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Critical Inquiry (2010) - Hitchcock's Hidden Pictures

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Miller talks about Alfred Hitchcock's hidden pictures. First, from Strangers on a Train, something obvious, literally obstructing the way. This surreal fatso is of course Alfred Hitchcock, the director of Strangers on a Train. Every Hitchcock thriller stages such a moment, when, as Richard Allen puts it, "the flesh-and-blood director himself" enters the image, cutting a passing figure onscreen; but the Strangers appearance is exemplary because one can't miss it. No sooner does Hitchcock come forward onto the platform than every theatrical audience all over the world emits the pleased purrs, the complacent chuckles of its recognition; the communal gloating is as definitive of the cameo as is Hitchcock's own flesh and blood. Even so, it remains a somewhat puzzling response.

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Hitchcock's Hidden Pictures

D. A. Miller

Perhaps you read too much.
— Guy to Bruno in Strangers on a Train

1. Hidden Pictures

First, from Strangers on a Train, something obvious, literally obstructing the way. The eponymous train is coming into Metcalf; Guy Haines is about to get off, and, though it's early in the film, he's bearing considerable narrative momentum with his valise and tennis rackets. At Metcalf, he's supposed to meet his hateful wife Miriam about a divorce that would allow him to marry the more personable Ann Morton, but he has also just met Bruno Antony, a stranger on the train, who has broached a less civilized plan; Bruno will murder Miriam if, in an undetectable (because unmotivated) swap of killings, Guy will murder Bruno's tyrannical father. We are already savoring the delicious conviction that the psychopathic alternative will be the one to grip the rails. But now, all of a sudden, a man comes onto the station platform proposing to board the train at the same narrow door where Guy stands ready to leave it; and the man's corpulence, not to mention a large contrabass that he is brandishing like a second paunch, magnifies the impediment. Yet between Guy and this stranger, not the slightest contact. Nimbly slithering around the fat man as if tracing the invisible but firm line of a cordon sanitaire, Guy makes sure to prevent any brush of the sort that has just made him so unexpectedly intimate with Bruno. Indeed, as he waves his valise in the air to avoid grazing the fat man's fat instrument, his rather theatrical courtesy seems less a sign of good manners than the subtle expression of an aversion. After he has detrained, moreover, the camera is neither so polite nor so subtle. Instead of following Guy on the narrative business, it mercilessly lingers on the fat man as he proceeds to hoist his bass and then himself up the stairs onto the train, the low angle of the shot emphasizing the mighty labor of his haunch.

Humiliated by both Guy's polite disregard and the camera's cruel observation, this surreal fatso is of course Alfred Hitchcock, the director of Strangers on a Train. I have been describing what is known as his appearance in the film. Every Hitchcock thriller stages such a moment, when, as Richard Allen puts it, "the flesh-and-blood director himself' enters the image, cutting a passing figure onscreen; but the Strangers appearance is exemplary because you can't miss it1. No sooner does Hitchcock come forward onto the platform than every theatrical audience all over the world emits the pleased purrs, the complacent chuckles of its recognition; the communal gloating is as definitive of the cameo as is Hitchcock's own flesh and blood.2 Even so, it remains a somewhat puzzling response. To judge by our swollen heads, one would suppose that Hitchcock had been trying to escape our attention rather than call it to a convention of his own devising. One would also suppose that many people in the audience, less clever than ourselves, fail to notice his appearance, even though (barring infants and aliens) such ignorant spectators are hard to come by. This appearance is no secret, no obscure reference for an elite; mass culture spectators, we read only what has been made legible for that purpose. And yet we all feel as pleased as a child who has just discovered a hidden picture, and as knowing as the cinephile who is watching Alain Resnais's Last Year at Marienbad and smiles to himself when he detects Hitchcock hovering in mid-air among the hotel guests.

For though everyone in the theater may be familiar with Hitchcock's identity, this familiarity is not shared by anyone on screen. It is in relation to these ignorant "persons of the fiction" that our feelings of superiority have been instigated and feel justified. As whom, after all, does Hitchcock appear in his films? Certainly, he never appears as anyone other than Hitchcock; he is never a character who bears another name or even anonymously exercises the slightest narrative function. As Anthony Shaffer put it, "he would be himself, but he wouldn't be anybody else"; and, accordingly, we do not say, "there is a bassist played by Alfred Hitchcock," but "there is Alfred Hitchcock carrying a bass." Yet though the fiction never identifies its author as someone else, neither does it ever come to acknowledge him as Hitchcock. Guy Haines, for instance, is utterly — and, to us, amazingly — oblivious to the fact he has just crossed paths with a film director as famous for his image as for the films regularly signed by that image. This is the self-contradiction intrinsic to the appearance; the fat man is nobody but Hitchcock, and yet Hitchcock is nobody but a fat man.

