There is no such thing as an isolated man or woman; we are each of us made up of a cluster of appurtenances.
—Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady
WRITING WITH A KEEN AND Catholic eye for shadow, Claude Chabrol and Eric Rohmer describe the conclusion to Alfred Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man (1956) as including a moment when the falsely arrested Manny Balestrero (Henry Fonda), “on his mother’s advice,” prays to God, “and as he contemplates the image of the Sacred Heart, a superimposition shows us the true criminal walking along the street and moving toward the camera until his face dissolves into Fonda’s” (148). (What we see, in fact, is the eyes of this stranger swelling up as he walks toward the camera until they occupy the space of Manny Balestrero’s eyes.) Soon later, this unknown man will be apprehended and Manny, with whom we have bonded, will be free. Or, “free.” It is hard not to love this leap, this swift and assured annunciation of the stranger as “true criminal” produced by his “miraculous” appearance onscreen after the prayer. When we see him, we have plenty of reason for fervently hoping that he is the thief “in truth”—that is, in legal as well as moral truth—since we want our beloved Manny, who has all along seemed innocent in our eyes, to find a way out of the Château d’If of the New York justice system in which it seems he may be condemned to spend the rest of his days for a series of robberies we earnestly believe he did not commit. Before proceeding, I must now pause, not only because all moral debates require pause but also, more importantly, because the story of Manny is more elusive than many viewers take it to be.
How do we know Manny committed no robberies? We did not see him rob anyone, and by convention when watching a film—certainly a Hitchcock film—we take the entire universe to be contained in what we see. Also, he says so, to more than one person in the story. The “he” in this case is Henry Fonda, a star we almost always like to like for his calm reasonability, his affable good humor, his dignified gaze, his yeoman humility. Manny is appropriately conventional and decent: he has a wife and two adoring children, a nice brother, and a sympathetic mother. His devotions are circumspect and honest: he makes his living by playing, of all instruments, the friendly, uncompromising, and modest double bass. He seems confused to be labeled a thief, sincerely so (and yet any professional thief might feign such confusion at such labeling). But to be rigorous in summation, as we were not present to watch the robberies we can only surmise that Manny’s statement of innocence is a verity. A witness, the clerk at the insurance company (Doreen Lang), claims to be absolutely certain she saw him. Could she be wrong? She could be wrong, of course, but the point is that she utters her accusation with total conviction, the same conviction with which Manny seems by his manner to proclaim his innocence. We see that this witness is trepidacious when she must look into his face. Does this mean her memory and judgment are ultimately not to be trusted, or else that Manny is in fact the robber, and when he comes to borrow money for his wife’s dentistry has once again terrified her? (What might make us wonder about this clerk is the fact that in the United States nowadays, “eyewitness misidentification is the single greatest cause of wrongful convictions nationwide, playing a role in more than 75 percent of convictions overturned through DNA testing” [Innocence Project].) Yet, still, how could the sweet and gentle Manny, Manny the loyal son whom we believe to be innocent, terrify anyone the way he is terrifying this poor woman? At the very beginning of the film we saw that he is an accomplished musician, that is, a subject of the Muse: how could an accomplished musician be a criminal, bad, immoral? We will return to these questions.
Manny, at any rate, will go free at the end of the film, and a second man will be arrested in his place, a man who looks remarkably like him yet whose features seem darker, less amicable. This second man we do not immediately like when we set eyes on him, and so we do not root for his release. We are eager and willing to accept the proposition that he is guilty. But is he really guilty? Has he really done the deed we were not present to watch him doing? True, after his face and body take over the face and body of Manny in the superimposition we see him attempting a new robbery and being caught in the midst of it. But is it not true as we see this “guilty” man striding down the sidewalk toward us, and as his “guilty” face is superimposed—almost perfectly—over Manny’s, that the most we can say is that his presence forms a strange and wondrous duplication, that he has the “look” of guilt—just as Manny apparently had? That whatever “look” Manny had (that impressed the witness so powerfully with certainty) another man has, too? Is it not true that in some strange way as this man approaches on the street we have been transformed into the nervous insurance company clerk, hot to make an identification? For Hitchcock, the look of evil is not idiosyncratic. Many men can exhibit it; perhaps any man can. This second man is initiated into, and trapped within, the justice system only after we already come to a conclusion about him, a conclusion that he is certainly and inevitably the one, and we come to this conclusion even though we have as yet no evidence, no basis in material fact (the material fact of Hitchcock’s images). Does he, too, not simply appear to fit the requirements of the role we are in the process of casting? And, more basically: in assigning him moral value, are we not indeed casting a role?
