But just as art has its “before” in nature and the finite spheres of life, so too it has an “after,” i.e. a region which in turn transcends art’s way of apprehending and representing the Absolute. For art has still a limit in itself and therefore passes over into higher forms of consciousness.
—Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art
IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, HEGEL argued that art evolves toward a limit, completes itself, and passes over into a higher form of consciousness. In the twentieth century, Arthur Danto draws on Hegel and claims that painting achieves its end and passes over into philosophy with the work of Andy Warhol because his works reflect on the philosophical structure of art itself. A catalyst to the final ascent of painting is the rise of cinema, which, according to Danto, also develops and passes over into philosophy, especially with certain camera techniques (used, for example, by François Truffaut): the camera breaks continuity with human perceptual mechanics, by jostling or jolting, thereby detaching the viewer’s immersion in a story, and causing her to reflect on the film as an object to be examined in relation to herself. I agree with Danto that film attains a philosophical end, but that end emerges early on in Buster Keaton, especially Sherlock Jr., and later recapitulates in clearer form with Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, Psycho, North by Northwest, Rope, and The Birds. The genius of Hitchcock’s cinema lies in how it traverses the sensuous show of objects on the screen and enters into an investigation of the very medium of film itself. Like the maturing human mind that turns from the world viewed to examine its own formal structure of viewing, cinema turns to itself and attains a form of self-awareness, and, in attaining self-awareness, cinema finally comes to an end. Of course, many films since Hitchcock have been made, and many more will continue to be made. New styles and technologies will continue to be made. But with Hitchcock film transcends representationalism, and, as Hegel writes of art, film thereby “passes over into higher forms of consciousness.” In Hitchcock film is doing philosophy.
Danto conceives art history as a philosophical bildungrsroman (an education story) on the model of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit in which human consciousness develops through history toward complete self-consciousness. “Hegel’s hero, Geist,” writes Danto, “goes through an ingenious sequence of states, through which he (she?) arrives at last an idea of his or her own nature” (“The End of Art” [EA] 135). Art, according to Danto, also goes through an ingenious sequence of states by which it arrives at last at an idea of its own nature: “I have certainly presented the history of art as a kind of Bildungsroman in which art struggles toward a kind of philosophical understanding” (EA 135).
Two historical developments, according to Danto, especially mark the growth of art: Plato and film. In the Republic, Plato “disenfranchises” art from truth, as mere representation (or imitation), which causes art to enter a struggle for recognition to attain its own philosophical self-identity—a struggle that will occupy art for the remainder of its history. Much later, with the rise of cinema, art’s identity crisis confronts a new challenge: faced with a superior representational medium, painting must prove itself against seemingly perfect moving pictures. Reflecting on his own thesis on this antagonism, Danto writes: “I had in mind moving pictures, pictures which directly represent motion by means of moving images, thus facilitating narrative representation in a way closed off to painting. Painting was therefore required to redefine itself or collapse into a secondary activity” (Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art [PDA] 118). Movement after movement and style after style emerged and faded, each one more self-reflective than the last of its own historical struggle to define itself and redefine itself to and against film—with all the “astonishing convulsions that have defined the art history of our century” (PDA xv)—until, at last, painting broke free of the artistic language of representation and began to speak in the distinctly philosophical language of self-interrogation and the metaphysics of the identity of indiscernibles. What began in Greece in the fifth century before Christ would finally come to an end in New York in the spring of 1964 with replicas of boxes of grocery store dishwashing pads.
As I saw it the form of the question is: what makes the difference between a work of art and something not a work of art when there is no interesting perceptual difference between them. What awoke me to this was the exhibition of Brillo Box sculptures by Andy Warhol in that extraordinary exhibition at the Stable Gallery on East 74th Street in Manhattan in April of 1964. (PDA 35)
The brilliance of Warhol’s Brillo Boxes is that they look exactly like actual boxes of Brillo, and with this perfect resemblance they achieve a form that does not represent (or attempt to represent) anything at all. Their effect, instead, is to raise a serious philosophical question: namely, what am I? One set of boxes is art, and the other is not art, and the one that is art is asking—as it looks into its own philosophical mirror—why the one that is not art is not art, and the one that is art is art—or not art. “My thesis,” writes Danto, “was that once art raised the question of why one pair of look-alikes was art and the other not, it lacked the power to rise to an answer. For that, I thought, philosophy was needed” (EA 134). At this point, painting passes over into philosophy, and engages the philosopher in art’s own self-examination. Painting thus become self-interrogating and in becoming self-interrogating it becomes self-conscious and in becoming self-conscious it finally comes to an end (EA 134).
Of course, to say art becomes self-conscious does not mean that the Brillo boxes themselves literally developed minds of their own. Art’s “self-consciousness” refers to an analogy with human self-consciousness. Art, like human knowledge, evolves from a representational form to a self-reflective form. Like the human mind examining its own form and its own relation to the external world, art also turns from its representations of the world and examines its own form and its own relation to the viewer viewing it. Once that turn is achieved, art may not be literally self-consciousness, but it is no longer art, either: instead, art is now doing philosophy, the only discipline whose subject matter actually includes itself; the only form of inquiry that asks what it is doing while it is doing it.
