetting old Bullock is the illusion itself, that suddenly something a little too simian has entered the sacred precinct of his home. Now, the shark in Jaws, as an entity of the screen, is continually prone to resembling a shark—what we imagine and conceive as a “shark”—whereas Carlo is consistently prone to resembling a man imitating a gorilla. For Carlo, being gorilla-like is exactly and entirely the intention of the performance, while for Mischa Auer the focus is on believably being the sort of man who thinks it is admirable to be gorillalike. Spielberg’s shark must go further. It must seem at certain moments to be the essence of sharkiness itself. When the reality of an animal-like construction is not at issue in a film but we are meant to see only real animal characters (played, typically, by real animals)—Howard Hawks’s Red River (1948), Stephen Herek’s 101 Dalmatians (1996)—the animal actor’s attentions off-camera would have to be edited out as distracting. But in the overall structure of Jaws, the dog’s glance off-camera doesn’t distract, it enhances: and similarly, all of the shark’s putative falseness, all of what we might be prone to read as a set-up, is a kind of off-camera glance. With the shark as with the dog: glancing off is not necessarily a denial of one’s reality. At the end of the film, the Great White is killed, of course, and audiences feel not only exhilarating relief that its ravenous (and ravenously real) hunger will no longer be vented on the citizens of Amity but also the smug contentment that comes with knowing that our doppelgängers onscreen have dominated an actual excess of nature. The final shot has Brody and Hooper paddling into shore on a fragment of a mast, with us trailing (like sharks?) in the water just behind them: we are swimming with true heroes. (And one can only imagine the joy of those on the filmmaking team, whose experience with the grossly malfunctioning shark machine was over.)

“Reading” the Screen This scene in Jaws, beyond the interest it holds for students of narrative or of this particular story, has much to teach more broadly about our experience as we watch film. What is it, after all, that we are doing when we watch a film? What is the project in which we are engaged, the problem that our action attempts to resolve? What, indeed, is the meaning of our action? Certainly all people are different to some degree, learn and experience the world differently, interpret it differently according to their psychologies, their cultural backgrounds, their social position and the conditions of their lives; and yet what is onscreen is something of a language to the extent that numbers of unrelated persons can use it together with shared meaning and implication. In gazing at the screen we do something with others, something social, something not


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only specifically cultural but generally human.2 There is no doubt that many people in watching movies are shopping: shopping for a glimpse of a star, shopping for a taste of an exotic setting, shopping for a dramatic thrill to be had up-close or from behind a suitable blind. Many theorists have also made the assumption, in writing and thinking about it, that film is a window on the world, giving us direct access to a represented social scene. In this light, people who watch believe they are encountering an image of their own social situation, the power structure in which they live out their lives, their historical reality, the interpersonal dynamic that colors or shapes their experience. At the same time, motion pictures are indubitably aesthetic and overwhelming, regardless of their content. The vision of the screen, with its forms and luminosities, its shifting surfaces and expressions, plays to our imagination as well as to our knowledge. Film is thus either a repository of pleasures or a mirror on reality, or both. For those with a historical bent, a film reveals something about the process of filmmaking at the time when it was made, and possibly also something about the structure of the society that received it. The Maltese Falcon (1941) tells us about America as it was entering World War II; Now, Voyager (1942) and Since You Went Away (1944) and The Clock (1945) about the America that was caught up in the maelstrom, an America whose self-consciousness evaporated in contact with the world; Notorious (1946) about America afterward, an America that was ultimately self-assured. A Star Is Born (1954) is a delicatessen of performances, a film unintelligible to any audience not already committed to the belief that we are not exactly what we seem to be—this during an epoch of status-building, consumerism, impression management, and rampant moralism. Paris, Texas (1984) is a gallery of landscapes, made at a time when capitalism triumphed under Reagan and every territorial prospect was an enticement to real estate developers, or when every vista marked a space that was to be inhabited somehow. Michael Haneke’s Caché (2005) is about power and guilt, social responsibility and chaos, made at a time when imperialism and warfare again raise their ugly faces in front of audiences everywhere. For Lacanian theorists (such as Slavoj Žižek), film is about our relation to the seen world (all film, no matter what is onscreen), and addresses the division of a primal unity made by birth and consciousness. For feminist theorists (Teresa De Lauretis, Laura Mulvey), film is about disembodiment and the differentials of power in a brutalizing gender system (all film, no matter what is onscreen). For

2. According to Barbara Klinger, males in Afghanistan, young and old, fought government edict and scrambled hotly to obtain “Leo” haircuts when they saw the golden tousled locks of Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic (1997), a quintessentially American film that was immensely popular (often through pirated versions) in that country and around the world.

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aesthetic theorists (Rudolf Arnheim, David Bordwell), film is about form and balance (all film, no matter what is onscreen), about the mechanism of construction, or grammar, by which meaning is metaphorized. For postmodern media criticism, film (all film, no matter what is onscreen) is a retreat toward a Baudrillardian hyperreality, a case study of our general, and problematic, manipulation by images that are ultimately controlled by a ruling class. What, however, is the depth of the experience we have of the screen that viewers and scholars approaching cinema from any of these perspectives might be working to consider? The creatures in films are not people, they are not representations of what is in the actual world. Nor are they the same manipulative entities no matter what the film. They are not, exactly, indices of our gender and our powerlessness. They can be read as all of these, and usefully so, yet there is something more to those images, to those creatures, that theory has only begun to detect: the immensity of them, for example, especially in close-ups; the brilliance and saturation of the color that floods over them or the uncanny variations in their luminosity if they are in black and white; the musical grace with which they move; the piquancy of what they say, if they speak; the structure of their faces; the fact that we are presented over and over again with those faces (faces, not people); the way we move into contact with them, or recede, through flash pans, dissolves, cutaways, zooms, jump cuts, wipes, and so on. Even considering all of this, we can still ask, what is it that we are doing when we examine the screen? What, in other words, are we thinking and knowing as we look at the image? And how is our way of looking a way of summarizing and articulating our thought and knowledge? In part, I am asking what it is, subjectively, to look at a picture: self-reflection, pleasure-seeking, influence, power, analysis, doubt, mendacity? Of looking in general Michel Foucault writes not only that natural history must “reduce the distance” between language and things “so as to bring language as close as possible to the observing gaze, and the things observed as close as possible to words” (Order 132) but also that the observing gaze refrains from intervening: it is silent and gestureless. Observation leaves things as they are; there is nothing hidden to it in what is given. The correlative of observation is never the invisible, but always the immediately visible, once one has removed the obstacles erected to reason by theories and to the senses by the imagination. In the clinician’s catalogue, the purity of the gaze is bound up with a certain silence that enables him to listen. (Birth 107)

That a gaze might “refrain from intervening” has serious moral implications, of course. There is every reason to fear that a culture obsessed with motion pictures might be indoctrinating a kind of habitual distancing and coolness in viewers, who might dream that by watching cinema they were not, in fact,


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getting involved but that such an attitude was a reasonable one to take. I am arguing here, of course, that in watching motion pictures we do get involved, but that we perhaps do not intensively enough recognize and admit this fact. In asking what watching films is, I mean to point to the problem of viewers not seeing their own seeing, not seeing their own experience, not fully enough relating to what is depicted as though a proper relation to pictures is passivity alone. The frame of the film fashions a new object. The cinematographer Nestor Almendros (Claire’s Knee [1970], The Story of Adèle H. [1975], Kramer vs. Kramer [1979], Sophie’s Choice [1982], The Still of the Night [1982], and so on) asserted that he needed the frame “with its four sides,” that he needed its limits: I think the frame was a great discovery (long before cinema, naturally). (During the Stone Age, the men of Lascaux and Altamira did not frame their paintings.) And what counts in two-dimensional art is not only what is seen but what is not seen, what does not let itself be seen. Eisenstein hit upon a brilliant explanation of why we Westerners need the frame. We see our landscapes through windows, whereas the Japanese, who are used to architecture with sliding walls and no windows, did their painting on scrolls that could be unrolled and had only two edges. In cinema, the spectator can concentrate on the essential when everything marginal or tangential to the theme is eliminated. (Man 12; see also Eisenstein 41)

So, subjectively, what is it that we are doing when we look, when we accept the limits of the frame, what Eisenstein comically referred to as “any piece of white paper with four corners to it” onto which we “cram . . . usually even without using the edges (mostly greasy from the long drudgery!), some bored caryatid, some conceited Corinthian capital, or a plaster Dante” (40), and how is it that we are proceeding when we measure, calculate, form an estimation, make a judgment, harbor an expectation or a fear? For instance, if we read any film as I have been reading this dog scene in Jaws, what is our project, what our commitment, what our position, what our hope, what our suspicion or intimation, what our timidity, what our security, what our price? To go back, then, to Spielberg’s dog: must we, for instance, agree to believe that the filmmaker—Spielberg, his writer, his producer, his assistant director: all of these working on a team—intended the dog to be present in the scene exactly as we have discerned him? This is almost always the first question people who have never thought seriously about films ask when any detailed reading is given of a filmic work, of a shot, of an expression, of the presence on a table of a lamp. Must we believe that because we could see the dog in this way—that because we could discern a relation between the scene with the dog and the later scene with the shark—the filmmaker intended this to happen

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and in fact arranged the film so that it should? Are we, then, in our perception of film, being responsive to the cues of the artist (the artist who, we presume, knows everything about his art)? “There is a very deep belief in our society,” writes Goffman, as presumably there is in others, that an object produces signs that are informing about it. Objects are thought to structure the environment immediately around themselves; they cast a shadow, heat up the surround, strew indications, leave an imprint; they impress a part picture of themselves, a portrait that is unintended and not dependent on being attended, yet, of course, informing nonetheless to whomsoever is properly placed, trained, and inclined. (Gender 6)

The artist may be taken to be such an “object,” one that is read for information by those who are “properly placed, trained, and inclined” as though his work is a “shadow” that he has “cast,” a “heat” he has brought to the “surround,” and an “indication” that he has “strewn.” In short, the moving picture may be read as though it speaks of the filmmaker, even when this self-portraiture is “unintended” and even when the film is “unattended.” Yet, for all this, we may believe we can know the filmmaker from the film, and it is in this respect that we may come to think a particular reading of a scene in Jaws somehow trails implications of an idea about those who made it. Read this way, the film is a field of cues left by an artist, and one can sensibly, reliably, and “accurately” discern and decode them. It becomes practical to ask, then, given that films are excrescences of the filmmaker’s intent: are we reading with enough accuracy the intent of the filmmaker here? Perhaps the answer to this question is, “No.” Spielberg did not intend that his film should be read this way. If so, perhaps we are violating his intentions in this reading. We have, in this case, “misread” the film, and are “wrong” for doing so, presuming that the film “belongs” to those who made it. (Yet a film also belongs to those who view it, certainly while they are viewing. The engagement makes the film theirs.) How can “misreading” happen? We might believe there are many possible readings but some are more “correct” than others, the most “correct” readings being those in line with the director’s “intent.” And when, fawning upon the director in this way, we accord him authorial privilege, is it not his “intent” that we highlight as the apex of his authorship? Do we not imagine the author, in such a calculation, as someone who intends to do something, who has a vision? And is his identity as author—auteur—not coextensive and coterminous for us with this desire, this idea, this will? (Will—not action.) If in making a film an author is an object that strews indications, then a reading of the indications informs us about him, but about what aspect of him? About his nose, his garage, his golf score, his diet, his stock portfolio, his bedtime reading, his favorite pizza? Indeed, is the author always and only the


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director? It might be a writer, a producer, even, at times, an actor, as we have seen looking at Rebel Without a Cause. The “filmmaker” is a hypothetical character behind the scenes, one that we often label with the director’s name (to his glory or peril). A reading of a film informs us about the “filmmaker’s” motive, his direction, his conviction about a subject, his way of seeing the world. To repeat: Spielberg and his team had an idea, an intent, and I offer the conjecture that my present reading does not accord with it. In this case, the “directorial” intent is something quite other than what I have projected. Say, for instance, it was intended only that the dog should be read as the companion of the Brody family, nothing more; the dog is on the chair because he follows Chief and Mrs. Brody around, and now that they are here, he is naturally enough here, too. That’s it for the dog. There are several objections to making such a conclusion. First, the dog has not only followed Chief Brody and his wife into a little reading nook, he has followed them into a shot. He is not only in their house, he is in the film in a certain way. The question isn’t what the relation is between these people and this dog; the question is, what is the relation between this dog and this film? If the dog follows Martin and Ellen Brody around in diegetic “fact,” can it be necessary that in this film, telling this story, we should be obliged to see him doing so? And even if we should see him, then why does he not follow them around wherever they go, ride with them in their car, visit the hospital as their son is brought there, hang out on the beach on the Fourth of July? A black Lab hangs out on that beach (and dies for it). Why does our canine friend appear in only this scene and one other scene (lolling on the bed)? Perhaps it was convenient to place him in this scene, it made a nice picture, and that is the only reason he is here. We have returned to set decoration. Spielberg, the authorial presence, having intended no more than that, is it really sensible to see more? But I would argue it is not the filmmaker’s will or intent that we see onscreen at all, ever. It is the filmmaker’s act. In writing, “There is a very deep belief in our society . . . that an object produces signs, etc.,” Goffman is debunking. Objects do not produce their significations out of themselves. What we see when we watch Jaws is what has been done, what has been accomplished by this filmmaker and those working under his direction, not what has been planned or imagined by them. The dog is in the shot, and so the presence of the dog is an accomplishment. It makes sense to take the film seriously as given. In order to do this, we need not invoke the filmmaker as having sent us a message in code, clear at its origin, entirely and profoundly, and then cast our way in hopes that we will “get” it. Jaws need not be seen as a twelve-million-dollar telegram sent by a twenty-eight-year-old prodigy. It is a work of art with a coherence that we are in a position to appreciate. Less important than what Spielberg thought he was “saying,” then, is what Jaws manifestly is. A reading for coherence should try to make sense of the whole thing, to see its parts in sensible relation to one

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another. Anyone who cared enough might try hard to see the parts of this film in a coherent, call it unified, vision—all of the parts, seen each in its fullness. I might care. The reader might care. Spielberg himself might care—might take a look to see what he once did. To invoke an authorial Spielberg who intended and wished for everything that we are capable of seeing is perhaps comforting for us in that it invokes the idea of a creative persona in whose zone of control (the film) we can relax our own critical energies. But in order to see what is onscreen clearly, we do not require to invent this Presence. This is not an argument that there is no auteur; it is a suggestion that the presence of the auteur actually does not materially affect our ability to watch the film. Let there be an auteur, then, who wanted to show everything we can claim he has shown. Or let the filmmaker have been an incompetent, whose product was composed entirely through a series of accidents. Either way, what we have is Jaws. Let us argue that the shark, no less than the dog, could be seen as only a decorative prop, marginal to the central meaning of the film (which is about the family bond according to some theorists who are serious about it, about man and nature according to others [see Friedman, who lists sixteen different modes of explanation that all fit]). Whereas one might argue that the shark is central for Spielberg, a symbol of cinema that is always moving, always hungry, always unfolding its purpose (see Pomerance, “Man-Boys” 139)—and therefore, for this filmmaker in particular, very special indeed—it might be objected that this kind of reading is entirely spurious and subjective, that no interpretation makes as much sense as the simple direct presence of the thing onscreen in the precise way that it is present. For such a literalist approach, the film is the ultimate reading of itself, and any interpretation that adds, detracts. In the end, surely, if a reading of the dog’s presence in line with the mechanical quality of the shark—a reading of the animal life in the film as arrayed along a continuum—brings a certain pleasure of thought, a philosophy; and if it seems consistent with the material of the film as it can be seen; then may a viewer not engage in it, as a creative perceptive act? When all is said and done, the dog is actually present as the Brodys drink their Scotch. The dog is really on that chair. No matter what Spielberg could now claim he intended in 1974 when he was shooting this film, he certainly did not intend to eliminate this dog and leave the footage on the cutting room floor. If the dog appeared on the chair by accident, if the dog blew in, if some dog owner walked him in on a leash and positioned him there without Spielberg’s knowledge, still, Spielberg looked through the viewfinder and saw him. And if he did not look through the viewfinder then he looked at the rushes. And if he did not look at the rushes, then he looked at the film in the editing room. And even if (preposterously) he never looked at the film, has never seen it, still the dog is there. One more step.


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What if we argue that the shark is central and the dog is marginal? (While Slavoj Žižek might have been able to make some case that one might imagine Hitchcock’s The Birds [1963] “without any birds” [104ff.], we really cannot imagine Jaws without any shark.) Therefore, it makes sense to speak of the shark in this film; it makes no sense to speak of the dog. But since both of these creatures are actually on the screen, actually visible in that wondrous Spielbergian light, with what logic, with what rationale, with what blueprint does one label one of them primary and the other secondary? They are both part of the knit verisimilitude that is the fabric of the story. Is there a secret legend by which one learns the importance that is to be attached to the visible objects of this world, this thing very important, that one less important, that one of no importance whatsoever? Spielberg himself takes delight in playing with the irony of importance later in Jurassic Park (1993), where immense dinosaurs, at least one of them considerably more vicious than the shark in Jaws, are cloned from a single picayune drop of blood taken from the trivial body of a mosquito preserved in amber that happens to be found. Walker Evans reflects a meditation on the spuriousness of assigning “importance” with his elegant book American Photographs, making profound compositions from objects that we often pass by as invisible, as unworthy of attention, in everyday life. The shark is onscreen longer than the dog, more menacingly than the dog, probably more unforgettably than the dog—but the shark is not more present than the dog. Like the shark, the dog is of this film. By way of conclusion, one truth about cinematic scholarship, advertising, and the umbilicus that joins them. When a film is released, the producers prepare publicity materials; these include statements about the work from the director and producer and a story synopsis written by a paid worker. This material becomes the basis for the accounts of the film given by reviewers and critics in their published evaluations. This (dominant) reading is also fostered by the design and limitation of visual publicity materials, including posters, trailers, published images, and so on. Hence prepared publicity material is the basis of the commonsense reading of the film apparently produced spontaneously by, but in fact cultivated in, viewing audiences. Invariably, film scholars use the same kinds of focused synopses in their own critical work, assuming that the film really is about what the production company has said it is about. For example: with Jaws no pictures of the dog are published in the newspaper; the dog does not appear in the trailer or the poster; and therefore paying attention to the scene with the dog is not sanctioned as a legitimate and proper way to “read” the film. A legitimate and proper reading should focus on Brody, Quint, and Hooper as they try to kill the shark. A shark coming out of the sea with tempestuous whitecaps; Brody pale with fear clinging to a rope; Quint grimacing angrily; Hooper steering desperately: the perfect image. Since the written publicity materials I am describing are not typically for public

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consumption, they remain invisible as a source of consensual understanding and as the undeclared standard against which other readings seem indistinct, bizarre, or willful. When we read a film, we are prone to being shaped and influenced by all of these publicity materials, by the alignments of bodies in the graphic imagery of posters and magazine ads, by the commentary in reviews and mediated interviews, by the tradition of Western narrative conventions which posits that some characters are more central than others. Through all of this our gaze must penetrate, and works to penetrate, and finally does penetrate in order that we may arrive, finally, joyfully, at the screen, where our experience of the film is actually focused. Our experience of the screen: the everything that is shown, how it meshes and unfolds, how it seems to regard our regarding of it, how it is vulnerable to being seen, how it converses with the speaking eye.

chapter 8

˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚ Not an Unusual Story Pompey they raised higher than ever, he and his laws and his high mind that aped the gods, so that his fall might be the more terrible. —George Bernard Shaw, Prologue to Caesar and Cleopatra

From the Ghosts In an old room lined with old books, an old man is telling an old story. As he talks, the light around him seems to die off, intense electrical illumination of the mid-twentieth century (the sixty-watt bulb) fading and traveling back in time to resemble weaker electrical illumination of the early twentieth century (the twenty-five-watt bulb), so that by the end of his tale he is virtually in darkness: Oh yes, I remember! Carlotta! The beautiful Carlotta. The sad Carlotta! . . . It is not an unusual story. She came from somewhere small to the south of the city, some say from a mission settlement. Young, yes. Very young. And she was found dancing and singing in cabaret by that man. And he took her and built for her that great house in the western addition. And, uh, there was a—there was a child. Yes, that’s it. A child! A child. I cannot tell you exactly how much time passed or how much happiness there was, but then he threw her away. He had no other children, his wife had no children. So, he kept the child and threw her away. You know, a man could do that in those days. They had the power and the freedom. And she became the sad Carlotta, alone in the great house, walking the streets alone, her clothes becoming old and patched and dirty. And the mad Carlotta, stopping people in the streets to ask, “Where is my child? Have you seen my child?” . . . She died . . . by her own hand. There are many such stories.

