I wrote Hitchcock—The Murderous Gaze more than thirty years ago. During that time I was teaching at Harvard and in almost daily conversation with Stanley Cavell, who was completing Pursuits of Happiness, his seminal study of the Hollywood genre he calls the “comedy of remarriage” (It Happened One Night [Frank Capra, 1934], The Awful Truth [Leo McCarey, 1937], Bringing Up Baby [Howard Hawks, 1938], His Girl Friday [Howard Hawks, 1940], The Philadelphia Story [George Cukor, 1940], The Lady Eve [Preston Sturges, 1941), Adam’s Rib [George Cukor, 1948]).1 Pursuits of Happiness presented a profound vision of this genre and, by extension, of all the leading Hollywood genres of the period—such as the genre Cavell calls the “melodrama of the unknown woman,” four exemplary members of which he went on to study in Contesting Tears (Stella Dallas [King Vidor, 1937], Now, Voyager [Irving Rapper, 1942], Gaslight [George Cukor, 1944], and Letter from an Unknown Woman [Max Ophüls, 1948], whose title he appropriates for the genre)—as inheriting concerns of American transcendentalism that enabled the popular American cinema to reach its artistic high-water mark.2
In the mid-1980s Cavell broadened and deepened this vision in a Harvard lecture course on moral reasoning (that itself broadened and deepened a course titled “Great Ideas of the Western World,” which he had taught twenty years earlier, taking in stride the obstacle of having a very naive young me as one of his teaching assistants). And twenty years after inaugurating the moral reasoning course, he made its lectures the basis of his remarkable book Cities of Words.3
Although The Murderous Gaze approaches Hitchcock’s films primarily through the prism of authorship, it notes that the “Hitchcock thriller” can also be viewed as a genre, or perhaps a cluster of closely related genres, comparable to the comedy of remarriage or the melodrama of the unknown woman. As Cavell’s own essay on North by Northwest demonstrates, Hitchcock thrillers share the concerns of the genres he studied.4 And there are differences that can be charted. In the Hitchcock thrillers that revolve around a “girl-at-the-threshold-of-womanhood,” for example, the narrative charts the stages of a woman’s education, just as in remarriage comedies. And that education goes hand in glove with the development of a romantic relationship.
In comedies of remarriage a woman and a man pursue happiness not by overcoming societal obstacles to their marriage, as in classical comedies, but by overcoming obstacles internal to their relationship, obstacles that are between and within themselves, obstacles they cannot overcome without achieving a radically changed perspective. These Hollywood movies present women and men as equals, as having an equal right to pursue happiness and as being equal spiritually or, we might say, morally—equal in their powers of imagination and thinking and in their capacity to cultivate the better angels of their nature. What is at issue in such films is not simply whether the leading woman and man will marry, or remarry, but whether the kind of marriage they create together will be a relationship worth having, one that enables them, as individuals and as a couple, to embrace every day and every night in a spirit of adventure—a kind of marriage exemplified by Nick and Nora (William Powell and Myrna Loy) in The Thin Man (W. S. Van Dyke, 1934), another landmark film made the same year as It Happened One Night, the earliest of the films Pursuits of Happiness scrutinizes. Hence comedies of remarriage pose, and address, a philosophical question about marriage itself. What is marriage? What, if anything, validates or legitimates a marriage, if a couple can be married according to the church and the laws of the state and yet, by the higher standards of the comedy of remarriage, not have a true marriage?
The Philadelphia Story renders explicit that this question about marriage is also a question about what it is to be human, a question about human relationships in general, a question about community and, as such, a question for, and about, America. Implicitly advocating America’s joining the war against fascism already raging in Europe at the time of its release, The Philadelphia Story is a summary statement as to what makes America worth fighting for, what is worth preserving in its heritage. In the comedy of remarriage a woman and man seek, and achieve, a conversation of equals—a relationship with each other, at once private and public, based on mutual trust—that can serve as a model of community and thus as an inspiration for America in its own quest to form a more perfect union.
What is worth fighting for, The Philadelphia Story declares, is not America as it is (as the wartime documentary series Why We Fight was later to assert, whitewashing reality in a way Hollywood romantic comedies of the 1930s refrained from doing). America as it is, The Philadelphia Story asserts (as do all the romantic comedies Cavell studies), is a place where the likes of George Kittredge—the phony “man of the people” trumpeted by cynical Sidney Kidd’s media empire—passes for a great American. America’s promise has not yet been fully realized. America has not yet become America. And yet, these romantic comedies affirm, this “unattained America,” as Ralph Waldo Emerson calls it, is still attainable. The dream of a more perfect union was still alive in 1930s America, though imperiled, as it was in Emerson’s time, when, as he wrote, the moral scourge of slavery was keeping America from taking a step toward becoming America. (The dream is still alive today—and still in peril.)
The remarriage comedies Cavell celebrates are grand entertainments that gave pleasure to viewers living through dark times, but they also entered into a serious conversation with their culture that set a high standard of moral purpose. Their commitment to channeling the awesome power of film to help America and Americans to awaken, to change, was not confined to a single genre, a point Cavell fleshes out in Contesting Tears. In Cavell’s inspiring vision, indeed, all the leading Hollywood genres during this period found stories to tell, and ways of telling their stories, that enabled them to share in the remarriage comedy’s way of thinking about morality. In Cities of Words Cavell characterizes this way of thinking as a species of moral perfectionism. He names it, more specifically, “Emersonian perfectionism.”5 And he explicitly declares that the philosophical way of thinking exemplified by Hollywood comedies of remarriage is also his own. By characterizing this way of thinking as a form of moral perfectionism, he acknowledged that philosophy, as he practices it, is a moral enterprise. And he took the momentous step of giving that enterprise—his enterprise—a name. In naming it “Emersonian perfectionism,” Cavell declared himself to be an Emersonian perfectionist.
Among the host of major thinkers Cities of Words addresses, Emerson plays a privileged role. The book, whose subtitle is Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life, is Cavell’s only work that explicitly declares his abiding commitment to teaching. With breathtaking intellectual assurance, Cavell pairs thinkers of the magnitude of Aristotle, Plato, Shakespeare, Locke, Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Henry James, Freud, Shaw, and Cavell’s Harvard colleague John Rawls with individual films, all classic Hollywood comedies and melodramas, except for Eric Rohmer’s Tale of Winter (1992), which in its cultivated way is as grand an entertainment as its American cousins. Every chapter on a thinker presents a powerful, utterly original interpretation of that thinker’s work, an interpretation that makes clear why it is illuminating to pair the thinker with the particular film Cavell has chosen as a match—given, in each case, his powerful, utterly original interpretation of that film. Taken together, these paired chapters convey, compellingly, that although America has not inherited the European edifice of philosophy, its movies have engaged in conversations with their culture that are no less serious, philosophically. But Emerson is the linchpin that holds together this remarkable book. Cavell uses Emerson’s writing, and only Emerson’s, as both an object and a “means, or touchstone,” of interpretation—as a tool for reading and for teaching reading (34).