Howard Becker wrote in 1963—as it turns out about men like Manny Balestrero (the character of Manny was based, indeed, on a real man of the same name who underwent the same torture)—that, theoretically speaking, correct accusation is only one of four possibilities in labeling deviant behavior. False accusation is equally possible, if not exactly likely to happen, also not a complicated situation to produce. An accuser with some social weight need only point a heavy finger (and indeed the verity of the accusation might ride with the intractability of that social weight). Given that rule-breaking either does or does not happen as a result of an action, and that rule-breaking either is or is not perceived to have happened, one distinct possibility is the person who does not break a rule but is perceived to have done so, in our case, Manny Balestrero. And only one of the four possibilities—not engaging in rule-breaking, and not being perceived to have done so—leads to what social authorities, lay and professional, would call “innocence” (Becker chap. 2). Not as many people are called “innocent” as we might suppose. Or, there is no preponderance of innocence in the social world.
When they mention “the true criminal walking along the street” (my emphasis), Chabrol and Rohmer display a certain conviction about the stranger who is “guilty” at the end of the picture, this founded on their ability to know instantly when evil is before them, to sense its rhythms and gestures, to recognize its subtle glow. The ability is part of their commitment to Original Sin as a fundamental principal on the basis of which their own thought, and Hitchcock’s (as they would like to paint it) stands. Hitchcock’s work, they believe, repeatedly demonstrates “the interchangeable guilt of all mankind” (149): that a good and an evil man—one who is not bad, and another who definitively is—could change places, or that the goodness of a man could be replaced by another man’s evil—this “goodness” and this “evil” being inherent and essential (and this transfer being a strange and wondrous form of contagion). Humans in their inextricable essence can be polluted, infected, besieged, and devoured, and the deep structure of character can be altered to tragic effect. To put this obversely, and I hope with more light: tragic changes in behavior, falls from grace, may be understood as invasions or transmogrifications of the soul, as the stuff of deep drama. It is possible that beyond Chabrol and Rohmer, French critics in general moved (in their own Catholicism) to find themes of guilt and redemption in Hitchcock’s work, weighing heavily the importance of the plight—read inner turmoil, sacrifice—of the falsely accused person in a social press that has little time or patience for delicacy, gentleness, civility, or kindness as it metes out punishment and reward. Martin Jay writes of the “disenchantment of the eye,” for example, linking it to a history of anti-ocularcentrism in French thought: the moral world transcends appearance, even denies it, and the riddling complexities of what the eye can see do not account for a moral summation of social life. The Hitchcockian problem, then, for what I would term “Catholic criticism” is that presumption of guilt either accords with some fundamental “interchangeable guilt of all mankind”—that man is flawed—or else resounds against some fundamental (and intrinsic) innocence that the falsely accused somehow—and horribly!—cannot demonstrate; that man cannot avoid the predicament of being read as flawed. This concentration on an inner, necessarily mute fundamental state is typical, say, of Truffaut’s approach to the undeniably moral film I Confess (1953): “Father Michael, bound by his holy vows on the inviolability of confession, makes no move to clear himself … In this picture … although the defendant has been legally cleared, he will remain under a cloud” (200n, 206). For the Catholic thinker, a man’s appearance in society must always evidence a deeper state of affairs, an innate condition, and should not be taken seriously in itself as a facet of the ever-shifting articulation that is modern moral life.
Consider, as a radically different way of looking at this issue, an argument of Erving Goffman’s:
It is, of course, hardly possible to imagine a society whose members do not routinely read from what is available to the senses to something larger, distal, or hidden. Survival is unthinkable without it. Correspondingly, there is a very deep belief in our society, as presumably there is in others, that an object produces signs that are informing about it. Objects are thought to structure the environment immediately around themselves; they cast a shadow, heat up the surround, strew indications, leave an imprint. … We take sign production to be situationally phrased but not situationally determined. (Advertisements 6; emphasis mine)
The system of belief that Goffman terms the “Doctrine of Natural Expression” would account for the “truly” guilty man in The Wrong Man inexhaustibly, unavoidably, “naturally,” and spontaneously “casting a shadow” of guilt as he walks toward the camera, “heating up the surround” with his past criminal actions, which stick to him like labels; “strewing indications” by his furtive glance; “leaving an imprint” with every step he takes. Given this logic, the story of The Wrong Man, seen very simply (and incorrectly, in my view), is that the “truly guilty” man happens not to show up early enough to prevent another man, “truly innocent,” from being arrested in his place and undergoing the tribulations of justice. The pain of these ineluctable tribulations is the meat of the film. Further (and as elaboration): the innocent man’s innocent wife is also wrapped up in the trial of his soul, and succumbs. (At the very end we learn that she is on the road to recovery, but that she has not yet recovered.)