Raptly listening to this are two considerably younger, much more adventurous people, perhaps in love, perhaps seeking love. The old man does not hurry 187

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his spiel; time is all of a piece to him. Outside in the brightly lit street, trams shuffle by and people scurry about their quotidian business. The concern of the raconteur’s story—which, part of a film, is nothing but a story-within-the-story—is a woman fallen into destitution, largely because of her ill treatment at the hands of a powerful man (at a time when every man was, in a way, powerful with respect to every woman). This particular victim was brought into the precincts of the city from some place outside, some place that we may presume was more bucolic and less sophisticated—certainly a place where there was less motion. The central dynamic of the little fiction is a movement by which youth, erotic appeal, and anticipation are brusquely abused and then turn to decay, hopelessness, and death. In a way, it is a tale about what happens to life without love. As the old storyteller ambles around the bookshop recounting all this, he passes hundreds and hundreds of volumes resting sweetly on shelves, gathering dust. Once bright and shining and full of promise, each of these is now a silent resident in the great repository of human knowledge. Neither of the two listeners pauses to reflect that this story they are hearing—and also this rather decrepit place in which they are hearing it—has special meaning for them as a statement of a theme their lives are also prone to playing out. They do not imagine themselves falling silent and passive, like these books they can see but are not really looking at; or being thrown away, like the Carlotta they are hearing about but not really coming to know. When they thank the old man for his kindness and say goodbye, they rush out of his shop rather peremptorily, leaving it in their wake quite as though it already no longer exists. “Thrown away” himself, the old man stands in the background as the light intensifies around him again, takes a drag of his cigarette. This is a sequence from Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), with Konstantin Shayne doing the talking, Barbara Bel Geddes and James Stewart drinking in his every word. The sad Carlotta, the mad Carlotta figures in the story of the film as the grandmother of a protagonist who is apparently being haunted by her, haunted, as it were, to the grave. The character of Carlotta Valdes was added to the script rather late, by Samuel Taylor, according to Bill Krohn. She “would affect everything from the film’s visual style to Bernard Herrmann’s unequalled score, adding fascinating historical and political resonances to the sexual dynamics Hitchcock had brought to the story” (190). (To the reader who has not discovered Vertigo it should be said, not only the story but the overwhelming story.) In the “decisive” version of the script, Hitchcock himself had penned a note about “night falling both outside and inside the bookshop” during Pop Leibel’s storytelling (191). Since Carlotta was a Hispanic woman who had been picked up and dropped by a European man in early San Francisco, the story of her demise brings us to notice what Robert Corber calls “the discrepancy between the actual experiences of real historical Hispanic men and women in the American West and the representation of those experiences in

n o t a n u n u s ua l s t o r y

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official histories of the United States” (156)—Pop Leibel being anything but an official historian. What Carlotta adds to Vertigo, aside from her putative power to lure people to their deaths from beyond her grave, is a palpable sense of the fragility of woman’s economic and social position in America of the late nineteenth century; a lingering, cloying sense of mortality; a vision of efflorescence that suddenly dries up, shrivels, vanishes; and a chilling reminder that there is a cold brutal presence in the world that young people, for all their beauty, do not typically grasp or intuit. When the young Madeleine (Kim Novak) is caught by the not-so-old Scottie Ferguson (Stewart) staring into Carlotta’s grave at San Francisco’s Mission Dolores, for example, she is taken to be extraordinary: something strange has possessed her, that a woman in such a flush of youth and beauty should be obsessed with, should have any inkling of, death. Other elements of interest are woven into this story. Gavin Elster, Madeleine’s husband, has less money than she does, and he is in the shipping business, specifically the business of building ships. He creates transport, therefore, but he is unable to stop his wife from being “transported” by her obsession with the dead grandmother. There is also a casual young girl of no social standing, indeed a bumpkin in the city. As the story turns out, she has a very noble spirit. And there is a central fascination with performance, both professional and amateur: people are continually putting on appearances, so that a matter of technical staging is frequently, and surreptitiously, in progress. Finally, Vertigo turns and turns again upon death and memory, continually drawing to the surface the difference between young people and old, the past and the present, history and experience.

Swept Down Viewers and devotees of George Cukor’s early masterpiece Dinner at Eight (1933) will know instantly (and protest) that in many ways I am invoking that film at least as much as Hitchcock’s, although some of the variables have been twisted a little. (Hitchcock often reflected, then profoundly extended, other filmmakers’ work [see Pomerance “Quotes”].) In Dinner at Eight, performance of one kind or another is to be found everywhere, not least in the persona of a professional actor (storyteller) who by film’s end has come to the end of his tether. Death, ebullience, youth, age are everywhere, too, and always in counterpoint with one another. There is a bumpkin in the city, quite chummy—in the finale—with an old Carlotta. There is a shipping magnate, if not a builder then an owner, whose fortunes are even more plainly precarious than Elster’s; with a wife who at least thinks she has an unlimited supply of money. And there is, of course—and virtually at the center—this Carlotta, Carlotta Vance instead of Carlotta Valdes, a woman in many ways abused and abandoned, a victim of circumstance, a figure who haunts.

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Our Carlotta here (Marie Dressler) is a fading diva who has returned from Europe to New York, principally, we might think, to dig up some cash but also with a serious plan to ground herself again after what seems like a hectic, not altogether pleasant, existence abroad. She isn’t having a particularly successful, or even a particularly pleasant, visit. She keeps meeting people—some of them almost ancient—who remember seeing her onstage when they were young, so that her vanity is incessantly targeted, her good will pumped up and dropped down like a drunk on a roller coaster. She is one of a group invited—indeed “wanted”—for dinner at eight next Friday by Millicent Jordan (Billie Burke), the dottily oblivious butterfly-wife of Oliver Jordan (Lionel Barrymore), whose shipping company is crumbling around his feet because its stockholders (among whom Carlotta can number herself) are defecting. Jordan’s stock is especially coveted by a coarse, mouthy paragon of the nouveau riche, Dan Packard (Wallace Beery), who was a miner in Minnesota before he picked up a whiny, tasteless hat-check girl named Kitty and turned her into his whiny, tasteless, social-climbing wife (Jean Harlow); and whose dream it is to vacate Jordan from his position and take over the company himself. Kitty is relieving her (apparently boundless) boredom by having an affair with Dr. Wayne Talbot (Edmund Lowe), a heartless professional who is not only coldly disattending the sensibilities and sensitivities of his own wife (Karen Morley), a dignified—if unostentatious—woman of class from Murray Hill, but also coldly ministering to Jordan’s badly failing heart. The guests of honor at the party are to be Lord and Lady Ferncliffe, newly arrived from—and apparently the wealthiest people in—England. Desperate for a single male to make up her party, Millicent falls upon Larry Renault (John Barrymore), a middle-aged actor whose glories have faded, whose sharp-tongued agent (Lee Tracy) can’t quite manage to plant him in hot new roles, whose face is sagging, who has fallen into the bottle, and who—it need hardly be added—can’t pay for his hotel room. Renault is secretly the objet d’amour of the Jordans’ daughter, Paula (Madge Evans). Although her fiancé is to return from Europe before the soirée, she intends to jilt him there and reveal her love for Larry to all and sundry, this in the face of the actor’s most strenuous objection: Larry has time for nothing but his own self-loathing, and he knows he has no future. Carlotta, who is staying at the same hotel as Larry, has seen Paula with him. Here as elsewhere in life, she has deftly put two and two together. All of the lines of action in the film bear upon erosion, decay, and loss—a motif that has struck some observers as being principally enunciated through the character of Larry Renault. Indeed, Larry is like a large object exerting a heavy gravitational pull upon our attention. Given that he is nothing himself but a quintessential performer, yet also a man who once had—and now has lost—everything, it is perhaps not surprising that he is often taken as the chief enunciator, or paradigm, of the film’s overall theme of decay, its exemplar yet


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also its motive. Further, much criticism has worked to claim that Barrymore himself had lost his career by the time Dinner at Eight was filmed; in short, that the pathos of Dinner was a reflection of what can happen to an actor out of luck, an actor like John Barrymore. “I don’t think there can be much doubt,” writes Gary Carey, for example, “that [Edna] Ferber and [George S.] Kaufman [authors of the Broadway play from which Herman J. Mankiewicz and Frances Marion wrote the screen version], who had previously used Barrymore as the model for Tony Cavendish in The Royal Family, had Barrymore in mind when they wrote the role of Larry Renault. It’s a little embarrassing seeing an actor playing a character based so unflatteringly on his own life. Barrymore was not, at this point, a has-been, as is Larry Renault, but his reputation was already suffering from a disappointing film career and increasing alcoholic misconduct” (39). Thus, we are to believe Barrymore was simply being himself on camera; and indeed, according to Patrick McGilligan, Barrymore told Cukor he was playing this—as McGilligan calls him—“bleak study of a drink-doomed Lothario” as “a combination of his father-in-law . . . his brother-in-law . . . and himself” (96). Biography as performance. Worse: performance as biography. But Larry Renault’s tribulations do not echo John Barrymore’s life, and Barrymore was far more astutely crafting this characterization than Carey or McGilligan credit. Of the construction of Larry Renault, Cukor himself told Gavin Lambert, Although Jack was playing a second-rate actor, he had no vanity as such. He even put things in to make himself hammier, more ignorant. When they come to see him about a come-back and mention Ibsen, he had this wonderful idea. He said, “Ah, Ibsen!” and got up and leaned against the mantel and declaimed a bit of Oswald in Ghosts, getting it all wrong. “Oh, mother, forgive me . . . the sun . . .” Then at the end, when he’s decided to kill himself, we thought that although he wanted to die in a picturesque way, he should fuck that up, too. (63, 65)

If Larry is at the bottom of his career, he has certainly inhabited peaks from which to fall; nor has the fall been entirely the result of his own imbalance. He is not speaking out of empty vanity, for instance, when he explodes at his agent for suggesting he play a nonstarring role onstage or when he sticks his face into the producer Jo Stengel’s (Jean Hersholt) and reminds him, “I’m Larry Renault . . . I’m a Name, and I know it. And so do you. . . . Eight thousand a week—that’s what I got. And I was going to get ten—only the talkies came in.” By his own diagnosis, Larry was one of the victims of sound cinema, an actor whose voice wasn’t strong enough but who had been enormously popular on the silent screen for his looks. Eight thousand a week, indeed, was close to the top star salary in the late 1920s, so Larry, if he is not fabricating, was no slouch in silent films. When

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sound was introduced, and the major studios invested themselves in a broad reconfiguration of resources both for adding recorded sound to motion pictures and for retrofitting the theaters in their owned-and-operated chains with appropriate speaker systems, a number of significant changes took place in Hollywood. The star’s contract, which had to be approved by Actors’ Equity (Vischer “Stage’s Move”), now negotiated (and offered bonus payment) for use of the vocal chords, and the new sound technologist, typically an immigrant from high technology (Bell, Westinghouse, General Electric) and not a bona fide member of the filmmaking clan, held more sway than others on the set as regarded any individual’s chances of being successful in talkies. “All of us are so frightened,” said Clara Bow (Eyman 183), responding to the unheralded contingency that “all of a sudden the sound engineers were listened to a great deal. . . . All the silent stars were being watched . . . as to whether they could talk or not” (195). Part of what disabled and confused actors was the emerging fact that it was not the voice one had that counted toward one’s future in pictures, it was one’s voice as it would be evident through the (as yet unperfected) recording process. “I sound like I’m twelve or thirteen,” cried Mary Pickford (181). Dialogue coaches and vocal practitioners sprang up like weeds, becoming as important to screen actors who needed training or a boost in confidence as make-up personnel, costume designers, and lighting cameramen had been earlier. (In Singin’ in the Rain [1952], the staunch character actor Kathleen Freeman plays just such a specialist.) Yet of all the many actors whose careers were jeopardized—or who failed in motion pictures—once sound recording was normalized, of all the “Larry Renaults” of the day, as it were, John Barrymore was not one. “No one welcomed the advent of the talkies more than Jack Barrymore,” wrote one early biographer. “One had to be able to act now,” in a time when “many an actor and actress who had become idols in the days of silent pictures found themselves now out in the cold” (Power-Waters 157). An excerpt from his first cinematic talking role, screened as part of The Show of Shows (1929), was hailed for the “magnificent delivery” and “marvelous control of his facial features.” Barrymore, with “vocal organs that could resonate like thunder or float whispered tones to the farthermost seat in the largest movie palaces” was never so popular (Kobler 255). His brother Lionel had an even easier time in the early days of sound, especially in The Lion and the Mouse (1928), a picture that “seemed to show quite clearly the immense advantage of stage experience,” according to one reviewer; “It was generally agreed that Barrymore, with his years of voice training, carried off the honors of this film. His voice carried magnificently and he used it with telling effect to get over a number of innuendoes quite impossible without speech,” while, by contrast, “May McAvoy’s performance was hardly enhanced by the use of her voice. She looked perfectly lovely, but when her first turn came to speak the


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result brought a resounding laugh from the audience” (Vischer “Synchronized Dialogue”). If we take Larry Renault’s self-diagnosis at face value, if his fall from grace is (diegetically) real in itself, and therefore no mere reflection on the actor who played him, it is a powerful reflection on vulnerability to modernity and social change, part of a portrait of a fallen worker and a short essay on the fate of workers in general in an economy beset by technological innovation and its capitalization. Once sound came in, the social hierarchy of Hollywood underwent a seismic shift with many internationally famous celebrities converted overnight into “victims of the talkers” (Eyman 260), since, presumably, they did not have “good and pleasing voices,” as at least one member of the public publicly demanded (O. N. Rada in “The Public and Sound”). People, declaimed Exhibitors Herald and Moving Picture World, were “fed up of run-of-the-mill movies and old-style stars. Pictures and personalities that would have been hits two years ago are flops today” (“In tune”). And the technical abilities associated with the production of valuable behavior at work, now radically changed, brought into the light how precariously social status rests upon work, and thus upon the body and its trained capacity. “Actors who still had jobs knew what was going on,” writes Eyman, “and reacted with appropriate displays of deference, which seemed insufficient to counter the prevailing paranoia. Even at lowly Columbia, ‘The soundman was the president of the United States he was so important,’ said actress Dorothy Revier” (260). Since the general conversion to sound was accessible to the public, even a Hollywood spectacle in itself, the pitfalls of acting before a microphone became broadly available as examples of the worker’s dependence upon physical ability and strength, in short, testaments to the worker’s fragile security in the face of the owner’s whims, strategies, and fascinations for technology. “What shall [the producer] do,” queried Peter Vischer, “with those screen stars, built up into heroes and heroines at enormous expense, whose voices are not adapted to modern speaking devices? Can he afford to go slowly, with all his competitors apparently going ahead under full steam?” (“Herald-World Present Status”). We must recall, however, that the character Larry Renault whose voice wouldn’t make it in talkies has the melodious voice of John Barrymore! What the decline of Larry Renault shows is not what Larry himself claims, defeat by Hollywood in the Age of Sound, so much as a man vanquished by his own normal human frailties—a philandering ego, surrender to the bottle, vanity, failing memory—but working hard to convince himself it was a social structural change that toppled him. When he says, reflecting that the young actor who will replace him is English, “I can be as English as anybohdddy!” the resonance in his voice makes perfectly clear that this is no sound engineer’s reject. But the metaphor of the microphone reject is a perfectly apt one for characterizing a more expansive problem, how a brilliant actor, like any other person working

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assiduously, can find himself suddenly cheapened, his labor insufficient, his devotion inutile, his soul emptied. In 1924, F. W. Murnau had sounded this theme with the demotion of his doorman in The Last Laugh (see Pomerance “Gesture”). Modernity changes the world, and one day a man who had a secure job and a flattering reputation suddenly has nothing, is nobody, must offer hand towels in the men’s toilet. Hollywood and capital investment in sound technology might cause the rupture of many actors’ screen careers. But what would produce the surrender and failure that is truly responsible for Larry’s fate? To some degree, certainly, he has missed the spirit of his time as it advances. What Larry’s screen audiences would have wanted, if he had been able to mobilize them, was what audiences watching Barrymore embodying him wanted, what studios had substantially equipped themselves to provide: the drawing-room comedy of manners, the “realist” portrait of social life, as distinct from the great historical drama. Ibsen, even if Larry had been able to remember it correctly, was not the stuff audiences craved now; George S. Kaufman was. The hope in moving from a published to a filmed version of Kaufman’s play was that “it will sell a lot of books,” according to its publisher (Longwell to Kaufman, 1 June 1933), and by the time the film had been out for less than a month the play version was indeed selling very handsomely (Longwell to Kaufman, 21 September 1933); the publisher was excited, in fact, to tell Kaufman that Grosset & Dunlap, which had secured rights for a popular motion picture version of the playscript, had “gotten the moving picture producers of Dinner at Eight to promise to take special stills as illustrations . . . with special attention paid to high lights, etc. for printing reproduction” (Longwell unsigned to Kaufman, 11 May 1933). What is exceptional about Barrymore’s performance in this light is his elegant, indeed perfectly modern and, for up-to-date audiences of 1933, wholly watchable reconstruction of a man whose talents are for an age gone by. Renault is a has-been; Barrymore is anything but. This antithesis between styles and personalities, this gap between Renault and Barrymore, heightens for the audience an awareness of the awkward poise with which any occupational endeavor—acting or otherwise—must perch itself upon a fluid arrangement of forces, materials, techniques, concentrations, and virtuosities. But the fact that Renault has not been a “victim of the talkers” hardly diminishes the horrifying thought—raised directly by his presence—that many employees were, and that, metaphorically, almost anyone could be. (Almost anyone. Louis B. Mayer, who owned the MGM that was screening “Larry Renault,” and his fictive counterpart in Larry Renault’s world, didn’t have their voices tested and weighed.) Further: in other aspects of civilized life, a force could diminish a human being, make him pale and fade away. Something far bigger than Hollywood has damaged Larry. More generally


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in this film, something beyond shipping failures, stock collapse, government inaccessibility, impossible love, or hopeless craving for status has gone spectacularly wrong. What is it?

The Mortal Performance Although he poses it, Larry Renault does not provide us with an answer to this question. Carlotta Vance does, as we shall see. Since the performance of an actor, before a camera even more intensively than on a stage, depends upon tiny nuances of facial expression, vocal inflection, posture, and, in general, fine muscle control, it is a creation perhaps especially damageable under conditions that threaten bodily orientation and management: on board a ship during a storm (Fred Astaire and Jane Powell dancing “Open Your Eyes” in Royal Wedding [1951]); under the influence of alcohol or pharmacological agents taken in sufficient doses (Steve Railsback stumbling tipsily through the paint shed in The Stunt Man [1980]). Actors must at least be aware of the possibility of this contingency, especially when their performances are played on a thread of mortality: playing the role of a police mole in the underworld in Martin Scorsese’s The Departed (2006), Leonardo DiCaprio’s Billy Costigan—a character who is an actor—confides to his psychiatrist (Vera Farmiga) with some relief that in moments of abject terror, he notices his hand is absolutely steady. The role of Larry Renault is therefore propitiously built and lit to gain our attention, since in his demise we see something of a classic breakdown leading to a classic catapult. Renault is also central because he typifies exactly the sort of person we are actually gazing at as we watch him, namely, an actor playing a character: his every whimper is ironic, his every misstep a story about not only him but also the sort of person he embodies for us—the screen actor in general. When the masks of propriety erode under the bottle, and buried emotion erupts unstoppered, we see the collapse of the architecture that supports masquerade. But it would be a misreading of Dinner at Eight to see only Larry Renault as vulnerable to collapse because he cannot engage adequately in the production of his social position. That he kills himself only highlights his condition for us, makes him an icon of failure, not least because he manages to collect the entire spotlight upon himself in his last, hopeless moment (in a gesture suggested, Cukor tells us, by Barrymore himself). However, in this era of colossal economic and social disintegration, all of the characters have been swept down in more or less this way. Oliver Jordan is the third-generation heir to a massive shipping fortune, but in the modern age expenses are high and the wealth of the company has been put out to the public in stock shares. He himself now owns a comparatively small part of his own business and patrimony, and he has no way to prevent his principal

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stockholders from unloading their shares to eager buyers. Within the space of the day scheduled for the banquet, he loses control of the business, and finds, as well, that he has fallen into very poor health and has not long to live. Dan Packard, for all his blustery energy and brutal intent, has not developed the social skills necessary for impressing the people down in Washington (as he boasts he will) or even for successfully manipulating his own wife; he is therefore locked in a project of self-aggrandizement that has spun out of control. His ignorance of his betters leads him to put too much faith in the success that can be achieved by making a good impression on them at a dinner party. In fact, he cannot imagine that precisely because of their elevated standing, the lofty Ferncliffes might think nothing of the party at all. As much as Packard’s business plans are wrecked by the Ferncliffes’ apparently sudden decision to leave town, Millicent Jordan’s hopes of bringing off a social coup are similarly dashed. In shocked outrage, she bellows that she has never heard of such behavior in all her life, but the stunned look on her face telegraphs instantly that this life of hers, as a measure of social value, orbits entirely without measure in the Ferncliffes’ effete universe. While Millicent can lift her nose at her cousin Hattie (Louise Closser Hale) and her cousin’s simpleton movie-buff husband, Ed (Grant Mitchell), it is true that she requires to be surrounded by such people in order to produce an elevation for that nose—a nose that has no natural height. Kitty Packard has been as ineffective in marshalling the controls that might shape and constrain her maid Tina (Hilda Vaughn) as Larry has in shaping his behavior. A working girl who has only conceits of bourgeois life, Kitty is the social equal of the young woman in her employ and, now overfed on chocolates and the amorous attentions of Dr. Talbot, far from a controlling force. Tina therefore blackmails her easily when she overhears a spousal battle. On top of this, Kitty’s hopes of climbing socially are stymied by her persistent stridency of tone and clumsiness. For his part, Talbot attempts by seducing his female patients to escape the clutches of his well-bred wife, yet her understanding— not really sympathetic, but loyal and long-lived—gelds him and binds him to her the more securely for every Kitty he tries secretly to kiss. He married up, but then committed the error of trying to forget. Kitty would like to have married up, but didn’t know how. The view from below is what Talbot and Kitty share, what gave them a basis for companionship. There is a great deal of death in this film, beyond the manifest death of Larry Renault. Jordan has only a little time left, but that notwithstanding, it is possible to imagine a younger, healthier Oliver standing behind this one, a jubilant, optimistic, flamboyant, charming man who once (and always) loved Carlotta Vance and who gained the splendid fortune that is now in jeopardy. Paula Jordan’s fiancé Ernest DeGraff (Phillips Holmes) seems exactly such a personality when we meet him at the dinner party: socially adept, handsome,