Meanwhile, cinema—having caused the final crisis of painting—would itself undergo a similar (though certainly shorter) evolution toward philosophy. Danto articulates this view in his essay “Moving Pictures.” Cinema begins in a detached representational form: “It would be wholly natural to treat the camera in essentially Cartesian terms, as logically external to the sights recorded by it—detached and spectatorial” (Philosophizing Art [PA] 229). The director presents the film as a representation of the world for a passive spectator who freely immerses her imagination in the film: she identifies with the protagonists and becomes part of the story. Eventually, however, the director alters the representational form. Danto writes: “It is as though the director became jealous of the characters who heretofore had absorbed our artistic attention to the point that we forgot if we had ever thought about art as such, and at his ontological expense” (PA 230). The effect can be seen when, for example, “the camera is, as it were, ‘jostled,’ or when, more archly, the camera literally climbs the stairway with an eye and a lubricity of its own and pokes into one bedroom after another in search of the lovers, as in one of Truffaut’s films” (PA 230). At one moment, the viewer lives imaginatively within the story (provided the camera perceives as we do), but at another moment (when the camera perceives as we do not), then we become acutely aware of our position in relation to the object of the film as a film—as a thing in front of us. The screen draws us into its world and then suddenly expels us: almost as if it knew what it was doing. “In such cases,” writes Danto, “the movement of the camera is not our movement, and this has precisely the effect of thrusting us outside the action and back into our metaphysical Cartesian hole” (PA 230)—because we become aware of it, the film, as a film. “When this happens, however,” Danto continues, “the subject of the film changes; the story is no longer one of young lovers, rather, it is about their being observed and filmed, as though the story itself were but an occasion for filming and the latter is what the film is about” (PA 230). Herein lies the transition to the Hegelian cinema, according to Danto: early film was exclusively about the world it represented (the young lovers), but now (with some exceptional works) film becomes about the spectator/object relation, that is, about the film experience itself. And when film reflects on its own nature, film, like painting, passes over into philosophy and comes to an end. Danto writes:
Film becomes in a way its own subject; the consciousness that it is film is what the consciousness is of. In this move to self-consciousness cinema marches together with the other arts of the twentieth century in the respect that art itself becomes the ultimate subject of art, a movement of thought which parallels philosophy in the respect that philosophy in the end is what philosophy is about. (PA 230)
Now I agree with Danto’s main thesis that film achieves a philosophical end once it becomes about itself. But that end, I think, is achieved very early on with Keaton and then later repeated in Hitchcock. Before getting to Keaton and our analysis of Hitchcock’s particular films, however, I want first to turn to Gilles Deleuze’s view of the philosophical relevance of Hitchcock, because what Deleuze says about Hitchcock clarifies the idea of an end of film (in Danto’s sense), as I see it.
Like Danto, Deleuze also develops a philosophical view of the history of cinema: “The great directors of the cinema may be compared, in our view, not merely with painters, architects and musicians, but also with thinkers” (Cinema 1, ix). The historical progression of philosophers reappears in film as a progression of directors. And like Danto as well, Deleuze also sees in the history of film a developmental movement that parallels the history of philosophy—with a turn in the middle. “Over several centuries,” Deleuze writes, “from the Greeks to Kant, a revolution took place in philosophy” (Cinema 2, xi). The revolution in Kant is known as the Copernican Turn (Kant 22). As Copernicus reversed our view of planetary rotation, Kant reversed our view of knowledge of objects. Prior to Kant, many philosophers like Hume described the mind as a passive spectator: senses receive impressions and the mind forms corresponding copies as ideas (Hume 3). As Richard Rorty argues, this model permeates the history of philosophy: the mind is like a “mirror of nature.” Kant reversed this view: the world becomes a mirror of the mind. Concepts like space, time, and causality cannot be copied from the world because they cannot be perceived. Instead the mind imposes them on experience. The mind, then, is involved in the construction of its own experience.
Now Deleuze seems to suggest that a similar revolution occurs in film with Hitchcock, who creates a new kind of character based on the viewer in the theater, whose job is to watch and then examine his own “mental relations” (C1, x). Before Hitchcock, for example in Griffith and Eisenstein, the viewer could identify with the protagonist whose actions move the story forward with causality, created with montage. According to Deleuze, “Hitchcock had begun the inversion of this point of view by including the viewer in the film” (Cinema 2, 3). The inversion takes place in two ways: teleological montage becomes causal fragmentation, and the protagonist (once a man of action) becomes a spectator who inquires into the fragmented causality all around him. Deleuze writes:
The character has become a kind of viewer. He shifts, runs and becomes animated in vain, the situation he is in outstrips his motor capacities on all sides, and makes him see and hear what is no longer subject to the rules of a response or an action. He records rather than acts. He is prey to a vision, pursued by it or pursuing it, rather than engaged in an action. (Cinema 2, 3; see also Cinema 1, 205)
The simplest way to understand Deleuze’s point about “including the viewer in the film” is to imagine the activity of inclusion in a thought experiment. Imagine a spectator in a movie theater watching a film. The film action appears fragmentary. What is missing from the film is unity (for the viewer) of the objects within the film. Suddenly the spectator levitates (still in a theater chair) and hovers over the heads of the audience, then he disappears into the screen, and finally he reappears within the film. The film viewer has become a film character and that character is still (like the theater viewer) a spectator, who observes and attempts to unify the action in the screen, and in observing the action, he also comes to observe his own “mental relations”: his ideas of himself in relation to the actions of the other people (or things) in the film.
When we turn to Hitchcock’s cinema to compare Deleuze’s analysis we find many such spectator characters: Jefferies (Jimmy Stewart) in Rear Window seated and watching, Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) in Psycho peering through a peephole, Scottie (Stewart) peering into the abyss in Vertigo, Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) in North by Northwest viewing Mt. Rushmore through a monument viewer, Rupert (Stewart) examining the strange actions of his students in Rope, and Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren) watching the sky filled with birds in The Birds. In each film, a spectator examines an object, finds him- or herself confused, attempts to unify a perspective, and, in attempting to unify a perspective, perceives his or her own mental relations and limitations.
