In “Self-Reliance” Emerson writes, “Primary wisdom [is] Intuition, whilst all later teachings are tuitions.”1 Thus Emerson is called a philosopher of intuition, Cavell remarks, adding that he is at the same time a teacher of “tuition.” “I read him as teaching that the occurrence to us of intuition places a demand upon us, namely for tuition; call this wording, the willingness to subject oneself to words, to make oneself intelligible. (Tuition so conceived is what I understand criticism to be.)”2 The pages that follow are motivated by the confluence of two intuitions. One is that, as authors, Hitchcock and Emerson, for all their obvious differences, have profound affinities. The other is that my own practice of reading films, as exemplified especially by the chapters on Notorious, Rope, The Wrong Man, Vertigo, North by Northwest, The Birds, and Marnie, is itself underwritten, philosophically, by Emerson’s essays. In this concluding chapter my intention is to “pay the tuition” for these intuitions.
“It is remarkable that involuntarily we always read as superior beings,” Emerson writes in “History.” “All that is said of the wise man by Stoic, or oriental or modern essayist, describes to each reader his own idea, describes his unattained but attainable self” (238–39). As is so often the case, unless one attends carefully to Emerson’s words, it is easy to misread him. He is not saying that unless we will ourselves to do otherwise, we read as if we were superior to what we are reading. He is not saying that we look down on works rather than acknowledge that their thoughts correspond to something in our own character, thereby denying ourselves the possibility of learning, growing from our reading, gaining a new perspective on our own thoughts. He is saying the opposite of this. When we read “involuntarily”—that is, when we do not “will otherwise”—when we do not, for example, let some theory or other run interference—we become “superior beings”—the word superior is used here without irony. If we do “will otherwise” and look down on what we read, we avoid, or try to defeat, another’s thoughts as if we fear they are threats to our own. Then our timidity, masked by a pretense of superiority, reveals our lack of self-reliance; we are ashamed to stand by our own thoughts, to claim them as our own, to express them, to make them available—even to ourselves.
A famous passage from “Self-Reliance” begins: “In every work of genius”—that is, every work, in whatever form or medium, in which an individual, paying the tuition for each intuition, expresses and publishes his or her own thinking—” we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.” The passage goes on: “Great works of art have no more affecting lesson than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility, most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else, tomorrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another” (259).
Although I was unaware when I was writing The Murderous Gaze that my practice of reading exemplified Emersonian perfectionism and was, indeed, underwritten, philosophically, by Emerson’s writings, I was fortunate to have a philosophical basis, thanks above all to having been Stanley Cavell’s student, upon which to reject the view, which was then dogma within the field of film studies, that the concept of authorship had been discredited, on theoretical grounds, as nothing but an instrument of pernicious ideology. And I had a philosophical basis on which to reject the broader view, itself dogma within the field, that by applying some theory or other we could know with certainty that classical Hollywood movies were in the repressive grip of ideology, that we could know, without performing the work I call “reading,” the cornerstone of serious film criticism, that they could not be “works of genius” in Emerson’s sense.
I remarked in the introduction that the idea that films express their thoughts by their successions of moods (moods the camera captures; moods its projected images cast) brings to my mind this oft-quoted sentence from “Experience”: “Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and as we pass through them they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue, and each shows only what lies in its focus” (473). Although every mood brings something into focus—the region or aspect that “lies in its focus”—it is only by seeing at every moment through one lens or another, hence partially, colored by our mood at that moment, that we see a world at all. And even our particular temperament—the “iron wire on which the beads are strung,” the iron rail that makes our “train of moods” run along a single track—“enters fully into the system of illusions, and shuts us in a prison of glass which we cannot see.” (“There is an optical illusion about every person we meet,” Emerson writes. “In truth, they are all creatures of given temperament, which will appear in a given character, whose boundaries they will never pass: but we look at them, they seem alive, and we presume there is impulse in them. In the moment it seems impulse; in the year, in the lifetime, it turns out to be a certain uniform tune which the revolving barrel of the music-box must play” [474].)