Cavell does not view Emersonian perfectionism as a theory of moral philosophy comparable to Kant’s deontological view that there is a universal moral law (the Categorical Imperative) by which we can rationally determine whether an action is right or wrong. Nor does he see it as comparable to Mill’s utilitarian view that the good action is that which will cause the least harm, or the greatest good for the greatest number. Instead, moral perfectionism in general is an outlook or register of thought, a way of thinking about morality expressed thematically in certain works of philosophy, literature, and film, that takes it to be our primary task as human beings—at once our deepest wish, whether or not we know this about ourselves, and our moral obligation—to become more fully human, to realize our humanity in our lives in the world, which always requires the simultaneous acknowledgment of the humanity of others (our acknowledgment of them and theirs of us). The questions that couples in remarriage comedies address in their witty give-and-take are moral questions, as Cities of Words argues. But they are “formulated less well by questions concerning what they ought to do, what it would be best or right for them to do, than by the question of how they shall live their lives, what kind of persons they aspire to be” (11).
In Bringing Up Baby, for example, Susan (Katharine Hepburn) teaches David (Cary Grant) that every day and every night is to be lived in a festive spirit, a spirit of adventure. That is, she helps open his eyes to the reality that this is, and always has been, his goal, no less than hers. When the brontosaurus skeleton that he had thought meant the world to him collapses in a heap, he knows that Susan has helped him discover what it is that he really seeks. What is sought, and achieved, in comedies of remarriage is a new perspective. It is a philosophical perspective insofar as the knowledge it makes possible is self-knowledge, the self’s awakening to its own condition, the reality that it is in the process of becoming, that it stands in need of creation. To become oneself, one must abandon oneself, for there is always a new perspective one must achieve, a new step one must take—and then another step, and then a step after that, and then…
The knowledge to which David awakens, with Susan’s help, is that he has let others dictate to him what and how to think. In Susan’s view, as in Emerson’s, letting others do the thinking for one is not thinking badly, not thinking in a bad way; it is not thinking at all. In discovering what he thinks, what he seeks, what really matters to him, David discovers who he has been, who he is, and how and why he wishes to change. Discovering what we really think, achieving a new perspective on who we are, who we have been, is thinking, in Emerson’s view. The moment David thinks, he discovers what makes thinking necessary. He also discovers that it is necessary for him to take action. Since David’s awakening thought is that being with Susan is what really means the world to him, it is to Susan, within their ongoing conversation, that he finds it necessary to express this thought, to marry thinking and purposeful action.
The witty but profound conversations between women and men in the comedies of remarriage Cavell studies are among the glories of world cinema precisely because they manifest, and declare, the possibility, and the necessity, of thinking and of giving expression to our thoughts, of marrying thinking and purposeful action, as David learns to do. For Susan, as for Emerson, thinking has a moral dimension. What she helps David discover is that he should think, he must think, must give expression to his thoughts, must marry thought and action. The thought that we must walk in the direction of the unattained but attainable self, that this is the path toward freedom, is the heart and soul of Emersonian perfectionism. What it means for a film to be an Emersonian perfectionist text, in Cavell’s sense, is both that its author, in creating it, took a step on that uncharted path and that the film calls on viewers to do so as well.
What does all this have to do with Hitchcock? That, in a nutshell, is the question the following chapters address. They argue that Hitchcock was profoundly attracted to the worldview that underwrote classical American genres such as the comedy of remarriage. The 39 Steps (1935) followed the lead of It Happened One Night, the monster hit that marked 1934 as the beginning of the period when Emersonian perfectionism was in ascendancy in Hollywood, by concluding with the union of a woman and a man that holds a hope of being a relationship worth having. In turn, Secret Agent (1936), Sabotage (1936), Young and Innocent (1937), and The Lady Vanishes (1938), brilliant films Hitchcock made in the few years remaining before his departure for Hollywood, all followed the lead of The 39 Steps by aligning Hitchcock thrillers with Hollywood comedies of remarriage—but only up to a point.
As these films also reveal, Hitchcock found himself unwilling, or unable, simply to abandon himself to the American genre’s Emersonian outlook. He was no less powerfully drawn to an incompatible vision. No doubt affected by a Catholic upbringing that impressed on his young imagination a strong and abiding sense of original sin, he never tired of quoting Oscar Wilde’s line, “Each man kills the thing he loves.”
One feature that distinguishes the Hitchcock thriller from the genres Cavell studies is the key role it accords to the film’s author—that is, to Hitchcock himself. A corollary of this is that the genre’s membership is limited to Hitchcock’s own films. Another of the Hitchcock thriller’s defining features is that a murderous villain, who aspires to exercise a godlike power over others, also plays a key role. The Hitchcock villain is a human being who dwells, like the film’s other characters, within the world of the film. As The Murderous Gaze argues, however, this master of the art of murder is also a stand-in for Hitchcock, master of what he liked to call “the art of pure cinema.” The villains in the films Hitchcock authors are his accomplices in artistic creation. And Hitchcock is their accomplice—or they are his—in murder. That is one reason, The Murderous Gaze proposes, that his films call for the panoply of motifs that book catalogues (and which we will encounter in the pages that follow). Hitchcock employs these signature motifs, in part, to declare his authorship and link his role as author with that of the murderous villain within the film’s world. That his own art has a murderous aspect is a quintessentially Hitchcockian idea. How, then, can a Hitchcock film possibly be an “Emersonian perfectionist text” in Cavell’s sense? Although I did not yet have a name for the more affirmative side of his split artistic identity, nor a historical or philosophical context in which to place it, it was already a central claim of The Murderous Gaze that a tension, or conflict, between two incompatible worldviews runs through Hitchcock’s work.
In the introduction to The Murderous Gaze I observed that I could imagine a reader coming to the end of the book and being struck by the magnitude of all that separates Psycho (1960) from The Lodger (1927). “What separates these films,” I wrote, “is also what joins them: a body of work that movingly stands in for an entire human life, even as it traverses and sums up the history of an art.” But I also observed that I could “imagine the book engendering in the reader the sense that Hitchcock’s work ends where it began.” I believed that my book had conclusively demonstrated that Psycho’s position—the thoughts, inscribed in its succession of frames, on the nature and relationships of love, murder, sexuality, marriage, and theater; on the nature of the camera, the act of viewing a film, and filmmaking as a calling; on the conditions of authorship in film; and on the kind of thinking—hence the kind of reading and writing—films call for if their thinking is to be acknowledged—was already articulated in The Lodger.6
I no longer believe this.