Deleuze is right: Hitchcock does include within the film the viewer who examines his or her mental relations. But a few points need to be added. The ultimate effect of the inclusion of the spectator and the revealing of mental images (as opposed to action images) by Hitchcock is the opposition—not the identity—created between the viewer in the theater and the viewer in the screen. By identifying with a viewer who is confused by moving actions immediately in front of him, the viewer in the theater is thrust from her immersion in the film, back into her “metaphysical Cartesian hole” (as Danto puts it), and forced to examine her own mental relations to the film as an object before her. To clarify this point, we may contrast it with Peter Bogdanovich’s analysis of Rear Window and its place in Hitchcock’s filmography:
Rear Window is sort of Hitchcock’s testament film—I mean, it’s a French term—meaning that in Rear Window perhaps you see the best example of what Hitchcock’s cinema, at its best, stood for, which was essentially the use of the subjective point of view. You have a shot of Jimmy Stewart. You show what he is looking at. You see his reaction. Basically the entire movie is based on that. He looks. You see what he sees. He reacts. That is kind of the heart of Hitchcock’s filmmaking. And he has an incredible ability to put you in the point of view of the leading character or whatever character. (“Rear Window Ethics: An Original Documentary”)
Bogdanovich is correct: the identity of spectator and viewer is what Hitchcock’s cinema is about (which is the same point in Deleuze). But just as Hitchcock “has an incredible ability to put you in the point of view of the leading character”—indeed, because he has this ability—Hitchcock also has an incredible ability to take you out of the point of view of the leading character, and thrust you back into the self-conscious position of the viewer in the theater. This effect is what Danto thinks (rightly) is so essential to the development of self-reflective cinema.
But how does Hitchcock do this? How can he so absolutely immerse the mind in a character (as Bogdanovich points out), and then so forcefully eject it from the film? Hitchcock seals the identity of the viewer and protagonist with an objective perspective of the world viewed from the protagonist’s position. The protagonist looks out at the world, and the viewer looks with him. Now, in two ways, Hitchcock uncouples that identity. First, Hitchcock forces the viewer so deep into the perspective of the protagonist that the viewer’s suspension of self-consciousness cannot be maintained. For example, in Rear Window, the viewer in the theater imagines being Jefferies. Like Jefferies, she imagines herself to be seated, in a very dark room, isolated, facing directly forward, in an immobile chair, staring across a large empty space, at a massive rectangular object filled with people whom she voyeuristically watches, but who cannot see her. The deeper the viewer immerses herself in this perspective, the more she tries to imagine being like Jefferies, the more forcefully does her own actual position come into view. For her imagined character and her own position are identical. She is exactly like Jefferies: seated in a dark room, isolated, facing directly forward, in an immobile chair, staring across a large empty space, at a massive rectangular object filled with people whom she voyeuristically watches, but who cannot see her. Once she becomes self-aware of her position outside the film, the film itself also comes plainly into view as a film. (I’ll return to this technique in Rear Window shortly.)
Second, Hitchcock seals three identities: the viewer’s perspective, the protagonist’s perspective, and the camera’s perspective. We look out as the protagonist, Jefferies, looks out (through the camera). The viewer fully immerses herself in this first person subjective point of view on the objects before her (just as Bogdanovich notes). But because Hitchcock has sealed these perspectives, and the viewer instinctively identifies with the protagonist, she has also laid open her imagination to Hitchcock’s uncoupling of the two perspectives of Jefferies and the camera, and the turning of the one (the camera) upon the other (Jefferies), and thus the turning of her own perspective upon herself. The camera and viewer look out through the protagonist’s perspective and the camera’s perspective—both at once—and then she follows the camera that detaches from Jefferies (as one of her identities) to look directly at Jefferies (another of her identities) who is also looking directly into the camera at the viewer herself, wondering what he (she?) is actually looking at—and wondering what to think while looking at it. The effect is to force the self-reflective stance of the viewer (first person looking at the third person’s point of view looking at the first person’s point of view); and once the viewer is aware of herself as a viewer in the theater, the film comes into view as a film rather than a story. (I’ll return to this technique shortly with North by Northwest.)
In both techniques, Hitchcock achieves the end of ejecting the viewer’s imagination from the story, and initiating a self-reflective inquiry into her own experience. Yet, paradoxically, the more self-conscious the viewer becomes of her own position in relation to the film—that is, the more she assures herself of her own detached identity from the screen—all the more she sees herself objectively mirrored within the screen (for that is precisely what Hitchcock’s films are about). And the more she sees herself objectively mirrored in the screen, the more she comes to realize that this film in front of her has very little to do with a simple (and not even particularly interesting) murder mystery. This film is about her, the viewer, sitting right there, watching a film. And once she grasps this point, she has understood the truth of Danto’s thesis: “Film becomes in a way its own subject; the consciousness that it is film is what the consciousness is of.” But once she grasps the idea of self-reflective cinema, the history of cinema also comes into view. For self-reflective cinema not only reflects on itself—it reflects on its own history: namely, the history of cinema as not self-reflective, the history of cinema as representational up until precisely this point of self-reflectivity. And on further investigation into this remarkable history, the philosophical viewer also comes to realize its complexity and its repetition. For the end of cinema by the time of Hitchcock has already come, as Hitchcock appears only too aware—in the form of Buster Keaton.
Roger Ebert calls Buster Keaton (1895–1966) “the greatest of the silent clowns” (Ebert xx). Keaton was a truly great physical actor (known for his daring), a radically experimental director whose effects still are jaw-dropping, and the man who achieved the philosophical end of film in 1924 with Sherlock Jr., which, along with The Cameraman (1928), is essential for understanding Hitchcock’s Rear Window. The opening frame of The Cameraman reads: “When acclaiming our modern heroes, let’s not forget The News Reel Cameraman … the daredevil who defies death to give us pictures of the world’s happenings.” In the next shot a daredevil photographer takes pictures on a battlefield. Then a new text frame reads: “And there are other types of photographers.” Keaton (as a character) now appears as a different kind of cameraman: not a brave daredevil but a common man who takes pictures of normal people at a reasonable rate: “TINTYPES 10¢.” Both cameramen are spectators within the film. But the war cameraman not only photographs action, he is a man of action. The tintype photographer, however, is much more of a spectator: “he records rather than acts,” as Deleuze writes of Hitchcock.