His fictional nonrecognition is absolute, universal. It is not just that he is unsightly among the beautiful people or anonymous and shabby among the rich and famous. With no part to play, no narrative pertinence, he lacks social being altogether; and absent such relational traction, his embodiment has no more existential grounding than a ghost. (That is what Resnais lets us understand in Marienbads faux appearance, where the obese Hitchcock is shown defying gravity.) Paradoxically, Hitchcock's appearance in his films dramatizes his invisibility to their world; he arrives on screen only to confirm this social death, and having done that, like a person who "knows when he is not wanted," he disappears to trouble us no more. That is why our own recognition of Hitchcock inevitably means patronizing him. Like gods, we seem to be giving him the only life he will ever know; like parents, we bestow on him the primal recognition that he seems able to get in no other way and from no other source. "Yes," our complacent notice says to the fat man, "Your appearance to the contrary, you are truly Hitchcock the filmmaker. We love you for being him, and perhaps even more, for your self-abasing dependency on us to see you are him."

Let me now bring forward another specimen of obviousness that comes even earlier in Strangers: the chance encounter between Guy and Bruno that gets the story going. If Hitchcock's appearance offered the obviousness of an obstruction, of something in the way of the story, this accident waiting to happen — justly regarded as one of Hitchcock's most absorbing visual narrations — offers the obviousness of the way itself, of the narrative path that our attention is being directed to follow. The film famously begins by crosscutting between two men's shoes: a pied pair walking leftward and a plain pair walking to the right. The alternation accelerates, with suitable musical punctuation, and we ex...