In a charming passage, Emerson evokes the possibility that our subjectivity actually creates our world in the same strokes by which it paints it a particular hue—the possibility that life’s “train of moods” is nothing but a train of illusions, dreams from which we only dream we awaken, only awaken into other dreams (like Vertigo’s Scottie, as we have seen, in what is usually called his “dream sequence”).
Do you see that kitten chasing so prettily her own tail? If you could look with her eyes, you might see her surrounded with hundreds of figures performing complex dramas, with tragic and comic issues, long conversations, many characters, many ups and downs of fate,—and meantime it is only puss and her tail. How long before our masquerade will end its noise of tambourines, laughter, and shouting, and we shall find it was a solitary performance?…What imports it whether it is Kepler and the sphere; Columbus and America; a reader and his book; or puss with her tail? (489)
For all its lightness of tone, this passage deepens Emerson’s essay’s immersion in the problematic of philosophical skepticism—both what philosophers call “skepticism about the existence of the external world” and “skepticism about the existence of other minds.” “Experience” does not mount an argument to defeat skepticism. But the essay does settle the matter of skeptical doubt to Emerson’s satisfaction in a way that enables him to move on, to put it behind him, so that later essays have no need to revisit it. “We live amid surfaces,” “Experience” acknowledges. “The true art of life is to skate well on them.” In the spirit of Pascal’s wager, “Experience” offers Emerson’s readers—and himself—this sage advice: “Let us treat the men and women well: treat them as if they were real: perhaps they are.” We have no proof that “other selves” are real. Neither have we proof that they are not. If they are not “other selves,” what is lost by treating them as if they were? If they are real selves and we treat them as if they are not, we deny their humanity—and our own. Why not treat them as if they are real, then? “Without any shadow of doubt, amidst this vertigo of shows and politics,” Emerson writes (his words seeming to have been chosen for him by Hitchcock’s publicist), “I settle myself ever the firmer in the creed, that we should…do broad justice where we are, by whomsoever we deal with, accepting our actual companions and circumstances, however humble or odious, as the mystic officials to whom the universe has delegated its whole pleasure for us” (478–79).
Coming to terms with the truth of skepticism, as we might put it, is the task “Experience” sets itself. “The new statement”—the new way of thinking philosophically that the essay takes its writing to be helping to found—“will comprise the skepticisms, as well as the faiths of society, and out of unbeliefs a creed shall be formed. For, skepticisms are not gratuitous or lawless, but are limitations of the affirmative statement, and the new philosophy must take them in” (487).
When Emerson composed “Experience,” his writings had already contested Kant’s belief in the necessity of synthesis, of “putting experiences together into a unity in knowing a world of objects,” and had arrived at the position that there is no such thing as an objective view that anchors our relationship to the world, as Cavell puts it. Our world is many worlds. As Cavell reads “Experience,” a main thrust of the essay is that “the existence of any one of these worlds depends on our finding ourselves within that world. They have no foundation otherwise.”3 As the opening of “Experience” asserts, when we awaken to our condition, we do not find ourselves within a world. Again, we find ourselves “in a series of which we do not know the extremes, and believe it has none. We wake and find ourselves on a stair; there are stairs below us, which we seem to have ascended; there are stairs above us, many a one, which go upward and out of sight.” That is, when we awaken to our condition, we are in no place we know. We find ourselves lost. “Ghostlike we glide through nature,” Emerson writes, “and should not know our place again” (471). As Uncle Charlie puts it in Shadow of a Doubt, we are “sleepwalkers, blind.”
How are we ever again to find ourselves within a world, in light of what Emerson calls the “Fall of Man”: the “discovery we have made”—the discovery Emerson’s essays have conveyed to their readers—that our flux of moods only “plays about the surface” and never “introduces [us] into the reality, for contact with which we would even pay the costly price of sons and lovers”? (472–73).