Must We Kill the Thing We Love? argues that Hitchcock’s ambivalence toward the Emersonian perfectionism that was in ascendancy in Hollywood during the period of the New Deal, and his ambivalence toward overcoming or transcending that ambivalence, was the driving force of his work. Beyond this, in tracing the trajectory of Hitchcock’s career, the book discerns, in the vicissitudes of his ambivalent relationship to Emersonian perfectionism, a complicated progression from his British thrillers like The 39 Steps, Secret Agent, and Sabotage to his earliest American films, such as Rebecca (1940), Mr. and Mrs. Smith (1941), and Suspicion (1941) (made when the Emersonian moral outlook was beginning to suffer repression in Hollywood); to his wartime films, such as Shadow of a Doubt (1943) and its companion piece, Lifeboat (1944); to postwar films like Notorious (1946) and Rope (1948); to his masterpieces of the 1950s, culminating in The Wrong Man (1956), Vertigo (1958), and North by Northwest (1959); to Psycho; to The Birds (1963); and ultimately to Marnie (1964), in which, I suggest, Hitchcock overcame or transcended his ambivalence and embraced the Emersonian perfectionism he had always also resisted.
After Vertigo, his most devastating illustration of the principle that “each man kills the thing he loves,” Hitchcock no longer wished to be the kind of artist for whom artistic creation was the metaphorical equivalent of murder. But how was he to create a film that bore his authorial signature yet demonstrated that his role as author had overcome or transcended the murderous aspect that had always been a defining feature of his artistic identity? Hitchcock picked himself up, dusted himself off, and started all over again, to paraphrase Fred Astaire, by making North by Northwest, which concludes with a marriage fully worthy of a 1930s remarriage comedy. In effect, by creating North by Northwest, Hitchcock vowed that he would never again make a film that equated its own creation with murder. But then why did he next make Psycho, a film in which, allegorically, he killed the thing he loved most in the world: the art of pure cinema itself? And how did Psycho free him to make The Birds and Marnie? In creating these last two masterpieces, Must We Kill the Thing We Love? argues, Hitchcock decisively overcame or transcended his ambivalence toward the Emersonian way of thinking he had longed to embrace for the sake of humanity but had resisted embracing for the sake of his art.
To embrace Emersonian perfectionism, as I do in this book, means, in part, to abandon oneself to the view that, as Emerson puts it in “Circles,” “Every action admits of being outdone,” that “our life is an apprenticeship to the truth, that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning.”7 Emerson’s writings can be understood as constituting a series whose order follows a logical necessity—as if each new essay took a step toward what he calls, in his essay “History,” the “unattained but attainable self” (239). A progression can be discerned from his early writings (such as his “Divinity School Address,” “The American Scholar,” and Nature); to Essays: First Series (which includes, among others, “History,” “Circles,” and “Intellect,” as well as the famous “Self-Reliance”); to Essays: Second Series (which includes “Experience,” perhaps his greatest essay); to the later writings (including Representative Men, which was a major inspiration to Henri Bergson, a fact that never seems to have piqued Gilles Deleuze’s curiosity, more’s the pity), and the essays in The Conduct of Life, such as “Fate” and “Behavior”). It is, indeed, a defining feature of the Emerson essay that it draws a circle around the essays that came before it, a circle around which another circle can be drawn (by another essay that succeeds it). It is a central claim of Must We Kill the Thing We Love? that this is a defining feature of Hitchcock’s art as well. Looking back from the perspective Marnie achieves, it is possible to perceive the Hitchcock thrillers that precede it as leading up to it—as if with each new film Hitchcock, too, drew a new circle, took a step toward the “unattained but attainable self.”
This book does not claim, of course, that Hitchcock consciously planned this trajectory, as if he were following a scenario he had scripted (the way, I argue in my chapter on Vertigo, the woman we know as Judy does in the second part of the film). “The one thing which we seek with insatiable desire,” the passage from “Circles” goes on, “is to forget ourselves, to be surprised out of our propriety, to lose our sempiternal [i.e., everlasting (having infinite temporal duration); as opposed to eternal (outside time and thus lacking temporal duration)] memory, and to do something without knowing how or why; in short, to draw a new circle” (414). To draw a new circle, in Emerson’s understanding, requires us to awaken to powers we had not been conscious of possessing, to open our eyes to the reality that we are not who we had believed ourselves to be, that our being is not limited to who we have been. It requires us to abandon an old self to enable a new self to be born, to acknowledge that the old self is now as dead to us as a heap of brontosaurus bones. This is what Emerson calls the “way of life” (414).
Emerson writes, “The way of life is wonderful: it is by abandonment” (414). In prefacing this with the sentence, “Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm,” his wording implies, first, that anything a human being can achieve that is worthy of being called “great”—the creation of a work of art like Vertigo, for example—is an instance of drawing a new circle, of being born anew, hence of abandoning a self, a habitation, that once had been new. Second, it suggests that without enthusiasm, it is not possible to draw a new circle; to draw a new circle, we must do so with abandon. Thus the sentence “The way of life is wonderful: it is by abandonment” plays, quite characteristically for Emerson, on two senses of the word abandonment. And “Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm” plays on two senses of the word enthusiasm. In today’s parlance the word means possession by an intense interest in an activity, whatever the provenance of that interest. But Emerson is also invoking the word’s original implication of divine inspiration, as if a new self cannot be born unless a divinity breathes life into it.
Hitchcock is famous for planning every detail of his films, storyboarding his shots, and in general striving to minimize the accidents of filming so as to exercise as much control as possible over the production—and over our experience of the projected film. As I demonstrated in The Murderous Gaze, however, what separates Hitchcock’s villains from Hitchcock’s protagonists is the villains’ hubris, their claim to arrogate to themselves the author’s power to preside over the film’s world. The protagonists, by contrast, ultimately prove willing to accept that their future is in the hands of a higher power. And yet, Hitchcock himself resisted ceding control, acknowledging limits to his own powers as author.
In creating Marnie, Hitchcock finally abandoned himself to Emerson’s wonderful “way of life.” The Emersonian side of his split artistic identity prevailed. But for Hitchcock, personally, this proved a pyrrhic victory. Marnie achieved a philosophical perspective from which he could see that his way was clear, as an artist, to go on in a spirit of self-reliance, to take further steps, to draw ever greater circles. But Marnie’s critical and commercial failure was a catastrophe from which his career never recovered. It hardened Universal’s resolve to prevent him from making Mary Rose, which would surely have been another masterpiece but which the studio believed—probably not wrongly—would have further diminished the dollar value of the Hitchcock “brand.” These reversals precipitated a crisis so traumatic that the films he did go on to make (Torn Curtain [1966], Topaz [1969], Frenzy [1972], and Family Plot [1976]), for all their brilliant, beautiful, and profound passages, moved him no closer to the “unattained but attainable self.”
Marnie drew Hitchcock’s largest circle.