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considerate, sweet, witty, fast, graceful. If she marries him, will Paula become the woman her mother became, desperate to solidify a million tiny decorative accomplishments because in fact she has no real power? Will Paula turn the earnest Ernest into her father, a man with a wounded heart, a man who has withstood too much pressure to keep his anxious and hungry wife innocent of the fact that their fortune is drying up? It seems clear that, out of vanity or genuine affection, Paula is sincerely carried away with Larry; and when she learns of his death, something dies in her, too. She will surely marry Ernest, but the blossom of her love will shrivel. That blossom has not shriveled in her mother; but Millicent is too desperate to stop rushing along for a moment and really be with the man she loves. Packard’s hopes of taking over Jordan’s company; his wife’s hopes of bouncing into the upper class; these are as dead by film’s end as Millicent’s vision of herself basking in the Ferncliffe glow. Ernest will be marching into a marriage with a woman he believes is swept away by him, because once she was. That he is now nothing more than a signal for her may never become apparent to him, and so he has lost not only a wife but a world—and he doesn’t know it, and may very well never learn. Oliver had to have his stock, but the deal died. Millicent had to “have” the Ferncliffes but the dinner died. Paula had to have Larry but Larry died. Packard had to have Jordan and Co., but his zeal died. Kitty had to have entrée to another class, but her chance died a long time ago, when she married Packard, although neither of them could face knowing that. And yet: it all did look so rosy, once. Oliver was going to find those stockholders . . . Packard was going to steal that company . . . Millicent was going to engineer that social triumph . . . Kitty was going to seduce that doctor . . . Talbot was going to escape from that wife . . . Paula was going to marry Larry and go sailing off into the sunset . . . These shiny dreams that fade and evaporate all signify America the land of promise and opportunity thrown down by the Great Depression. As a tool of the hegemony, the film helped reassure the downtrodden that the rich were as troubled as they, indeed more troubled because more optimistic to start with. And as an address to the ressentiment of the poor (who populated the movie houses), the film had a strong message: here were a tribe of self-indulgent narcissists, rightfully the targets of resentment and loathing for their snobbishness, their advantages, and their sybaritic lifestyle, now diminished and demeaned, equalized, democratized once and for all, as they deserved to be. The doctor, the shipowner, the famous thespian, the brassy speculator, the socialite, the glamour girl, the spoiled princess—all frozen in their tracks by something massive and overwhelming and ineluctable and cold. Not Dinner at Eight but The Party’s Over. And yet this reading is both too easy and too casual. It makes for a film that is repetitive and tedious—but this one is not!—and it neglects something

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crucial and chilling. Let us look again at our Carlotta, she who was magnificent and beautiful once, a long time ago.

Another Voice From the earliest labors on this film, Carlotta was envisioned as a woman entrapped by the inescapable probabilities of age. “Carlotta has beauty,” wrote Jessie Burns, 10 March 1933, synopsizing the Kaufman/Ferber stage play for MGM, “but it needs to be excavated out of the flesh accumulated by soft living. She is, perhaps, fifty-three. Still clinging about her is an aura of the old splendor of an actress and a heart-breaker; no one is more conscious of this aura than Carlotta herself” (Burns, “Reader’s Report” USC). But then Burns adds a coloration that is virtually bleached out of the film, washed away: “What a damned pity that she picked the wrong period to live in. She was too young for Prince Edward and too old for Wales. She fell right between princes.” In the film she is not too young for anybody, and has fallen, not between but outside the possibilities of love. A somewhat more replete, even bizarre, characterization was sketched by Frances Marion in her own synopsis, 23 February 1933. According to this, Oliver Jordan fell in love with Carlotta as a young man with a penchant for etching and playing the piano, who had composed “some of Carlotta Vance’s most famous songs.” Carlotta had given Oliver heartache by escaping to Europe “with the most popular matinee idol of the gay nineties. Carlotta Vance never married, but she doesn’t attempt to disguise the fact that she has never really loved any man as she had loved Oliver Jordan” (Marion, “Synopsis” USC). In this synopsis, which is also an early plan for the film script, the story ends with Carlotta persuading Paula that no good can come of confessing her love for the dead Larry—indeed, that a woman should not confess everything to her husband. She escorts Paula in to dinner, and that was to have been the end of the film. Elided by this possible scene structure is the caustic finale line uttered by Marie Dressler to Jean Harlow, in which she comically dispenses with Harlow as a slattern in ambiguous language that brings the house down; and also something far more pregnant and involving, which is a scene Marion and Mankiewicz shaped for Carlotta Vance with Paula before the guests march in to dine. In the 6 March script by Marion, Carlotta is in the hotel when she discovers that Larry is dead. (All versions of the screenplay depart from Ferber and Kaufman’s original in respect of Larry’s suicide, in that the stage play provides for no direct witnessing of Larry’s death at all and moves from him sitting before a gas fire directly to the dinner party at which he never arrives, with Paula “glancing toward the door, moving about restlessly, never giving her full attention to any one person in the room” [Kaufman typescript].) Carlotta says


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to Paula, “I knew it was coming. . . . that’s the breaks in the game” (Marion Shooting Script, 6 March 1933, USC). The next day, a sequence was scripted for the Jordan drawing room at the dinner soirée. Millicent notices that Mr. Renault hasn’t arrived, and Carlotta responds, “Well, I’m starving, for one! Let’s have dinner!” (Marion Shooting Script, 7 March 1933, USC). In a set of proposals sent to the studio by Bertram Bloch three days later, Paula confesses her illicit love to her father, and Talbot, who knows Oliver is slowly dying, warns her off: “You have his life in your hands” (G. Willcox to Miss Farrell, 10 April 1933, USC). By 6 April, however, the script was in the hands of Herman Mankiewicz, who crafted a scene for Carlotta and Paula in the Jordan home in which Carlotta informs Paula that Larry is dead. As Paula cries that she must go to him, Carlotta becomes impatient and says, “It would take very little to get me to shake you by the shoulder until your teeth rattled” (Mankiewicz, Script for Dinner Sequence, 6 April 1933, USC). She helps Paula powder her nose and they race back to “that dreadful dinner party.” Within the next two weeks, the script changed in a significant way, because a 20 April transcript from dialogue reels gives the concluding sequence with Carlotta and Paula in a different light. After Carlotta convinces Paula to think of her father and not bring her affair with Larry into the open, Paula remonstrates, “My poor Larry—he’s dead, Carlotta,” at which point Carlotta says to her, “Yes, but after all, my dear—there’s nothing to be done—that’s the unfortunate thing about death—it’s terribly final, isn’t it—even when young people can’t do anything about it” (transcript of dialogue, 20 April 1933, USC). Since the direction of Carlotta’s little speech hadn’t been implied by any of Marion’s early script work, it seems reasonable to take the sentiments recorded on 20 April as the work of Mankiewicz. What he added is substantial, given Paula’s considerable arrogance and self-importance earlier in the film and her assertion of having the right to feel whatever she wants and to do as she pleases in respect of her love for Larry. To Carlotta she preaches, “You want me to give him up. Well, I won’t. You’re just like all the rest of the old people. You think you know best—because you’re old. You think you’ll tell me what to do with my life. Well, you can’t—because it’s my life. I’m young. I’ve got a right to go to the man I love” (transcript of dialogue, 20 April 1933, USC). Reacting to this outburst, Carlotta is making an explicit reference not only to Paula’s youth but also to her own relative age, in short, drawing to the surface a structure of human experience and relation that has been implicit throughout this film but addressed openly only through the humorous, puckish observations other characters make about Carlotta not being as young as she once was. At this moment, Carlotta is no mere butt of humor but a woman who has gathered and consolidated her strengths and position in an attempt to confide to Paula, for whom she has a deep regard, one of the great facts of life, namely that life is more important than death. And in saying about death, “Young people can’t

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do anything about it,” she is reminding Paula that the energies and vivacity of youth, while a characteristic of life, are not life itself. That you are young and vibrant, she seems to mean, is not as important as (in your vibrant youth) you think. More important, still, is that we are all here, together, at this moment. The tragedy is that Carlotta can appreciate this fact, while Paula cannot; and Carlotta can see this tragedy, yet she must reach out as far as she possibly can. Six days later, the dialogue was transcribed from the film and has a more polished, and even more chilling, quality: Carlotta: Listen, listen, Paula, I realize that I’m an old woman, and that young people have a right to do as they want, but at this time I think you should consider someone else, your Father. Paula: My poor Larry, he’s dead, Carlotta. Carlotta: And nothing can be done. That’s the unfortunate thing about death, it’s so terribly final, even the young can’t do anything about it.

Now, in a galvanizing rhythm, Carlotta is emphasizing not only the finality of death, but how terrible that finality is, how irrevocable and unbounded. And she is making a direct statement to Paula about the limits that adhere to the energy of youth, pointing out that youth is far from unbounded itself and that with all the rights in the world there are certain actions that simply cannot be committed. Paula has been distracting herself thinking about her rights and her desires, which flow from her vivacity and her energies, when the world has little time, in truth, for either. This is a powerful lesson, echoing the Boatswain’s address to the arrogant Gonzalo in the opening scene of The Tempest, as the ship rocks and the storm rages uncontrollable: You are a counsellor; if you can command these elements to silence, and work the peace of the present, we will not hand a rope more; use your authority: if you cannot, give thanks you have lived so long, and make yourself ready in your cabin for the mischance of the hour. . . . (Tempest I.i.20–26)

Paula is being shown that in the face of mortality, authority—even the authority of the unbruised young—is impotent. The new and final reading of the line was created by Dressler herself, in front of the camera. It is not to be found, worded exactly this way, in any version of the script but does appear in the transcript of recorded dialogue. And she turns a little, when she says it, so that her fierce dark eyes are glaring off into a strange space very proximate to the lens, certainly not the space inhabited by Paula in the Jordan library, or by any other character in the film. “That’s


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the unfortunate thing about death, it’s so terribly final, even the young can’t do anything about it.” The delivery is meticulous, every syllable a pearl on a chain. The gaze is not only fierce and steady but as black as night. In speaking, she does not twitch, sway, shake, or turn, but is a statue with a voice. And therefore, the words have a clarion force, and we cannot but be shaken to our core. “She was a law unto herself,” Cukor said of Dressler (Lambert 66). Hers is a statement to all characters, to all audiences, to Carlotta herself and—even through Carlotta—to the actress speaking. In Forms of Talk, Erving Goffman proposes that a speech may be animated (that is, technically produced) by one speaker, authored by a second, and uttered in the name of a principle espoused by yet a third. In the case of this pregnant line, for example—“That’s the unfortunate thing about death, it’s so terribly final, even the young can’t do anything about it”—Mankiewicz is the author, Dressler the animator, Cukor’s filmmaking the principle. And yet we also have what seems a perfect conjunction of animation, authorship, and principle in a single breath, since the animation by Dressler is perfectly apposite to a performance by Carlotta Vance, both of these women being old actors scanning their youth from a promontory that allows no access to it in reality. So perfectly does the sentiment uttered fit Carlotta in her slow disappearance—a disappearance that has methodically proceeded for us through the entire film—and so exquisitely does the wording allow for a more general consideration of the meaning, that Dressler’s career, too, is wholly invoked, as is anyone’s: the writing here, that is to say, is of the sort that obliterates the writer. And the speaking obliterates the speaker. In the performance by these two great personalities of the stage and screen, Vance and Dressler, superimposed upon one another, we see a truth that incorporates all possible motive and principle, as though for a stunning moment there is no film in which all this is being contextualized and watched, no George Cukor arranging it, no theater in which we have embedded ourselves in a comfy bubble of darkness to observe, but only a tender human woman who is sharply, horribly conscious of her mortality. Dressler achieves this—call it magic, by absorbing all of the relevant experiences of her life; looking around her not only at the characters but at the actors with whom she must play her scenes, and especially at the young Madge Evans who is certainly too young to know what wholesale collapse is; by feeling the beat of the clock moving ahead but also allowing her the hiatus in which to speak; by knowing, in short, life, which itself not only glows and promises but also diminishes, flickers, hesitates, desires, goes out. Given that the film is entirely—although comically—a waltz with death, however, this line, coupled with the strange gaze and posture with which it is delivered, with the quintessential fluidity of breath that shapes it, also has the effect of drawing together all the various threadlines of the story, all the mortalities invoked and implied, in such a way that Dinner at Eight appears altogether, in a flash, as an architecture conceived and articulated with a view

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to substantiating, placing, and sounding exactly these words. The film is the pretext upon which Marie Dressler may stand and say this, staring darkly not quite into our eyes. Mortality, after all, is invoked from the start, when Oliver Jordan announces, “The Castillian isn’t going to sail tomorrow . . . No use sending a boat out with not enough cargo in it to keep her down in the water”; and continues directly as Carlotta, entering his office and hearing him say “You’re looking marvelous!” echoes with a slightly doubtful “Do I? . . . Oh, I do, don’t I!”—as though, even in this first presentation to us, and to him after so many years, the primary object of her attention is honesty, directness, and confrontation with the cascade of time. She is acknowledging that she does, exactly, look marvelous, and that the look is a construction. Everyone who looks marvelous, by implication, is in Carlotta’s shoes, gazing back at a past long gone and forward to a condition of finality. When Kitty Packard picks up her bedside telephone to take Millicent Jordan’s dinner invitation, for example, she looks like a living glittering rhinestone, with dreamy white chiffon covering her, a white satin headboard behind her, a wide white ribbon tied at her throat, snowy spangles around her neck, light beaming from a bauble on her finger, and hair the color of platinum rolling over her head. Her lips are painted darkly, her eyes and lashes painted, her brows drawn by an etcher with the sureness of Whistler’s hand. This is nothing but a banquet of contrivances, all to enunciate the personality and bearing of a mere child fallen into lush circumstances. “We are all mortal,” Carlotta seems to be saying, with force but not with resignation. The lack of resignation, the dignity, the awe on her face—this is the core. It is an awful truth, but an important one, and rather than being flattened into retreat by the indisputability and ominousness implied in what she says, Dressler seems charged with an urgency to convey this magnificent message directly and instantaneously. The direction of her gaze not into our eyes but almost into them, close enough that we know that she knows that we will be there watching; coupled with the exact wording of the line—“It’s so terribly final, even the young can’t do anything about it”—(not just final but terribly final; not just the young, but even the young) and the entire structure of the film before it, including Carlotta’s having been ridiculed for her age (“Can’t anybody ever talk to me without throwing in the word ‘old’?” she complains to Packard in Mankiewicz’s script), the various collapses and weakenings, failures and catastrophes that beset the host of characters, the palpitant impossibility of the dinner being successful against so many odds, the fragility of Jordan’s company in these times of financial disaster, all merge in an instant to produce a moment in which a character’s voice seems to emerge entirely from its bindings in a character’s body within a narrative and address us personally, truthfully, beautifully in the night. (Always, in the movie theater, it is night.) Dressler doesn’t enunciate the line as much as sing it, softly, on a


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“It’s so terribly final, even the young can’t do anything about it.” With a tiny turn of the gaze, an actress brings gravitation into cinema. Marie Dressler (r.) with Madge Evans in George Cukor’s Dinner at Eight (MGM, 1933). Digital frame enlargement.

single breath, quite as though another voice is speaking through her, with her knowledge and assent. To hear all of the music that Dressler makes here, however, and to let it resonate within us, we must be willing to briefly forget about the unfolding eventfulness of the film, to lose our grasp on the story, to float. What we can then experience at this moment is a powerful union of the writer’s craft, the actor’s canny vocal improvisation and posture, the artful placement of the camera to reveal all this while decorating it with absolutely nothing more, and the director’s sensitive structuring of all the scenes that played before; so that there is a kind of screen gesture, a way in which the film itself makes expression, through all aspects of its form, regarding life—not only social life, but life itself—and its limit. The actor onscreen does not only embody a character and bring the quickness of the living image to the line of narrative. She also has the power to mobilize and concentrate an expression of self, since she is entirely co-present with her character. If James Stewart could muse that the beauty of cinema was its ability to capture and render “pieces of time,” it is also true, and provocatively so, that the actor’s work freezes and offers not just narrative time but also the time of the actor’s life. A tiny moment of screen performance, sculpted as it

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is by a sensitive, thinking worker out of the exigency of feeling, out of other actors’ work all around, and out of the pressing but also relieving pulse of time, can lever the structure of an entire film, can balance or unbalance it, turn it, illuminate a thousand other moments, angles, objects, postures, and pretenses in order suddenly to offer us a whole new understanding of the story and of our experience. The actor must use her sense of space both topographical and narratological, and also her experience, which amounts to saying that an instant of performance is biographical and biological, a summation of every previous moment in an actor’s life. There are viewers—and at a time Cukor himself was one of these—who fail to be convinced that Marie Dressler could have been, once upon a time, a stunning beauty of the stage or screen such as Carlotta Vance ostensibly was. “When I learned that Marie Dressler was to play Carlotta Vance,” he is reported to have confided, I said to myself: she is not quite my idea for the part, not the way it was played on the stage by Constance Collier. Constance was enormously distinguished, she had been leading lady to Herbert Tree. But, very shrewdly, Louis B. Mayer contended that Dressler was the biggest thing in pictures, although she looked like a cook and had never played this type of part. (Lee 242)

Dressler, writes Betty Lee, “enjoyed” playing the role and “dominated the screen whenever she was before the camera” (243). That she had neither the bearing nor the distinction of Collier, of course, contributes to Dressler’s stunning power as she proceeds to build the role of the has-been, rapidly alternating, in scene after scene, between expressions of dashing insouciance and grim decrepitude, then finally eclipsing herself in the haunting finale moment about mortality. There, one biographer writes, the actress, who had been filming since 1914 and had made a national reputation with, among other pictures, Min and Bill (1930), Let Us Be Gay (1930), and Tugboat Annie (1933), “brings such knowing skill that it appears as a valedictory to her entire career” (Kennedy 199). Could an audience, we might wonder, believe in the sudden spiritual collapse—the sudden awakening to a mortal current—of a woman whose character was entirely upright and dominant, noble and refined? Would not some of the refinement seem to cling to her as a superficial veneer, once she began to act as though the foundation for her dignity had crumbled? In Dressler—who had never been the beauty she was having Carlotta pretend to, who had never rested quite upon the heights—was the perfect basis for Carlotta’s ruin, since, always something of a ruin already, always already collapsed, she could inspire our conviction in the dull, penetrating reality of a fall. It was for Dressler, then, even more than for Carlotta Vance, that Mankiewicz wrote that final speech, putting words into her mouth that would have


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clanged falsely from so dignified a performer as Constance Collier but that seemed philosophically true, momentary, even actually alive when Dressler uttered them. “I believe,” she wrote in her autobiography, “there comes a time in life when there is nothing to do but wait” (241). Through all of Dinner at Eight, Dressler convincingly shows us that for Carlotta, and for her—perhaps for anyone who can love this film—that time has come. When she informs Paula of the helplessness of youth she sounds, in our waiting room, a knell of honor.

chapter 9

˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚˚ The Horse Who Drank the Sky “I can believe anything in the dark.” —Sarah Miles (Deborah Kerr) in The End of the Affair (1955)

Spirit of Place Here is what D. H. Lawrence wrote in 1923 about the “spirit of place”: Every people is polarized in some particular locality, which is home, the homeland. Different places on the face of the earth have different vital effluence, different vibration, different chemical exhalation, different polarity with different stars: call it what you like. The spirit of place is a great reality. (12)

Rocky Balboa says something to the same effect in the film that concludes his career: “If you stay some place long enough, you become that place.” And “Whatever is present for a long while becomes part of one,” Oliver Sacks confided in a talk in Toronto in November 2007. The place that is present for a long while is home. Among other things, home is a place we look at, that effuses with a form, a hue, a perspective. The Thames, the Seine, the Hudson, the Jordan, the Mississippi have their own smells, their own colors. In London at the corner of Gower Street and Torrington Place, where one can buy Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature and catch a No. 24 bus that will drive all the way down past Victoria and then all the way up to Camden Town; in Paris at the corner of the Rue de Solferino and the Rue de Lille, where in the morning mists one can just see the rise of the Passerelle de Solferino as it curls hopefully, woodenly over the river; in Manhattan at the corner of Greenwich and Seventh Avenues, where behind a wire fence a tiny garden grows, bravely sharing the sunshine with the towering monstrosity that is St. Vincent’s Hospital—in all particular places, there is an invocation 206