It is very unhappy, but too late to be helped, the discovery we have made, that we exist. That discovery is called the Fall of Man. Ever afterwards, we suspect our instruments. We have learned that we do not see directly, but mediately, and that we have no means of correcting these colored and distorting lenses which we are, or of computing the amount of their errors. Perhaps these subject-lenses have a creative power; perhaps there are no objects. Once we lived in what we saw; now, the rapaciousness of this new power, which threatens to absorb all things, engages us. Nature, art, persons, letters, religions,—objects, successively tumble in, and God is but one of its ideas. Nature and literature are subjective phenomena; every evil and every good thing is a shadow which we cast. (487)
What Emerson calls the “Fall of Man” is precisely what Cavell calls the “fall into skepticism” when he argues that “film could not have impressed itself so immediately and pervasively on the Western mind unless that mind had at once recognized in film a manifestation of something that had already happened to itself.” This “something” was a cultural trauma that has produced “a sense of distance from the world,” a “terrifying recognition that reason as such, language as such, can no longer be assured of its relation to a world apart from us or to the reality of the passions within us.”4
In The World Viewed Cavell describes this crisis, at once of knowledge and of expression, as the “unhinging of our consciousness from the world.” Our subjectivity became interposed between us and our presentness to the world. “Our subjectivity became what is present to us; individuality became isolation.” The wish that prompted the creation of film as an artistic medium, he argues, was the wish to overcome this “unhinging of our consciousness from the world,” the wish to “reach this world,” to escape the metaphysical isolation to which our subjectivity condemns us.5
“Our condition,” Cavell writes, “has become one in which our natural mode of perception is to view, feeling unseen. We do not so much look at the world as look out at it, as if from behind the self” (102). When we view films, “our sense of invisibility is an expression of modern privacy or anonymity, as though the world’s projection explains our forms of unknownness and of our inability to know.” He adds, “The explanation is not so much that the world is passing us by, as that we are displaced from our natural habitation within it, placed at a distance from it. The screen…makes displacement appear as our natural condition” (40–41).
Cavell’s compelling picture of the modern human being looking out at the world as if from behind a camera envisions our subjectivity as interposed, as interposing itself, between ourselves and the world. The World Viewed understands the entire history of movies to be bound up with their origin as an expression of the wish to overcome the metaphysical isolation that is the condition of human existence in the modern period. What we crave is to “reach this world” and “attain selfhood,” which Cavell understands to require “the always simultaneous acknowledgment of others” (22) (our acknowledgment of them, and theirs of us). Movies thus originate, in Cavell’s view, as a response to the condition Emerson so accurately diagnoses—the condition that we find ourselves outside our world, not within it, as if we, and our world, do not really exist but stand in need of being “realized.”
Every mood brings something into focus—the region or aspect of the world that “lies in its focus.” And yet, as Emerson puts it in “Experience,” “Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion.” It is only by seeing at every moment through one lens or another, hence partially and colored by our mood at that moment, that our eyes are capable of seeing a world at all. “Thus inevitably does the universe wear our color” (473), Emerson adds, meaning both that we inevitably paint our world in a particular hue and that we inevitably see the world as on our side, as championing us. “As I am, so I see; use what language we will, we can never say anything but what we are” (489.
As I have said, the idea that what is “unhandsome” in our condition, in Cavell’s view, our “clutching at things” in our human effort to escape our humanness,” is central to the philosophical enterprise Emerson took himself to be founding, which in the New World was to replace the European edifice of philosophy. Indeed, Cavell characterizes Emerson’s enterprise—which Cavell takes himself to be inheriting—as the “overcoming of thinking as clutching.”6
In favor of what?
Wittgenstein asks himself, in Philosophical Investigations, “What is your aim in philosophy?” His answer: “To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.”7 To be sure, the fly would then find itself within a world, not a prison. But the fly would still be a fly, poor thing. Emerson aims higher. In his view, as in Wittgenstein’s, becoming free is a necessity if philosophy is to achieve its aim. And Emerson, too, believes that thinking, which has the power to imprison us, can also free us. Thus the passage I have just considered is preceded by these sentences: “The making a fact the subject of thought raises it. All that mass of mental and moral phenomena, which we do not make objects of voluntary thought, come within the power of fortune; they constitute the circumstance of daily life; they are subject to change, to fear, and hope.” And the sentence that follows the passage asserts that “a truth, separated by the intellect, is no longer a subject of destiny.” In “Fate” Emerson writes: “Intellect annuls fate. So far as a man thinks, he is free” (953). Freedom does not mean escaping from our human condition. Freedom is a possibility within our humanness. Emerson’s aim in philosophy is to help us to become more fully human, to help us to walk in the direction of the unattained but attainable self, or, as he more or less puts it in “Experience,” to help us to master the “true art of life.” For Emerson, philosophy’s goal is to help us to “realize” the world we “think.”