I am not especially interested here to develop an argument about The Wrong Man. Instead a certain critical fascination fascinates me, specifically the unwavering attention to an undeniable, inner state of being and its relation, in an exemplary way in Hitchcock’s work, to the moral life. What the Doctrine of Natural Expression, as Goffman has it, can never account for—yet what must surely be accounted for in contemporary culture since at least the turn of the twentieth century—is, first, the importance of what is around us, what is beyond the self, indeed, the context we address in our expression, this vital surround made quintessential in the act of performance, which implies and invokes the world of fakery, verisimilitude, theater, and conning; and, too, a key allied circumstance, mistaken appearance. In The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James has Madame Merle say,
When you have lived as long as I, you will see that every human being has his shell, and that you must take the shell into account. By the shell I mean the whole envelope of circumstances. There is no such thing as an isolated man or woman; we are each of us made up of a cluster of appurtenances. What do you call one’s self? Where does it begin? where does it end? It overflows into everything that belongs to us—and then it flows back again. I know that a large part of myself is in the dresses I choose to wear. I have a great respect for things! One’s self—for other people—is one’s expression of one’s self; and one’s house, one’s clothes, the book one reads, the company one keeps—these things are all expressive. (287)
As I have tried to argue in depth in An Eye for Hitchcock, Hitchcock knows that a performance, if it is to be successful and even brilliant, need not be intentional (14–57). Further, the sign production that we (perhaps far too) casually take “to be situationally phrased but not situationally determined” may be situationally determined in fact, situationally structured, indeed—although in Manny Balestrero’s case it is not—by the dramatic necessity of mounting a certain appearance in such a way as to address the expectations of a particular audience. (Manny, who wouldn’t see himself as mounting a performance, suffers from sincerity, and thus has significant troubles understanding how his view of himself might not be shared by the police.) While a set of signals may be interpreted as flowing without interruption or contrivance from the “true” self of a performer, performers may also not regard themselves as performers and may or may not be aware of the signals they are apparently emitting. (The grounds for signaling may be established by others.) The issue, finally, is an audience’s ability to successfully read intent, not an actor’s desire or capacity to show it. The actor, indeed, may do very little. Writing of the epic theater in 1939, Walter Benjamin noted that the actor’s task “is to demonstrate through his acting that he is cool and relaxed,” and when we regard performance we attend to these qualities of coolness and relaxation as significant even if this amounts to noting that they are absent. For the actor, cool and relaxed self-awareness is thus in part—in important part—a matter of knowing what others are likely to see when one makes an entrance, regardless of what one hopes for. In playing Manny Balestrero locked up in jail, for example, Fonda at several moments produces a benignly passive gaze, a gaze that does not presume to ask for consideration or benevolence from his captors. In this way he caused Manny to sign openly that he knows he is not in control of the way his identity and appearance are interpreted and, thus, yields signally to his fate.
Such a dramaturgical approach as I follow Goffman in taking resists considering “inner,” or emotional, states of affairs as central in the elaboration of human interaction, and focuses instead on what might be called “outside views,” such as the views an audience has of dramatically staged action (in the theater, for example, or on film). Writers discussing morality, or moralism, tend not to be dramaturgical in method, however. They have a very particular thing in mind when they say “morals,” namely the relation and difference between Good and Evil, perhaps the dualism in human spirituality and experience engendered by the co-presence of Good and Evil in the world, and sometimes even the interchangeability of the two (as is demonstrated in, among other films, Strangers on a Train [1951], when the “good” Guy Haines is influenced [or inspired] by the “evil” Bruno Anthony to do a killing [I leave for another occasion a discussion of whether either of these men is what the canonical appreciation claims him to be]). Associated with this central, rather Manichean, focus is a concern with sin, guilt, darkness, spiritual decrepitude or decay, and doubt, and with the struggle for virtue, goodness, or happiness in a world where, as Donald Spoto has suggested, sounding not a little like Hamlet, “Respectability and luxury are not sufficient” (22) because “evil sprouts round us like demonic weeds” (535).