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of the smells and colors of locality and history, smells and colors geographic and poetic that call up natures, tinctures, nodules of experience. Even in one city there are many such spirits of place. In Los Angeles, the corner of South Robertson Avenue and Alden Drive, where the glitterati lunch at The Ivy; the corner of Bronson Canyon Road and Franklin Avenue, where the Scientologists gather under a palmy canopy behind a tall hedge; the corner of Figueroa and Exposition, where the students come sleepily to USC in the morning; the corner of La Cienega and Jefferson Boulevards, under the stench of a chocolate factory and oil fields—all these could be in different universes. Characteristic shapes, motions, actions, histories, modes of gathering—all these qualify a space and convert it to a place. Place is something we long for. We breathe place, taste the recollection of place, feel the subtle perturbations when someone alters place, position ourselves and therefore set angle and intentionality in place, devour place, invent place, speak in the language of place. “In Algeria,” Yi-Fu Tuan quotes Albert Camus, “dogs can be heard barking at night over distances ten times greater than in Europe. The noise thus takes on a nostalgia unknown in our cramped countries” (Tuan 15). But modernity dissolved place in a rush of movement, a field of probability, a condition of disembodiment. Power, capable of escaping place, overarched or evaporated localized politics. Modernity reconfigured and recast power in a new, increasingly globalized space of rapid mobility, pervasive strangeness, electric engagement, and fractional participation (see Parsons et al. Working Papers; Pomerance “Introduction”). Regarding power and the new modern city space, Walter Benjamin quotes a Parisian police agent: “It is almost impossible to maintain good behaviour in a thickly populated area where an individual is, so to speak, unknown to all others and thus does not have to blush in front of anyone” (Baudelaire 40). Noticing and evaluating a blush involved familiarity, relationship, spatial proximity, and the interpersonal bonds that modernity loosened and ultimately dispensed with in the name of what Max Lerner once called a “culture of machine living,” a means of social organization whereby persons in their fullness, with their biography and class condition foregrounded, were no longer required as the agents of social action; where the active agent “cuts himself off increasingly from the organic processes of life itself” (259). And Henry Giroux writes, “As power travels beyond national boundaries, it is largely disconnected from any moral obligations and accountability to its employees, the young, the aged, the local community, and the larger social order. In the age of neoliberal globalization, . . . power extends across, around, and over territorial boundaries disrupting the neat correspondence between the sovereignty of the nation-state and the space of the political. Power is now more extraterritorial” (110). Politics, Giroux concludes, turns

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inward; the state is “hollowed out” and public services are privatized. But these phenomena occur as a result of a particular historical thrust, one that evacuates one kind of social space and replaces it with another. Echoing McLuhan’s rhapsody on the “primitivity” or “tribalness” of the “global village,” Tuan notes how in nonliterate cultures, because “not only the means but the desire to think historically is lacking” (189), history and origins are not especially valued in the face of present experience, which is all-enveloping; and the cult of the past, “manifested in the establishment of museums and in the preservation of old buildings . . . a type of consciousness that emerged at a certain stage in Europe’s history,” is essentially absent (194). Giroux suggests of the modern neoliberal world that local space is replaced by a vast, globalized zone whose boundaries are not places but telecommunications links. It is important to note that this is a criticism born in nostalgia for place, in an abject feeling of loss at its fragmentation. It offers a preference for a certain topos, a certain long regard. In a way, it is a classical mode of looking and appreciating, certainly an approach that was challenged early in the twentieth century. Fragmentation was perceived as a cultural phenomenon in the aftermath of the First World War, when the new effects of shelling, including “shell-shock,” took on iconic significance in the work of, among others, Wyndham Lewis. Paul Fussell describes a kind of separation of self from situation that took place frequently during this conflict, a prevailing emotional style of the front in which “utter sang-froid, or what we would have to call the style of British Phlegm” leads soldiers faced with shelling “to affect to be entirely unflappable; one speaks as if the war were entirely normal and matter-of-fact” (181). Or one suffers the mental devastation of shell shock, a condition Rebecca West works to describe in The Return of the Soldier: “His very loss of memory was a triumph over the limitations of language which prevent the mass of men from making explicit statements about their spiritual relationships” (133). In film, the fragmentation of place has been equated with the fragmentation of the objects that occupy it, typically through the mechanism of the explosion. In the war films of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, the explosion is shown as a manifestation of place and placement, a phenomenon attached to place even while obliterating it: spot-bombing, which leaves the frame both intact and untroubled while fracturing objects within it, as in Things to Come (1936), One of Our Aircraft Is Missing (1942), or The Bridges at Toko-Ri (1954). In action-adventure films and science fiction films of the late 1970s and beyond, by contrast, explosions produced through new pyrotechnic technology and the use of miniatures give the appearance, momentarily, of obliterating the screen itself, and when clarified at a distance reveal the coming apart, and the dispersal through space, of the constituent parts that in coherence had embodied place previously. A good example, predictive of much that would follow it—even, indeed, of a yet more


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stunning explosion that follows it in the selfsame film—is Grand Moff Tarkin’s cruel devastation of the planet Alderan in Star Wars (1977): the blast, which leaves absolutely nothing behind, lasts about three seconds onscreen. Through its own history cinema thus documents the way place is reconfigured as space in modernity. Place is both political and meaningful to those who inhabit it; this is true when the habitation is lawful and creative, and also when it is transgressive and the place becomes a “scene of the crime.” In André Téchiné’s poetic Le Lieu du crime (1986), for example (a reflection upon Great Expectations), we have a delicious evocation of the Gironde, no less powerful because of the “illegality” of some of the action that transpires there. The same can be said for Lars Thorwald’s apartment—to the extent that we can see it in our “voyeurism”—in Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954). Interestingly, some filmmakers have attempted to make motion pictures set in the globalized, evacuated, depoliticized modern space. Wim Wenders’s Until the End of the World (1991), Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic (2000), Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation (2003), Steven Gaghan’s Syriana (2005), Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Babel (2006) are among a group of films that begin by briefly positing place and then proceed to effortlessly escape its gravitational pull, to accelerate a narrative that occupies an international zone in which the ability to achieve motion is more important than the sense of occupying place. In The Bourne Ultimatum (2007), virtually the entire film is a chase, and the very few static shots are made with a slightly shaky hand-held camera that seems to breathe and shudder. Sense and gravity are sacrificed for potentiality. The characters’ weight is left behind, while the camera, divorcing itself from them, roams without commitment among colorful ciphers that float like feathers in a twisting optical space. In Babel, for example, by the time the Latina housekeeper Amelia (Adriana Barrazza) has taken the two American children who are in her care to Mexico, crossed back into the U.S.A. illegally, and raced into the desert with her wards in tow—all this intercut with shots of the Border Patrol in pursuit, shots of the children’s parents surviving their own ordeal simultaneously in Morocco, and shots of a grieving mute teenage girl in Tokyo, not to say close shots of Amelia wandering among the cacti and finally being arrested and torn away from the (completely unidentifiable) “spot” where she has left the children to wait—it is difficult to be certain where she is, what “desert” she is wandering in, what “country” she belongs to, lives in, visits, feels connection for, or recognizes, and indeed, what is happening beyond a vague and globalized invasion of violence, militarism, desperation, incomprehensibility, despotism, and pain that are, at once, everywhere the human heart beats and thus, speaking of location, precisely nowhere. Though Amelia’s situation is serious; though the film posits that what is occurring is a tragedy; still it lacks gravity, the sense of being affiliated to a spirit of place. In Until the End of the World, finally, the protagonist is assaulted by a

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quivering vision of undifferentiated light, so faithfully has he exhausted himself in trying to see the deep nature of life on earth. Lost in Translation is all murmurs and distorted spaces, a picture of an unfathomable transcontinental zone (in some ways like Spielberg’s The Terminal [2004]). Syriana and Traffic both race through the events they depict, leaving the viewer with a blur that substitutes for a vision. Much the same can be said for The Kingdom and Rendition (both 2007), which progress by bouncing through locales that are offered as containers for, but not established settings of, action. In all these films, our sense of movement is paramount. (One can speak reverentially of gravity. In an interview aired 13 March 2007, Stanley Donen confided to Robert Osborne on Turner Classic Movies that the idea of having Fred Astaire dance on the ceiling in the “You’re All the World to Me” number of Royal Wedding [1951] was “self-evident” to him, who had in his youth looked upon Astaire as a kind of idol. It seemed, Donen said, that of all people Fred Astaire was the one least subject to the laws of gravity. The gravity Astaire escapes in this remarkable dance is only holding his feet to the floor; because the photograph of his beloved is in the room with him, his movement takes him up and around the place, allowing him to touch and embrace every corner and aspect of it, but he is never inspired to actually float away, abandon the scene; and the camera never for an instant generalizes the dance movements beyond the articulations of feeling flowing from this [exceptional] body.) One limiting condition of the depoliticized, denatured, global zone of placelessness in which, for Giroux, power is “extraterritorial” is the television screen, which is like a magic carpet that flies us not to a particular destination but, more accurately, over all destinations in a ceaseless shift that is all progress without any voyaging. Not only does this screen seem to fulfill the potential first stated by Dave Garroway and Edward R. Murrow by appearing to transport us around the geographical world as we know it—and, of course, after CNN more potently than ever before in broadcast history—it zooms past human figures and topographical details with a profound self-consciousness of its own capacity for transformation. When Marshall McLuhan described the result of being saturated by television images as residing in a “global village,” his emphasis was on the word “global”; when a village becomes “global” it is, of course, no longer a village at all; one is not there. Or, as Gertrude Stein put it, there is no there there. There are no horizons. (Hitchcock often said that for him, happiness was a clear horizon.) And the global village has no population, since although people move through it they do not reside. The “global village” is an indiscriminate planetary zone, where power can roam at will, where marketing can trumpet the movement of power. In his book Living-Room War, Michael J. Arlen, who was in the late 1960s the television critic for the New Yorker, noted how, through a certain discipline,


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one could pull oneself away from the television screen and the placelessness it implies and urges: What is one going to say about Petticoat Junction anyway—beyond making a few arch, superior little cultural leaps into the air, and then jumping on its stomach? Who wants to spend his time jumping on Petticoat Junction? What did begin to seem interesting, though, interesting at any rate to me because I’d never really looked at TV before, was this sense of the other reality of television—television observed not merely as a box, a piece of furniture dispensing such commodities as “information” or “entertainment,” but as—well, as something we are doing to ourselves. It was as if one had had this lens focused in tightly on the television screen, watching these mechanical figures in Western hats acting out their mechanical charades, and then gradually had begun to widen the lens, taking in the table beneath the set, the walls, the furniture, a hand holding a cigarette, a pair of legs, people—people (no matter what they seemed to be saying) connecting with the figures on the screen, connecting with each other, looking, peering into the set, looking (no matter what they seemed to be saying) for a reflection, for God knows what. (ix)

One could lean back, then, and notice, not only the awkward cubical thing residing upon one’s floor as both cherished furniture and member of the family but also that stunned regard with which one was admiring it, and the regard of one’s friends as they sat to one’s side engaging themselves similarly. It was possible to dis-engage oneself long enough to actually witness the engagement one had just terminated as a cultural fact itself. Perhaps in disengaging oneself one could even recover one’s place and placement in a more proper world, and notice that the television set also occupied—and was trying vainly to be—a place in life. Or perhaps, more surprisingly, in detaching oneself from the constant movement for a brief hiatus one could recognize the power and possibility in that movement, that nonclassical, thrilling flickering. In 1966, François Truffaut invoked the capacity of television to globalize and depoliticize our consciousness in Fahrenheit 451, where bourgeois citizens possessed one or more wall screens that could convey, in an arrogant and vast display, the inept banalities of the State brainwashing apparatus. This film is set in an age when books are banned and no well-behaving citizen reads. The revolutionary fireman Montag, whose job it has been to burn these fetishized objects, learns to read one night by the flickering purple glow of such a television screen, and his life is changed. As he reads, the displacing television produces an eerie, but localized, light, rather like a beacon drawing him away from the controlling culture and toward a condition in which he can be embedded, not only socially but metasocially, with other revolutionaries living their clandestine lives. As in the strange light he sees the words on the page—the opening lines of David

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Copperfield—seem to shudder and move, so we, watching at the edge of the seat, sense that film is movement, that placement onscreen can only be a trip through space. The issues of placement and displacement; the movement inherent in modernity; and the structure of perception are all related to one another, and in ways that are nowhere, to my knowledge, more provocatively implied than by Schivelbusch, who notes that through mechanized movement, play between the wheels and the road was lost, and with it spontaneity and urgency. Achieved with the railway was “a novel ability that Gastineau calls ‘la philosophie synthétique du coup d’oeil’ (‘the synthetic philosophy of the glance’). It was the ability to perceive the discrete, as it rolls past the window, indiscriminately” (Railway 60–61). Railway travel, then, dissipates the spirit of place that Lawrence extols, replacing it with a padded experience in which we are divorced from the directness of the landscape. What separates us from our world in such circumstances is complex: the upholstery and design of the railway carriage, the synthetic organization of the rails and wheels through a single principle of matching and gauging, the rider’s inability to control the journey. With modern possibilities of travel, the experience of place becomes the glance through space, the “coup d’oeil,” or, as Ortega puts it in a discussion of Impressionism, a series of “side-views ‘from the tail of the eye’” (123). By contrast, the perception of the landscape as place, which required contact and also stillness, embodied that landscape as a combination of rounded, embodied objects that seemed real: An age-old habit, founded in vital necessity, causes men to consider as “things,” in the strict sense, only such objects solid enough to offer resistance to their hands. The rest is more or less illusion. (Ortega 111)

One question we must surely ask: to what degree is looking at movies as disorienting as traveling on a railway? Films do work to separate us from the world we see, to turn place into space, to shuttle us in our act of perception, and, indeed, to transport us, as Schivelbusch says of the railroad, “no longer . . . as a person but . . . like a parcel” (Railway 121). But is the coup d’oeil inevitably and always problematic, or may it turn out to be a new form of perception suited to an epoch demanding new strengths and capabilities? One beautiful example of place and placement onscreen, for example, occurring in the middle of Howard Hawks’s Sergeant York (1941), has qualities inappropriate for more impressionistic filmic moments—the car chases of Bullitt (1968) or The Bourne Supremacy (2004), for example—even though they are stunningly right, here. Alvin York, the pacifist country boy (Gary Cooper), his appeals against the draft board exhausted, must finally go off to war, and he departs from his mother (Margaret Wycherly) and sister Rosie (June Lockhart) in a bucolic scene. “I’ll be acomin’ back,” he vows, then walks out of the tiny shack and into a magnificent


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landscape, the Cumberland Mountains of Tennessee stretching off in the far distance and a long valley before them thick with trees. There is a country road running up to the house, with a haystack and a stick fence and a waiting mule. As he climbs onto the mule, and his young brother George (Dickie Moore) climbs up behind him, with Mother York and Rosie waiting by the fence, the camera does not move, so that we can drink in these tiny people against this vast and overwhelming setting. Hawks cuts to a medium shot of the two on the mule, and Alvin repeats, “I’ll be a-comin’ back,” with a little wink. Then in the long shot again we see the beast walking off with its passengers. Cut to another medium shot of Rosie and her mother. “Ma, what are they a-fightin’ for?” Mother York has a vacant expression, agonizing, indeed, in its vacancy. “I don’t rightly know, child. I don’t rightly know.” In the long shot again, the mule is disappearing and we slowly fade to black as the vista disappears, too. The repetition of the long shot, in lengthy takes, and with no camera movement, stresses how Alvin does not really want to be going off, does not really want to be in motion away from this place, which is his childhood, his universe, his future, his commitment, his focus of meaning. That there is a dominating sense of place in this scene, then, contributes exactly to our adopting Alvin’s point of view, and perhaps to our retaining that point of view through the rest of the picture. It certainly evokes a pre-modern social scene, which is what rural Tennessee would have been in the mid-teens of the twentieth century. The distinct sense of place is here conveyed in an elaborate scenic design, “an enormous farmland and mountain set on a revolving merry-go-round base (to allow for different perspectives), with a two-hundred-foot stream and 121 trees” (McCarthy 310); through artful composition in the camera; through a minimization of camera setups, and a choice of camera positions that could render the greatest flexibility in depiction through minimal movement; through reducing the actions of the characters so that rather than seeming to move across the filmic space they pose within it, figures in a landscape. In general, when film shows us place rather than space the camera is tranquil, the composition full, the depth of field extreme, the sense of time expansive, even suspended. Place is specific, personal (and therefore characteristic), and evocative. It stimulates a form of meditation. But meditation also happens when the future is flying toward us, though we cannot discern it; and when the past is flying away, though we cannot cling to its trace.

The Reality of Illusion There are many different kinds of film, and our experience in watching the screen varies. Sometimes we have a stunning sense of grasping the image merely as a “coup d’oeil,” an exciting glance, and sometimes we have a sense of being connected to a place. A viewer’s sense of being placed in a film, of being situated,

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is achieved by filmmakers and viewers working together. The filmmaker may accentuate a film’s distancing and delocalizing propensities; or else deny them and recreate a dramaturgical scene, a topos, that becomes virtually embodied and tangible by its intensification and design, the way action is set in it, the way we are given access to it as a sight. It makes little sense to theorize that all film, regardless of anyone’s attachment to it, is based on the glance but not the gaze, or on the gaze but not the glance; that all film is relentless in its mechanical coupling of the viewer to (and thus, education by way of) the systematic logic of the medium (“suturing”); that all film, whether we are sensible of this or not, locks us into a passive position where our vision and our thought are unwound through the agency of the “politique” of a narrative—all this is to deny cinema its poetry and its haunting effect, its indeterminacy as an evanescent image, its strange realism, its cultural resonance, its visual magic, its ability to confront us with a phantom that, however false and constructed we may recognize it to be, intrigues and enflames us nevertheless, ceaselessly, beneficially. Of some denizens of the nineteenth century Schivelbusch writes: “Parisians who migrated south in the winter saw nothing but blue skies and the sea” (Railway 38). They were, he quotes Mallarmé, “calm, self-absorbed people, paying no attention to the invisible landscapes of the journey. To leave Paris and to get to where the sky is clear, that is their desire.” Movies can be “invisible” landscapes. Often, listening to people chatting about movies they have seen, I think myself in the presence of these “Parisians,” whose ideal destination, where the skies are “clear,” is the “opinion,” the often abbreviated resolution of the conundrum of a film’s plot, the summative evaluation of the performances of the celebrated stars acting it out. A viewer after seeing Babel: “It was like Crash! It shows what one single gun can do in this world!” Well: Babel, in part about a child in Morocco experimenting with his father’s new rifle and inadvertently blowing a hole in a visiting American tourist’s neck in a tour bus a quarter mile away, does show how much pain and confusion can come from the misuse of one single gun, yes; but as a summary of the film, such a statement shows that little attention has been paid to the apparently invisible landscapes of the journey of watching it. Babel is also about a deaf teenage Japanese girl grieving in the dark silent neon caverns of her postmodern city. It is also about an illegal Mexican immigrant running afoul of American border security. It is about children. It is about the modern world-space, bounded by telecommunications links. It is also images, the boy with the rifle standing in the wind on a hilltop, the victim’s husband going pallid with fear, the Japanese girl’s helpless grin, the illegal immigrant covered in dust from the desert in which she has been hiding. To let any of these images become embodied, round, palpable, and therefore real, to begin to see objects rather than merely hints of light flickering in quick transports, is to have an altogether more engaged relation to the film. Yet engaged relations are implicating: they do not release us swiftly for further eager participation in the


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marketplace of the media. Looking intensively in this way, we cannot gulp and swiftly digest a film, throw it off quickly, and be prepared to see another, then another and another, in a kind of festival of the everyday. (The film festival, in fact, has become a simulation and intensification of the experience of traveling through films, with status and prestige accorded to ticket-buyers according to the number of movies they can watch—or survive—per day.) This is watching motion pictures the way we watch television programs, always ready for the one that will follow. Yet, if to be absorbed by a movie is to cease this relentless hunt, to quell this irritating hunger for something to consume, we must also search to understand whether all modernist glances at the screen must be craven and cynical, or whether it might not be possible even in a flurry of motion to bring a certain piety to our act of watching film. An argument can be mounted, of course, that cinema is by its nature removed from the direct experience of the audience, and that therefore every act of going to the movies is always already an engagement in which we pick up in our seeing a “speed that caus[es] the foreground to disappear” (Schivelbusch, Railway 189). The foreground in every shot of every movie, after all, is the theater space in front of us—a space that loses its discreteness in the darkness, that hides from us; and that also potently keeps us away from an intensive and direct contact with filmic space. Further, and even more importantly, what we are looking at onscreen is not real. It is a series of impressions, hurtling past very quickly. There is, then, no real place on the screen, and to go further, we are never looking at anything but the screen itself and the scintillations that are bouncing from it in the darkness. To this argument, the argument of apparatus theory, two serious objections need be mounted. First, the assertion of primacy of that actual—and disappearing—theater space is specious. The theater space is designed and architected to disappear, to offer a tentative foreground that can be instantaneously withdrawn when the presentation begins. Indeed, the perceptual foreground in the theater is of scant interest in itself, relatively speaking, and aside from the occasional moral entrepreneur whose true purpose in the theater is to detect the behavior of other viewers in the darkness, or the devoted scholar of movie houses themselves, no one goes into a theater to look at, to be attracted to, or to be engaged with the theater itself or the patrons silently watching there. (All art requires for its appreciation a certain disconnection of the perceiver from his social setting.) Just as the conversation in which we embed ourselves with our fellow theatergoers is filled with “curtailables,” framed interactional snippets structured through choice of subject matter and style of speech to be instantaneously terminable when the curtain goes up or the film comes on; so our aesthetic involvement with the design of the theater space is constructed out of “marginal appreciations”—glances and glimpses that may enrich our visual experience while we undertake them, yet provide no inducement to memory or