Our lives in the world are such, Emerson remarks, that we possess everything we require for thinking. But when, in “Intellect,” he poses the question, “What is the hardest task in the world?,” his answer is, “To think” (420). He writes, “I would put myself in the attitude to look in the eye an abstract truth, and I cannot. We all but apprehend, we dimly forebode the truth.…Then, in a moment, and unannounced, the truth appears. A certain, wandering light appears”—“certain” meaning, I take it, both “particular” and “possessed of certainty”—“and is the distinction, the principle, we wanted. But the oracle comes, because we had previously laid siege to the shrine” (419). The mind’s vision is capable of “raising” every rude “fact in our life” into a “truth”—but only when that “certain, wandering light” appears to illuminate it, to reveal it, to enable it to be seen, to be read. We cannot will this light to appear. It takes a revelation. We receive our thoughts.
Cavell invokes Emerson’s term indirection to name something that “Experience” refrains from naming: “the direction of reception, of being approached, the handsome, attractive part of our condition.” He writes, “The idea of indirection is not to invite us to strike glancingly, as if to take a sideswipe; it is instead to invite us, where called for, to be struck, impressed.” The opposite of “clutching,” then, that which would be the “most handsome part of our condition,” is “the specifically human form of attractiveness—attraction naming the rightful call we have upon one another, and that I and the world make upon one another.…(Heidegger’s term for the opposite of grasping the world is that of being drawn to things.)”8
How “unhandsome” is the notion, for so long dogma within the field of film studies, that to think seriously about films, we must break our attachments to them, stop letting them move us, so we can fix them firmly in our grasp! For if we keep ourselves from being struck by films, keep them from making impressions on us, we cannot think about their value, why we seek our attachments to them, why they attract us and draw us to them, what rightful call they make upon us. In that way we cannot think seriously about films at all.
No less unhandsome is the notion, once sacrosanct within film studies as well, that in classical movies the camera is an instrument of “the male gaze,” as if there were one and only one thing the eyes of men are forever doing, and as if the camera, too, is forever doing this same one thing—namely, “clutching at” women, treating female subjects as objects to be seized, held, kept, interrogated, controlled. To be sure, Laura Mulvey’s massively influential 1975 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” asserts that in classical movies there are two things, not one, that the camera’s “male gaze” is forever doing, that the camera oscillates between sadistically “clutching at” women (not Mulvey’s term, but it might as well be) and fetishizing them.9 The latter, her essay claims, is the alternative way by which movies objectify female subjects: by reducing women to images, at the same time manipulating those images so as to cause them, as we might put it, to disavow the flesh-and-blood women they are images of.10 But it is not possible for film images to separate themselves from what they are images of. To do so, film images would have to be something other than what they are. If film images were really “fetishized,” it would be impossible for them to capture “the moods of faces and motions and settings” the way they do. Thus Cavell hits the nail on the head when he asserts that “the details of Freud’s description of fetishization do not account for what becomes of things and persons on film, say for the relation between a photographic image and what it is an image of.”11
And if the camera’s way of capturing “faces and motions and settings” were really by “clutching at” them, their moods—paradigms of what Emerson calls “evanescence” and “lubricity”—would simply slip through the camera’s fingers, figuratively speaking. If that were the case, film images would not be able to attract us, strike us, make impressions on us. Then movies would not be what they are, would be unable to express themselves the way they do. In our everyday lives we feel displaced, as if our subjectivity were interposed between our true being and the world we long to reach. But the world on film does not feel lost to us. Our displacement feels natural. And it feels natural because it is not possible for us to reach the projected world, hence not possible to fail to reach it.