Moods of Faces and Motions and Settings
At a colloquium in Paris occasioned by the publication of The World Viewed in French translation, Cavell remarked that thinking about film had left “permanent marks” on the way he wrote. It taught him, as he put it, the “necessity to become evocative in capturing the moods of faces and motions and settings, in their double existence as transient and as permanent.”8
Cavell refers to the necessity of evoking a film’s “moods of faces and motions and settings.” In The Murderous Gaze I characterized my method as putting into words the thinking inscribed in a film’s succession of frames. In writing about films, we have different ways of doing things. Pursuits of Happiness and Contesting Tears include a handful of images from the films; Cities of Words includes none. The original five readings of The Murderous Gaze have more than six hundred; the new chapter on Marnie written for the second edition adds over two hundred more, about the same number as Must We Kill the Thing We Love?, a much slimmer book.
Yet if it is by its “moods of faces and motions and settings” that a film expresses itself, makes its thoughts knowable, and if we cannot put into our own words what the film is saying without finding words that evoke those moods, then capturing a film’s “moods of faces and motions and settings” cannot be separated from following the film’s thoughts. Neither can a film’s “moods” be separated from the ways the camera frames its “faces and motions and settings,” the ways they appear before us, when they are projected onto the movie screen, “in their double existence as transient and as permanent.” Hence Cavell’s writings about film and my own, for all their differences, are engaged in a common enterprise.
This enterprise—at once philosophy, criticism, history, and practical instruction in viewing and thinking and writing about films—is grounded in a practice—I think of it as an art—that can be characterized, with a nod to Henry James, as tracing the implications—the thoughts expressed by—a film’s “moods of faces and motions and settings, in their double existence as transient and as permanent,” as they are inscribed in its succession of frames. Both Cavell and I call this practice “reading.”
This is a book about Hitchcock, not Emerson. The chapters that compose the body of the book invoke Emerson’s name only occasionally, usually in the context of reflections on the Hitchcock thriller’s relationship to the Hollywood genres Cavell has shown to be exemplary of Emersonian perfectionism or in the reflections those reflections motivate on the question, “What, if anything, justifies killing another human being?” Hitchcock thrillers, in their darkness, may well seem—in a sense they are—further removed from Emerson’s way of thinking—not that dark thoughts are alien to his essays—than comedies of remarriage, for example, which manifest none of Hitchcock’s ambivalence toward Emersonian perfectionism. Yet as authors, Hitchcock and Emerson, for all their obvious differences, have profound affinities—affinities not fully shared by Frank Capra, Howard Hawks, Leo McCarey, George Cukor, or Preston Sturges, significant artists in their own right, who directed the remarriage comedies Cavell has studied.
In the course of writing the chapters that follow, I realized that this book would be incomplete unless I “paid the tuition” for this intuition, to borrow one of Emerson’s felicitous terms. To that end I composed a concluding chapter that complements this introduction by looking closely at passages from several of Emerson’s essays and tracing some of the implications, for the study of Hitchcock’s films, and the study of film in general, of the astonishing fact that the terms in which they speak about reality, about our “flux of moods,” about what it is within us that never changes, about freedom, about reading, about writing, and about thinking, are remarkably pertinent—almost uncannily so—to “reading” films, to writing about them, and to thinking about their medium, and about the art this medium makes possible. My own practice of reading films, and writing about them, is underwritten, philosophically, by Emerson’s way of thinking about reading and writing.
Consider, for example, this oft-quoted sentence from Emerson’s great essay “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” (244). Insofar as films express themselves by their successions of moods (moods they capture; moods those moods cast over us), a film is a “train of moods,” too.
When Emerson adds, “Temperament is the iron wire on which the beads are strung” (244), his formulation invites us to understand that our “temperament” is also the “iron wire”—the iron rail—that enables our “train of moods” to run smoothly, even as at every moment it limits us to moving in a predetermined direction—as if for all their “flux,” our moods run along a single track. A film’s “train of moods” runs along an “iron wire,” too, figuratively speaking. We can think of it as the strip of celluloid, or as the succession of frames it bears, which assures that every time the film is screened, its “train of moods” keeps to the same track. Every film is its own “train of moods.” It runs along its own track—the track laid down by its succession of frames. And every master of the art of pure cinema, such as Hitchcock, inscribes his or her own thinking in those frames. Hence we can also think of the “iron wire” on which a Hitchcock film’s “colored beads” are strung as its author’s own temperament—the temperament, particular to Hitchcock, to which the film’s succession of frames gives expression.
And when Emerson observes, later in “Experience,” that our “flux of moods” (485) 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), but that “there is that in us which changes not” (485), I am irresistibly reminded of Cavell’s words, that a film’s “faces and motions and settings” (or is it their moods?) have a “double existence as transient and as permanent.” Every human being has his or her own temperament, particular to that individual. But we have in common the mind’s power—a power that is itself baffling to the mind—to “raise” a “fact in our life” from the “web of our unconsciousness,” as Emerson puts it in “Intellect,” as if by illuminating it with the “certain, wandering light” of a “lantern,” we transform it into a “thought,” a “truth,” “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). Perhaps it should not surprise us that André Bazin, a century later, was to employ the identical metaphor in characterizing the film image. For the film projector is literally a lantern. Metaphorically, the camera is a lantern, too.
Films express themselves in the “flux of moods” they capture and in the “flux of moods” those moods cast over us. But there is something in the world on film that remains fixed, unchanging—an unmoving ground that makes films capable of realizing a world at all. Writing about D. A. Pennebaker’s classic documentary Don’t Look Back (1967), I put the point this way: “In the world on film, everything is forever turning, turning, turning again. Film is a medium of the ephemeral, the never-to-be-repeated, a medium of the rain and the wind. That the world is forever changing is the only thing that never changes about the world, part of what makes the world a world. Hence film is also a medium of the unchanging. Don’t Look Back enables us to return to this moment, fall under its spell, experience its moods, every time we view the film.”9 And this double temporal existence of the projected world, vouchsafed by the ontological conditions of the film medium, is a key to thinking about the work of the director known as the Master of Suspense.
In North by Northwest’s art auction sequence, Roger Thornhill, the Cary Grant character, harps on his knowledge that Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint) throws her whole body into her job, deliberately arousing the jealousy of the villainous Vandamm (James Mason) and placing Eve in dire jeopardy. Roger is so angry and hurt that he wishes her to die. But Roger is no Vandamm. The difference between them, in Hitchcock’s eyes, is revealed at the moment the Professor (Leo G. Carroll) tells Roger that Eve is a double agent, and the camera moves in to frame Grant in a medium close-up, his expression underscored by the headlights of a taxiing plane.
This shot powerfully conveys Roger’s anguish, the mood his face expresses, at this moment. Beyond this, Hitchcock designs the shot to communicate to us that Roger’s pain is engendered by his onset of knowledge that is also self-knowledge. To convey the pain of Roger’s enlightenment, Hitchcock creates a shot that perfectly illustrates the point Emerson makes in his essay “Behavior” when he writes, “The eye obeys exactly the action of the mind. When a thought strikes us, the eyes fix, and remain gazing at a distance” (1041).