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feeling. The Balaban and Katz emporia of the 1920s and onward, decorated to the hilt, and the John Eberson movie palaces such as the Paradise in the Bronx evoked by Barry Keith Grant (“Paradise”) carried this principle to the limit without ever making a theater space so powerful that viewers were unable to lose it when the film began. When the film is over and the lights come up, we have no trouble leaving this space that is relatively “real.” The film is distanced from us by a vanishing foreground that is of only the slightest significance, in fact: a foreground we are not only willing to see vanish, but one we would cheerfully abandon altogether if we could see films in another, equally amenable, space. This foreground has as its primary function what Bazin attributed to the footlights and scenery of the theater and the frame surrounding a painting, that of working to “mark the contrast between [the work of art] and the real world” (1:165). Viewers of films at home or on computers do not bemoan the loss of the aesthetic pleasure of the theater’s disappearing foreground, any more than spectators in the art gallery—typical spectators, at any rate, rather than sociologists or philosophers considering this very issue—willingly fix their attention upon the frames rather than upon the paintings they bound. The assertion of film’s inherent “unreality” is more touching, and moves us toward a more profound truth. Surely, there is nothing we are committed to in watching film other than a focus upon moving pictures. To argue from the pictorialism to a lack of reality, however, is to commit a serious error. For when we watch movies—that is, while we are watching them—we take what we are seeing to be real in the terms in which it is offered. We know full well that we are looking at pictures, like Kurt Vonnegut’s Harry— Harry . . . scowled at a picture of a French girl in a bikini. Fred . . . nudged Harry, man-to-man. “Like that, Harry?” he asked. “Like what?” “The girl there.” “That’s not a girl. That’s a piece of paper.” “Looks like a girl to me.” Fred Rosewater leered. “Then you’re easily fooled,” said Harry. “It’s done with ink on a piece of paper.” (Vonnegut 109)

—and yet, unlike him (for he is utterly cynical) we choose to invest these pictures with all the seriousness of whatever compels our belief in reality. We accord images reality, and as a result we obtain not only certain manifest pleasures but also certain advantages as regards our abilities to conceptualize, to imagine, to understand, to desire, and—the inverse of desire—to fear. To see Scottie Ferguson hanging for his life from a gutter in Vertigo is to fear that he will fall; indeed, to share his mortifying fear: all this even though we are aware that in “reality,” so to speak, there is no Scottie Ferguson, no gutter; that an


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actor named James Stewart, whom we have never met, is portraying him by allowing his picture to be taken and printed on celluloid stock hundreds of thousands of times (according to the terms of a contract [of the sort discussed quite fully in Clark Negotiating] that explicitly establishes the studio’s right to make and exploit images of him in connection with a photoplay). We know it is not a real street he is looking down into—indeed, we know he is not looking down at all. (All of the subjective “vertigo” shots in this film were made horizontally.) Yet one agrees to absorb and be absorbed by, be convinced by, the artifice, and that is how one first grasps and then enjoys the images and the tale. With Vertigo, what would we rather pay attention to: Alfred Hitchcock sitting in a chair on a movie set smoking his cigar, or Scottie Ferguson dangling for his life from a gutter?1 Even scholars of Hitchcock, whose careers are based on their concentrations upon his directorial style, take immense pleasure in devoting themselves to Scottie’s troubles as though they really existed and were being revealed as the film progressed. So, film is both unreal and very real. Its reality is not inherent but a product of our own action as viewers. “Whatever things have intimate and continuous connection with my life are things of whose reality I cannot doubt,” writes William James (298). If the illusions of the screen but touch us deeply enough, long enough, we accept them while they are touching us, even though we are capable of knowing, when later we reflect upon the experience, that they were nothing but figments. To be touched and affected by visual and other fictions, then, is not to lose touch with reality, or to commit oneself to a belief generally in what is to be found inside the frame. It is not, after all, the general belief in such objects and conditions that engenders the transformations that art is capable of working in us, it is the momentary and quite localized belief. It is our commitment to the emplacement of ourselves as participant viewers, as persons for whom a point of view has been provided and in front of whom some world is beautifully unfolding according to its own principles. And if we consider, too, that transparent movie house—the theater that can vanish—and what happens to our awareness and conviction as it melts into the darkness, we may see that a sense of reality is engendered again by the sharpness and brightness of what is available, by comparison, onscreen. As James has it, “Any relation to our mind at all, in the absence of a stronger relation, suffices to make an object real” (299). James goes on to emphasize the importance of “sensible vividness or pungency” (301) and follows Charles Bernard Renouvier in the invocation of the name mental vertigo for our “belief of a thing for no other reason than that we conceive it with passion” (309). Mental vertigo is the way through, the way out, the way forward. 1. At this writing, this seems a pregnant question indeed. Sir Anthony Hopkins promises to star as Hitchcock in Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho, a film that will present at least a simulacrum of the director for our viewing pleasure.

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Appearance—that is to say, surface—is vital to our belief in reality. This “mental vertigo” is induced by a presentation: it is a condition suffered consistently and almost interminably by us in our waking life, as one appearance after another instigates us to conceive in the reality of an object, a person, a place, a rhythm. The manifestations of the movie screen are no less real to us than the stars in the sky, which are also nothing but appearances, traces of long-traveled light from sources that are usually no longer there. We not only believe in the stars but navigate by them, so long as their positions relative to one another can be taken as stable. In a similar way, we can navigate by the images on a screen, without having to accept them as more substantial than traces of light. The production of place onscreen varies according to dramatic need, and I have mentioned films in which our sense of movement through space is so dynamic and intense that the idea of place loses all meaning. The car chase in the finale of Paul Greengrass’s The Bourne Supremacy (2004) is a paradigmatic vision of placelessness. Here, our hero Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) must flee an avid assassin by racing through the streets of Moscow. The sequence of the chase—involving plenty of near collisions, swerving, swift reversals of direction, driving on too-narrow streets, damaging cars, racing across bridges, and ending with a galvanizing crash in a tunnel—occupies about ten minutes of screen time but involves almost four hundred discreet shots, many of them lasting much less than half a second. Further, the lens is changed with seeming randomness, so that a long shot is followed by a macro-close shot, or a close shot by a medium shot and another close shot from another angle, there seeming to be no pattern at all to the logic. Our attention is dispersed across the field in which the action occurs, is itself fragmented and rapidly displaced. We see Bourne’s facial expressions, then the river with his pursuer a long way off, then a hand on a gear knob, then a car window, then cars tumbling down streets, and so on. The sense of place is completely dissolved. But there is also no compensating rhythm to the editing, except that it seems to speed up persistently, as though the cars are going faster and faster toward an unknown destination. Place, in this sequence, is only what we traverse, not what we inhabit. And this film is not about habitation, it is about thrust. Both space and place are real enough to us as we experience them. The meditation we experience when we see a place, such as Alvin York’s farmstand, produces a sense of reality that seems perduring and fully rounded. And the coup d’oeil we experience in The Bourne Supremacy is conducive to a different, but equally pressing, reality, one involving not an illusion of materiality but an illusion of contingency. Both contingency and illusion seem real. The Bourne sequence is a stunning example of Bordwell’s “intensified continuity,” gripping the audience’s attention principally on the basis of a staccato movement from position to position, inside, then outside, then inside the protagonists’ cars


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again. The physical space of the city is exploded by the multiplicity of camera positions, each viewer empowered, apparently, to travel even faster than the vehicles so as always to occupy an ideal position from which to see their blurring movement. In Doug Liman’s The Bourne Identity (2002), a hand-to-hand combat scene in Bourne’s Paris apartment was filmed with the same intensified continuity and similarly in a place that had been fragmented to permit the incomprehensibly fluid camera. We sense the thrusts of the two fighters, their urgency, their desperation, their will, their canniness, their strength and ugly brutality, yet we cannot quite see where they are, except vaguely, in flashes. But just as there is a Jamesian “mental vertigo” in our entrancement with places and placed objects, with the “real” rotundness of people and things that seem bounded and subject to gravity, so we experience that “vertigo,” although perhaps in a different form, in such flashing perception, such coup d’oeil commitment, as all three Bourne films call up. The vertigo of constant movement is more brilliant, more transcendent; the vertigo of entrancement is more touching, provokes more wonder. Bordwell’s argument is that such intensification of continuity as we can detect in these Bourne sequences is a growing phenomenon; that contemporary film’s placelessness, as it were, is becoming a staple of the medium. We might think of this as Tourettic cinema, always and characteristically spasmodic, “characterized by an excess of nervous energy,” as Oliver Sacks describes the neurological condition that inspires me to make this analogy, “and a great production and extravagance of strange motions and notions: tics, jerks, mannerisms, grimaces, noises, curses, involuntary imitations and compulsions of all sorts, with an odd elfin humour and a tendency to antic and outlandish kinds of play” (Sacks 87). Intensified cinema—panoramic cinema—is always, Tourettically, on the lookout for a new, if improbable, camera angle, a composition that can be read more quickly than ever before (and therefore be legible even if it perdures onscreen for only a fraction of a second: Bourne’s fingers grasping that gear knob), a freshly captivating rhythm for editing shots together in a provocative tattoo. That chase sequence in The Bourne Supremacy has about half as many shots as a typical motion picture of the 1930s and 1940s, racing past in just a few minutes. But now I want to look, with a considerably less frenetic need to move, shift, twitch, and jump myself, at a single interesting example of the cinema of place, in which we inhabit and are transformed by—not so much an action that takes place in a scene as—a scene in its very topology, a place in its emplacement.

Arcady An ambitious young photographer (David Hemmings) wanders into a beautiful empty park and finds two lovers (Vanessa Redgrave, Ronan O’Casey)

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embracing in the silent tranquility of an open glade surrounded by trees that are swaying in the wind. Shhhhhhhh, sounds the wind. At the margins of the park a short picket fence, painted green, neatly divides the clipped luminous grass from the dense, dark trees. Our photographer makes several casual pastoral shots, sneaking from posture to posture, as the two lovers stand in one another’s arms. As he turns to leave after his hunt, the woman races after him and demands his film, telling him he should leave people in peace. “It’s not my fault there’s no peace,” says he, a little too smugly. Blow-Up (1966) is the first of Michelangelo Antonioni’s works made in English and also the first made outside his native Italy (Antonioni had contracted a trio of films to Carlo Ponti, whose demand was for English-language product). The script, written by Antonioni with Tonino Guerra, a collaborator of long standing, and with dialogue by the English playwright Edward Bond, is inspired by a story called “Las Babas del Diablo” (“The Devil’s Drool”) by the Argentinian writer (domiciled in Paris) Julio Cortázar. The photographer tells the girl there are other things he needs on the roll, but if she’ll come to his studio afterward, he’ll cut out the shots she wants. Cortázar’s story was translated into French in 1963 as “Les Fils de la Vierge,” and subsequently found publication in New York, in a translation by Paul Blackburn, as “Blow-Up.” Like much of Cortázar’s brilliant writing, the story is a work of profound meditation and narrative locomotion, with the language seeming to move in and out of the narrator’s embodiment and to attach itself to the world being described: therefore, a simple recantation of the plot line hardly does justice to the effect of reading it: All of a sudden I wonder why I have to tell this, but if one begins to wonder why he does all he does do, if one wonders why he accepts an invitation to lunch (now a pigeon’s flying by and it seems to me a sparrow), or why when someone has told us a good joke immediately there starts up something like a tickling in the stomach and we are not at peace until we’ve gone into the office across the hall and told the joke over again; then it feels good immediately, one is fine, happy, and can get back to work. For I imagine that no one has explained this, that really the best thing is to put aside all decorum and tell it, because, after all’s done, . . . (Cortázar, “Blow-Up” 115)

But the central “event,” simply, is that an amateur photographer taking snapshots one cloudy day on the Île Saint-Louis catches a woman seducing a young boy. Later, looking at the shot, he sees a man sitting nearby in a car and begins to calculate that it was for the benefit of this figure that the seduction was taking place, and that the disruption of activity caused by his too clumsy act of photography in fact gave the (innocent) boy an opportunity to flee. Antonioni professionalizes this photographer, substituting a jaded, even arrogant coolness for the oneiric meditation of Cortázar’s narrator, and moves


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him from Paris to the mod style bubble of 1960s London. By trade, our hero specializes in fashion, and we see him early in the film working in a swank studio with high-paid models, including, in a sequence meant to display his celibate domination, the celebrated and slinky Veruschka Von Lehndorff. In his spare time he is producing a book of photographs of old age and destitution in the modern age (the images are actually by the photographer Don McCullin), shooting “all night in a doss house” to get stark black-and-white depictions of hopelessness and frailty. But in this tranquil park setting, he has managed to get “something fabulous to wind up with,” the perfect way to finish this otherwise unsettling and violent book: a man and woman alone, separate from the world and somehow from one another, and all around them the wind dispassionately shuffling the leaves. Sshhhhhh. The young woman takes up the photographer’s glib invitation much, much more quickly than he expects, then lets him lead her upstairs to his sitting room and ply her with his attentions. He smokes her up, they listen to jazz and are about to have sex when the doorbell rings. It is the delivery of an antique propeller he purchased at a shop outside the park earlier. They banter about where he might put it. Then he goes into his darkroom, fishes out an old reel of film, and nonchalantly gives it to her with an amicable smile. Oops, it’s late—she must go. Now, safe, he rushes to develop the roll he shot in the park and to print some of the pictures. As he makes 16 x 20 enlargements of these and pins them, still sopping wet, on the deliciously thick beams of his living area in a rough sequential order, it becomes possible for him to reconstitute the passage of time during the few moments of his being in the park. He is in two places at once, his studio and the tranquil green remove. (In fact, when he snaps a photograph, a photographer cannot see what the aperture is transmitting to the film surface, because the mirror flicks down. Thus, the camera sees, but the photographer doesn’t. And looking at his image later, he can, for the first time, with a certain profound delight, experience the act of sight in the place he no longer inhabits.) His eye moves from image to image sedately, and he goes to print more shots to fill in the “narrative” gaps. Finally, he can stand and survey a long row of photographs, lined up rather like the frames of a motion picture shot in VistaVision (running laterally rather than vertically, with each frame larger than normal size).2 As he looks more closely, Antonioni’s camera slowly creeps in to crop out the room in which he is standing (that is, to usher him entirely back in 2. For more on VistaVision, Paramount’s patented large-negative and pseudo-widescreen process that was immensely effective and popular during the 1950s, see Carr and Hayes 144ff. and Haines 81–86. Haines lists fifty-three features released in VistaVision in the United States, all of which were in color (while the images shot by the photographer in Blow-Up are in black and white); the process was also used by the Rank Organization in the United Kingdom.

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time and across space), losing his head and shoulders and finally obliterating everything but the images themselves (exactly a reversal of the process Arlen describes with his television-watching experience). Very dimly on the sound track we hear now, as we heard it earlier in the park, the sound of the wind rushing through the trees and the bordering shrubbery, and to the gazing eye the branches in the photographs seem to shudder with this breath. Shhhhhhhhhhh, shhhhhhh. The man and woman, it is now clear, have been arguing. He is considerably older than she, resigned, perhaps even irritated at her willfulness. She turns away. She looks behind her, quite anxious. They are in one another’s arms. The sky behind is as gray as pewter. There is a large bushy growth in front of which they are standing, and it summons a memory of the Tree of Knowledge. Alone here, they are somehow primordial. No decoration: the man has whitened hair, a gray suit; the woman wears a charcoal and white checked shirt and a simple gray skirt cut just—just—above the knee. It is a very peaceful scene, very elegiac, very moving—awkward—inexplicable. But that female gaze into the shrubbery at the side of this beautifully bounded little area!: with her eyes she is pointing off to the right side of the image. Our photographer traces a line from her eyes into the dark bushes, leans forward, squints along the length of it. He looks at her face again. Her face is intense, frightened perhaps. With a magnifying glass he peers again at the bushes. Maybe something is in there . . . He runs into the darkroom with the image (he must traverse a long catwalk looking down into his studio), frames a section of the bushes, and rephotographs. Now he has an image of an image, the grain rather large, and he prints the blowup to mount in his sequence. This time, as he pans through the memory chain of the moment in the park, he follows along from the woman’s gaze to: a dark patch in the bushes at park’s edge where there is a figure crouching with a pistol. The gun, the hand holding it, the face—all are unmistakable, although as dotty as a Seurat. He rushes to the telephone to call his agent Ron with the spectacular news. “In the park . . . I saved a man’s life!” The sound of the door buzzer interrupts him, however. He puts down the receiver and goes to see who it is, half taken aback and half wearied to find a pair of eager teenage girls who, much earlier in the day, had begged him to photograph them. He sets them to making coffee and goes back to his call. Alone, they creep out of the kitchen and begin rummaging through a rack of dresses he has in store for his models. He comes upon them and the three get involved in a passionate ménage that leaves him utterly exhausted. “You might have thought what a wonderfully erotic experience I was having,” the actor David Hemmings wrote much later, but “the whole romping scene, as it was shot, felt somehow unsatisfactory” (19–20). This feeling, interestingly, is manifest in the film, as the photographer stirs to dress himself with a look of irresolution on his face. The sex done, he dismisses the maenads and then, both


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vitiated and alone, emptied of any hope, stares again at the photograph that ends his sequence, a picture showing the bush in the center of the little park at a moment after the man has disappeared and the girl has fled. Something about that bush . . . Again he makes a photograph of a photograph, but this time the grain is so very large—because the bush in the original picture was very far away, and he’s had to blow it up—that it is a matter of arbitration to distinguish anything. It does seem as though on the ground, behind the bush, gray in a pond of grayness, lies something rather like a body. He must go back to the park now, to determine whether what he was witnessing was in fact a murder, and not a murder attempt that he succeeded in arresting. The park at night. Utter silence. Utter stillness. The area in question is a long rectangle, bordered by tall dark trees and the low green-painted wooden fence familiar from the photographs. At the far end is the large dark bush. Lighting the area is a huge turquoise neon advertising sign, bearing a glyph in no known language. The photographer is wearing white jeans and a dark green velvet blazer under his mop of tomato red hair. In the eerie light the grass is a penetrating emerald green, the green of Arcady. For one viewer, indeed, it is “too green” (Arrowsmith 107). Cautiously he steps across the spread of park that covers the screen, heading for the bush that seems the center of this world; and then finally he comes upon it, looking up for a moment at a black branch over his head. As he drops his view the camera follows, and there on the ground at his feet is, indeed: the corpse of the man from earlier in the day, all stained perfectly in tones, like an elegant black-and-white photograph. The complexion is grayed out in the turquoise light, the eyes are staring blackly into nothingness, the pearl gray suit perfectly matches the salt-and-pepper hair. Eeriness diffuses outward from the body, so that the very air around it might for a moment be sucked away. The photographer squats down to be near the thing. With its starched white shirt, spiffily knotted black tie, and snowy handkerchief barely showing in the breast pocket, the body looks for all the world like a mannequin. Does it have a voice? Might it be speaking, although the mask of its frozen expression reveals nothing? Do the eyes not register curiosity? . . . concern? . . . fear? . . . ultimate acceptance? The photographer stands and waits. For the deepest profundity of this scene, however, let us back up a few moments. We see the park. We look up at the neon sign, signaling “language” and also “meaninglessness” in shimmering Mediterranean turquoise neon— something rather like a capital “F” and then a slanted, squared-off “o” and an upside-down “v,” perhaps a Greek delta with its bottom gone. We see the green, green, green rectangle of the grassy sward, a green thought in a green shade. We see the photographer enter and move cautiously forward, wanting to find a body, afraid to find a body. Is the body in general something one desires, or something one desires to avoid desiring? The grass = nature, that is, from

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A green thought in a green shade. Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (MGM, 1966). Digital frame enlargement.

before mankind; and yet also of mankind, since its coloration is so aesthetic. (Antonioni arranged for the already-green grass to be painted greener still.) All the elements presented here combine to create eventlessness, poise, fixity: the intensity of the green, visible in several shades between the grass and the surrounding trees and the photographer’s jacket; the minimal camera movement within shots; the small number of shots and the tendency of the camera to hold a shot while the photographer steps across it, rather than moving with him; the stolidity of the body he finds; the purity of the black shrubbery; the fact that the photographer has not brought his camera, so that his eyesight (like our eyesight) must be enough to register everything; the omnipresence of the haunting turquoise light, artificial and at the same time otherworldly. There is a sense that this night will never end, or that it is relentlessly alive and always ending, step by step, glance by glance. The park is a public venue and yet we have a penetrating discomfort at being here in the night, as though we are trespassing. Many public spaces give exactly this feeling after the sun has set, as though in darkness they belong to another, daemonic, force. Not only does the park seem alive, it seems more alive than the photographer does (and, of course, more alive than the victim); the shuddering branches of the trees, the vibrancy of the grass, the vacancy of the place—quite as though it expressed itself by whispering, “Do not enter here.” The advertisement blinks on and off incomprehensibly and yet gigantic, as though important (important but cryptic). In long shot, finally, we see the young man steal away, anxious, guilty?, turning to look behind him again and again, finally breaking into a run, as he greets the envelope of darkness.