In truth, there is only one thing that movie cameras do: they film whatever is in front of them. Cameras are machines. They have no subjectivity, no moods in whose hues they paint the world. They are not capable of “clutching at” people. But they have no need to do so in order to capture, on film, the moods that human faces and bodies express. This is because human beings possess what Emerson calls “wonderful expressiveness.” As he puts it in his late essay “Behavior”: “If [the human body] were made of glass, or of air, and the thoughts were written on steel tablets within, it could not publish more truly its meaning than now. The whole economy of nature is bent on expression. The tell-tale body is all tongues” (1041). And this leads to an extended aria about the eye as exemplary of the “wonderful expressiveness” of the human body. “Man cannot fix his eye on the sun, and so far thus seems imperfect,” the passage begins, with a gloss on the Bible, as well as on Kant. The allusion to “Let us fix our eyes on Jesus [the Son], the author and perfecter of our faith” (Hebrews 12:2) adumbrates the essay’s heretical claim that what we must seek to perfect is not our faith in God but our ability to “read” the “secrets” Nature is forever revealing. But the human eye can do, and express, an amazing variety of things:
An eye can threaten like a loaded and leveled gun, or can insult like hissing or kicking, or, in its altered mood, by beams of kindness, it can make the heart dance with joy.…
Eyes are bold as lions,—roving, running, leaping, here and there, far and near. They speak all languages. They wait for no introduction; they are no Englishmen; ask no leave of age, or rank; they respect neither poverty nor riches, neither learning nor power, nor virtue, nor sex, but intrude, and come again, and go through and through you, in a moment of time. What inundation of life and thought is discharged from one soul into another, through them! The glance is natural magic. The mysterious communication established across a house between two entire strangers, moves all the springs of wonder. The communication by the glance is in the greatest part not subject to the control of the will. It is the bodily symbol of identity of nature. (1043)
Our eyes, and our faces and bodies in general, express our moods, make us readable by others, as they make others readable by us. “Men are like Geneva watches with crystal faces which expose the whole movement. They carry the liquor of life flowing up and down in these beautiful bottles, and announcing to the curious how it is with them” (1043). These “announcements” can be read. They will be read, Emerson’s wording implies, only by those curious to know “how it is with us.” But his wording also implies something beyond this. What our bodies express is not limited to our “flux of moods,” which only “plays about the surface.” Human bodies disclose not only particular moods but also that “wonderful expressiveness” itself, which reveals to the beholder that these “beautiful bottles” carry the “liquor of life.”
“We look into the eyes,” Emerson writes, “to know if this other form is another self, and the eyes will not lie, but make a faithful confession what inhabitant is there” (1042). When we look into another’s eyes, both our own eyes and the eyes we behold testify, faithfully, that this “other form” is “another self,” that the “liquor of life,” which is in us, is in the other as well. He adds, “‘Tis remarkable, too, that the spirit that appears at the windows of the house does at once invest himself in a new form of his own to the mind of the beholder,” reiterating that this “spirit that appears in the windows of the house” (1042) reveals itself to be a separate being with a mind of its own. We are not alone. But if, as Emerson asserts, “communication by the glance” is the “bodily symbol of identity of nature,” this “other self” is identical to us in nature. There is in the other, too, “that which changes not.” Hence there is no real “wall” between us; the same “vast-flowing vigor” flows up and down within us.
When Emerson writes about eyes, and about the expressiveness of the human body in general, the way he does in “Behavior,” his words provide food for thought, not to mention priceless instruction, to anyone who aspires to write seriously about films. For the “spirits” that appear in the “window” that is the movie screen “invest themselves” in “new forms of their own” that possess the “wonderful expressiveness” of our own bodies, our own eyes. Through the “flux of moods” that “plays about the surface” of these “forms,” these “spirits” appear to our mind as other selves, beings no different from us in nature.
Comedies of remarriage have faith that these “forms” are capable of “introducing us to the reality” that the “beautiful bottles” we behold do carry the “liquor of life,” that when we behold them, an “inundation of life and thought” that “moves all the springs of wonder” is, indeed, “discharged from one soul into another.” Hitchcock, too, was drawn to this idea. But he was also drawn, as we have seen, to the idea that film is a medium of taxidermy—as if the “forms” projected on the movie screen are really as dead as Norman Bates’s stuffed birds, and the “natural magic” of the “glance”—the spirit’s, the camera’s, the viewer’s—has the power to breathe into them only an imitation of life. And this idea, too, has an affinity with Emerson’s way of thinking. We have already considered Emerson’s point, in “Intellect,” that when the intellect casts on a “fact in our life” the “certain, wandering light” of a “lantern,” we transform it into a “thought,” a “truth,” which is an object “impersonal and immortal. It is the past restored, but embalmed. A better art than that of Egypt has taken fear and corruption out of it” (418)—precisely André Bazin’s metaphor for the film image.
