The MacGuffin: News and Comment (25/Aug/2012)
(c) Ken Mogg (2012)
Aug 25
Two weeks ago I wrote here: 'If there is one Hitchcock film that I think is indebted to [the "Absurdist" plays of Eugene] Ionesco, it's The Birds (1963).' When you think about it, the only things that stop The Birds from being obviously Absurdist are its surface 'naturalism' (including the acting) and its 'portentous' tone (from the credits sequence onwards). Change those two things (say by introducing an 'amusing' and 'sardonic' score, and by asking the actors to play in a broadly comic and deadpan style), and you already have the increasingly out-of-control situation which recalls various Ionesco plays. (I looked up this week Ionesco's 1953 'Victims of Duty' which immediately preceded his 'Amédée, or How to Get Rid of It', which we've been discussing. It, too, is about a petit bourgeois couple, Choubert and Madeleine, living a life in which 'nothing ever happens' - until the arrival one day of a detective who has a literally absurd obsession about the correct spelling of the name of the previous tenant of the couple's flat. To help the couple remember what he wants to know, the detective insists that Choubert eat stale bread. Other people are drawn into the matter and eventually the detective is stabbed to death, proclaiming, 'I am ... a Victim ... of Duty.' Whereupon, everyone echoes his words - 'We are all Victims of Duty' - and then order each other to chew and swallow stale bread!) But also this week I was in touch further with my correspondent DF (see last week's entry), and I thanked him again for his observations. I noted that Hitchcock had long been pre-disposed to a general idea of The Absurd by his appreciation of the fiction of G.K. Chesterton, such as the Chesterton story "The Tremendous Adventures of Major Brown" in 'The Club of Queer Trades' (1905). (For much more about Chesterton's influence on Hitchcock - a topic to which I'll come back - see my long profile of Hitchcock here) In turn, DF reminded me that 'Chesterton himself stands in a long [English] tradition' of the absurd and the grotesque, including works by Laurence Stern, Charles Dickens, and Lewis Carroll. DF is right, of course. An article in 'Encyclopaedia Britannica' on comedy and The Absurd notes: 'The English novel contains a rich vein of the comic grotesque that extends at least back to Dickens and Thackeray and persisted in the 20th century in such varied novels as Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall (1928), Angus Wilson's Anglo-Saxon Attitudes (1956), and Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim (1954).' (Note that the last two roughly coincide in time with the onset of the actual Theatre of the Absurd. The same article points out: 'It is only in the mid-20th century that the savage and the irrational have come to be viewed as part of the normative condition of humanity ...') DK added that other pertinent influences on Hitchcock were probably 'a bit of music hall fun ... and let's not forget the absurdity of the best silent comedies, either'. Hear, hear! (Significantly, Buster Keaton was chosen by Samuel Beckett to appear in his 20-minute Film, made in 1965.) But I want to come back to Chesterton and Hitchcock. Last week, in this context of The Absurd, I suggested that Hitchcock's philosophy of 'pure film' and specifically of 'thrillers' was aimed at bringing audiences 'alive', at the core of their being. I had forgotten that Chesterton actually wrote a comedy-mystery novel called 'Manalive' (1912), which seems circumstantial evidence for the sort of Chestertonian influence I'm claiming. The novel's plot-line actually sounds a bit like Pasolini's film Theorem (1968) in which a moribund household is transformed after being visited by a Christ-like figure, in Chesterton's story called Innocent Smith. Is it too hard to see how such a plot-line could be adapted by Hitchcock into both Shadow of a Doubt (where the Christ-like figure is actually a Devilish one) and The Birds (where the Christ-figure is The Birds themselves - something that a writer in the UK journal 'Movie' once noted, 'a whole Christ population' of birds!)? In any case, here now are a couple of things I found out when visiting the website of the American Chesterton Society (http://www.chesterton.org/) recently. First, 'Manalive' has just been filmed. Second, a paper read to the 28th Chesterton Conference at Seattle University in 2009 by its author David Deavel was entitled "Chesterton and Alfred Hitchcock". Reportedly, after referring to the passage in 'The Club of Queer Trades' in which Chesterton writes, 'A man should feel he is still in the childhood of the world' (on this, cf. my own 2005 profile of Hitchcock, already cited) and noting that both Chesterton and Hitchcock wrote chase-stories, Deavel added that he thought that the nearest thing by Hitchcock to 'Manalive' was his 'little-seen' film The Trouble With Harry, and that there may have been an influence. However, if both artists 'explored the collision of the ordinary and the extraordinary' (as they attempted to 'find the flaw in the universe'), Deavel felt that they also diverged. 'In a film like The Birds, inconvenience turns to horror. "An inconvenience," Chesterton maintained, "is only an adventure wrongly understood, while an adventure is an inconvenience rightly understood." Perhaps needless to add, I don't agree with Deavel that there is necessarily a divergence of the two artists revealed here. I'll seek to conclude this discussion of Hitchcock and The Absurd next time.
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