Keaton again inserts the spectator into the film in Sherlock Jr. A man works as a projectionist in a movie theater while studying to become a detective (like Sherlock Holmes). The first frame reads: “While employed as a moving picture operator in a small town theatre he was studying to be a detective.” The first cinematic shot of the film establishes confusion between the spectator and object. The first shot is taken of a movie theater from the perspective of the screen looking out on the audience, with Keaton himself (the actor and director)—playing both a viewer and a film projectionist—seated alone in the theater, not watching a film but reading a book, How to Be a Detective.
Later he gets his chance. While visiting The Girl, his girlfriend (Kathryn McGuire), another man, The Sheik (Ward Crane), steals her father’s (Joe Keaton) watch, pawns it and buys her a gift, then plants the pawn receipt on Sherlock Jr.—the aspiring detective who gets caught red-handed with the receipt while presuming to solve the case of the missing watch. Having failed and lost the girl, and now an apparent thief, Sherlock Jr. gives up detective work and returns to film. The text frame reads: “As a detective he was all wet, so he went back to see what he could do to his other job.” Not particularly good as a projectionist either, Sherlock Jr. falls asleep in the middle of showing the film Hearts and Pearls (the story of stolen pearls) and begins to dream. In his dream he steps out of his sleeping body and notices the film rolling and examines the screen. He sees the same film Hearts and Pearls, but now Sherlock Jr. sees it anew. The two leads in the film have become the two leads in his own life: The Sheik and The Girl. In one of the most stunning sequences in the history of cinema, Sherlock Jr. (still out of body in the screen) walks down the aisle of the movie theater and steps right into the film itself—only to be quickly tossed back out into the theater by The Sheik. Frustrated but undeterred, Sherlock Jr. waits for a scene change (without The Sheik) and jumps back in and sits on a bench to rest. But the scenes suddenly start to change around him: the bench disappears, and he falls down in a bustling street. Now he finds himself on a mountain cliff and nearly falls. Now he is surrounded by lions, now in the path of a speeding train, now in the ocean, now in the snow, and now he falls over the original bench. To quote Deleuze on Hitchcock’s viewer-protagonist: “the situation he is in outstrips his motor capacities on all sides.” Sherlock Jr. struggles to impose concepts of substance and causality to anticipate and schematize what might happen in the next frame given the last—just as the viewers in a theater do. Finally he gains control (within the film within the film) and assumes his new character: he becomes “the world’s greatest detective—Sherlock Jr.!” Sherlock Jr. now proceeds to solve the case and gets the girl. Meanwhile Sherlock Jr.’s girlfriend has undertaken her own investigation and discovered him to be innocent and The Sheik a criminal; so she returns to Sherlock Jr. in the projection booth, who upon waking has the same inference in hand. The two lead characters in the film Hearts and Pearls embrace as Sherlock Jr. and his girlfriend also embrace in the projection booth.
Sherlock Jr. is only marginally a detective story: it’s true power lies in its self-reflective form. And the real detective story lies in Keaton’s own Holmesian investigation into the representational structure of film itself. By examining the film from all sides, Keaton discovers (and creates) an entirely new kind of self-reflective cinema. The impact of this film, and, Keaton’s cinema in general, on Hitchcock should not be underestimated. For Hitchcock not only rearticulates the end of film, but does so self-consciously, knowing the end has already come. He thereby achieves a cinema of even greater self-reflectivity than Keaton because Hitchcock’s cinema is at once formally and historically self-conscious—and nowhere is this self-consciousness more evident than in Rear Window.
Jefferies is a combination of three of Keaton’s characters: the newsreel war cameraman, the common man tintype photographer, and Sherlock Jr. Jefferies begins as a daredevil cameraman (like Keaton’s war cameraman): “a daredevil cameraman who defies death to give us pictures of the world’s happenings.” But he breaks his leg taking a dangerous shot and sits confined to a wheelchair. So, just as Keaton transitions from action cameraman to passive spectator cameraman, Hitchcock also turns Jefferies into a pure spectator, who observes through his camera common lives like Keaton’s tintype photographer. Yet Jefferies does not observe people’s everyday lives from the street like Keaton’s photographer. Rather, like Keaton’s projectionist in Sherlock Jr., he observes from a rear window. Jefferies sits relatively immobile (like a man in a theater or a projectionist) and stares straight ahead across a gulf of inaction at a massive wall whose proportions mirror a movie screen; and the windows themselves also appear in letterboxed proportions: each window frames the action of an individual like a movie screen. Examining these windows, Jefferies also examines himself, just as Sherlock Jr. examines his own mind as he watches a film from his own rear window. As Deleuze puts it, “The hero of Rear Window has access to the mental image, not simply because he is a photographer, but because he is in a state of immobility: he is reduced as it were to a pure optical situation” (205).
Within the windows of the wall, people’s private stories unfold, and Jefferies observes and analyzes. He sees in their lives representations of his own life because he imposes the categories of his own mind upon the empirical givens of the apartment building windows and discovers relations among the objects and himself. Miss Torso, for example, represents the isolation of Jefferies’s own girlfriend Lisa Carol Fremont (Grace Kelly), whom Jefferies holds at arm’s length. The newlyweds represent the future Lisa wants. The feuding couple represents Jefferies’s fear of marriage. The struggling artist represents Jefferies’s own struggles with his photographic art (which have put him in a wheelchair). And Miss Lonely Hearts represents Lisa in the future without Jefferies: both women serve dinner for the men they love, but Miss Lonely Hearts only pretends someone is there with her. Jefferies and Lisa discuss the various rooms and compare them to Jefferies’s own. Speaking of Miss Torso’s apartment, Lisa says to Jefferies, “You said it resembled my apartment, didn’t you?”