In any case, the more we “clutch at” films—and the more we fetishize theories that purport to tell us a priori what films are and are not capable of expressing—the more they will “slip through our fingers.” The alternative is to receive films, to read them, moment by moment, trusting to our experience to reveal the thoughts they are expressing in their indirect way, thoughts that are inseparable from the moods the camera captures and the moods those moods cast; inseparable from the ways their “flux of moods” moves us to take thought; and inseparable from the ways the films “introduce us into the reality”—the reality that baffles the intellect; the reality that we are, and are not, alone; the reality that we inhabit a world, or worlds, in which there are other selves whose nature is no different from our own.
“Every man, in the degree in which he has wit and culture,” Emerson writes in “Intellect,” “finds his curiosity inflamed concerning the modes of living and thinking of other men” (420). These are, as he elsewhere remarks, the very stuff of novels—and, of course, films. We naturally “aggregate” such “facts in our life,” as Emerson calls them. As he puts it in an inspired gloss on Plato’s allegory of the cave, “The walls of rude minds”—“rude” in the sense of raw, unpolished, as in “the rude bridge that arched the flood” in Emerson’s “Concord Hymn”—are “scrawled all over with facts, with thoughts” (420). Each “fact in our life,” in effect, is a memory, a trace of a past experience. And our past thoughts and “fancies” are, in this sense, “facts in our life” as well. “In common hours, we have the same facts as in the uncommon or inspired, but they do not sit for their portraits; they are not detached, but lie in a web” (423). To isolate a “fact in our life” from “the web of our unconsciousness” (418), to “suffer the intellect” to see it (419), is, metaphorically, to shine a lantern on an object and make it sit for its portrait—as if (to invoke the irresistible metaphor) we were pointing a camera at it, isolating it in a close-up, and projecting its image on a movie screen. And it is not simply to illuminate this “fact” but also to read its inscription.
Emerson’s wording suggests that, owing to the nature of the object the lantern illuminates, and to the nature of the lantern itself, there is no difference between seeing the object and reading what the lantern’s light reveals to be inscribed on it. The light reveals the object to be an inscription. And to see it thus illuminated is to read it. Again, Emerson’s metaphorical language pictures the “action of the mind” in terms that make it irresistible to draw parallels with film. As we observed in the introduction, the projector is literally a lantern. And the camera, metaphorically, is a lantern, too.
In Emerson’s view the intellect dissolves the difference between seeing and reading. For Emerson, indeed, dissolving differences is what the intellect does. “Nature shows all things formed and bound. The intellect pierces the form, overleaps the wall” (the wall, the boundary, that separates one thing from another; the wall that binds, seemingly imprisons, an individual’s mind). By “making a fact the subject of thought,” the intellect raises that fact above the “considerations of time and place, of you and me, of profit and hurt” that “tyrannize over” men’s minds, “separates the fact considered from…all local and personal reference, and discerns it as if it existed for its own sake.” It is because the mind’s vision “is not like the vision of the eye, but is union with the things known” (417–18), that the intellect has the power to dissolve the difference between seeing and reading. But to read Cary Grant’s expression in the close-up Hitchcock presents to us at the moment in North by Northwest at which Roger learns who Eve Kendall really is, or to read Ingrid Bergman’s expression in any of her close-ups in the racetrack sequence of Notorious, all we have to do is see it. The medium of film, too, is capable of dissolving the difference between seeing and reading, hence capable of dissolving the difference between the vision of the eye and the vision of the mind, between what our eyes literally see and what our imaginations conjure. How could the medium not possesses such powers, given that films express themselves—make their thoughts knowable—by their “moods of faces and motions and settings”?