What Hitchcock’s camera captures is the dawning of an intuition in Roger, the birth of a thought. What is particularly striking here is the way the shot underscores the fact that a thought is striking him by having a harsh light momentarily illuminate Grant’s face. Within the world of the film this light is cast by the headlights of a taxiing airplane. Metaphorically, it is the light—at times painful, at times blinding—of what Emerson calls “the intellect.” Had Hitchcock deliberately sought a way of illustrating, in the medium of film, Emerson’s picture of the way the mind works, he could not have come up with a more perfect means.
Figure 0.1
By choosing to frame Grant frontally as well as closely, Hitchcock not only enables the camera to capture the birth of this man’s thought; he designs the shot in a way that identifies the camera—enables the camera to identify itself—with the intellect. The shot at once captures Roger’s mood and inscribes his thought—his awakening to the knowledge that it is necessary for him to change. In inscribing Roger’s thought, the shot also inscribes—we might say it realizes—Hitchcock’s thought. I have in mind not only Hitchcock’s thought about Roger but also his thought about the camera—a thought that can be expressed precisely in Emerson’s terms: it is the thought that the camera is a lantern whose certain, wandering light has the power to raise a fact in our life from the web of our unconsciousness, transforming it into a thought, a truth, an object impersonal and immortal. Hitchcock’s thought, I would like to say, is that his art of pure cinema is a “better art than that of Egypt.”
Hitchcock dissolves from this shot to the Mount Rushmore Monument, viewed from such a distance that the familiar carved figures, standing out against the natural rock face of the mountain, are framed between the intensely blue background of the sky and the tops of tall evergreens in the lower foreground. The dissolve is so slow that for a lingering moment Roger—Cary Grant—shares the screen with these American presidents—heroes all, as our nation’s mythology would have it—chiseled permanently into the rock, their human faces, once flesh and blood and animated by the spark of life but now writ in stone, quite literally “raised” into objects “impersonal and immortal.”
Figure 0.2
Their monumental visages, rendered small by being superimposed over Grant’s larger-than-life face, convey the impression that these American heroes are standing guard over Roger, although none seems actually to be looking at him. It is as if they have his back, in today’s parlance. But it is also as if they are projections of Roger’s imagination at this moment—the moment he has opened his eyes, for the first time, to the reality of his own longing to change, to write his own future, to become a man of true character, a new American hero.
By this dissolve, too, Hitchcock expresses a thought about Roger. And this thought about Roger is a thought about Cary Grant as well. “A man is but a little thing in the midst of the objects of nature,” Emerson observes in his essay “Manners.” “Yet, by the moral quality radiating from his countenance, he may abolish all considerations of magnitude, and in his manners equal the majesty of the world” (529). This is the kind of individual that Roger, at this moment, is wishing to become. It is the kind of individual Hitchcock’s camera reveals Cary Grant, onscreen, to be—even as it reveals its own power to reveal this. Emerson describes this kind of individual when he writes, in a passage that Pursuits of Happiness invokes in connection with the character Grant plays in The Awful Truth: “I have seen an individual, whose manners, though wholly within the conventions of elegant society, were never learned there, but were original and commanding, and held out protection and prosperity; one who did not need the aid of a court-suit, but carried the holiday in his eye; who exhilarated the fancy by flinging wide the doors of new modes of existence; who shook off the captivity of etiquette, with happy, spirited bearing, good-natured and free as Robin Hood; yet with the port of an emperor,—if need be, calm, serious, and fit to stand the gaze of millions” (529).
At this point Hitchcock has his camera zoom in on Mount Rushmore, isolating the monument from its natural setting, then narrow its field of vision by masking the frame with an iris—an iris as circular as the lens of a camera. He invokes this old-fashioned convention to imply, retroactively, that this shot has all along been from the point of view of someone looking through an optical device, such as a telescope—or the viewfinder of a camera. When Hitchcock now cuts to Grant, framed in profile, looking through a telescope, this gesture implies a connection between his view and the camera’s. This is a textbook instance of what in The Murderous Gaze I call a “declaration of the camera,” one of Hitchcock’s signature practices.
These shots, and those that immediately follow, make evident that in thinking about Roger and about the great star who incarnates him, and in thinking more generally about myth and reality, artifice and nature, about heroism, about America, that this sequence is also expressing thoughts about the camera, about the act of viewing, about the film medium, about the art of pure cinema, about change, about transience, about permanence, about the double temporal existence of the projected world.
It is both a premise and a conclusion of this book that Hitchcock’s films call for being read with the same kind and degree of attention as Emerson’s essays and that, like Emerson’s essays, Hitchcock’s films are capable of instructing us on how they are to be read. As Cavell elegantly puts it—it takes one to know one—Emerson is a thinker with the “accuracy and consequentiality one expects of a mind worth following with that attention necessary to decipher one’s own.”10 Cavell’s wording implies that if we follow our own thinking with the attention necessary to follow Emerson’s, we will find our minds, too, to be worth following that way. Perhaps the same can be said about all the great thinkers Cavell writes about in Cities of Words. But the idea that without following our own thinking we cannot know the minds of others, and that without knowing the minds of others we cannot know our own minds—the idea that it is by reading and by writing that we come to know our own minds, as well as the minds of others—is Emerson’s teaching, as it is Cavell’s.
Figure 0.3
The Master of Suspense
Emerson’s essay “Experience” begins with the question, “Where do we find ourselves?” His answer: “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” (471). When we awaken to our condition as human beings, we find ourselves suspended, in Hitchcock’s view as in Emerson’s. Does that mean it is the human condition to be in suspense?11
When in North by Northwest Roger, pursued by a crop-dusting plane flown by a pilot with murderous intentions, sprints toward the cornfield that is his one hope of refuge, he believes that his fate remains undecided. But Roger’s fate has been decided. Hitchcock has decided it. Every time the film is screened, the outcome is—can only be—the same. No other outcome is possible. Nothing is contingent in the projected world. Nothing is possible that is not necessary. In Hitchcock’s remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), Louis Bernard (Daniel Gelin), the French stranger the McKenna family meets on a Moroccan bus, explains that “in the Muslim religion, there are no accidents.” There are no accidents in the world of a Hitchcock film either. Whatever happens cannot but happen; the future is as fixed, as immutable as the past. The movie screen does not have a frame; it is a frame, Cavell remarks in The World Viewed.12 He also says that the projected world is the world as a whole. Hence what is inside the frame has the same reality as what is outside the frame—except for what is on the other side of the screen, so to speak: our world, from which the projected world is separated, spatially, by a barrier that is not possible to cross. But a barrier that cannot possibly be crossed—the speed of light, say—is not a real barrier, not really a barrier, at all. And what is true for film’s spatial dimension is no less true for its temporal dimension. Within the projected world, past, present, and future have the same kind and degree of reality. Nonetheless, like sand in an hourglass, a film runs through the projector in one direction only, one reel emptying as the other fills. The world on film is timeless. It also exists in time.
