The MacGuffin: News and Comment (13/Jan/2004)
(c) Ken Mogg (2004)
January 13
Speaking of the importance Hitchcock attached in Rear Window to giving a representative cross-section of humanity ... I have been struck by the similarity (and relevance) of two statements about 'all-inclusiveness' . The first comes from a wonderful entry on "Romanticism" by Jacques Barzun which he wrote for 'The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural' (1986). Here is is, somewhat truncated: 'Far from being a rejection of reason itself, Romanticism was a search for all the elements that the human mind and human sensibility could perceive. [...] To put it another way, the Romantics refused to rule out any fact or possibility a priori. This resolve - often an instinctive attitude - meant first of all a suspicion of the abstract, the generality, and a love of the concrete and particular. (p. 356) The second statement comes at the very end of Peter Ackroyd's powerful book 'Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination' (2002). '[T]he history of the English imagination', Ackroyd sums up, 'is the history of adaptation and assimilation. Englishness is the principle of diversity itself. In English literature, music and painting, heterogeneity becomes the form and type of art. [...] The English have in that sense always been a practical and pragmatic race [...] This native aptitude has in turn led to disaffection from, or dissatisfaction with, all abstract speculation.' (p. 448) Okay. Coming back to Hitchcock, various further comments by him leap to mind. First (to Truffaut): 'Directors who lose control are concerned with the abstract.' Second (to Chabrol): the screenplay is secondary to form - it must be made to conform to a holistic conception in the director's (i.e., Hitchcock's) head. Hitchcock's avowed distrust of 'logic' (cf Keats's 'consecutive reasoning') fits in here, albeit he could be logical when it was required of him. Logic has its place. Nonetheless, a film like Family Plot (1976) is sympathetic to its 'fake' spiritualist heroine Blanche (Barbara Harris) and that should tell us something - as I argue in the latest 'MacGuffin'. Although there are many brilliant passages in both Rear Window and Family Plot (e.g., their respective opening scenes), profundity of direct statement is nowhere to be found in them (not even when Stella in Rear Window quotes the 'Reader's Digest'!). Nonetheless, they both ultimately satisfy (I like Family Plot a great deal). The analogy I draw in the latest 'MacGuffin' is with how psychologist and psycho-therapist Carl Jung regarded the medieval practice of alchemy: for Jung, alchemy was never just phoney 'science' or 'chemistry' as we use those terms today - rather, its formulae and practices embodied the timeless quest for individuation, wholeness. It's no accident, for example, that alchemy contains numerous psychologically potent mandala symbols. Likewise, I see in both Rear Window and Family Plot a Romantic microcosm and much distilled British wisdom - and pragmatic filmmaking.
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