As I have said, Emerson understands the “facts in our life” that the intellect “raises” to be traces of past experiences—traces that we behold in a “state of rapture” when a lantern appears, as if by magic, and isolates such a “fact” from the “web of our unconsciousness” by shining its “certain, wandering light” upon it. Film images, too, are traces of the past. The “faces and motions and settings” projected on the movie screen were once present to the camera that filmed them. In turn, our experiences of films become “facts in our life” that we have “aggregated naturally,” like all the other “facts” woven into the “web of our unconsciousness.” This is what makes it possible for Cavell to say, in the haunting opening sentence of The World Viewed, “Memories of movies are strand over strand with memories of my life.”12
When a lantern shines a “certain, wandering light” on a “fact in our life,” an intuition dawns in us, a thought is conceived. We behold the “fact” as illustrating a principle, a truth. Because the vision of the mind, unlike the vision of the eye, is “union with the thing known,” the intuition is the lantern. But it once was the lowly “fact in our life” it now illuminates. Facts become thoughts, thoughts facts; thoughts beget further thoughts. Hence Emerson’s formulation: “Every intellection is mainly prospective” (421). Our thoughts could not beget further thoughts, however, if the intellect were not “constructive,” as he puts it, as well as “receptive.” It is futile to try to “clutch at” an intuition we once rapturously beheld in an effort to keep it from falling back into the “web of our unconsciousness.” For an intuition to become a full-fledged thought, we have to “pay the tuition” for the intuition by expressing it, making it available to ourselves and to others. We have to “bethink us where we have been, what we have seen, and repeat, as truly as we can, what we have beheld” (421). To “revisit the day” in this way, Emerson concludes, is what is called Truth.
This strikes me as a remarkably apt description of the practice of “reading” films as the preceding chapters exemplify it. Because memories of movies are strand over strand with memories of our lives, to read a passage from a film is to shine a “certain, wandering light” on particular “facts in our life” (“facts” that the camera/lantern has already “raised” by shining its light on them); to gaze rapturously upon them, discovering their value and the principles they exemplify; and to “pay the tuition” for our intuitions by finding words that “truly report what we have beheld,” as I have tried my best to do in all the readings in this book.
The constructive intellect “produces thoughts, sentences, poems, plans, designs, systems”—and films, not to mention books about films. For a thought to be “reported,” published, it needs “a vehicle of art by which it is conveyed to men.” It “must become picture or sensible object,” Emerson writes. “We must learn the language of facts” (422). “The most wonderful inspirations die with their subject, if he has no hand to paint them to the senses. The rich, inventive genius of the painter must be smothered and lost for want of the power of drawing, and in our happy hours we should be inexhaustible poets, if once we could break through the silence into adequate rhyme.…As all men have some access to primary truth, so all have some art or power of communication in their head, but only in the artist does it descend into the hand” (422).
But film images are not handmade. Godard once defined film as “truth 24 times a second” to register the fact that the camera is a machine that can do nothing but capture whatever takes place in front of it, just as the projector is a machine that can do nothing but “report” something the camera has captured. This is what enables the camera, in tandem with the projector, to manifest an astonishing facility it shares with what Emerson, in a marvelous passage from “Intellect,” calls the “mystic pencil” with which we “draw” our dreams: “As soon as we let our will go, and let the unconscious states ensue, see what cunning draughtsmen we are! We entertain ourselves with wonderful forms of men, of women, of animals, of gardens, of woods, and of monsters, and the mystic pencil wherewith we then draw has no awkwardness or inexperience, no meagreness or poverty;…the whole canvas which it paints is life-like, and apt to touch us with terror, with tenderness, with desire, and with grief” (423).
Having no will to let go, the camera—the “mystic pencil” that “draws” films—likewise “has no awkwardness or inexperience, no meagreness or poverty.” Because the “whole canvas which it paints” is reality itself, albeit reality re-created in its own image, the world on film is not only “life-like”; it is life itself, and our experiences of films become “facts in our life.” The “language of facts” is film’s mother tongue.
In Hitchcock’s films, which are “works of genius” in Emerson’s sense, every framing, every cut, every camera movement, at once inscribes a thought and “pays the tuition” for that intuition. Thus they dissolve the difference—in a way only films can—between the “receptive” and the “constructive” intellect. But films do not automatically express thoughts. It is entirely possible for the camera to isolate a face in a close-up, allowing us to recognize the mood it expresses, without “raising” that expression, illuminating it, revealing it to be a legible inscription of the film’s thought, the way Hitchcock’s camera does.