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References

  1. ↑ I borrow the phrase, with its useful emphasis, from Richard Allen, Hitchcock's Romantic Irony (New York, 2007), p. 21.
  2. ↑ Thomas M. Leitch argues that "it is the audience's desire for pleasure ... that gives the cameos their point." His claim seems to be true as far as it goes, by which I mean—and will be showing—that this Hitchcock game goes further than notions of "pleasure" and "point" take us (Thomas M. Leitch, Find the Director and Other Hitchcock Games [Athens, Ga., 1991], p. 5).
  3. ↑ In print, I mean. But on celluloid, there is room to wonder. The first scene of Francois Ozon's Swimming Pool (2003) alludes to the opening conversation in Strangers, and seems to reflect on the two Hitchcock appearances (the hidden celebrity photograph, the unrecognized passerby) that frame it on either end. The detective novelist Sarah Morton is accosted by a fellow tube rider who, while reading one of her books, has identified her from the author photo:
    "Excuse me, but aren't you Sarah Morton? It is you. I recognize you. Look, I'm reading your latest novel. I love it. I'm a big fan of Inspector Dorwell. I've read all your books—"
    "You must have mistaken me for someone else. I'm not the person you think I am. Excuse me." (leaves the train)
    In an obvious sense, the reprise is a reversal. Morton is recognized as an author, though she doesn't want to be; and if, as one can't help thinking, Hitchcock would like to be recognized as an author, and not just a fat man, he has made this almost impossible. But both authors are bent on affirming, against the common perception of them, an unknown self and a secret writing.
  4. ↑ This puts us in an intimate connection with Guy's plight. The famous tennis player is so used to being recognized that when Bruno says, "Aren't you Guy Haines?" he need answer only with a fatuously benevolent smile. But all smiles stop together when he loses his alibi because — in an amazing reversal of his habitual good fortune — the drunken Professor Collins doesn't know who he is, and so doesn't remember meeting him on the train, and so can't give him an alibi. Like Hitchcock in the appearance, or like Bruno who must wear his name on a tie clip, Guy is made to inhabit the abject condition of nonrecognition.
  5. ↑ Andrew Sarris, "Hitchcock," Focus on Hitchcock, ed. Albert J. LaValley (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1972), p. 88.
  6. ↑ Bill Krohn, Hitchcock at Work (London, 2000), pp. 123–24.
  7. ↑ Only a few months ago, for example, the blogosphere was percolating with conjecture that Hitchcock had made an appearance in drag in North by Northwest. Closer attention reveals that the lady in question is not Hitchcock, but Jesslyn Fax, the actress who plays the sculptress in Rear Window. And yet the pointed gratuitousness of the camera's focus on her unites with her own direct look at us to give the moment the structure of a Hitchcock appearance.
  8. ↑ One of many examples: as the train is pulling into Metcalf, a bulky man may be observed just starting to emerge from the shadows on screen right; it might be Hitchcock, who in the very next shot comes on the platform from that direction, as if continuing the movement. But it isn't; the first man does not carry a bass, and Hitchcock is wearing a suit of a different shade.
  9. ↑ Even with the surrogate, moreover, a similar problem may be shown to arise. Like the cameo, the surrogate is never unambiguously singular, and it too enjoys an essentially doubtful distribution. In Strangers, for instance, one critic will maintain that Hitchcock is Bruno, while another, equally persuasive, will contend that Hitchcock is the anonymous passerby who causes Bruno to drop his lighter. And once you start considering the many such claims, along with the prospects that may be suggested by your own ingenuity, you will find your list of surrogates expanding to become virtually coterminous with the entire character-field. Whereupon the notion of a surrogate will have lost its utility and meaning together: to find Hitchcock everywhere is no better than not finding "him" at all.
  10. ↑ François Truffaut, "A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema" (1964), in Movies and Methods: An Anthology, trans. and ed. Bill Nichols (Berkeley, 1976), p. 233.
  11. ↑ Eric Rohmer [Maurice Scherer], "Roberto Rossellini: Stromboli" (1950), The Taste for Beauty, trans. Carol Volk, ed. Jean Narboni (Cambridge, 1989), p. 126.
  12. ↑ Is it worthwhile indulging the quibble that, strictly speaking, Hitchcock is not the author of this anthology, but only its compiler? Given that the front cover bears the title "Alfred Hitchcock's Book of Suspense" (like "Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train" in the credits); that the back cover features Hitchcock's picture in the author's place; and that the inside contents are framed by his preface, the distinction seems to entail no difference. And yet it may also have the merit of glancing at a certain "anthologizing" tendency in the film's own handling of suspense. As is well known, Hitchcock conceived Strangers as a return to form after the back-to-back failures of Under Capricorn and Stage Fright. Under pressure to offer not a new invention but an inventory of old ones, he structured this comeback as a succession of set pieces, a virtual digest of suspense effects and devices.
  13. ↑ In Spellbound, he carries a violin case, in The Paradine Case a covered cello, in Vertigo a horn case. Rear Window puts his appearance in a musician's apartment; and Topaz scores it to the theme song from Alfred Hitchcock Presents. It is as if his direction were being imaged as a performing art, the rendering of a preexisting score.
  14. ↑ "The Band Played On" is in fact being replayed during her romantic strangulation, as if to underline this failed, now ironic correspondence.
  15. ↑ The literalized tracking shot has been noticed, if not discussed, by Sabrina Barton; the literalized shots, by Tom Cohen. See Sabrina Barton, "'Crisscross': Paranoia and Projection in Strangers on a Train," in Out in Culture: Gay, Lesbian, and Queer Essays on Popular Culture, ed. Corey K. Creekmur and Alexander Doty (Durham, N.C., 1995), p. 220, and Tom Cohen, Hitchcock's Cryptonymies, 2 vols. (Minneapolis, 2005), 2:30.
  16. ↑ If it is too close to belong to the old-time religion of "the reading," it is also too close to find sufficient justification in the new theology of Theory. Game theory, for instance, has allowed Leitch to say many interesting things about the Hitchcock appearance, but his model, in which "the audience's desire for pleasure ... gives the cameos their point" would never allow us to recognize the hidden pictures, which mar both the pleasure and the point of "finding the director." Likewise, Cohen has proven an amazing adept in what he theorizes as Hitchcock's "cryptonymies," secret names that run through Hitchcock's oeuvre, where they point to the conditions of the visual in a primordial linguistic inscription. Yet while these often outre discoveries astonish Cohen's readers, Cohen himself remains completely unfazed by them, apparently not even aware of the vertigo they occasion in others. That is because, for him, the "secret names" never name any genuine secrets; they have always already been deciphered as so many interlocking allegories of the poststructuralist problematic that now serves as our mathesis universalis. Hence, though full of surprises, his work cannot recognize or experience surprise in Hitchcock; and the extravagant wordplay that it perceives it also circumscribes within what might be called a deconstructionist thematics. It does not — and on principle could not — make room for a charade that was at once intelligible and pointless.
  17. ↑ The proliferation of Hitchcock possibles throughout the film ministers to the same fantasy of touching him; it is as though we were put in a game of tag that could only end when we laid hold of "the real one."
  18. ↑ Philip Fisher's discussion of "the modern spiritualization of fear in the sublime" helps us measure how far Hitchcock is from sharing any romantic or Kantian tendency in this regard. See Philip Fisher, The Vehement Passions (Princeton, N.J., 2003), pp. 146–50.
  19. ↑ Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, N.C., 2004), p. 81. See also Donald Spoto, The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock (Boston, 1983), p. 440.

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