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This scene has an inexpressible gravity and poignancy, not because of what the photographer does—he makes almost no expression—but because of the place itself. Somehow at night the park has become a site of intense privacy, a completely localized setting. Blow-Up is a film that invokes chilling vistas. John Freccero notes how “in order to relieve the grimness of his photographs, which he senses with some detachment, [the photographer] goes into an Arcadian scene, a park with an enclosed garden.” Freccero continues, “Had he seen Poussin or read Panofsky, he would have known that this disillusionment awaits all attempts at pastoral evasion: ‘Et in Arcadia ego.’ Death resides even in Arcady” (120–21). A click the photographer hears as he stands near the body, a click that might be the sound of a shutter opening and closing, or the sound of a pistol being cocked, or an insect sound, or what?, is a contemporary analogue to both the startling epigraph on the tomb in Poussin’s two paintings titled Et in Arcadia ego (1630; 1635), the latter of which, for Panofsky, “shows a contemplative absorption in the idea of mortality,” and the skull resting upon the tomb (with the fly resting upon its forehead) in Guercino’s Et in Arcadia ego (1621–23), which Panofsky suggests conveys “a warning rather than sweet, sad memories” (313; 309). There is more to what’s in front of you than just what you see, that click says, here in this green space, but who—or what force—exactly, is speaking? Arcady is at once the utopian anti-world into which our haphazard lives bring us for immortality, a paradise of greenery and peace, and a locus of tombs. The dark bush is the victim’s tomb. The photographer is the blithe shepherd who comes across the presence of Death at the very moment in his life when he had convinced himself of his powers to vanquish it. The gentle rolling of the ground along which the photographer walks away from the camera is the earth’s sighing breath made tangible. The quiet swish of the wind in the trees, added to the underpinning hum of the city traffic far in the distance, makes for the sound of an ocean out of sight, a primordial sea that bears us back to origins, back to ultimate darkness. Of the perfect Euclidian proportion of this green place; of the perfectly satisfying saturation of its color; of the eerie magnificence of the light; of the curious silence and the dark shadows in the high bordering trees—of all this no one who has ever seen Blow-Up will lose memory. This is because the composition is entirely sufficient to express the vision. Or: the screen contains a vision that is entirely sufficient to absorb our attention as a substitute for the real world. “Le cinéma,” wrote Bazin, “substitue à notre regard un monde qui s’accord avec nos désirs” (Film substitutes for our regard a world that matches our desires). My own desire, after watching this film more than three dozen times over as many years, was to find, and enter, that very park, a park I was convinced did not exist in the everyday world. But it does. It is Maryon Park, off Woolwich

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Road in East London. In the summer of 2005, only hours before the London terrorist bombings, as it turned out, I drove there, late in an afternoon, spinning through the bizarre little streets of Charleton and finally coming upon my target almost by accident, adjacent a railway line and hidden behind a brick wall. I went in, breezed past the tennis court where, at the conclusion of BlowUp, the photographer watches a troupe of mimes pretending to play and when their “ball” goes flying off makes the commitment to follow it and pick it up, accepting their reality, their reality of illusion, as his own. I found the stairway the photographer climbed as he followed the two lovers up into their delicious too green aerie, and I followed it up. I found the green sward where the lovers embraced, where the photographic act was committed, where the figure lay in hiding with the gun. The fence was still there, bent now and broken, still green although faded considerably. The perfect green grass, although it had been covered by tall clumps of yellowed weed, remained, in my mind, as green as Arcady. I was standing in this place and so it had what I was obliged to call “reality,” but the film that I was remembering was realer still.

Dancing in the Dark The meditative places I have been describing are classical in the sense that they do not necessarily facilitate movement, or in the sense that they are formed through composition, perspective, color, and depth of field rather than impulse, propulsion, syncopy, and rhythm. In modernity, there is an intensification of movement—often a motion without vector that amounts to anxious jittering—and urbanized heightening of social pressure. Percussion begins to dominate sound, whereas earlier it had grounded, measured, and shaped acoustic expression. As music becomes a drummed persistence, the mass media drum both sound and picture into us. Cultural and social life, vastly more complex than ever before, must be synchronized to permit flow, and so the beat is essential in the regularizing and scheduling of ritual activity. Like the pre-modern world, the modern world demands the cyclicality of rhythm, less for energy than for regulation, less for spiritual than for profane relations. But is it possible, we must wonder, whether the modern movement typified by the railway (and by film in its unspooling), instead of leaving in its surround merely a delocalized space in which the impression a passenger forms of the environment is a coup d’oeil that is the “height of disdain,” opens up a new idea of place, a new spirit? Looking at the movements of modernity from the point of view of a tranquil resting position, that is, taking a classical view, one sees in them an “emptying” of place, what Anthony Giddens calls “disembedding.” Perhaps, however, places are not only fixities to be moved through. Perhaps it is not only a static regard that we can adopt in considering place and placement. In and through movement, the modern subject may find


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a new sort of place, describable not through its opportunities for meditation and repose, not through its perspective, but through a strange lasting quality of the glimpses that are possible there and through the unforgettable rhythm of those glances. It is conceivable, too, that the glimpse may be extended through critical perception, an application of memory, a suspension of impulse, an abnegation of the centralizing and educating principle of the storyline, to the end that a cinematic moment may gain its full potential as the building block of film. In a moment, as perceived in flow and then grasped (or fished) away, we may detect all the contingent properties of cinema at work together: implication and residue of narrative; minute detail of performance; nuance and texture of lighting and coloration that quicken sensation and retrieve memory; placement—indeed, the quick sense of life—of the camera; the importance and structure of the edit; the design of the scene, its movement, its frame. Caught out, as it were, the moment itself becomes embodied for us as cinema. Thus, a fleeting image can have a profound place in cinema. A film can move not only, not even, from scene to scene, or shot to shot, but from moment to moment; and a single shot, made with a moving camera, can constitute a moment, and can move from object to object, or across an object, or around an object, this and nothing more (the craned camera swooping upward to capture, to obsess upon, the revolving, sopping object that Gene Kelly is when, umbrella down, he whirls around the road in that fabulous dance number, “Singin’ in the Rain”). Thus it is that in a little cinematic flow, we can follow an extended action, an action composed so that it fully occupies the physical and narrative space of the screen for a time. And inside this flow, this modern passage through a tale, we can be arrested by a vision that arrives unexpectedly, lingers too briefly for meditation, disappears too soon. Given the intrinsic relationship between the glimpsed but provocative image and modern rhythms, pulsions, flows, torrents, and haphazard combinations, such an image can seem to indicate a peculiarly modern place, a setting in which our emotion is seduced and contended with, yet which does not linger or spread itself beyond the glimpse. To write about such a moment in film, a moment in which we discover, speedily relish, and then lose a modern place, is difficult in its own right, because the printed page has little intrinsic capacity for the delineation of rhythmic effects aside from the meter of the poetic line. To say a shot is “long” or “short” is, in either case, to use a one-syllable word for the purpose of articulating something about filmic duration that no pronunciation of the word can accomplish. Long. Short. To write “Lonnnnnnnnnnnng” is to stretch oneself past the limits of the language. To say a shot is extended, apparently endless; or swift, brief; is merely to connote. And when, during such a shot as one might wish to describe, or during a sequence that contains it, the camera is at work

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panning, say from right to left, it is beyond the capacity of words on a page to convey the speed of the movement articulated in the pan. If in such a pan the screen reveals one part of something, then more of it, then all of it, then less of it, and finally none of it again, writing on a page cannot quite get at the actual effect of that movement, the actual felt temporality of it, the rhythm through which the one part, then the other, then the other, and the other, and the other and the other, become visible and disappear. It is fair enough to say, then, that something becomes visible in film—certainly in modern film—that words simply cannot describe but must circumlocute. As finale, then, a circumlocution. The setting is another park entirely, far from London, in which our invisible curtain may be rung down. We are in New York City, that glamorous shimmering chalice of possibilities, in the early 1950s, in a suite in the Plaza Hotel (now, sadly, gone). Gabrielle Gerard, a ballet dancer in a beautiful, simple, creamy, knee-length dress with a shirt-collar neck—the sort of dress one simply cannot pay to acquire, designed in this case by Mary Ann Nyberg, who finding that her seamstresses would need more than a thousand dollars to make such a thing picked one up at a flea market for twenty-five dollars and used it as a model for making the dress herself—a dancer who has been rather dismissive of Tony Hunter, an older, mild-mannered, once-famous Hollywood hoofer with whom she has been contracted to star in a Broadway show, convinced that dancing with him is both beneath her dignity and artistically impossible and having been more than a little insulting in rehearsal, has been pressured to offer him an apology and for this purpose has now brought herself to his abode in a rather luxurious suite, the floor of which is strewn with framed Impressionist paintings (not copies) that belong to him. (For an “early Renoir” that Tony quips he “stole from the artist’s desk at school” [sending up Gaby’s too obvious regard for his age], a “pseudo-Renoir” to be painted by Thelma Hope was replaced by a “print of some painting actually made by Renoir, because we cannot call a painting ‘a Renoir’ in so many words unless we do use a Renoir print” [Monta to Green and Gleason, 30 August 1952].) The two dancers are a little stiff with one another for a few minutes, but then, mercifully, Tony decides to give Gaby a break and accept her apology, offers to take her out for the evening. But for the Stork Club or El Morocco, she’s not “dressed.” So, eschewing a yellow cab, he guides her to a hansom, saying casually when the driver asks for directions, “Leave it to the horse.” (The driver, at any rate, was paid $210.00 for three days’ work.) They ride blissfully into Central Park (that is: with the carriage they are rocked on an MGM rear-projection stage while plates of the actual Central Park are projected behind them). It is a lovely evening, with smoochers apparently going at it on benches under the trees (“Look!” Tony points off-camera, “People!”) in a way that theater folk cannot afford the time for, caught up as


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they are in the merciless struggle of show business. The horse stops near a paved dancing area and the two riders wander away, soon enough stepping into a choreographic reverie (created by Michael Kidd) that is set to the haunting Arthur Schwartz/Howard Dietz tune “Dancing in the Dark,” a tune that is, we are to presume, haunting both of their imaginations simultaneously (even as it is being played for us on the sound track, in a Roger Edens arrangement and a Conrad Salinger, Lloyd “Skip” Martin, and Alexander Courage orchestration, by the MGM studio orchestra, all this being a kind of second thought, since originally the plan was to use “I Guess I’ll Have to Change My Plan” [Comden and Green memorandum, 21 August 1952]). (To listen to Liza Minnelli squealing with delight during this number, on the DVD, is not quite as entertaining as watching the dance, although she very astutely points out every difficult and magnificent move.) We see easily enough in this routine that Tony and Gaby really can dance together, really, really and truly, indeed that their dancing together is superlative beyond superlatives. They become friends and unite to make their Broadway show a success. Perhaps, dancing in the dark, they fall in love. The film is Vincente Minnelli’s The Band Wagon (1953), the dancers Cyd Charisse and Fred Astaire. The musical number is one of the great icons of American musical film history, some say the finest moment of the musical. Every intention to touch, every touch is fated and also invented; the turns, the embraces, the extensions all move so fluidly as to take the breath away. If ever one has seen this dance, one can see it now . . . But to return to that horse: We pay no attention to him at all as he clip-clops along Fifty-ninth Street and then into the park, notwithstanding the fact that we were clearly warned he is, at least at this moment, a more significant player in this little drama than either of the people taking a ride from him. It is not, after all, because in Tony Hunter’s posh hotel suite they are able to rationally align their divergent philosophies of art and life; not because they find one another physically appealing; not because it is evening, the time of romance, that Tony and Gaby finally unite, in this scene and this film. They unite because they realize they are a dancing team. And they realize they are a dancing team because they accomplish a brilliant dance. And they accomplish a brilliant dance because they are moved to begin to dance with one another. And they are moved to dance because they have been deposited at a spot in the park where couples are dancing, deposited there after a journey in which they glide through the city with a certain ease, a certain unfolding expectancy, a certain rhythm. And who found this spot in the park? “Leave it to the horse.” It was the horse who found this spot in the park, the horse who chose the rhythm with which to bear them there. It was the horse who chose Central Park at all, the horse whose knowledge of the various

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routes he can tread, Kenneth Boulding once reminded me, forms part of the sum total of information on the planet, a kind of envelope of information like a skin. And the horse it was who set up this dance, standing in for the creative forces behind the film—Arthur Freed, Betty Comden, Adolph Green, Roger Edens, cinematographer Harry Jackson, art director Oliver Smith, set designer Preston Ames, orchestrators Courage, Martin, and Salinger, choreographer Kidd. Surely we must pause to ask ourselves about this horse, how he could have such intuitions, how he could produce, in none other than Astaire and Charisse indeed, such magnificent inspirations. While we have every reason to admire Astaire and Charisse as talents, and while all the acknowledgments of this film in print have pointed to these dancers, or the producer, as central to this extraordinary vision—The Band Wagon is one of the peak accomplishments of the Arthur Freed Unit at MGM—what about that horse? “Leave it to the horse,” indeed. We seem to pass him by in a pan shot that, moving left to right, aims toward, then leaves, his head, as we dutifully, eagerly follow Tony and Gaby wandering toward their private little glen. We seem to pass him by. Actually, the shot is not a pan at all, and the horse is patiently drinking all through it while his driver fiddles with a cigarette. Because Tony and Gaby are walking from left to right behind the horse, however, and because we are following them with our eyes, we have the sensation of gliding past the horse. But if it is Tony and Gaby to whom we have attached ourselves, if it is their dance and union we have come here to witness—“Will these two antagonistic souls be able to dance together, will they?”—still we cannot quite abandon this horse. The driver has given him to water himself at a black castiron fount, to which he is utterly devoted. The charm of the creature, in fact, is that he is so devoted to his fount, so deliciously oblivious of the stellar Astaire and Charisse, not to mention the camera and the lights. Indeed, for the instant we see him, he seems locked away in a moment of demure privacy—no show horse this!—exhibiting a kind of delicious modesty as he ignores the apparatus of filmmaking for the delights of his water. Yet, too, this could be any common horse, since any horse might be thirsty and any horse might turn himself away to drink. He is a working horse, certainly, a creature with dignity, worth, a history, a place in the world, and his thirst is substantial. Then we see what this horse is drinking. He is drinking the sky. That is to say: his water is colored a vivid, dark, luxurious, mysterious sapphire blue, a blue we have the opportunity to see nowhere else in this film and rarely if at all when we scan the vast array and gay smorgasbord of color films (of three-strip Technicolor, since its advent, around 1935, of Warnercolor, of Metrocolor, and, later, of Eastmancolor) in which this film proudly holds its place, rarely, that is, because of how saturated and dense it is on the screen. This is no mere flagrant, even rude, too typical, Technicolor sky blue to which


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we are accustomed by a legion of travelogues (and which Hitchcock eschewed), the blue that can be seen, say, between the palm trees in His Majesty O’Keefe (1954) or behind the rock face in King Solomon’s Mines (1950) or over the water in Boy on a Dolphin (1957), nor is it the typical ocean blue (pirate movies, naval battles, the romance of Two English Girls [1973]), or the blue of Delft plates, the blue of rich fabric (as in Gone with the Wind [1939] and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp [1943]), even the scintillating, hypnotizing blue of the sequined dress Edith Head designed for Betty Hutton to wear in Incendiary Blonde (1945), or blue of moonlight (The Guns of Navarone [1961]); or the lavender blue of tight-fitting gloves (Meet Me in St. Louis [1944]); or eye blue: Paul Newman’s eye (Torn Curtain [1966]), Cillian Murphy’s eye (The Wind That Shakes the Barley [2006]). This horsewater blue is a blue that shines and penetrates our most private reserve of appreciation, yet also recedes without limit, a blue one wishes one could taste. It is an indigo, an imperial blue, a blue of dreams. This one reminds us that, as Tennessee Williams wrote in Camino Real, “Blue is for distance. Distance is blue.” Victoria Finlay attributes to this tendency of blue to recede, our usage of it (in English) to represent “depressing as well as transcendent things. . . . Fantasy, depression and God are all, like blue, in the more mysterious reaches of our consciousness” (317). C. L. Hardin gives us a nice physical explanation: If the lens of the eye accommodates so that an image formed by middlewave light is focused on the retina, a shortwave image will focus in front of the retina, and a longwave image will focus behind it. Shortwave light thus focuses like light from a more distant object, and longwave light focuses like light from a closer object. To focus on a blue patch we must therefore accommodate our lenses as we would when we focus on a distant object. (129)

And how distant is that water in that fount, since it is right before our eyes? Another way to muse upon this is to ask what we take that water to be, beyond itself, in its ineffable blueness, and what relation we take it to have to ourselves as we gaze at it while moving. The blue water, after all, as tempting as it might be as material substance, can be apprehended only through a glance as we glide past it. Yet at the same time the glance is not quite the disorienting panoramic perception of which Schivelbusch writes, or that disdainful glint of the eye that moved Ortega. This horse has access to a special fount, a fount that contains in liquid form—that is, not as stably as a solid that seems “real” nor as unstably as a gas that is all impression—a microcosm of some great azure vault, call it the heavens, otherworldly, poetic, the past, the anticipated, the redeeming. And we see this only while also remembering seeing it and anticipating seeing it, that is, in motion, as, relentless, we glide, swoop, race past because we are intent on following Tony and Gaby to see if they can dance together, because it is Tony and Gaby we love. Because this horse and this fount are not “important.” This

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blue, the blue of blue skies way up above, the blue of perfection and happiness, the blue of childhood and innocence, the blue of repose and retreat, is something the horse is concerned with, focuses upon with his huge—but blindered—eyes. We see it—too suddenly—and then lose it just when its purity is most evident. Blue is certainly arcane as a perception and a thought. It was “the last of the psychologically primary hues to be distinguished by a basic linguistic color category,” and this, it turns out, not so very much by peoples living around the Equator since for these peoples, whose eyes contain more macular yellow pigmentation than those of people who inhabit the poles, “less shortwave light reaches their retinas” (Hardin 167). They find it more taxing, therefore, to tell blue from green, the water this horse is drinking as compared to the park in which that photographer wanders to find his truth. Since it is arcane in its essence, then, blue provokes wonder and uncertainty. One could say it lightens the gravitational pull of the scene, and in this case, it renders the space in which Astaire and Charisse are to dance a blue space, one subject to a different kind of gravity. William Gass claims that “blue is the color of the mind in borrow of the body; it is the color consciousness becomes when caressed; it is the dark inside of sentences” (57). Could this horse be drinking the secret, the unspeakable, brilliantly nonverbal utterance that Tony and Gaby will now be making through their dance? Ultramarine, a color “illustrious, beautiful and most perfect, beyond all other colours; one could not say anything about it, or do anything with it, that its quality would still not surpass,” wrote Cennino Cennini (quoted in Finlay 321). And blue is very old, bespeaking centuries. Michel Pastoureau writes that although its “victory in the competition among ever-changing chromatic preferences had been prepared long in advance,” the triumph of blue in the eighteenth century “came thanks to the appearance of a new color symbolism, which enthroned blue as the worthiest color and assured its associations with progress, enlightenment, dreams, and liberty”; this while it also “became central to new chromatic classifications spawned by the Newtonian revolution, the adoption of the spectrum, and the theory of primary and complementary colors. Science, art, and society henceforth operated on the same chromatic principles and made blue, instead of red, the principal hue” (124). Although in the twelfth century color had often been regarded suspiciously as a means of concealing truth (Pastoureau 47), by the beginning of the sixteenth century it could have struck an artist like the young Michelangelo as the opposite, a talisman of revelation and efflorescent purity, since he desired it, yet could not afford to secure it, for the gown of a kneeling Virgin in The Entombment (1501), according to at least the passionate and learned imagination of Victoria Finlay (309–10). A contemplation is inspired by the too-momentary placement, the toosudden disappearance of the horse drinking the sky. The horse, for his part,


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seems to drink eternally, seems beyond the cares of the provisional life, but because we center our attention on the two dancers clad in white, who shuffle across the screen blissfully, we leave him behind, we disregard him, and in that disregard he takes on the effect of a mover himself, disappearing even in his constancy and his unalloyed tranquility. He is a momentary horse, sudden after the hotel suite and the hackney outside, sudden after the long rolling trip to the park, sudden in the impulse we feel he has had for sharing with us his secret potion. Momentary, sudden, at any rate, is our seeing him in this flashing (and flashingly colored) instant, this improbability—a horse drinking not merely water but the essence of blueness. An artistic horse (related, no doubt, to the horse of many colors from The Wizard of Oz [1939]), a horse sympathetic to the moment, to design, to the naturalness of an act, to silence, to subtle movement, to aesthetic effect: a cinematic horse. The fleeting glimpse of this blue substance, this horse drinking it, constitutes one of the myriad treasures of cinema, a treasure that can appear in no other medium: the tinting of the water and the lighting that reveals it; the Technicolor process in which this blue is recorded first on a black-and-white stock and then transferred into color by way of relief matrixes and specific dyes; the movement of the various figures before the camera, and the magnitude of their presence for us as they recede from the blue (the star system); the music; the moment; the era. Although, as Patricia MacKay writes, it is possible to entertain the audience through the use of “bright, lively attractive colors, attractive forms, and not trying to impose a quasi-serious philosophic approach” (16), in this case the intensity of the color inspires meditation and cultivates philosophy, especially because of the brevity of our experience of watching. The meditation takes us inward and outward at once, to origins and destinations all distant, all blue. “As a designer, historically speaking, I am a colorist,” Oliver Smith claimed, looking back thirty years later on what he had done here (Mikotowicz 41). The scene, number 72–73, was shot 10 November 1952, on Stage 27 at MGM, the horse (standing down below where years later Cary Grant would cling from Mount Rushmore) enduring six minutes of rehearsal from 11:42 until 11:48 a.m., then withdrawn for a group of propmen who pulled the carriage instead. To establish this perduring and glorious vision of the horse drinking the sky, as I call it, water was poured into the trough from 2:34 until 2:36 p.m. No notations remain to explain how the water became blue. Three takes were made in the ensuing four minutes (Daily Production Report). The trough itself was born entirely in Smith’s imagination. While on a site that is today called Cherry Hill a horse fountain had existed in Central Park at one point, the result of a creative (and expensive) response from architect Jacob Wrey Mould to incoming new regulations from the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, it was huge and rather ornate, and designed to be used by many animals at once. “The Park that turned democratic ideals

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into landscaped realities for the people likewise would spare no expense in the treatment of its horses” (newyorkology.com). But there have never been small founts or troughs for horses in the Park, nothing like this, and no trough filled with a potable sky. It is true that when we go to the movies, our pleasure and our thought persistently forsake a real world to engage with exactly such an imaginary one, that we take a ride energized by exactly such a creature as this horse. The vehicle in which we ride, if it has some of the attributes of a railway car—the smoothness of our ride, our ability to forgo the realities of geographical territory once the system of the rails and the wheels (the camera and the projector) are in place—retains most fundamentally the direct and tangible qualities of the animal energy that is its real reason for being. Again and again in cinema we are transported to and simultaneously presented with a space where greets the eye swiftly and in passing, too soon ready to vanish and yet, for all this, ineffably present as the fix of our experience, something like a horse who drinks the sky. That in ways never fully comprehended but always luring our wonderment we may move across such creations, grasping and swallowing them or just reaching out in a gamble, that again and again we may commit ourselves to such movements and such precipitations, is the great thrill of cinema. We find our eyes surprised, hungry, insatiable, longing, loving, losing, and lost.