Nor do films automatically “touch us with terror, with tenderness, with desire, and with grief” any more than novels do. “Society is the stage on which manners are shown,” Emerson writes in his essay “Behavior.” “Novels are their literature” insofar as they are “the journal or record of manners.” He goes on: “The novels are as useful as Bibles if they teach you the secret, that the best of life is conversation, and the greatest success is confidence, or perfect understanding between sincere people” (1049). This is the gospel Emerson’s essays preach in the hope that readers will see the light and know that we—and America—can, and must, change; that we can, and must, walk in the direction of the unattained but attainable self and help move America a step closer to the more perfect community that is its dream and its promise. And Emerson’s essays aspire to practice the gospel they preach.
“Why not realize your world?” is the challenge “Experience” poses to itself. Indeed, every Emerson essay aspires to rise to this challenge, to take a step in the direction of overcoming or transcending the discrepancy, which baffles the intellect, between the “world [we] converse with in the city and in the farms” and the world we “think” (491). Taking such a step requires “raising” the world of the everyday. It also requires bringing down to earth our thoughts of a more perfect world, acknowledging what is of value in what is closest to us, embracing what is “handsome” in our condition.
Teaching us the “secret” that “the best of life is conversation, and the greatest success is confidence, or perfect understanding between sincere people,” preaching this gospel, is precisely the aspiration of Hollywood comedies of remarriage. They, too, aspire to practice what they preach. If novels can teach this secret, how much better equipped to do so are films—on condition that such sincere and understanding heroes and heroines can be discovered, “complete persons” with “the holiday in their eye,” subjects of the camera whose form and manners, projected on the movie screen, are such that we will really see them as “fit to stand the gaze of millions,” as he puts it in “Manners” (529).
A novel can describe such a person, not show one. A novel can assert that a character is a hero whose eyes have no “mud at the bottom” of them (1043). But when in North by Northwest Hitchcock’s camera “shines a lantern” on Cary Grant’s face at the moment of his moral awakening, we see, and know, that this man is such a hero; we see with our own eyes that the “report” we are receiving is true. Because the world projected on the movie screen is reality, albeit reality transformed by the medium, it stands in no need of being “realized.” This gives films a unique and remarkable advantage over novels in preaching—and practicing—the Emersonian gospel that we can, and must, “realize” the world we “think.”
In arguing that Hitchcock’s career was driven by the conflict or tension between embracing and resisting Emersonian perfectionism, the preceding chapters in no way suggest that what he was resisting was the aspiration of “realizing” the world he “thought.” Far from it. The Murderous Gaze demonstrates, and Must We Kill the Thing We Love? confirms, that Hitchcock’s lifelong commitment to the art of pure cinema compelled him to strive to make virtually every shot communicate a thought—a thought it makes knowable—at the same time it captures, and expresses, a mood. “What a man is irresistibly urged to say, helps him and us,” Emerson writes in “Behavior.” “In explaining his thought to others, he explains it to himself: but when he opens it for show, it corrupts him” (551). That Hitchcock’s films say what he was irresistibly urged to say is something I was irresistibly urged to say in The Murderous Gaze, and irresistibly urged to say again in Must We Kill the Thing We Love? Hitchcock was irresistibly urged to express the thought, or we might say the suspicion, that human beings do not possess, even metaphorically, the freedom to be reborn.
From the beginning of Hitchcock’s career, the shadow of a doubt darkened the Hitchcock thriller. We can think of this shadow as the thought that we are fated always to kill the thing we love. Or as the thought that we are all in private traps from which we can never be freed. Or that we all have “mud at the bottom of our eye,” hence that insofar as it is Hitchcock’s own thoughts that his films make knowable, insofar as the camera is the instrument of this merely human author, it, too, has “mud at the bottom” of its eye, as it were. Or as the thought that the art of pure cinema corrupted him, his films, and his viewers.
How this shadow came to be lifted, how this doubt came to be overcome or transcended, how Hitchcock came to abandon the way of thinking that had defined his identity as an artist, and how he came to embrace what Emerson calls the wonderful “way of life,” is the story this book tells.