Again the influence of Sherlock Jr. is striking. Sherlock Jr. in the dream sequence also sees in the film Hearts and Pearls representations from his own life: the leads become his girlfriend and the villain. He sees from his rear window a crime take place (a theft). Hitchcock repeats this story in Rear Window: Jefferies also sees from his rear window a crime take place (a murder)—and, like Sherlock Jr., Jefferies—who is also no master detective—must become a master detective in order to solve the case. Jefferies, however, has a problem. He remains immobile in his wheelchair, much as Sherlock Jr. remains (sleeping) in his projectionist chair. So he must project his imagination and identity into the object viewed, just as Sherlock Jr. the projectionist also “projects” his own imagined identity into the screen, and just as a film viewer projects her own identity into the film screen. We want Jefferies to enter the screen, but he can no more enter than we ourselves (the viewers) can enter a film screen. But Jefferies, like Sherlock Jr., also has a girlfriend, and he sends her into the object (the opposing apartment building). So, like Sherlock Jr.’s girlfriend, Fremont also becomes a detective, and, like Sherlock Jr.’s mind, she traverses the space between the rear window and the spectator object. Once across the space between spectator and object, Fremont looks back at Jefferies and at the viewers, who identify simultaneously with both Jefferies and Fremont as spectators and objects of spectation.
The opposite traversal of the theater-like distance also occurs as the murderer catches Jefferies spying on him. Fremont finds the ring of the dead woman, puts it on her own finger (note the symbolism of what Jefferies himself might be capable of), and then, facing backward to Jefferies from the murderer’s apartment, she puts her hands behind her back and points to the ring on her finger. But the murderer sees her silent code to Jefferies and looks across the courtyard to see Jefferies spying on him. And when he looks out, he looks directly out in the second person at the viewer—and indeed, Hitchcock’s point is strikingly clear, as the murderer catches the film viewer (previously in a one-way blind spectatorial position) spying on him as well. Now he leaves his apartment and shows up in the dark to meet Jefferies (and to meet the viewer)—who, remember, is also in a dark room (the theater)—as if to say, I see you seeing me; now see yourself seeing you seeing me.
Sherlock Jr. also looks into and out of the screen after entering it, and once he has solved the case, he also returns from the screen to the rear window. Keaton and Hitchcock spend the entirety of these two films alternating the sides of the spectator/object opposition. As a consequence, negotiating the complexity of Rear Window (and Sherlock Jr.) is no easy task. A series of spectatorial convulsions keeps the mind off balance and unable fully to immerse itself within the film. Before the film, the spectator sits quietly in a theater aware of her position. The film begins. She identifies with the protagonists, Jefferies and Fremont. The protagonists peer out at a screen-shaped object (the letterboxed wall of apartments filled with windows that are also letterbox shaped). The more the viewer identifies with a seated viewer in the dark peering voyeuristically across a space at a letterboxed shape, the more she becomes aware that that is precisely her position in the theater. The deeper her identity with the character, the more the identity uncouples from the character, and at a certain point the uncoupling becomes strikingly conscious and the viewer is simply jolted from her vicarious adventure to see immediately before her the film as a film about the viewer herself watching the film right in front of her. She may continue to enjoy the story unfold, but an entirely new line of inquiry has opened up. For she is now actively engaged in examining herself examining an object that appears to be about what she is doing right now. The genius of Rear Window lies in how it simultaneously opens these two dialectical lines of inquiry at once: one by the film about a murder mystery, and the other by the film about itself. To clarify this point about two lines of dialogue, a brief analysis of Noël Carroll’s view of film narration will be helpful.
In Mystifying Movies, Carroll (drawing on V.I. Pudovkin) develops the view that films narrate by raising and answering plot questions. An initial scene raises a question, and later scenes answer it. The scenes move forward in time by means of this dialectic: “The basic connective—the rhetorical bond between the two scenes—is the question/answer” (171). Carroll gives an example:
If a giant shark appears offshore, unbeknownst to the local authorities, and begins to ravage lonely swimmers, this scene or series of scenes (or this event or series of events) raises the question of whether the shark will ever be discovered. This question is likely to be answered in some later scene when someone figures out why all those swimmers are missing. (171)
Carroll’s example comes from Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, but the same dialectic can be found in virtually any film, and certainly in Hitchcock’s films. In Rear Window, for example, once Jefferies suspects a murder, a question arises: Will Jefferies (in a wheelchair) catch the murderer? That story unfolds according to a narrative dialectic. But in addition to a narrative dialectic—to build on Carroll’s analysis—a phenomenological dialectic between viewer and viewed also unfolds within the film. These two dialectics have some common features: both rely on a relation of the viewer to the film; both take place in the form of question and answer; and both are unspoken. On this last point, we do not, for example, need a voiceover in Jaws for certain questions to arise in the mind of the viewer: Will the shark kill again? Will the shark be discovered?
Nor do we need a voiceover for certain questions to arise in the mind of the viewer about the relation of the film to itself. For example, the viewer asks: Why am I suddenly so vividly self-aware in viewing Rear Window? Why does the architecture of the set look exactly like a film theater? Is it my failure of will to immerse in the film, or does this film seem purposefully to throw into relief my own relational position to the screen? Is this film somehow actually about the experience of film itself? And, if so, what would that mean for the history of film? Just as a film asks questions about its characters, a film can also ask questions about itself and about the nature of film in general. These questions can also be uttered in the second person and first person self-reflexive: Rear Window asks the viewer: Do you see yourself reflected isomorphically in the screen? Do you understand that this film is not really about a murder mystery? Have you grasped what is really going on? And what exactly am I, if I am not a representational film?