Hitchcock famously expounded on his understanding of the difference between suspense and surprise:
We are now having a very innocent little chat. Let us suppose that there is a bomb underneath this table between us. Nothing happens, and then all of a sudden, “Boom!” There is an explosion. The public is surprised, but prior to this surprise, it has seen an absolutely ordinary scene, of no special consequence. Now, let us take a suspense situation. The bomb is underneath the table, and the public knows it, probably because they have seen the anarchist place it there. The public is aware that the bomb is going to explode at one o’clock and there is a clock in the décor. The public can see that it is a quarter to one. In these conditions this same innocuous conversation becomes fascinating because the public is participating in the scene.13
Cutting to the clock makes the viewer acutely aware that time is passing. A perfect illustration is the classic sequence from Sabotage that ends with an explosion that kills Stevie (Desmond Tester), the protagonist’s likable young brother (and, even more shockingly, the puppy he befriends on the bus). We know, as the unsuspecting boy does not, that the film can he has been asked to deliver contains a bomb set to explode at a quarter to the hour. The boy looks at each clock the bus passes on the street. Each time, Hitchcock cuts to Stevie’s point of view, so that we see, as he does, that the bus is running late—although he is oblivious of the consequences. The last second before the explosion is represented by a close-up of the minute hand of a clock as it moves, in “real” time, from “44” to “45,” signaling the fatal explosion. By this means, Hitchcock is acknowledging or declaring the transience that is one aspect of the temporality of film: the fact that in viewing films we experience every moment—as we experience every moment of our lives—within time, under the sway of one mood or another. Indeed, it is one of Hitchcock’s signature devices to include in his suspense sequences an element that functions, like the cuts to the clock faces, to render perspicuous the suspense-inducing condition that, for us as well as for the characters, time moves on like clockwork—and that time is running out.
I am thinking, for example, of the brilliant passage in Notorious in which Alicia (Ingrid Bergman) and Devlin (Cary Grant) descend into Sebastian’s (Claude Rains) wine cellar. The sequence is rendered all the more suspenseful, for them and for us, by the knowledge that should the champagne at the party run out, Sebastian would have to go to the wine cellar for more champagne and find out that his wife had purloined the key. Every cut to champagne being poured or drunk—Hitchcock makes his cameo appearance by downing the first glass—and to Alicia pointedly refusing a refill—reminds us that time, like the champagne, is running out. Every cut to the bottles remaining on ice reveals that their number is dwindling, not only reminding us that the moment of decision is drawing closer, but quite literally enabling us to see the passage of time, making time itself visible.
Figure 0.4
In the 1956 version of The Man Who Knew Too Much, the Albert Hall sequence is a remarkable tour de force. Its stroke of genius is the shot in which the camera follows the score of the cantata the orchestra and singers are performing as the music leads inexorably to its climax, at which point, according to the villainous plan to which we are privy but Jo (Doris Day) is not, a cymbal crash will block out the sound of the assassin’s gunshot. The music, conducted by no less than Bernard Herrmann, becomes identified with the film itself, the notes of the score standing in, as it were, for the words of the screenplay Hitchcock is “conducting.” What is on view becomes a vision—a vision not only of time advancing like clockwork but of the very film we are viewing as it moves on toward its predestined ending. Ironically, Jo’s scream derails the smoothly running machinery of the musical performance, disrupting both the composer’s and villain’s designs—but not Hitchcock’s, which it is impossible for Jo to disrupt.
Figure 0.5
The Lodger, the film the director always called the first true Hitchcock picture, contains his earliest use of this device of rendering visible the passage of time both within the world of the film and within our world. I am thinking of the shots of the lodger (Ivor Novello) poring over a map of London on which triangles mark the locations of the Avenger’s murders.
With each recurrence of this setup, we can see the pattern as it is emerging, the fact that (as an intertitle tells us) the triangles form a spiral zeroing in on Daisy’s home. We can see that this progression has an end point. And time is of the essence, as it is in the Griffith-like chase that climaxes the film, in which what is at stake is whether Joe will arrive in time to keep the mob from tearing the lodger to pieces. The lodger’s anguish reflects his knowledge that completing his project would make him a murderer. Divided between a past that haunts him and a future that holds hope only for the closing out of that past, he is in what Norman Bates, who knows whereof he speaks, calls a “private trap,” within which, no matter how much one “scrapes and claws” trying to escape, one never “budges an inch.”
Figure 0.6
When the lodger, pursued by the mob, attempts to climb over a fence, his handcuffs catch on a spike. Unable to move, he hangs suspended, hands clutching at him from all sides. He is tormented by the mob, within which Hitchcock personally assumes a place. He cannot escape from these would be avengers, but neither can they get him in their clutches. This is a vision of eternity, of endless suffering.
In The Murderous Gaze I pondered this vision and posed the question, “Who brings the lodger to this moment of harrowing suspense?”14 Here, I must respectfully part company with my young self. For the lodger, this is precisely not a moment of suspense. A man without hope for the future, like Scottie at the end of Vertigo, is not in suspense. In the lodger’s mind the outcome is not uncertain. Being suspended is the outcome.
For himself, the lodger believes, no change is possible, no release, no dawning of a new day, no future. Or, rather, past, present, and future are one to him—as if he had awakened to the reality of his condition, the reality that he exists only in the world of a film, a projected world, a world that does not really exist. The lodger, suspended, is untouched by the stream of time. Or, we might say, for him time itself is suspended—in something like the way the world is suspended when it is projected on a movie screen. If the shots of the lodger poring over his map declare the transience that is one aspect of the temporality of film, this shot declares the permanence that is the other aspect of film’s temporality, the fact that in the projected world past, present, and future have the same kind and degree of reality, hence the same kind and degree of unreality. Time stands still for him in this vision of timelessness, of world—or worldlessness—without end. Suspended as if for all time, the lodger, like Scottie looking down from the ledge, is beyond suspense.
Figure 0.7
Hitchcock is called the “Master of Suspense.” Does this mean that he had mastered suspense? Had Hitchcock, like the lodger and Scottie, reached a place beyond suspense? If so, was this a happier place than theirs? As I have said, Hitchcock never tired of quoting Oscar Wilde’s line, “Each man kills the thing he loves.” To believe that we are fated in such a way is to be beyond suspense. For it is to believe that in our lives, as in the lives of characters who exist only within a world on film, there are no accidents, that our future, no less than our past, is fixed, that it is not possible for us to write our own futures, to change, to become. It is to believe that our longing to realize what is human in our nature is doomed never to be fulfilled or that human nature itself condemns us to unfulfillment. It is to believe not only that “Que sera, sera, whatever will be, will be,” as Jo puts it in The Man Who Knew Too Much when she sings to her son to pass on her mother’s words of wisdom; it is also to believe that, no matter what Jo may sing to her son, no matter what her mother may have sung to her, the future is “ours to see.” And it is not a pretty picture, if it is our fate to kill the thing we love.