Two weighty conditions obtain for adepts of this version of morality, morality as an attribute of the soul: two vexing problems that become, inevitably, obsessions. First, there is a possibility of a kind of doubtful twofoldness, not at all of the kind rejoiced in by William Blake, when he prays, “Twofold always. May God us keep/ From single vision and Newton’s sleep” (“Letter to Thomas Butts”) but of the kind adduced by Montaigne, when he writes, “We are, I know not how, double in ourselves, so that we believe what we disbelieve and cannot rid ourselves of what we condemn” (“Of Glory,” qtd. in Spoto 278). And then, there is a call for eternal (and eternally uncorrupted) vigilance. Spoto, for instance, says, “The Catholic sensibility triumphs. Everyone is capable of sin. Vigilance is always called for” (536, my emphasis). Ending Shadow of a Doubt (1943), the kindly detective Jack Graham (MacDonald Carey) intones, “The world has to be watched very carefully,” a statement, we could say, about optical devotion and the performance of organized life, yet for most critics writing about it, a prediction of the theme, apparently generic in Hitchcock, that returns powerfully in Vertigo (1958) and that suffused D’Entre les morts, the novel that inspired it (see Pomerance Eye, 237–41), wherein Scottie Ferguson’s surveillance is born of his ancestor Flavières’s recollections of a childhood religious trauma:
That third day. … When I was a kid, whenever I thought about that third day. … I would sneak out to the quarries and let out a great shout, and my shout ran off far underground, but nobody answered. … But it was still too soon. … Now I think my cry was heard. I want so much to believe it. (Trans. mine)
In his early criticism of Hitchcock—in this case discussing Lifeboat (1944)—the Catholic Truffaut, himself already concerned as a writer—and soon to be concerned as a filmmaker—with the simultaneous presence of Good and Evil, points out, “If Good and Evil are not named, it is precisely because they are in the center of the discussion, which deals with nothing else” (qtd. in Dixon 93). (The discussion in Lifeboat is, of course, not at all confined to Good and Evil, but also wanders at great length into social space and confinement.) Later, watching The Trouble with Harry (1955), Truffaut sees (among the “Fall shades” that “disclose a poetry that offers a mischievous contrast to the gruesome text and action”) that the characters, “as soon as they think they are or might be guilty, start behaving as if they actually were guilty, thus creating the misunderstanding on which the whole plot is built. This shows how much Hitchcock remains true to himself” (qtd. in Dixon 98, 97; emphasis mine).
Perhaps, however, even if in his personal life he was the “rigid moralist” that Spoto declares him (277), Hitchcock can be understood as having screened a quite different moral vision, one that may be less focused on the innerness of dualism and the rigorous need for surveillance than his critical admirers have forced themselves to see in his films, and that points out articulately and consistently the fact of incessant moral judgmentalism in human affairs, even its impotence. When, late in his life, he told a schoolboy from his alma mater St. Ignatius, “I have a conscience with lots of trials over beliefs” (Spoto 590), he may well have been summarizing a lifelong concern not with the weeds in the garden but with our proclivity for weeding and the difficulty for fallible humankind in detecting the weeds that should be pulled. Morality gives an appearance, and as a filmmaker—a man more interested, in the end, to make pictures than to frame moral pronouncements—Hitchcock’s interest naturally lay with precisely the way in which a face might attract the attribution of good or evil. It was the face, I think one could argue, that caught his fascination—the face that could present itself to a camera, the face that could cover something the camera could never see—and not the essence moralists might claim lay beneath. Then, Hitchcock was no moralist. He wanted to show the problems that confounded moralism, the state of affairs that prompted civilization to invent morality as a way of safeguarding itself against what cannot be foreseen.
In the summer of 1965, while Hitchcock was closeted with Brian Moore writing Torn Curtain, Phi Beta Kappa convened a symposium on morality, including such luminaries of the time as Daniel Bell, René Dubos, and Henry A. Murray. Shortly afterward, a small panel was asked to make comment on it: Robert Coles, Joan Didion, Roger Shinn, Theodore Sizer, and the young psychiatrist Kenneth Keniston, whose noteworthy book on alienated youth, The Uncommitted, was on the verge of publication. Keniston’s contribution, “Morals and Ethics,” for all its slimness, is a richly lambent jewel of meditation and analysis that repays considerable study. His primary drive is to make a particular distinction about morality—as regards its psychological function and its place in social evolution—that his fellow discussants, who “use the terms ‘morality,’ ‘morals’ and ‘ethics’ more or less interchangeably” are neglecting to make: what we might call “morals” and what we might call “ethics” are positioned at “opposite ends of a continuum of morality that runs from specific to general, and from reflexive to reflective and from primitive to civilized” (628). More precisely, the word “morals” refers to
the socially learned, largely unconscious, relatively specific and apparently self-evident rules of right conduct in any community. When an individual violates his moral code, he feels guilt, the pangs of conscience experienced as a part of the “not-me,” as an alien force that acts upon the conscious and experiencing self. Moral codes tend to be specific and situational: they tell us how to behave ourselves … in defined kinds of situations. (628)
“Ethics” refers to something rather different, something that seems to me akin to what most observers deem the “moralism” or “moral focus” to be seen in Alfred Hitchcock’s films:
the individual’s thought-out, reflective and generalized sense of good and evil, the desirable and the undesirable, as integrated into his sense of himself and his view of the world. When an ethical man violates his own ethic, he feels not guilt but a sense of human failure, a kind of existential shame that he has not been who he thought himself to be. … While morals tell us how to behave, ethics tells us what to aspire to. (628)
It seems clear to me that when we look at a film like The Wrong Man and watch the inner turmoil suffered by Manny and Rose Balestrero, particularly toward the end of the film, when it seems at once that Manny will go free but that Rose will perhaps always live now in the shadow of despair, we are watching an ethical drama play out. And also that most arguments about “Hitchcock’s morality” are in fact arguments about what Keniston would call the “ethical” world of his characters, that world and its doubts, its vacuums, its labyrinths, its obscurities, its fervent hopes.