Questions of this film-phenomenological form differ from narrative plot questions because plot questions are not self-reflective, and reflective phenomenological questions about the film as a film are not narrativistic: the two kinds of questions have almost nothing to do with each other. Narrativistically, a viewer watching Jaws wonders what will happen next within the story (but no phenomenological questions arise). Phenomenologically, a viewer watching Rear Window (as a self-reflective film) wonders what is going on now within the film/viewer relation (and narrative questions are backgrounded). Once one becomes aware of the second dialectic arising from the first, the film experience may become increasingly confusing and difficult: for the film seems to be both narrativistic and non-narrativistic. This confusion only compounds as the viewer continues to inquire into the self-reflective structure of the film. For upon viewing Rear Window as a self-reflective (and, in some sense, non-narrativistic) film, a new and second narrativistic dimension emerges within the film, one that tells the story of film itself, just as Warhol’s Brillo Boxes tells the story of painting (from its own perspective). One cannot fully understand the philosophical dimension of the Brillo Boxes without some grasp of the prior movements of representationalist painting that precede it, and against which Warhol reacts. Similarly one cannot fully understand the self-reflective dimension of Rear Window without some grasp of the history of representationalist cinema—beginning with its most primitive forms such as the praxinoscopes and magic lanterns—and then its first historical self-overcoming in Keaton. This second narrative (told by the self-reflective film) has the genre form, as Danto points out in his discussion of Hegel and Warhol, of a philosophical bildungsroman: a narrative of the ascent from primitive representation to mature self-reflectivity.
This formal and historical self-reflectivity is the defining feature of Hitchcock’s work and can be seen throughout his films. While not all can be discussed here, a few do stand out. In Psycho, for example, Hitchcock again inserts the spectator into the screen—only this time as villain rather than hero. Norman Bates lives in a house on a hill and runs a motel below it. He spies on his guests from his house through a window and from a hole in a wall of a motel room. The house window and the motel room hole create the same one-way blind, detached spectator point of view of the window in Rear Window, the same one-way blind spectator point of view in a movie theater, and the same rear window spectator view in Sherlock Jr. Through the hole, Bates sees a world, but not the world as it is in itself. Like Sherlock Jr., he sees a world made from representations of his own mind that he projects onto the world. He sees a world made from the simply givens of his guests and the mad categories he imposes upon them—categories of a man who keeps the corpse of his beloved dead mother in a bed in his house, because he believes she is still watching him, because he has internalized her spectator’s gaze as an additional spectator within his own mind. As Bates spies on a woman, he knows his mother will punish him for his attraction to the new motel guest. He begs her for his freedom, but she punishes him in the form of Bates himself dressed as his mother.
Of course, at first we do not know about Bates. In fact, we intuitively identify with him. Bates appears to be a reasonable and mild-mannered motel owner who helps a woman—who, we know, is on the run. The identification with Bates, however, is short-lived and soon uncouples as we discover Bates to be a voyeur who spies on the private lives of others. But in the moment of that uncoupling a new identification simultaneously arises with Bates: for the viewer sees herself reflected in the character of Bates as a Peeping Tom, and is promptly thrown back on herself as a detached spectator watching the screen. She, like Bates, is also a voyeur looking in through a Cartesian peephole with its one-way blind perspective—peering in on the unsuspecting individuals and imposing her own projected imagination onto the objects before her. The viewer now examines herself as an object, yet simultaneously finds Bates himself equally examining himself as an object, spectating on himself (as his mother) about his spectation on the woman. He watches himself watching others from the rear window in the house and the hole in the wall. The identity of the film viewer with a psychopathic voyeur now uncomfortably tightens. That she, the viewer, like Bates, is a conflicted human being whose self-consciousness lies precisely in her capacity for self-interrogation, and no less subject to madness, cannot be lost on the reflective viewer for whom the Hegelian divided self is an epistemological fact.
The reflective viewer now suspends the narrativistic dialectic of what will happen next to Bates, as the phenomenological dialectic comes plainly into view, and she inquires into her own relation to the film, and the film’s relation to itself. The viewer asks herself: What exactly is going on here, besides the story of a killer? For she senses something self-reflective is taking place. The film appears to be about her, the viewer, another conflicted spectator who takes great pleasure in voyeurism and imaginatively projecting her identity into an object. And once this inference is in hand, the film appears anew. Psycho is no more about Bates-the-killer than it is about the viewer’s relation to herself and to the screen in which the killer appears. Psycho, like Rear Window, and like Sherlock Jr. is a philosophical meditation by film on the representational form of film. Psycho is about itself.
In North by Northwest, Roger Thornhill is mistaken for a spy (George Kaplan) and kidnapped. The spy/spectator must impose order on his confusion by conceiving himself within the manifold. He is not a spy but must become a spy to discover the plot around him. His investigation ultimately takes him to Mt. Rushmore National Park, a spectator visitation site. Upon arrival, he stands facing the grand overwhelming rectangular object, just as we face the massive rectangular object of the screen, containing the stone monument that looks back at the viewer. The camera pans in on the monument and then zooms through a circular viewing hole. Suddenly the camera pulls back from a first-person perspective and reveals that what the spectator (in the theater) had actually been viewing was the monument from Thornhill’s perspective, through a monument viewer (like mounted binoculars). Now we see the relation from a third-person perspective: we see Thornhill looking through the freestanding monument viewer at the monument.