WOR K S CI T E D A N D C ONSU LT E D

Abbreviations BFI CF HER

Special Collections, British Film Institute, London Cinémathèque Française, Paris Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills LOCMS Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. LOCMUSIC Music Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. USC Cinema-Television Library at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles WB Warner Bros. Archive, University of Southern California, Los Angeles

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I N DE X

(Page numbers in italics indicate illustrations.) Aaton camera, 162 À Bout de souffle (Breathless) (Jean-Luc Godard, 1960), 5 Actors’ Equity, 192 Adams, Gordon, 79, 80 Adbusters, 80, 81 Ahern, Fred, 132 Alfie (Lewis Gilbert, 1966), 19 Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho (2008), 217n1 Allen, Corey, 41, 43 Almendros, Nestor, 163, 165, 181 Alonzo, John, 163 Alves, Joe Jr., 172 American Graffiti (George Lucas, 1973), 160 American in Paris, An (Vincente Minnelli, 1951), 112 American Photographs (Walker Evans), 185 American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA), 233 Ames, Preston, 230 Antonioni, Michelangelo, 140, 142, 220, 221, 224 Arcady, 223, 225 Arcalli, Franco, 142 Archives of Gynecology and Obstetrics, 12 Ardrey, Alex, 67 Arlen, Michael J., 141, 222 Arnheim, Rudolf, 180 Arnold, Matthew, 123 Arthur, Jean, 58

Ashby, Hal, 163 Asner, Ed, 7 Astaire, Fred, 7, 112, 195, 210, 229, 230, 232 Auer, Mischa, 177, 178 Auschwitz, 106 Avdienko, A. O., 77 Avildsen, John G., 160 “Babas del Diablo, Las” (“The Devil’s Drool”) (Julio Cortázar), 220 Babel (Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2006), 209, 214 Bacchae, The (Euripides), 27 Backus, Jim, 43 Badham, John, 160, 161 Bagdasarian, Ross, 112 Baker, Diane, 7 Bakersfield (California), 63 Balaban and Katz (A. J. Balaban, Barney Balaban, Sam Katz, and Morris Katz) movie emporia, 216 Baldwin Hills (Los Angeles), 51 Bale, Christian, 142n1 Bancroft, Anne, 146 Band Wagon, The (Vincente Minnelli, 1953), 7, 229–234 Barrazza, Adriana, 209 Barrymore, John, 190, 191–195 Barrymore, Lionel, 190, 192 Basic Instinct (Paul Verhoeven, 1992), 19 Bass, Saul, 15 Bataille, Georges, 166 Baudrillard, Jean, 1

2 47

248 Baudry, Jean Louis, 30 Bazin, André, 8, 12, 139, 216, 225 BeeGees (Barry, Robin, and Maurice Gibb), 154, 155, 156 Beery, Wallace, 168, 190 Bel Geddes, Barbara, 188 Belle et la bête, La (Jean Cocteau, 1946), 35 Bell Telephone, 192 Belton, John, 29, 165 Benjamin, Walter, 33, 86, 93, 119, 120, 207 Bennett, Tony, 77 Benny, Jack, 14 Berger, John, 11 Berry, Halle, 1 Bianchi, Daniela, 151 Biltereyst, Daniel, 45 Bingham, Dennis, 2 Biograph (American Mutoscope and Biograph Company), 21 Birch, Pat, 3 Birds, The (Alfred Hitchcock, 1963), 136, 185 Birth of a Nation, The (D. W. Griffith, 1915), 27 Bis ans Ende der Welt (Wim Wenders, 1991), 17, 209–210 Blackburn, Paul, 220 Blackmail (Alfred Hitchcock, 1930), 54, 91, 127, 143 Blair, Linda, 111, 122 Blake, William, 164 Bloch, Bertram, 199 Bloom, Orlando, 1 “Blow-Up.” See “Babas del Diablo, Las” Blow-Up (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1966), 139, 140, 219–226, 224 Boccioni, Umberto, 28 Bogdanovich, Peter, 34 Bond, Edward, 220 Bonitzer, Pascal, 122 Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967), 32, 168–169 Bordwell, David, 12, 164, 180, 218, 219 Borglum, Gutzon, 66, 73, 75, 79 Borglum, Lincoln, 66 Boulding, Kenneth, 230 Bourne Identity, The (Doug Liman, 2002), 15, 219 Bourne Supremacy, The (Paul Greengrass, 2004), 212, 218, 219 Bourne Ultimatum, The (Paul Greengrass, 2007), 209 Bouzereau, Laurent, 175 Bow, Clara, 192

index Boyle, Robert, 63, 68, 69, 72 Boy on a Dolphin (Jean Negulesco, 1957), 231 Bridges at Toko-Ri, The (Mark Robson, 1954), 208 Brooks, Richard, 160 Brown, Garrett, 161 Brady, Alice, 177 Brando, Marlon, 36, 157 Brecht, Bertolt, 101n5 Breen, Joseph I., 135 Brief Encounter (David Lean, 1945), 7 Brissac, Virginia, 43 Brooks, Richard, 37 Brown, Norman O., 34, 116 Büchner, Georg, 36 Bullitt (Peter Yates, 1968), 212 Burke, Billie, 190 Burke, Kenneth, 57, 124 Burks, Robert, 70 Burns, Jessie, 198 Bush, George W., 79–81 Cable News Network (CNN), 210 Caché (Michael Haneke, 2005), 179 Cage, Nicolas, 1 Cail, Harold, 67 Camino Real (Tennessee Williams), 231 Camus, Albert, 207 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), 111 Canty, Marietta, 56 Cardin, Pierre, 25 Carey, Gary, 191 Carey, John, 160, 164 Carroll, Leo G., 82 Carter, Jimmy, 74 Cavell, Stanley, 12, 72, 73, 117 Cennini, Cennino, 232 Central Park (New York), 228–229, 233–234 Cézanne, Paul, 2, 176–177 Chaikin, Joseph, 62 Champ, The (King Vidor, 1931), 168 Chaplin, Charles, 19 Charisse, Cyd, 7, 47, 229, 230, 232 Charleton (London), 226 Chavez, Carlos, 77 Cherry Hill (Central Park, New York), 233 Chicago, censorship in. See Rebel Without a Cause Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974), 147, 149 Chion, Michel, 112, 113, 117, 121, 125, 137

index Church, Thomas Haden, 18 CinemaScope, 38, 40, 42, 54, 60, 171 Cinémathèque française, 3 Cinématographe, 28 Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941), 7, 159, 168 Claire’s Knee. See Genou de Claire, Le Clayton, Dick, 55 Cleaver, Eldridge, 77 Clinton, William J., 77 Clock, The (Vincente Minnelli, 1945), 179 Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Steven Spielberg, 1977), 140 Coates, Anne V., 142, 144, 145, 161 Cocteau, Jean, 20 Coleman, Charles, 66 Coleman, Herbert, 65 Collier, Constance, 204, 205 Comden, Betty, 230 Concerto in F (George Gershwin, 1925), 112 Connery, Sean, 7, 151 Constitution of the United States of America, 45 Conversation, The (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974), 147, 160 Cook, David, 144, 160, 161, 165 Cook, Whitfield, 130, 131n3 Cooper, Chris, 152 Cooper, Gary, 75, 76, 212 Cooper, Gladys, 6 Copland, Aaron, 77 Coppola, Francis Ford, 160, 163 Corber, Robert, 188 Corrigan, Timothy, 19–20, 21, 22, 24 Cortázar, Julio, 110, 220 Coulouris, George, 9 Count of Monte Cristo, The (Alexandre Dumas), 133 Courage, Alexander, 229, 230 Cox, Brian, 152 Crash (David Cronenberg, 1996), 17 Crash (Paul Haggis, 2004), 214 Crèvecoeur, Michel Guillaume Jean de, 77 Crowther, Bosley, 36, 37 Cukor, George, 191, 195, 201, 204 Cumberland Mountains (Tennessee), 213 Dachau, 106 Dadoun, Roger, 88, 89, 99 Damon, Matt, 152, 218 “Dancing in the Dark” (Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz), 229 Daniels, William, 146

249 Dark Knight, The (Christopher Nolan, 2008), 142n1 Darwin, Charles, 91, 95–96 Daviau, Allen, 161, 163 David Copperfield (Charles Dickens), 211–212 Davis, Bette, 6 Davy Crockett fad, 172 Day, Doris, 2, 120 Day After Tomorrow, The (Roland Emmerich, 2004), 23 Day for Night. See Nuit américaine, La Dead Man (Jim Jarmusch, 1995), 6 Dead Zone, The (Stephen King), 18 Dead Zone, The (David Cronenberg, 1986), 18 Dean, James, 7, 36, 37, 41, 55–56, 58 Death Watch. See Mort en direct, La Debord, Guy, 34, 122 De Lauretis, Teresa, 179 Dench, Judi, 169 De Niro, Robert, 157 Denke, Karl, 105 Departed, The (Martin Scorsese, 2006), 195 Depp, Johnny, 6, 169 Depression, Great, 197 Deux Anglaises et le continent, Les (Two English Girls) (François Truffaut, 1973), 231 De Wilde, Brandon, 58 DiCaprio, Leonardo, 179n2, 195 Dietrich, Marlene, 126, 128, 128n1, 129, 129n2, 130, 135 DiMaggio, Joe, 10 Dinner at Eight (Edna Ferber and George S. Kaufman, Oct. 22, 1932), 191, 198 Dinner at Eight (George Cukor, 1933), 7, 189–205, 203 Dior, Christian, 129n2 Disturbia (D. J. Caruso, 2007), 17 Doane, Mary Ann, 121, 122, 153 Dolby sound, 165 Donat, Robert, 143–144 Donen, Stanley, 210 Donnie Darko (Richard Kelly, 2001), 18 Dor, Karin, 10 Doran, Ann, 43 Douchet, Jean, 62 Dreamers, The (Bernardo Bertolucci, 2003), 3, 4 Dreams (Akira Kurosawa, 1990), 10 Dreigroschenoper, Die (The Threepenny Opera) (Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, August 31, 1928), 101

250 Dressler, Marie, 7, 190, 195–205, 203 Dreyfuss, Richard, 140, 169, 175 Dr. Zhivago (David Lean, 1965), 15 Dumas, Alexandre, 157 Dunaway, Faye, 147 Durkheim, Émile, 94 Dwyer, John M., 172 Eastmancolor, 230 East of Eden (Elia Kazan, 1955), 7, 36, 55 Eberson, John, 216 Edens, Roger, 229, 230 Edison, Thomas Alva, 32 Edouart, Farciot, 69; Edouart triple-head projector, 69 Eisenstein, Sergei, 181 Eisner, Lotte, 103, 104 E la nave va (And the Ship Sails On) (Federico Fellini, 1983), 120, 122, 123, 124 Elder, R. Bruce, 148 El Dorado (Howard Hawks, 1963), 7 Eliot, T. S., 3 Ellis, John, 14, 15, 19 El Morocco (New York), 228 Elstree Studios, 128n1 Empire of the Sun (Steven Spielberg, 1987), 32 End of the Affair, The (Edward Dmytryk, 1955), 206 Entombment, The (Michelangelo), 232 Et in Arcadia ego (Giovanni Guercino, 1621–23), 225 Et in Arcadia ego (Nicolas Poussin, 1630), 225 Et in Arcadia ego (Nicolas Poussin, 1635), 225 E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (Steven Spielberg, 1982), 1, 3 Evans, Madge, 190, 203, 201 Exhibitors Herald and Moving Picture World, 193 Exorcist, The (William Friedkin, 1973), 111, 122, 123 Eye for Hitchcock, An (Murray Pomerance), 63, 78, 81 “Eyes Outnumber the Nose Two to One, The” (Robert A. Paul), 13–14 Eyman, Scott, 193 Fahrenheit 451 (François Truffaut, 1966), 211 Farmer, Gary, 6 Farmiga, Vera, 195 Farm Security Administration (FSA), 75

index Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), 80 Ferber, Edna, 191 Fiedler, Leslie A., 75, 78, 79 50 Cent (Curtis James Jackson III), 77 Fifty-ninth Street (New York), 229 Film Forum (New York), 25 “Fils de la Vierge, Les.” See “Babas del Diablo, Las” Finding Neverland (Marc Forster, 2004), 175 Fine, Bob, 111 Finlay, Victoria, 231, 232 Fontaine, Joan, 24 Ford, John, 160 Forster, E. M., 25 Foucault, Michel, 180 Frame Analysis (Erving Goffman), onlooking, 5 Frascella, Lawrence, 41, 59 Freccero, John, 225 Freed, Arthur, 230; Freed Unit at MGM, 230 Freeman, Kathleen, 192 French New Wave, 141, 144 Freud, Sigmund, 34 From Russia with Love (Terence Young, 1962), 151, 152 Frye, Northrop, 74, 75, 76 Fuller, Samuel, 160 Fulton, John, 67 Fussell, Paul, 208 Futurism, 28, 33 “Futurist Manifesto” (Umberto Boccioni), 28 Garfinkel, Harold, 38 Garrel, Louis, 3, 4 Garroway, Dave, 210 Gary, Lorraine, 170, 171, 173, 174, 175 Gass, William, 232 Gastineau, Benjamin, 29, 212 Gaudreault, André, 21 Gay, Peter, 87 General Electric, 192 Genou de Claire, Le (Claire’s Knee) (Eric Rohmer, 1970), 181 Ghosts (Henrik Ibsen, Jan. 5, 1894), 191 Giamatti, Paul, 18 Giddens, Anthony, 226 Girodet de Roussy-Trioson, Anne-Louis, 59 Giroux, Henry, 207–208, 210 Glass Menagerie, The (Tennessee Williams), 1

index Glenn, Pierre-William, 161 Godard, Jean-Luc, 36, 38 Godfather, The (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972), 32, 160 Godfather Part II, The (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974), 160 Gojira (Ishirô Honda, 1954), 25–26, 26 Goffman, Erving, 48, 83, 118, 166, 182, 183, 201 Gone with the Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939), 231 Goodman, Paul, 21 Gordon-Levitt, Joseph, 18 Gorky, Maxim, 30, 35 Gorney, Karen Lynn, 154 Gorss, Saul, 70 Graduate, The (Mike Nichols, 1967), 146, 149 Graham, Martha, 3 Grant, Barry Keith, 216 Grant, Cary, 9, 63, 64, 65, 68n1, 70, 72, 73, 74, 76, 78, 79, 81, 82, 84, 157, 233 Great Expectations (Charles Dickens), 209 Green, Adolph, 230 Green, Eva, 3, 4 Greer, Germaine, 58 “Grey’s Anatomy” (2005), 11 Griffith, D. W., 21, 27, 71 Griffith Park Observatory (Los Angeles), 37, 43–44 Grosset & Dunlap, 194 Grossmann, Karl, 105 Gründgens, Gustaf, 88 Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri), 59, 225 Guernsey, Otis Jr., 64 Guerra, Tonino, 220 Gunning, Tom, 4, 21, 27, 30, 95, 100, 119 “Gunsmoke” (1955), 50 Guns of Navarone, The (J. Lee Thompson, 1961), 231 Guthrie, Woody, 77 Gyllenhaal, Jake, 169 Haarmann, Fritz, 105 Hackman, Gene, 147 Hale, Louise Closser, 196 Haller, Ernest, 42 Hamilton, Murray, 169, 174 Hansen, Miriam, 27 Hardin, C. L., 231 Harlow, Jean, 190, 198 Hartman, Geoffrey, 71

251 Hasler, Emil, 93n3 Hawks, Howard, 160 Head, Edith, 231 Heat (Michael Mann, 1995), 157 Hedren, ‘Tippi,’ 7 Heflin, Van, 58 Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, 164 Hellboy (Guillermo del Toro, 2004), 23 Hemmings, David, 139, 219, 222, 224 Henckels, J. A. (Solingen), 106, 107, 108 Henderson, Allen, 68 Henreid, Paul, 6 Hepburn, Katharine, 157 Herrmann, Bernard, 188 Hersholt, Jean, 191 Herzen, Alexander, 53 Hinkle, Bob, 55 His Majesty O’Keefe (Byron Haskin, 1954), 231 L’Histoire d’Adèle H. (The Story of Adele H.) (François Truffaut, 1975), 181 L’Histoire de l’oeil (Georges Bataille), 91 Hitchcock, Alfred, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 70, 71, 72, 73, 77, 81, 82, 83, 84, 129, 130, 131n3, 132, 134, 135, 136, 160, 167n1, 210, 217, 217n1, 231 Hitchcock at Work (Bill Krohn), 63 Hitchcock—The Murderous Gaze (William Rothman), 63 Hoffman, Dustin, 146 Holmes, Phillips, 196 Hong, James, 147 Hope, Thelma, 228 Hopkins, Anthony, 217n1 Hopper, Dennis, 19, 44 Hopper, William, 52 “How Deep Is Your Love?” (Barry, Robin, and Maurice Gibb), 155, 156 How to Marry a Millionaire (Jean Negulesco, 1953), 157 Humberger, Charles E., 65, 67, 68 Hunt, Peter, 151 Hurricane Katrina, 79 Hurt, William, 17 Huston, John, 160 Hutton, Betty, 231 “If You Believe” (Irving Berlin), 112 “I Guess I’ll Have to Change My Plan” (Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz), 229 Île Saint-Louis (Paris), 220 In a Lonely Place (Nicholas Ray, 1950), 167