It seems at least as fruitful to consider what we may learn from Hitchcock’s screen if we take it to be, exactly as the traditional critics have claimed, the locus of a “moral” drama—but “moral” in the more operational sense that Keniston has framed. Morality is thus connected with propriety, duty, social obligation, the maintenance of front, and the systematic (predictable) production of what Goffman terms “normal appearances” (Relations 238 ff.); it is much a feature of navigational activity, making possible the determination of who our co-actors are in life and what their alignment and intent—more this play of surfaces, indeed, than an issue of religious, metaphysical, or otherworldly aspirations and dreads. Masquerade, professional or amateur, has the potential for moral disruption. By wearing an identity that is provisional, the individual manifestly brings into play the importance of stage lines in social interaction, shows in which what we understand to be going on becomes a function of what we are in a position to perceive in the actions of those who make undertakings in our presence (and of how much social power any perceiver might be able to use). Whether or not the masks people wear can be, or ought to be, considered genuine or false (in relation to some presumably perduring deeper self) is far from the central problem—more urgent is the moral scheme that attaches to a given role performance, a specified mask, and that is limited not by the capacities and intents of he who engages in action but by the limits of the situation in which the action occurs.
In this light let us consider the moral status of Edward Drayton (Bernard Miles) in Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), assuming, for the sake of a straightforward, clean argument, a point of vantage entirely proximate to that of Ben McKenna (James Stewart), another protagonist in the film, as he meets and then engages with this man. They are in a posh restaurant in Marrakech, on a balmy evening, hungry and at adjacent tables. Drayton charmingly presents himself as a wholly credible, indeed ingenuous, former “big noise in the Ministry of Food during the War,” who was “quite happy farming my bit of land down in Buckinghamshire when these United Nations fellows started worrying me.” Now, here he is, with his charming, even bubbly, wife Lucy (Brenda De Banzie), the two of them having “pulled ourselves up at the roots” in order to become United Nations Relief. Drayton is “preparing a report on soil erosion at the moment,” he tells the McKennas, as they sit together over a Moroccan dinner. Genteel without being stiff, Edward has the kindliness to offer Ben and Jo some instructions on one-handed eating, and the grace to stutter a little when he does it. As to Jo, she is a famous popular singer who has commanded Lucy’s fandom for some while, it seems, although the Draytons don’t go to concert halls, Edward being “such an old stick-in-the-mud” who isn’t one for “this terrible bebop, or whatever you …”—meaning most of what the popular venues offered to aficionados’ ears in those days (Elvis Presley released “Heartbreak Hotel” in January of the year this film was released). The man may be a bit of a clod, but in this he is nothing if not utterly charming, and soon later, when the McKennas are involved marginally in a horrid murder in the marketplace and must go to the commissariat to file a report, Edward shows himself to be linguistically accomplished to some degree by offering graciously to be Ben’s interpreter.
The situation in the marketplace is far more complex than it can first have seemed to Ben, however. The victim of the slaying, Louis Bernard (Daniel Gélin), has whispered a message to McKenna with his dying breath, thus making the arriving gendarmes suspect the two men are linked and leading to Ben’s being asked sternly to come to the commissariat. Lucy Drayton steps forward with the offer that she can take Hank—Ben and Jo’s ten-year-old (and rather precocious) son—under her care until they return from the police. “You … don’t want your little boy to go, do you?” While the police inspection is in process, Ben is called out to take a telephone call. A mysterious voice informs him that his son will be harmed if he utters a single word of what Louis Bernard said to him in the market. With Drayton at his side, he quickly phones the hotel for Lucy, but she has not arrived back. Ben returns to be questioned further, but now, riddled with anxiety—and forcing Jo to go along with him—remains strictly mum about Bernard, even when he learns that the dead man had been an agent of the Deuxième bureau. Back at the hotel, Ben learns that the Draytons have checked out, and realizes that these two proper middle-class English folk have kidnapped his son. They are “proper,” not proper. At this point, and in absentia, Edward Drayton gains a new identity altogether: gone is the chummy, bumbling, educated but subservient civil servant’s mask, once taken as a genuine personality but now clearly visible in retrospect as only a makeshift covering, replaced with what appears to be something far less provisional, and certainly more nefarious: a man associated in some way with a brutal slaying, a man cool enough to pretend to be one’s helper in order to eavesdrop on one’s conversations to the police, a man, further, so artful in performance that he was able to hide all of these “true” traits—as they now seem—under the mask of the genteel farmer who appeared last night at the restaurant and in the marketplace this morning. If Drayton is not a killer, he is at least a kidnapper, and either way he lacks the regard for the sanctity of the family, for the courtesy due to travelers in a foreign land, and for the fragility of human feeling and life that he gave the impression of having before. As for his chirrupy wife: near the end of the film, we find her guarding the kidnapped child in an upstairs salon of an embassy, as downstairs in the ballroom, in front of dowdy dignitaries and their diamond-studded wives, Jo puts on a performance of “Que Sera, Sera” in hopes of catching the ear of her son. “That’s my mother’s voice!” yells Hank, waking out of a dream, but Lucy, the supposed fan of Jo McKenna, can only reply, “Is it?” The fandom was a cover, too, intended to excuse the fact that, in the restaurant, Lucy Drayton had been keeping an eye on the McKennas (just as, seeing her watching them outside the hotel earlier, Jo suspected).