This shot series occurs quickly but is important for understanding the film. Thornhill’s perspective resembles that of Jefferies in Rear Window and Norman Bates in Psycho. A detached spectator views (through a glass) an object whose proportions resemble a cinema screen from across a large empty space, and like Jefferies and Bates, he is confused by the object and his own relation to the object—an object that appears to look back at him and calls into question his own spectatorial position. Talking to the professor at his side, Thornhill says: “I don’t like the way Teddy Roosevelt is looking at me.” The four faces on the massive wall, like a movie screen with their letterboxed proportions, look back at the viewer as well.
The camera by this point has moved from in front of Thornhill looking at the monument (first person), to the side of Thornhill looking at Thornhill looking at the monument (third person), and now to the back of Thornhill (first person again), looking once again at the monument with Thornhill in front of the monument (facing the monument like the film viewer). The first transition reveals that what we were watching is someone else’s perspective, while the second transition reveals to us our own self-conscious perspective. We look at Roosevelt, but then are forced to reconsider who is doing the looking. We then look at Thornhill looking at Roosevelt and are invited to reconsider what other viewing relations occur. Now we look forward at Thornhill looking forward at Roosevelt looking back. This third perspective forces the viewer’s awareness of her own perspective—and not only her own perspective, but her own perspective on Thornhill’s perspective on Roosevelt’s perspective—of her perspective.
To take this series once again from the top, we begin with deep immersion in the protagonist’s perspective. We do not even know we are looking through a glass, and we see no other characters. But then through two crucial perspective transitions, Hitchcock quickly expels the viewer from the screen. By the time the camera is behind Thornhill, we are no longer in the film as projected identities. We are squarely and uncomfortably back in our self-consciously spectatorial position: examining ourselves examining a film in which a spectator is examining himself examining an object through a glass and wondering whether the seemingly inert object (the monument) is somehow reflecting on him. In this moment, we know that the film itself is looking back at us—not literally but conceptually, and looking into itself as well. The film’s subject matter is not the case of mistaken identity (Thornhill’s), but its own self-identity in front of a reflective viewer. For the film is actually about us watching it. Instinctively, the mind attempts to reinsert, and Hitchcock allows it, as he slingshots the imagination directly into the monument, with Thornhill trekking across the faces of the spectator site. The re-immersion, however, is temporary, to say the least, as Hitchcock portrays on the screen in conceptual form the very idea of the immersion of the spectator from detached Cartesian position—into and out of the object again.
In Rope, Rupert Cadwell is a scholar who studies the world from a detached perspective—he is a kind of spectator. Two of Rupert’s students, Brandon Shaw (John Dall) and Philip Morgan (Farley Granger), murder their friend and fellow student David Kentley (Dick Hogan) in cold blood for art’s sake. They put him in a long wooden chest and serve dinner on top of the chest at a party for his father and aunt and his fiancée. Brandon and Philip accept Rupert’s Nietzschean view that murder is immoral for the common man but permitted for superior individuals. Brandon thinks himself superior and David inferior. Rupert arrives late (which further detaches him as a spectator). He soon senses something wrong. Sitting in the middle of the manifold, he unifies the strands of action by determining causality within the party. Rupert schematizes the objects around him by means of conversation on Nietzsche’s philosophy of crime and the superman and discovers the killers in the form of his students.
Brandon admits to the crime but accepts no moral culpability. He simply repeats back to Rupert what Rupert has always told him and held true. Rupert hears, in horror, his own lectures taking life as though they had leapt off the chalkboard, picked up a yard of rope, and strangled David themselves. Rupert says, “You’ve thrown my own words right back in my face, Brandon.” Just as Kant finds the subject looking back at itself through its own construction of reality, Rupert finds himself at the center of a crime he didn’t commit. The constructive activity may be unconscious to the mind (as the constructive imagination is largely unconscious on Kant’s view)—but the product of the mind’s construction is there to be seen nonetheless. Rupert, however, cannot and will not accept his own construction in the form of Brandon. His ideas about morality were merely a parlor game played with Nietzsche’s texts to entertain the young on the careless assumption that no one would believe what was being said in class in the name of truth. But the spectator in the theater who performs her own investigation sees the matter otherwise.
The relation of viewer to viewed once again appears in the film and renders the film self-reflective. The viewer in the theater identifies with Rupert, a relatively passive, seated, detached spectator who watches a context unfold. The identification can be maintained more or less while Rupert is part spectator and part guest. But the two roles fall apart once Rupert realizes what he is viewing: the aftermath of a murder; and with that uncoupling, the viewer achieves a new measure of aesthetic distance. In identifying with a perspective of what is right in front of her eyes in the form of a large rectangular object, the attention contracts from the screen (as itself a large rectangular object), and the relation to the screen is thrown into relief. The relation becomes increasingly difficult as the viewer forcefully attempts to reinsert herself into the protagonist’s perspective (because the story is not over). But the character of Brandon will not allow it, as he casually holds up a philosophical mirror to Rupert (with whom we identify), and shows Rupert his own reflection. Brandon seems to say to Rupert: You are more involved in this than you think are; look at yourself and see; you are not a passive spectator.
At this point, the viewer is forced again to examine her position in relation to the screen and the theater. But no sooner does she contract (again) her view and examine the phenomenological content immediately before her, than that content appears complete within the film itself. Often noted, Rope takes place almost entirely within one room, which gives the film continuity. But the one room film also reflects the one-room structure of the theater. In the film, a back row of seats faces out directly toward the seats in the theater. In viewing the film, we are looking at a kind of conceptual mirror image. The spectator Rupert sits with the other guests in a row before a large rectangular object that fills a large portion of the room and concentrates the attention of the room upon it. But all except Brandon and Philip are oblivious to the rectangular object for what it actually is (a coffin)—just as all in the theater are oblivious to what the large rectangular object is immediately in front of them (and which concentrates their attention): namely, a film screen. We do not think of the screen as a screen. We sit unconscious of what lies before us as we lose our sense of self inside the party at Brandon’s and Philip’s apartment. Hitchcock has once again immersed the spectator in a narrative, promptly expelled the imagination from the object back into a self-conscious spectatorial position, and then forced the mind to examine itself examining the object, only to find the protagonist (with whom it originally identified) doing exactly the same thing: examining himself examining the object immediately in front of him. Indeed, Rope is only marginally a murder mystery—like Rear Window, like Psycho, like North by Northwest, and Sherlock Jr., Rope is about itself.