In Emerson’s view it is within our power to take a step in the direction of the unattained but attainable self. “Intellect annuls fate,” he writes in “Fate” (501). It is not that we hold our fate simply in our own hands, however. We must make our way in a world with other people in it. But it is not possible for us to walk in the direction of the unattained but attainable self unless we think for ourselves, rely on ourselves to take the next step; unless we open ourselves to change; unless we abandon our old settlements; unless we let our old self die, or acknowledge that it has already died, so that a new self can be born. Every step we take is a risk. We cannot be certain it will move us closer to our goal. But neither are we in suspense, in Emerson’s view. We do not have the luxury of waiting in suspense to find out whether the step we have just taken has moved us forward. We have to take the next step before we know where the last step has left us.
To be unambiguously committed either to Wilde’s worldview or to Emerson’s is to be beyond suspense. But Hitchcock found himself suspended between them. Indeed, he found himself suspended between wishing to choose between these worldviews and wishing to deny the necessity of choosing. In The Murderous Gaze I characterized Hitchcock, whose films metaphorically equate artistic creation with murder, as uncertain about what his authorship made of him or revealed about him. The book’s five original readings picture Hitchcock as intending his films to sustain incompatible interpretations, as if he were creating his films from a place beyond suspense. Is it that Hitchcock couldn’t decide between two positions? I suggest in The Murderous Gaze, rather, that this irreducible undecidability was his position. When I wrote that book, I did not take Hitchcock’s aspiration to be reconciling the irreconcilable, deciding the undecidable, bringing together the two halves of his artistic identity. Rather, I took it to be acknowledging, and embracing, the mysterious doubleness he took to be at the heart of the art of pure cinema. The entire trajectory of Hitchcock’s authorship, as I traced it in The Murderous Gaze, calls forth the dark picture that, from The Lodger to Psycho and beyond, all Hitchcock did, in effect, was “scratch and claw without budging an inch” (xvi).
Extending and revising my thinking in The Murderous Gaze, Must We Kill the Thing We Love? offers a more affirmative interpretation of Hitchcock’s authorship, which is that with each new film he thought a new thought, took a new step, drew a larger circle, always walking in the direction of the unattained but attainable self.
Drawing a New Circle
“The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, moves on.”15 Our lives move inexorably on, every moment succeeded by the next, until our time runs out. At every moment our future becomes the present; our present, the past. Is our future, like Scottie’s, already written? Are we fated, as he is? Or are our powers of thought capable, as Emerson believed, of freeing us—but also making it our responsibility—to write our own future, to realize our world? There are no accidents, no contingencies, within the world on film; nothing that is not real is possible. But our world abounds in unrealized possibilities. And our lives are woven of contingencies. I was not fated to write The Murderous Gaze. And I am not fated to be writing these words now. Yet I can now discern permanent marks that the writing of The Murderous Gaze left on me, and not only on my writing. Every moment of our lives is transient yet leaves permanent marks. Had I not written The Murderous Gaze then, my temperament would still be what it was, what it is. But I would not now be writing Must We Kill the Thing We Love?, I would not have become the writer, the person, I am.
In this sense it becomes possible, looking back on our pasts, to discern a kind of necessity in the contingent moments of our lives. They could have been different. But if they had been different, we would now be different. Our futures are not yet written. And we do not have to let others write them for us. Nor do we have to write our futures in foolish consistency with our pasts. It is by acknowledging the past—acknowledging that it is past, abandoning it, yet mourning its passing—that we free ourselves to move on, to take a new step, to walk in the direction of the unattained but attainable self. This was Emerson’s faith. It is a faith that Hitchcock was torn between embracing and resisting, between wishing to embrace and wishing to resist.
As I have said, at the time I was writing The Murderous Gaze, I was teaching film at Harvard and in almost daily conversation with Cavell, who only a few years before had been my doctoral adviser (and who, to me, has never stopped being my teacher, as well as my friend). But when I read The Murderous Gaze now, I can see clearly, as I could not when I was writing the book, that I, like Hitchcock, was torn between embracing and resisting the philosophical outlook that Cavell’s subsequent writings have taught me to call “Emersonian perfectionism.” My own ambivalence manifested itself, in the five original chapters, in a conflict or tension between my practice of reading films—a practice that I passionately embraced, indeed single-handedly pioneered; a practice I now understand to be exemplary of Emersonian perfectionism—and certain of my assumptions and conclusions that resisted it. To be sure, I had reasons for drawing those conclusions. But I no longer wish to be the kind of person who is satisfied by such reasons. Thus I found myself moved, after many years, to publish an expanded edition of The Murderous Gaze and to write an altogether new book about Hitchcock.
Thirty years ago I was as drawn as Hitchcock was to the idea that “each man kills the thing he loves.” Evidently, I botched it, though, when I wrote The Murderous Gaze. In writing Must We Kill the Thing We Love? I have been relieved to discover that Hitchcock’s films have not stopped being alive for me and that I respect them as much as ever and love them even more. Of course, “killing” Hitchcock’s cinema, or anyone’s love for it, is not my goal—nor, I trust, the outcome—in writing this book. Neither is it my goal to “kill” The Murderous Gaze, which I also have not stopped loving. As I put it in the preface to the second edition, “No one had ever written such a book before, about Hitchcock or any other director. It does not say everything there is to say about Hitchcock’s films. Far from it. But what it does say is said nowhere else. And it says it in a singular way and in a distinctive voice” (x). It is a voice, I am happy to say, I still recognize as my own.
In the three decades since the publication of The Murderous Gaze, Hitchcock’s films have been the subject of dozens of substantial and illuminating books and essays. To name just a few of the writers from whose work on Hitchcock I, personally, have benefited (with apologies to those I have inadvertently omitted and others whose writings I have not yet discovered): Richard Allen, Dan Auiler, Charles Barr, Lesley Brill, Paula Marantz Cohen, Tom Cohen, Robert Corber, Sidney Gottlieb, Nicholas Haeffner, Sam Ishii-Gonzáles, Steven Jacobs, Robert Kapsis, Marian Keane, Bill Krohn, Leonard Leff, Thomas Leitch, Frank Meola, Tania Modleski, Tony Lee Moral, Christopher Morris, John Orr, Dennis Perry, Leland Poague, Murray Pomerance, Stefan Sharff, Irving Singer, Susan Smith, David Sterritt, George Toles, James Vest, Michael Walker, Robin Wood, Slavoj Žižek.