The Draytons, at any rate, are bogus, and perhaps Edward Drayton especially so. At a shabby little nondenominational church in London, we soon discover him to have a different personality still, one which makes any imagination of him that McKenna could have had in Marrakech quite inadequate. He is the pastor of the tiny Ambrose Chapel, a man who can boast a congregation all his own and some real powers of sermonizing. And, as we discover in his living quarters above the sanctuary, he is also a criminal mastermind hiding behind the façade of this pastorship, a slimy and insulting creature who is arrogant and haughty with the suave European (Reginald Nalder) he has hired to perform an assassination. Nor in his arrogance does he ever pause to stammer, so his restaurant vocalization was also faked. His elocution is flawless as he rehearses the assassin for the timing of the cruel act and, further, it turns out that more than being a modest untrained listener he has a serious musical background—the rehearsal involves finding a precise moment in a cantata during a performance of which, tonight, the marksman is to make his shot, and Drayton has no trouble putting the needle down on his LP recording with elegant accuracy three different times, and, indeed, pretending to conduct the piece for the assassin’s benefit and his own pleasure.
Figure 9.1. The Man Who Knew Too Much—fake Draytons.
I will forego some further modifications of Drayton’s personality that are developed later in the film in order to concentrate a little more on the rehearsal scene. Suffice it to say that in each of the iterations of the Drayton character, a moral schedule attaches to him, and that each moral schedule differs from the one that preceded it. As a charming English husband from Buckinghamshire, he must show politeness to his wife, attentiveness to strangers she wishes to meet, and the gentility expected of the (superior) British gentleman abroad. Drayton has no trouble manifesting all of these directly and clearly. As a kidnapper, he must be purposive and swift, a man who can deftly capitalize on momentary opportunities. While the Buckinghamshire farmer was loath to leave his landholding and move to Morocco—in short, a man who does not move easily—the kidnapper of Hank McKenna was able inside an hour to arrange that a child should disappear, procure an airplane to move his cargo to England, make the necessary arrangements to get the boy across British customs, and see to it that no trace was left behind. The proper moral stance for such a person is opportunistic adaptation, and Drayton shows himself expert at this.
At the chapel, he must show the moral purity of a man of the cloth at one moment (in front of his congregation) and the brutal willingness to keep a family separated and to orchestrate a political killing at another. The killing itself is a model of the moral flexibility and masquerade Drayton has been using throughout. A piece of classical music, the “Storm Clouds” cantata by Arthur Benjamin, will cover a shooting. Not only will the shooting be invisible and inaudible—because it occurs during a performance of the music—and thus unknowable to the audience who take the music to be the central feature of their present reality; but also, the music, which appears to be a source of pleasure and enlightenment for the audience, is at one and the same time being used as a timing system for the kill, the assassin having been briefed to make his shot in a particular bar of the score and on a particular downbeat (indeed, at a tactically perfect moment, when the orchestral and choral forces will be performing at maximum amplitude). Just as the horrid kidnapper seems to be a gentle pastor, the blueprint for killing (the musical score—shown in closeup) seems to be a recipe for cultural apotheosis. While it might be convenient to regard high art as the “true” and “central” function of the cantata, and by corollary, preaching to a congregation as a “true” and “proper” aim for the human spirit, nevertheless Hitchcock’s mise-en-scène does not work to privilege traditional morality in these ways. The cantata performance sequence is a brilliant tour de force in which the magnificence of the art is contrapuntally juxtaposed against the meticulous machinations of the assassin in gauging the environment, measuring space, positioning himself, taking aim, and so on, all while Ben McKenna races through the hall against the obstructions of the Metropolitan Police to try to head the assassin off (see Pomerance, “Finding Release” 224–42). In short, culture is the killer—a veritable moral twist. Drayton as kidnapper is living in a power relationship where if he controls the assassin whom he has journeyed to Marrakech to find, still he is controlled by the as-yet invisible forces behind the assassination plot, forces to which he owes obedience if not allegiance and which act to substantiate the transformations of identity that Edward must continually effect. As a kidnapper, he is playing in front of an audience just as much as he does when he gives a sermon; it is a different audience, with different expectations, but it judges how “good” he is in his actions like any other audience does. When the assassination fails, Drayton is judged to have done “bad” work—not, that is, to have entertained the “bad” thought of killing a man but to have entertained the “good” thought badly.