In The Birds we’re introduced to a quiet coastal town, as Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren) our protagonist, delivers a gift of lovebirds in a small motorboat. Like Jefferies in Rear Window (and the film viewer herself), Melanie sits confined, detached and isolated, in a purely observational position. Like Jefferies who sits opposed to the apartments, and the film viewer who sits opposed to the screen, Melanie sits opposed to a massive sky, whose objects, the birds, seem passive and harmless (like the distant objects on a theater screen). They can be caught and caged and given as gifts to be kept as pets. Melanie, however, has made a mistake. For seated calmly in her boat, the once passive objects of the sky begin to descend and attack. They attack Melanie and the entire coastal town.
Some think this film to be a philosophical study in how the powers of nature—seemingly passive and under human control—can erupt at any time without warning. The artifice of culture is an unstable illusion and a temporary mask on what lies beneath as sex and violence and the irrationality of the unconscious. Camille Paglia develops this view in her book The Birds: “The Birds charts a return of the repressed, a release of primitive forces of sex and appetite that have been subdued but never fully tamed” (10). There is something to this point, but it should not be taken too far. For the age-old story of the unstable polarity of reason versus nature seems to be only the occasion for Hitchcock’s underlying philosophical interrogation of the film experience itself. Hitchcock achieves this form in the same way he achieves it in the other films discussed. He begins by immersing the viewer in a story; the viewer soon finds that the protagonist is a viewer who questions what she is viewing; the viewer steadily becomes aware of herself in the theater; and in becoming aware of herself she sees anew that same relational awareness mirrored in the screen.
What is most interesting about The Birds, however, is how, as the film unfolds, the subject/object poles reverse: from human-spectators watching bird-objects to bird-spectators watching human-objects. The transition is achieved by the birds themselves overtaking the position of the seated spectator (through violence). By the end of the film, Hitchcock has sealed the identity of the viewer with Melanie, dislodged that identity, and resealed the viewer’s identity with the birds. The final sequences complete the reversal, beginning with the gas station scene. After the gas station explodes in flames, the camera moves to the perspective of the birds. The shot here is from the sky, among other birds in flight, all looking down at the flames. They are spectators in a row viewing a cinematic object, and we the viewers view the same flames from this bird’s-eye point of view. This same perspective also closes the film, which Hitchcock considered the film’s most difficult shot (as he explains in an interview with Bogdanovich in “All about the Birds”). The key to this last shot is its identity with the architectural space of the inside of a movie theater. From the back of the theater, we can (if we detract attention from the screen) look out and down on other film viewers in the theater. In the final shot of The Birds, Hitchcock shows us precisely this image on the screen. For the birds now appear as though they were seated in their own theater inside the film—hundreds of them, perched in rows, seated quietly in the dark, like film viewers watching objects across an empty space—objects that happen to be the same people with whom we originally identified in the film. In the moment the viewer realizes she is viewing a conceptual mirror image of her own position in the theater, the entire film (as a film) comes perfectly into view, and she grasps that what Hitchcock is doing in The Birds has little to do with birds: what he is doing is philosophy, and what he is examining philosophically is the self-reflective structure of his own representational art form.
Figure 11.1. The Birds—birds as theater audience members.
To this day, Hitchcock remains one of the world’s greatest directors—perhaps the greatest. His stories of the complexities of the human soul captivate the imagination with some of the most beautiful and sublime and suspenseful moving images ever put to the screen. But Hitchcock’s genius far transcends his own mastery of the ultimate medium of representation. His true genius lies in the completion of a cinematic and philosophical bildungsroman that entered its own Hegelian struggle for recognition in the mid-nineteenth century with primitive projectors. What began as the quintessential representational medium of art, and which would speed painting to its philosophical conclusion, would itself also speed to its own philosophical end in self-reflectivity (twice): once in Keaton and then in Hitchcock—each of whom is every bit as much philosopher as filmmaker. Hitchcock’s cinema not only raises questions about plot but equally raises questions about its own medium, and thereby transcends its fundamentally representationalist form and becomes self-interrogating—thus passing over from cinema to philosophy. Yet in completing the form of film, Hitchcock’s cinema equally reflects its own historical self-consciousness, and its recapitulation of the end that has already come in the work of Keaton, a fact of which Hitchcock in Rear Window as a study of Sherlock Jr. seems all to aware. Yet Hitchcock is able, in the final analysis, to transcend even Keaton (if only to a very limited extent). For whereas Keaton’s cinema self-interrogates and tells the story of its own medium, Hitchcock’s cinema not only self-interrogates and tells the story of the its own medium, but it also reflectively tells the story of how Keaton tells the story of how cinema evolved from representationalism to self-reflectivity (from a later historically self-reflective perspective)—thereby rendering Hitchcock’s cinema even more historically self-conscious, more self-reflective, and, in a certain sense, tragic as well: confined as it is to reflect on an epic end that has already come and gone. Beyond this end, no significant philosophical development in film is possible—any more than painting has a philosophical direction after Warhol. Film continues on, of course, but these post-historical films can do no more than to portray philosophical ideas on the screen or to recapitulate the same lines of development already traced out from early representationalism to the later self-interrogating and historically self-conscious cinema of Keaton and Hitchcock.
I am very grateful to Elizabeth F. Cooke, Steven Sanders, and Barton Palmer for helpful comments on this chapter. Of course, any mistakes that remain are my own.
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