252 Incendiary Blonde (George Marshall, 1945), 231 Incredible Shrinking Man, The (Jack Arnold, 1957), 32 “In the Hall of the Mountain King” (from Peer Gynt, op. 23) (Edvard Grieg), 88, 90, 107 Irving Blvd. (Los Angeles), 52–53 Jackson, Harry, 230 Jackson, Peter, 11 James, William, 217, 219 Jaws (Peter Benchley), 169 Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975), 33, 160, 169–186, 171 Jay, Martin, 91, 167 Jefferson, Thomas, 72n2, 73, 81 John, Georg, 88 Jolie, Angelina, 1 Joplin, Janis, 77 Josephson, Erland, 94 Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg, 1993), 185 Kael, Pauline, 168 Kaes, Anton, 96, 108 Kate Mantilini (Beverly Hills), 157 Kaufman, George S., 191, 194 Kazan, Elia, 36 Keane, Steven, 44, 45 Keaton, Buster, 75 Kefauver, Sen. Estes (chair, Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency in the United States, of Senate Committee on the Judiciary), 37, 44 Kelly, Gene, 227 Kelly, Grace, 22 Kennedy, John Fitzgerald, 77–78 Kerr, Deborah, 206 Kidd, Michael, 3, 229, 230 Kinetoscope, 28 Kingdom, The (Peter Berg, 2007), 210 King Solomon’s Mines (Compton Bennett and Andrew Marton, 1950), 231 Klinger, Barbara, 179n2 Klute (Alan J. Pakula, 1971), 16 Kôchi, Momoko, 26 Kracauer, Siegfried, 2, 5 Kramer vs. Kramer (Robert Benton, 1979), 181 Kristallnacht (November 9–10, 1938), 106 Krohn, Bill, 135, 167n1, 188 Kubrick, Stanley, 163 Kuntzel, Thierry, 88 Kürten, Peter, 105

index Laberinto del Fauno, El (Pan’s Labyrinth) (Guillermo del Toro, 2006), 124 Lacan, Jacques, 1, 179 Ladd, Alan, 58 Lady in the Lake (Robert Montgomery, 1947), 19 Lambert, Gavin, 191 Landau, Martin, 65 Landgut, Inge, 88 Lang, Fritz, 87, 89, 99, 101, 101n5, 104, 105 Lascaux cave drawings, 181 Last Laugh, The (Der Letzte Mann) (F. W. Murnau, 1924), 194 Lawrence, D. H., 206, 212 Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean, 1962), 141, 142, 144, 150, 161 “Lawrence Welk Show, The” (1955), 50 Leacock, Richard, 161 Lean, David, 144, 145 Le Carre, John, 133 Lee, Betty, 204 Lehman, Ernest, 64, 65, 66, 70, 71 Leigh, Jennifer Jason, 16 Lieu du crime, Le (Scene of the Crime) (André Téchiné, 1986), 209 Lennard, Robert, 128n1 Lerner, Max, 76 Let Us Be Gay (Robert Z. Leonard, 1930), 204 Levant, Oscar, 112 Lewis, Wyndham, 208 Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, The (Michael Powell, 1943), 231 Lincoln, Abraham, 72n2, 73, 74, 76, 81 Lion and the Mouse, The (Lloyd Bacon, 1928), 192 Living-Room War (Michael J. Arlen), 210–211 Lockhart, June, 212 Lodger, The (Alfred Hitchcock, 1927), 92, 95 Lombard, Carole, 177 London, Michael, 19 Lonedale Operator, The (D. W. Griffith, 1911), 21 Lookout, The (Scott Frank, 2007), 17, 18 Lord of the Rings, The (trilogy)(Peter Jackson, 2001, 2002, 2003), 11, 23 Lorre, Peter, 3, 86, 100 Lost in Translation (Sofia Coppola, 2003), 209, 210 Louma crane, 162 Lowe, Edmund, 190 Lucas, George, 160, 161

index Lumière, Auguste and Louis, 30, 31 Lupino, Ida, 160 M (Fritz Lang, 1931), 3, 86–109, 97 MacKay, Patricia, 233 Mackendrick, Alexander, 40 Magnolia (Paul Thomas Anderson, 1999), 18, 23 Maguire, Tobey, 169 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 214 Malone, Dorothy, 7 Maltese Falcon, The (John Huston, 1941), 179 Man from Laramie, The (Anthony Mann, 1955), 76 Mankiewicz, Herman J., 191, 198, 199, 201, 202, 204 Manson, Charles, 2 Man Who Knew Too Much, The (Alfred Hitchcock, 1956), 76, 108–109, 112, 113, 120, 121, 124–125 Marion, Frances, 191, 198, 199 Marnie (Alfred Hitchcock, 1964), 7 Martian Chronicles, The (Ray Bradbury), 6 Martin, Lloyd “Skip,” 229, 230 Maryon Park (Greenwich, Eng.), 225–226 Mason, James, 82 Massey, Raymond, 7 Mattey, Robert, 175 Matthews, Blayney, 55 Mayer, Louis B., 194, 204 McAvoy, May, 192 McCambridge, Mercedes, 111 McCullers, Carson, 77 McCullin, Don, 221 McGilligan, Patrick, 191 McIntosh, Mary, 88, 89 McLuhan, Marshall, 208, 210 Meeks, Rusty, 55 Meet Me in St. Louis (Vincente Minnelli, 1944), 231 Melcher, Terry, 2 Méliès, Georges, 122 Men, Play and Games (Roger Caillois), 10, 31 Mencken, H. L., 77 Method, Stanislavskian, 16 Metrocolor, 230 Metz, Christian, 12 MGM: Legal Department, 65, 66, 67; Stage 27, 69–70, 78, 228, 233; studio orchestra, 229. See also North by Northwest Midler, Bette, 112

253 Midway Airport (Chicago), 72 Miller, Barry, 155 Milwaukee Motion Picture Committee, 44, 45 Min and Bill (George W. Hill, 1930), 204 Mineo, Sal, 52, 56, 57, 58 Minnelli, Liza, 229 Mirren, Helen, 169 Mission Dolores (San Francisco), 189 Mitchell, Grant, 196 Molloy, Marilyn, 70 Mondrian, Piet, 40 Monroe, Marilyn, 10, 157 Monsieur Verdoux (Charles Chaplin, 1947), 19 Monta, Rudolf, 65, 66, 67 Moore, Dickie, 213 Morecambe, Gary, 78 Morimoto, Hiromitsu, 25 Morley, Karen, 190 Morris, Nigel, 131n3 Mort en direct, La (Bertrand Tavernier, 1980), 161 Mould, Jacob Wrey, 233 Mount Rushmore, 64–85 Mulvehill, Chuck, 143 Mulvey, Laura, 1, 11, 179 Murch, Walter, 148, 161 Murphy, Cillian, 231 Murrow, Edward R., 210 Musée d’Orsay (Paris), 10 Music Man, The (Morton DaCosta, 1962), 112 My Man Godfrey (Gregory La Cava, 1936), 177 My Own Private Idaho (Gus Van Sant, 1991), 19, 75 Nabucco (Giuseppe Verdi), 120 Naked Spur, The (Anthony Mann, 1953), 76 Naremore, James, 78 National Park Service of the Bureau of the Interior, 65, 66, 67 Neubabelsberg Studios, 2, 5. See also Universum-Film AG Newman, Paul, 231 “News Hour with Jim Lehrer, The” (1995), 77 New Yorker, The, 210 Nicholson, Jack, 142–143, 147 None But the Lonely Heart (Clifford Odets, 1944), 9 North by Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock, 1959), 62–85, 74

254 “No Strings (I’m Fancy Free)” (Irving Berlin), 112 Notes on a Scandal (Richard Eyre, 2006), 18, 169 Notorious (Alfred Hitchcock, 1946), 179 Nouvelle Vague, 141, 144 Novak, Kim, 157, 189 Now, Voyager (Irving Rapper, 1942), 6, 179 Nuit américaine, La (Day for Night) (François Truffaut, 1973), 173 Nuremberg Rally, 106 Nyberg, Mary Ann, 228 Nykvist, Sven, 163 O’Casey, Ronan, 219 Oh, Sandra, 10–14, 15, 17 On Dangerous Ground (Nicholas Ray, 1952), 37 Ondra, Anny, 143 Ondrícek, Miroslav, 163 “One” (Harry Nillson), 23 101 Dalmations (Stephen Herek, 1996), 178 One of Our Aircraft Is Missing (Michael Powell, 1942), 208 On the Beach (Stanley Kramer, 1959), 110–111, 113, 114, 115, 116, 124 “Open Your Eyes” (Burton Lane and Alan Jay Lerner), 195 Origine du monde, L’ (Gustave Courbet, 1866), 10, 12, 13 Ortega y Gasset, José, 20, 168, 212, 231 Osborne, Robert, 210 O’Steen, Sam, 146, 147 O’Toole, Peter, 141 Oudart, Jean-Pierre, 30, 166 Pacino, Al, 157 Page, Don, 51 Pakula, Alan J., 163 Pallette, Eugene, 177 Panaglide, 161 Panic in the Streets (Elia Kazan, 1950), 93n2, 168 Panofsky, Erwin, 225 Paradine Case, The (Alfred Hitchcock, 1947), 132 Paradise Theater (The Bronx), 216 Paramount Pictures (Los Angeles), 31, 67, 69 Paris, Texas (Wim Wenders, 1984), 179 Parker, Jon Kimura, 2 Parker, “Colonel” Tom, 49 Party Girl (Nicholas Ray, 1958), 47 Passenger, The. See Professione: Reporter

index Passion of Anna, The (Ingmar Bergman, 1969), 94 Pastoureau, Michel, 232 Payne, Alexander, 19 Peau douce, La (The Soft Skin) (François Truffaut, 1964), 173 Peck, Gregory, 110 Penal Colony, The (Franz Kafka), 167 Penn, Christopher, 16 Pennebaker, D. A., 161 Petro, Patrice, 87 “Petticoat Junction” (1963), 211 Phantasmagoria, 30, 31, 32, 33 Philadelphia Story, The (George Cukor, 1940), 154 Philidor, Paul, 30 Phoenix, River, 19, 75 Pickford, Mary, 192 Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (Gore Verbinski, 2003), 32 Plato, 167 Platt, Edward, 42 Plaza Hotel (New York), 228 Ponti, Carlo, 220 Porter, Edwin, 32 Potente, Franka, 152 Pound, Ezra, 140 Poussin, Nicolas, 225 Powell, Jane, 195 Powell, William, 177 Presley, Elvis, 49 Prince, Stephen, 8, 146 Principles of Psychology (William James), 3 Production Code Administration (PCA), 46, 135 Professione: Reporter (The Passenger) (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1975), 7, 142 Prokofiev, Serge, 90 Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960), 163 “Que Sera, Sera (What Will Be, Will Be)” (Ray Evans and Jay Livingston), 2, 120, 124–125 Quinn, Anthony, 25, 144 Radio Corporation of America (RCA), 49 Railsback, Steve, 195 Railway Journey, The (Wolfgang Schivelbusch), 28–30 Rain People, The (Francis Ford Coppola, 1969), 160 Rains, Claude, 6 Rank Organization, 221n2

index Rapid City (South Dakota), 81 Rauschenberg, Robert, 77 Rawlins, David, 158 Ray, Johnnie, 112 Ray, Nicholas, 7, 36, 37, 38, 39, 41, 47, 49, 50, 51, 53, 54, 55, 61 Reagan, Ronald, 179 Reaping, The (Stephen Hopkins, 2007), 23 Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock, 1954), 22, 112, 154, 209 Rebecca (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940), 24 Rebel Without a Cause (Nicholas Ray, 1955), 36–61, 57, 183 Redford, Robert, 147 Redgrave, Vanessa, 219 Red River (Howard Hawks, 1948), 178 Red Violin, The. See Voilon rouge, Le Reeves, Keanu, 19 Remnick, David, 80 Rendition (Gavin Hood, 2007), 210 Renoir, Pierre-Auguste, 228 Renouvier, Charles Bernard, 217 Repas de bébé, Le (The Baby’s Breakfast) (Auguste and Louis Lumière, 1895), 7 Requiem for a Heavyweight (Ralph Nelson, 1962), 25 Return of the Soldier, The (Rebecca West), 208 Revier, Dorothy, 193 Reville, Alma, 130, 131n3 Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini Op. 43 (Sergei Rachmaninoff), 2 Ritchard, Cyril, 143 Rivette, Jacques, 37 Robertson, Peggy, 84, 129n2 Rockwell, Norman, 77 Rocky (John G. Avildsen, 1976), 160 Rohmer, Eric, 37, 45, 46 Roosevelt, Theodore, 72n2, 73, 74, 76, 79, 81 Rose, The (Mark Rydell, 1979), 112 Ross, Diana, 77 Rothman, William, 71, 144n2, 167 Rotunno, Giuseppe, 110 Rouch, Jean, 161 Royal Family, The (Edna Ferber and George S. Kaufman, Dec. 28, 1927), 191 Royal Wedding (Stanley Donen, 1951), 210 Ruelle, Emile de, 143 Ruskin, John, 28 Ryan, Robert, 7 Saboteur (Alfred Hitchcock, 1942), 73 Sacks, Oliver, 219

255 Safe (Todd Haynes, 1995), 18 Saint, Eva Marie, 64–65, 70, 73 Salinger, Conrad, 229, 230 Sandburg, Carl, 77 Saturday Night Fever (John Badham, 1977), 154–159, 156, 160 Scheider, Roy, 169, 171, 173, 176 Schiffbauerdamm (theater, Berlin), 101 Schivelbusch, Wolfgang, 27–30, 87, 98, 148, 162, 212, 214, 231 School of Rock (Richard Linklater, 2003), 18 Schropfer, Johann, 30 Scream, The (Edvard Munch, 1893), 136 Sebald, W. G., 3, 27 Secret Agent (Alfred Hitchcock, 1936), 81 Sergeant York (Howard Hawks, 1941), 212, 213, 218 Seurat, Georges, 222 “Seventy-six Trombones” (Meredith Willson), 112 Seven Year Itch, The (Billy Wilder, 1955), 10 Shahn, Ben, 77 Shakespeare, William, 32, 157 Shane (George Stevens, 1953), 58 Sharif, Omar, 144 Shaw, George Bernard, 187 Shaw, Robert, 170 Shayne, Konstantin, 188 Short Cuts (Robert Altman, 1993), 16 Show of Shows, The (John G. Adolfi, 1929), 192 Shurlock, Geoffrey, 46 Sideways (Alexander Payne, 2004), 11, 18 Since You Went Away (John Cromwell, 1944), 179 “Singin’ in the Rain” (Nacio Herb Brown and Arthur Freed), 227 Singin’ in the Rain (Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly, 1952), 192 Smith, Oliver, 230, 233 Soft Skin, The. See Peau douce, La Sondheim, Stephen, 115 Sontag, Susan, 33 Sophie’s Choice (Alan J. Pakula, 1982), 181 Sorenson, Theodore, 77, 78 Spaulding, Don, 67, 68 Speed (Jan de Bont, 1994), 19 Spielberg, Steven, 140, 160, 161, 163, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185 Spoto, Donald, 68 Springer, Claudia, 47

256 Stagecoach (John Ford, 1939), 28 Stage Fright (Alfred Hitchcock, 1950), 126–138, 128 Stahl-Nachbaur, Ernst, 87 Stalin, Josef, 77, 79 Star Is Born, A (George Cukor, 1954), 179 Starobinski, Jean, 166 “Star Trek” (television shows, various), 31 Star Trek (films, various), 31 Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977), 22, 112, 160, 209 State University of New York at Binghamton, 39 “Stayin’ Alive” (Barry, Robin, and Maurice Gibb), 158 Steadicam, 161, 162 Steichen, Edward, 77 Stein, Franz, 93 Stein, Gertrude, 210 Sterling, Martin, 78 Stern, Stewart, 42, 54 Stevens, George, 55 Stewart, James, 76, 121, 157, 188, 189, 203, 217 Still of the Night (Robert Benton, 1982), 181 Stone, Sharon, 19 Stork Club (New York), 228 “Storm Clouds” Cantata (Arthur Benjamin), 112 Story of Adèle H., The. See Histoire d’Adèle H., L’ Studies in Classic American Literature (D. H. Lawrence), 206 Stunt Man, The (Richard Rush, 1980), 195 Sugarland Express, The (Steven Spielberg, 1974), 160 Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (F. W. Murnau, 1927), 32 Susannah and the Elders (Thomas Rowlandson, c. 1785), 167 Swann’s Way (Marcel Proust), 119 Sweet and Lowdown (Woody Allen, 1999), 32 Swing Time (George Stevens, 1936), 32 Syriana (Steven Gaghan, 2005), 209, 210 Takarada, Akira, 25, 26 Tandy, Jessica, 136 Tanitch, Robert, 59 Tarantino, Quentin, 38 Tate, Sharon, 2 Taylor, Elizabeth, 157 Taylor, Samuel, 188

index “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting” (“Futurist Manifesto”) (Umberto Boccioni), 28 Technicolor, 42, 230, 233 Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre, 117 Telotte, J. P., 105 Tempest, The (William Shakespeare), 200 Terminal, The (Steven Spielberg, 2004), 210 There’s No Business Like Show Business (Walter Lang, 1954), 112 They Live By Night (Nicholas Ray, 1948), 32 Things to Come (William Cameron Menzies, 1936), 208 39 Steps, The (Alfred Hitchcock, 1935), 127, 144 Three Days of the Condor (Sydney Pollack, 1974), 147 300 (Zack Snyder, 2007), 24 Three Musketeers, The (Alexandre Dumas), 46 Through Navajo Eyes (Sol Worth and John Adair), 17 THX-1138 (George Lucas, 1971), 160 Time, 80 Titanic (James Cameron, 1997), 179n2 Tocqueville, Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de, 77 Todd, Richard, 126, 128, 129, 131n3, 135 Tolkien, J.R.R., 11 Topaz (Alfred Hitchcock, 1969), 10 Top Hat (Mark Sandrich, 1935), 112 Torn Curtain (Alfred Hitchcock, 1966), 231 Tourette’s Syndrome, 219 Tracy, Lee, 190 Traffic (Steven Soderbergh, 2000), 209, 210 Trafic (Jacques Tati, 1971), 125–126 Travolta, John, 154, 156, 156, 158 Tree, Herbert Beerbohm, 204 Trow, George W. S., 22 Truffaut, François, 29, 64, 66, 81 Tuan, Yi-Fu, 207 Tugboat Annie (Mervyn LeRoy, 1933), 204 Turner Classic Movies (TCM), 210 Two English Girls. See Deux Anglaises et le continent, Les Union Station (Chicago), 73 United Nations, 82 United States Army Corps of Engineers, 80

index United States Department of the Interior, 68. See also North by Northwest Universal Pictures, 176 Universum-Film AG (UFA), 2 Until the End of the World. See Bis ans Ende der Welt “Va, Pensiero” (Giuseppe Verdi), 120 Vaughn, Hilda, 196 Vernon, John, 10 Verrazano Narrows Bridge, 154–155 Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958), 15, 157, 188–189, 216–217 Violon rouge, Le (François Girard, 1998), 11 Vischer, Peter, 193 VistaVision, 221, 221n2 “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (Laura Mulvey), 15 Von Lehndorff, Veruschka, 221 Vonnegut, Kurt Jr., 216 Wagon Master (John Ford, 1950), 167 Waiting for Godot (Samuel Beckett), 115 Walken, Christopher, 18 Walsh, Kay, 128n1 Ward, Janet, 167 Warner, Jack, 44 Warner Bros., 44, 45, 55. See also Rebel Without a Cause Warnercolor, 41, 42, 230 Washington, George, 72n2, 73, 81 Watergate affair, 163 Waxman, Franz, 112 Wayne, John, 7, 157 Weekend (Jean-Luc Godard, 1968), 17 Wegman, William, 77, 175 Weimar Germany, 87–88, 89, 96, 104, 105 Weis, Elisabeth, 136 Weisel, Al, 41, 59 Welles, Orson, 34, 139, 159, 169

257 Wernicke, Otto, 87 Westbeth (New York), 25 Westinghouse, 192 West Side Story (Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim, Sept. 26, 1957), 115 Wetzel, Hans, 111 Wexler, Haskell, 162 Whitaker, Forest, 169 Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Mike Nichols, 1966), 157 Widmann, Ellen, 88 Widmark, Richard, 168 Wilding, Michael, 129, 136 Williams, Adam, 65, 68n1 Willis, Gordon, 163 Wilson, Janis, 6 Wind That Shakes the Barley, The (Ken Loach, 2006), 231 Wings of the Dove, The (Henry James), 25 Wise, Robert, 159 Wizard of Oz, The (Victor Fleming, 1939), 116, 117, 118, 119, 124, 233 Wolfe, Ian, 44 Wollen, Peter, 71 Wood, Natalie, 42 Wood, Robin, 71 Woods, Frank, 27 World War I, 91, 105, 208 Written on the Wind (Douglas Sirk, 1955), 7 WRS Motion Picture and Video Laboratory, 141 Wycherly, Margaret, 212 Wyman, Jane, 126, 128n1, 129 Yeats, William Butler, 85, 138 Young, Terence, 151 “You’re All the World to Me” (Burton Lane and Alan Jay Lerner), 210 Žižek, Slavoj, 1, 179, 185 Zsigmond, Vilmos, 163

A BOU T

T H E

AU T HOR

Murray Pomerance is a professor in the Department of Sociology at Ryerson University and the author of Johnny Depp Starts Here, An Eye for Hitchcock, Savage Time, and Magia d’Amore. He has edited or co-edited numerous anthologies, including City That Never Sleeps: New York and the Filmic Imagination; Cinema and Modernity; A Family Affair: Cinema Calls Home; From Hobbits to Hollywood: Essays on Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings; American Cinema of the 1950s: Themes and Variations; BAD: Infamy, Darkness, Evil, and Slime on Screen; Where the Boys Are: Cinemas of Masculinity and Youth; and Enfant Terrible! Jerry Lewis in American Film. He edits the Horizons of Cinema series at State University of New York Press, and co-edits both the Screen Decades and Star Decades series at Rutgers University Press.

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