What Hitchcock beautifully shows is the intensively performative nature of Drayton’s identities, and thus their moral equivalence. He is continually an actor mounting a character, but it is a matter of arbitration to decide which, if any, of the identity positions are fundamental and stable enough to underpin the others. Is a criminal kidnapper/killer pretending to be a preacher, after all, or is a preacher pretending to be a kidnapper/killer for the quick money his shabby congregational employment clearly doesn’t bring? In focusing this way on performance and performative capacity, Hitchcock works as a modern filmmaker, aware that he lives in a social world where all is in motion, all is provisional—indeed, aware that cinema itself bespeaks this modern condition. The search for belief, for holiness, for innocence, for certainty in such a world of continual fluctuation really is an agony. As, watched by the smirking assassin who sees him as a “wolf in sheep’s clothing,” Drayton regards himself in the mirror, brushing the last hairs into place to become the pastor of his flock, he sees—as, looking over his shoulder, do we—two selves simultaneously, the actor/kidnapper slowly disappearing brush stroke by brush stroke, and the pastor appearing at the same time. In a culture of mobility, where moving from situation to situation and moral requirement to moral requirement is the standard business of life, what fixed truth can one possibly see evidenced in a mirror?
All of Drayton’s actions, relatively incoherent as they may seem when viewed in light of one another, are appropriate for the situations in which they are enacted: all of them are “socially learned, largely unconscious, relatively specific and apparently self-evident rules of right conduct in a community” although, to be sure, the community of which the kidnapper Drayton takes himself to be a member operates according to rules incommensurate with those that govern the community of his congregation, or the community of fellow travelers to which he belongs in the Marrakech restaurant. Appeals to “the morality of good and evil” indiscriminately posit a centralized moral universe, with a single implicit community and a single scale of value; in short, appealing to broadly shared notions of “good” and “evil,” while appealing to sentimentality and fear, operates by globalizing human relations and thus simplifying them, and neglects consideration of situated community, of power imbalance and conflicts of vested interest, of organized human interaction (such as crime) that works to achieve ends contradictory to what the dominant class supports and encourages. Drayton’s collapse at the end of the film may well be a direct consequence not of his clearly discernible “immorality,” as so many readers of The Man Who Knew Too Much aver explicitly or implicitly, but of the stress of moral conflict he has had to bear in constantly shifting from behaviors that would please his superiors in the kidnapping/murder scheme to behaviors that would seem logical to his (more conventional) wife and congregation. When he behaves “badly,” he feels guilt, but given that Drayton shifts from orientation to orientation, in a way consonant with the shifting demands and constant mobility required of the modern personality, his guilt is itself manifold. Who knows but that guilt might be riddling him as he chats amicably over squab in the restaurant, since he knows he is being false, at least to some degree, to his true purpose in Morocco, which is to hire a killer.
This more complex reading of Drayton requires a complex understanding of the film. Even though Hitchcock punishes Drayton in the end, he takes pains to show the many conflicting sides of his character, and the subtle transformation he must undergo as he sheds one self to don another. As Drayton looks into the mirror in the rehearsal scene, we see two persons, one, as it were, on either side of the glass: the pastor/farmer/husband (who doesn’t know much about music) and the kidnapper/planner (who does). Later, during the assassination attempt, we see that the assassin himself knows music—he reads a score. Thus, symphonic orchestration is not obviously and naturally benign in this film, but takes its moral nature from the situation and the usage to which it is put. Or: the music is good for the audience because is gives them acoustic pleasure; and it is good for the assassin and his director because it gives them a logic whereby to artfully succeed in their work. Hitchcock goes to pains in this film to avoid sending any signals whereby we can decisively align the Prime Minister, who is the intended victim of the assassination attempt, with one or another moral universe; and he does the same with the Ambassador, who (spoiler alert!) is plotting the assassination. The Prime Minister seems jolly, the Ambassador stern, but there are many rationales that could explain either of these attitudes in men who hold such positions.
A mirror also functions to split a character in The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927), a film for which Hitchcock himself had high regard. Here, rather than a villain being divided into contradictory personalities, the sensibility of the audience is divided regarding the moral status of a central character. London is being terrorized by a “Ripper” who is murdering girls in a systematic and brutal way. A dark stranger (Ivor Novello) appears in a boarding house and takes a room, soon striking up a friendship with the landlady’s daughter (June), who is affianced to the chief police officer on the case (Malcolm Keen). Suspicion begins to fall on the boarder with increasing gravity until it seems all but obvious that he is the killer in question, his brooding, secretive, almost delirious behavior being interpreted by the many “conventional” bourgeois protagonists as prima facie evidence of his shadowy guilt. There is finally a chase sequence in which he flees from a mob, which succeeds in penning him against a fence and almost skewering him there, but suddenly news comes that the real criminal has been caught elsewhere. Tempting as it is to think of this as an early iteration of Hitchcock’s repeated theme of the wrong man being accused and suffering torment—evidence, that is, of the filmmaker’s Catholic attitude—the boarder, we must remember, appears only ambiguously as the wrong man throughout the story. He appears definitively as the wrong man only in retrospect. At this point, having “suffered a severe nervous strain,” he lies in recovery in a hospital, having identified himself as the brother of one of the Ripper’s unfortunate victims. The landlady’s daughter comes to his side to affirm her love for him.
