A modern filmmaker** muses about elegant solutions to problems that are created by complex systems, intertwining realities: a blend of pop culture influences—Star Wars-like imagery—juxtaposed against contemporaneous events, Central American coups, jungle poverty. In a world extrapolated from present-day reality, people act in accordance with the reality in which they are thrust. Their personalities are blended into a background, hidden yet subtly apparent to an observer. If we are attentive enough. If the act is good enough.
The filmmaker’s view is that artists had to try harder in his day to send messages, especially those that conflict with a zeitgeist, with what’s de rigeur. He calls them elegant solutions, these laconic expressions, these collisions of image and idea that insinuate an individual voice, but then represses because there’s a massive wall ahead. There’s much attention to detail in the filmmaker’s art: the displacement of ideas onto the trivial. Freud would have approved, and perhaps he should have approved more, the filmmaker opines, as it’s not as though surrealists of Freud’s era didn’t try to engage the Viennese doctor on the matter of film. Alas, Sigmund was more of a literary and history enthusiast than a cinephile. He’d write about Shakespeare, muse on Moses, much more readily than he’d comment on the tales and tricks of cinema.
He could be forgiven, I think, for thinking the silent era of film frivolous: that Charlie Chaplin was little more than a clown fit for children’s consumption, not the worldly dreams of adults. He might have thought that Stroheim’s Greed was ponderous, and likewise anything Eisenstein was making; that Lang’s Metropolis was facile, depicting a society that wasn’t anything nearly as ugly as it was in the years between two world wars, much less what Freud didn’t live to observe. Might he have thought D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation racist? That westerns were condoning genocide? Would he have cared about whether Greta Garbo spoke? In the twilight of his life, might he have been charmed by Shirley Temple or Judy Garland; recalled The Wizard Oz from the bookshelves of an earlier time, and in his last hours dreamed of lovely things beckoning from over a rainbow? Had he lived beyond the nineteen thirties, he might have taken notice of an up-and-coming cineaste who was a bit like himself—who in time would be subject to as much caricature as Freud himself.
The iconography that surrounds Alfred Hitchcock is similar to that which permeates Freud’s world: the latter had his cigars, his couch, pince-nez glasses, tweed attire, and imperious gaze. Hitchcock’s image is likewise severe: he poses with his chin up, looking cold and menacing, invariably dressed in black, ever conjuring a next generation of American Gothic. British born, he was a natural fit for Hollywood tastes: a born entertainer without inhibitions except those imposed externally; a sadistic figure eager to use whatever tool that would tease and torment his suspense-addicted audience; a snaky rebel looking to twist and turn around all the rules and regulations that were in his way. This was the forties through the sixties, roughly: Hitch’s time. His canvas. Like the surrealists, he could play with symbols, use birds, trains, pieces of clothing, to displace the sexual and aggressive. As he got older, he played along as restrictions ebbed: the ratings system that replaced the previously censorious Hays code for the motion picture industry. Into the seventies, he could show nudity, be more explicit with his killings.
Interestingly, this didn’t make him more popular, or a better filmmaker. Frenzy, from 1972, has its moments of gore—one or two scenes are a bit grisly, even. But its best moment emerges from the kind of artifice that Hitchcock could have used twenty years earlier and easily passed by censors. As the film’s villain prepares to commit his second murder, taking a victim into a private room, the camera pulls away—I mean pull away, not cut—and takes the viewer slowly down a staircase, knowing what’s happening off camera. Ugh. That’s cold, one might say. The framework is similar to that of Psycho, the more iconic horror-show prototype of a decade earlier. Only 2 or 3 killings are necessary to make a point, to stir fear.
Less is more. Spielberg was influenced by this idea, which is one of the reasons Jaws is scarier than any of its copycats or stupid sequels. Less shown and more imagined pertains to sex also. At the risk of sounding like a conservative boomer, I prefer the cheeky suggestion to the soft-porn display. It’s not quite as suspenseful. At the end of North By Northwest, as Cary Grant saves Eva Marie Saint from the cliff-edge, which then cuts to him pulling her onto the bed in the train cabin wherein they’d first met, which then cuts to a shot of the (presumably) same train entering a tunnel, we get the point. And he’s Cary Grant, whom we like, so we want what will happen next—a happy ending, so to speak. We didn’t always get happy endings in Hitchcock films. The implicitly gay couple in Rope will be tried for murder, we’re led to believe. Norman Bates will be institutionalized, his psychotic affliction with an Oedipal underpinning to be treated by a psychoanalyst, perhaps. Jimmy Stewart is a tragic figure in Vertigo. He loses Madeleine, twice, which punishes the perversity that has been latent within his heroic persona. We don’t know what will happen to the characters of The Birds. Its heroine appears to survive that metaphorical attack from nature. She might bond with the jealous mother of her newfound lover. Unlike one of the birds’ victims, her eyes have not been gouged out. This all seems to remind us of something.
What if it had been different? What if Hitch had been born twenty or so years later. Might he have depicted the birds’ picking meat off the bones of their victims, tearing away flesh with no inhibition? What if he’d visibly shown all five or six or however many knife slashes tore down upon Janet Leigh’s body in Psycho? This is interesting to think about given post-feminist critiques of Hitchcock’s films. The admirer of artistic vision celebrates that tact of giving us a largely aural experience of the famous shower-scene death, coupled with flashes of naked flesh, plus an unrealistically thin streak of blood streaming down a drain. Because that era’s censors blocked all that was graphic, we forgive Hitchcock for the liberties he took with realism. We get that he was doubling down on fantasy, speaking to our fears and secret desires. Had he not hidden himself well with cheeky suggestion, the outcry against his obvious misogyny would have been louder. He might have lost the plot—the plot we want as much as anything—had he not been restrained. Imagine, for example, if his alter-ego leading man from NBW, Cary Grant, had murdered Eva Marie Saint for manipulating him? What if It’s-a-Wonderful-Life-Jimmy Stewart had overcome his vertigo in time to capture Kim Novak (another hoodwinking female) and then beat and/or raped her before she stumbles and falls to her death?
It wouldn’t be as clean. Or would it? Is clean clean because it represses, or does honesty, even brutal honesty, cleanse? A re-boot Vertigo can’t make us innocent. It wouldn’t be a film that we love because it protects us from really knowing something awful and exciting. It wouldn’t be like a dream that both censors and reveals.
** the mystery filmmaker here is Terry Gilliam, speaking of his film, Brazil
Graeme Daniels Psychewriter 