“Hitchcock studies” has become almost an academic field of its own. Thanks to this impressive and rapidly growing body of literature, we know far more about Hitchcock’s working methods, the circumstances of the production of his films, their reception, and so on. We also have the benefit of illuminating insights into the films themselves gleaned by a wide range of critical approaches. Yet nothing scholars and critics have since discovered about Hitchcock’s work seriously calls into question the significance and relevance of The Murderous Gaze, much less invalidates the practice of reading it exemplifies, or the Emersonian perfectionism that underwrites that practice. How could it?
Hitchcock critics can be loosely divided between writers who emphasize the “darker” side of his art (Slavoj Žižek, for example, and Robin Wood in his later writings) and those whose emphasis is on—what? I don’t want to call it the “brighter” side; perhaps the “hopeful” or “redemptive” side (early Robin Wood, for one; also Lesley Brill, who sees Hitchcock’s films as romances). In Hitchcock’s Romantic Irony Richard Allen follows the lead of The Murderous Gaze in seeing both sides, and the tension or conflict between them, as equally essential to Hitchcock’s artistic identity, although he understands the two positions somewhat differently than I do and places Hitchcock, quite fruitfully, in relationship to the aesthetic tradition of British romanticism rather than American transcendentalism, a late flowering of romanticism in the New World.16
Thinking through Hitchcock’s relationship to American thought, and specifically to Emersonian perfectionism, has a crucial advantage, however, in that it is Emerson’s worldview that underwrote not only the greatest achievements of nineteenth-century American literature (and to a large degree twentieth-century American literature as well) but also the equally great achievements of the classical American cinema. And part of the groundbreaking importance of Cavell’s books about the comedy of remarriage and the melodrama of the unknown woman is that they envision these popular genres not as instruments of pernicious bourgeois, capitalist, or patriarchal “ideology”—ways of not thinking, ways of avoiding or suppressing thought—but as inheriting the serious way of thinking founded philosophically in America by the writings of Emerson and his great disciple Thoreau.
As excellent a critic as Robin Wood, whose pioneering early book Hitchcock’s Films is filled with deep insights, and whose Hitchcock’s Films Revisited is filled with even deeper insights, explicitly identifies American culture, in his last published essay on Hitchcock, with what he calls “fascism” (with a small f, to distinguish it from Fascism).17 Wood sees American culture’s fascist tendencies as the inevitable product of American capitalism, which he regards as an institutionalized system of domination and violence. Wood applauds Hitchcock for subjecting America’s “fascist tendencies” to a devastating critique all the more powerful for the fact that the director himself was anything but exempt from those tendencies. Wood fails to appreciate, however, that Hitchcock’s critique of America’s fascist tendencies is as deeply rooted within American culture as are those fascist tendencies themselves. For the Emersonian perfectionism that underwrites this critique has been a powerful force within American culture ever since Emerson made his living as a popular lecturer and Thoreau spent his time in jail—a force that has repeatedly been repressed yet repeatedly resurfaces (in the 1930s: in the New Deal and in Hollywood movies; in the 1950s and 1960s: in rock ‘n’ roll, the civil rights and antiwar movements, and the “counterculture”; in the 1970s and beyond: in the feminist and gay rights movements; and in our time: in the election of Barack Obama).
That it is illuminating to place Hitchcock’s films within the American literary and philosophical tradition of which Emerson was the “founding father” is the guiding intuition of Frank Meola’s erudite, nuanced, and eloquent essay “Hitchcock’s Emersonian Edges,” which I had the pleasure of reading only after completing the chapters that follow.18 One element of my book’s originality is its sustained demonstration that in his films Hitchcock is working out, thinking through, his ambivalence toward Emersonian perfectionism. Another is the book’s argument that there is a dialectical progression in Hitchcock’s thinking—as there has been in mine—that leads him ultimately, in Marnie, to overcome or transcend his ambivalence. Yet another is that the practice of reading that the book exemplifies—which is intimately responsive to (and reflects philosophically on) the ways Hitchcock’s films are “written,” cinematically—has deep affinities with Emerson’s own ways of thinking, and writing, about thinking, writing, and reading.
In the chapters that follow, I write about films that many others have written about, but only occasionally do I pause to situate my claims in relation to other Hitchcock critics. More often, I relate my present thinking to my own published writings. Do I believe I’m the only important person, or the only person with important thoughts, who has written about Hitchcock? Of course not. But I am the only person who has had my thoughts, thoughts motivated by, and accountable to, my experience of the films I’m writing about. Only by taking a step beyond these thoughts can I draw a new circle, in Emerson’s sense. Is extending and revising one’s own thoughts a legitimate mode of writing? I’m no Emerson, but that’s how his essays are written. As I argue in this book, it’s the way Hitchcock’s films, cinematically, are “written” as well. Every Hitchcock film extends and revises the thinking in his earlier films, draws a larger circle around the circles they drew, shifting the center by expanding the periphery.
I have already had occasion to “part with my young self,” as I put it, on the question of whether the lodger, impaled on the spiked fence, is in a state of suspense. There will be more than a few such occasions as we proceed. For example, the emotionally charged and densely argued reading of Vertigo that plays a pivotal role in Must We Kill the Thing We Love? hinges on two intuitions that had not yet dawned on me—or on any other commentator on the film, for that matter—when I wrote “Vertigo: The Unknown Woman in Hitchcock,” an essay published several years after The Murderous Gaze.19 How could I not have known what I now know about Vertigo? How could I have come to see what once I could not see?
In “Circles” Emerson writes, “People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them” (413). “I unsettle all things” (412), one more oft-quoted line from “Circles,” along with a portrait of the square-jawed Sage of Concord, is emblazoned on one of my tee shirts, now more than a bit the worse for wear. (Another bears the cherubic, all but chinless, visage of the Master of Suspense.) Writing a long chapter on Marnie, as well as a new preface, for the second edition of The Murderous Gaze, unsettled my thinking about Hitchcock, or revealed to me how unsettled my thoughts had become in the years since I wrote The Murderous Gaze. “Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth, that around every circle another can be drawn” is yet another inspiring sentence in “Circles” (403), too long, unfortunately, for a tee shirt. In writing Must We Kill the Thing We Love? I have drawn a new circle.
When I was writing The Murderous Gaze, I believed I was giving equal weight to the two incompatible pictures of Hitchcock’s authorship I discerned in the films I was studying and the two moral outlooks or worldviews between which I understood him to be suspended. I can see now, though, how much I favored the darker picture. In The Murderous Gaze dark moods predominate. And they keep getting darker, and intensifying, until the last pages of the Psycho chapter and the melancholy postscript I began writing when I heard the news that Hitchcock had died.
Dwelling mainly on films I passed over in The Murderous Gaze, Must We Kill the Thing We Love? retraces the trajectory of Hitchcock’s career—with several detours along the way—in a manner intended to balance the scales. Happily, the Moving Finger, having writ, has tilted the scales in favor of the Emersonian perfectionism I find myself no longer resisting.