The room into which the boarder is shown after he makes his first entrance is hung with framed pictures, most of which are portraits of female faces roughly in a Pre-Raphaelite style. One of his first acts as resident in the landlady’s house is to declare that he does not like these, and he turns the pictures to face the wall. Soon after, she comes up and carries them all away to storage downstairs, after which point the room presents itself as a constant reminder of this business, because on the walls, where each of the pictures had hung, there remains a pale patch, like a perfectly rectangular wound or scar. It is as though an effacement has been made to the representative presence of “girls” in this room, much as in the “real” world of the diegesis an effacement had been made to the living girls who through the act of murder are being removed from social life, their serial victimizations functioning as gouges in the social body. In the redemptive hospital scene at film’s end, however, behind the patient’s bed, a framed picture hangs on the wall, also turned away from view. On the surface, we know that his frail condition as the sibling survivor of a murder victim brought on his debility to regard and appreciate pictures of other young people, hence his censorious actions in the boarding house and presumably also here. But the missing picture, or the picture turned from view, also enunciates effacement, and here the single turned frame suggests the absence of the sister for whom he has been grieving, and at the same time the absence of the nefarious persona that had been attached to him by virtue of circumstance. Is his debilitated condition in hospital the result of overflooding guilt? Well, what could he be guilty of? He has killed no one. He could be guilty of failing to prevent the killings, of having failed to protect his sister. Thus, even ethically innocent and in love, he is morally culpable—culpable in seeming culpable—and must endure this status until some resolving force or event, beyond the limits of this scene and moment, change him. His embrace with the beautiful heroine in the finale has the power to be immensely redeeming, to cure and restore him even more wholly than the hospital stay has done. We may also read the recuperating lodger as suffering a deeper, more imprisoning guilt that flows from a deeper, more imprisoning effacement. The social world has set upon him and replaced his face with an imagined one. Desperate to find the killer, the population has created one out of an innocent man.
It is by means of a mirror that we first establish the boarder’s gaze upon the problematic pictures in the boarding house. He stands at the left of the frame, gazing directly off at something disturbing directly in front of him that we cannot see except by looking in the mantelpiece mirror that is behind his back. It is a demure girl posing with slanted shoulders. As his hand catches at his heart, his eyes open and we see the back of his head and shoulder appear in the mirror. He approaches the image on the wall, now more fully visible in the mirror, and virtually disappears offscreen at left. From the side, we see him stare at the picture and then approach a window, through which the camera now peers directly into his face. His eyes are intense, glazed, dark. His lips are tightly pursed. We are in a position to read him as a warped and murderous personality, just the commodity Londoners are poised and hungry to find, fixated—because of the inspiration of the pictures—on the thought of finding a new victim; indeed, controlled by some dark and deeply buried urge that is triggered by the framed images on the walls, it is an urge he is powerless to control (and in the face of which, therefore, he is innocent!). At the end of the film, however, we are able to think back on this image and see that young man’s face as having been filled with unbearable grief.
For its drama to unfold successfully, The Lodger thus requires the audience to be capable of entertaining two diametrically opposed views of the same character, yet not at the same time. Whereas in The Man Who Knew Too Much Drayton flipped back and forth in front of our eyes, using a mirror to achieve movement from role to role much as an actor would do in preparing for a part, the lodger has always been a dutiful brother but has been misperceived as a killer. For the lodger, the mirror shows us a vision we are to believe in order to experience the flow of the film, yet also to disbelieve, since in its dark and forbidding nature it is a vision of what he is not. In The Wrong Man, it is evident to us throughout the film that the accused man is innocent, but it is not evident to us that the man finally presented as the “actual” thief is “actually” a thief; in short, we are lured into pegging him as guilty just as the police were lured into pegging Manny. All three films, made over a span of thirty years in this director’s august career, pivot on the theme of provisional goodness and evil, of moral status applied through judgment that is subject to fallibility, or through judgment enacted by official agents of the dominant culture upon others who are relatively powerless and whose motives, therefore, have a likely impertinence. In his sensitivity to the situated and unstable nature of the moralities and immoralities, the struggles and the guilt, that he puts on display lies Hitchcock’s modernism, his dramatic springboard, and his genius.
With gratitude to Nellie Perret and John Turtle.
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