Like other notable Canadian intellectuals, Murray Pomerance is no follower of the intellectual fashions. His introduction to An Eye for Hitchcock, a blast of chill northern air, blows away the cobwebs festooning the Hitchcock Memorial that has been erected in the US in recent years, garlands spun by spiders in whom the radioactive rays emitted by a few French geniuses have induced bizarre mutations.
At the same time, Pomerance's habit of breaking off communication every now and then to assume the mien of an oracle reminds one more of Marshall McLuhan than it does of Northrop Frye and Donald Harman Akenson, whose recent history of the Bible and the Talmud, 'Surpassing Wonder', is a wonder itself because of its commitment to reason, which carries over to its style. The orphic flights in An Eye for Hitchcock pose an occasional problem for the reader, but not an insurmountable one. And they are a small price to pay for the riches the book contains.
Continuing the Canadian comparisons for a moment: Akenson is a Professor of Irish History at Queen's University; Pomerance is chair of the department of sociology at Ryerson University. Nothing in their academic job descriptions promised major contributions to biblical scholarship and Hitchcock criticism, yet that's what they have produced. Blame it on Canada. In ways that mystify us bumpkins to the south, many things are done better there than they are here.
Murray Pomerance is the first sociologist to write on Hitchcock, and his knowledge of this little-understood discipline yields stunning revelations in every chapter. (There are six: one each on North by Northwest, Spellbound, Torn Curtain, Marnie, I Confess and Vertigo.) Hitchcock, Jay Presson Allen told the author, was always observing what went on around him. Pomerance believes that this position of the observer, coupled to the director's previous experience of English class society, gave him more than a layman's understanding of the world to which he transplanted himself in 1939, and this book convinces us that it was so.
Pomerance's step-by-step analysis/appreciation of Roger Thornhill's campaign of calculated boorishness during the auction in North By Northwest - four pages as funny as what they describe - is one of many passages where his trained eye (portrayed on the book's cover) explores scenes and leitmotifs that critics have neglected: the scene leading up to the first kiss between Constance Peterson and 'Dr. Edwardes' in Spellbound; the scene at the blackboard in Torn Curtain; the leitmotifs of bathroom and automat in Marnie (which were going to come together in one shot before Hitchcock decided to loop different off-screen dialogue); the 'play within the play' when Keller announces Villette's death in I Confess while Father Logan is perched on a ladder, painting the sitting room of the rectory.
In the North By Northwest chapter, Pomerance tracks the riddles of identity propounded by the 'George Kaplan' MacGuffin through many surprising examples of how 'Roger isn't himself,' coming finally to the paradoxical conclusion that ' he is quite wrong about not being George Kaplan ' (author's italics). Roger's existential crisis comes upon him in Room 796 of the Plaza, when he begins to realize 'that he is at least the sort of person who could easily be mistaken for Kaplan by everyone in the hotel: he is Kaplanesque.' This delightful word means, among other things, 'rank consumer,' a role that Roger, the master of marketing, has always considered himself to be above. Leading us back through the film, Pomerance then demonstrates that Roger is defined by his charming pretense that he is a bit above being a consumer, one of the suckers.
Films about the advertising business were a genre in the late 50s, the American version of the European art films made in conformity to what Jean-Pierre Oudart calls 'the Bresson model' (Cahiers du cinéma 232), in which the hero, no revolutionary, is sympathetically 'out of it,' refusing participation in society's rituals of exchange (economic, sexual or linguistic). Here, however, the Man in the Gray Silk Suit is himself seen as suffering from a form of alienation that is finally nothing but an ideological feint (to use a term that Pomerance wouldn't). The turning point for Roger comes when he haughtily refuses the wise (and free!) advice of the farmer to get on the bus, is strafed by the crop-duster and escapes in a stolen pickup. Once he steals the pickup, Roger is finally 'in the world' - on the way to a hopeful outcome that is, ironically, not unlike that of Robert Bresson's Pickpocket (also released in 1959), in which the hero is saved by love and rejoins the human race.
In a groundbreaking article on North By Northwest, Raymond Bellour argued that the mechanism by which Thornhill is obliged to identify with Kaplan, a fiction created by the CIA, exposes in an exemplary way the mechanisms of seduction used by what was then known as 'classical cinema.' Pomerance turns this reading on its head by arguing that Thornhill, by becoming Kaplan, becomes authentic, beginning to give 'a live performance that until this moment has been nothing but a hollow rehearsal and a game.' The demonstration of this idea is compelling enough to remind us that Roberto Rossellini made yet another film that was released in 1959 with the same theme: General della Rovere, in which a no-good becomes a hero by being obliged to play one. A little sociology (Erving Goffman's The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, which also appeared in 1959, was one of the main sources of inspiration for this chapter) does indeed seem to go a long way in illuminating Hitchcock.
Each chapter has a different focus: The brief one on Spellbound offers fresh perspectives on Hitchcock and Freud; the discussion of Torn Curtain peels back the spy thriller façade to expose a study of hierarchy and rituals of interaction in academia; Marnie turns out to be a film about class, not hysteria; I Confess is illuminated by historical considerations concerning the conflict between Church and State in Quebec in 1953; and the chapter on Vertigo leaves social commentary behind for a difficult but rewarding investigation of vertigo and verticality, past and present, sight and sound (and their synesthetic exchange) in a film whose mysteries lie in another realm altogether.
Rereading individual chapters with the whole in mind is, of course, quite rewarding: The terrible moment when Roger and Eve discover that they are on top of the Monument, for example, exemplifies Pomerance's definition of vertigo, developed at greater length in its own chapter, as the discovery that one is higher up than one thought - an experience that the spectator of Hitchcock's cinema, where ideas of verticality are viscerally important, constantly risks encountering.
My favorite chapter is the one on Marnie, where Pomerance, a fan of Stanley Cavell, implicitly reinterprets the film as a variant on Cavell's famous schema for comedies of remarriage without ever alluding to his predecessor, and in the process greatly improves on his performance as a Hitchcock exegete. The much-maligned Mark Rutland is rehabilitated as a class-bound sexual predator who drops his blinders enough to finally be a friend to Marnie; she in turn is revealed to be another character like Roger Thornhill, radically displaced in childhood and chasing after an ever receding, ever beckoning phantom.
In a final pirouette, Pomerance demonstrates that Marnie is not only a revolutionary at odds with a society dominated by men and money, but 'an avenger from below the Mason-Dixon line, redeeming its losses by single-handedly and with the greatest of dignity pilfering the vaults of the great northern cities and businessmen.' This surprising conclusion suggests another cinematic analogy, this time to a film made a decade later: John Cassavetes' A Woman Under the Influence, whose feuding couple, as novelist Pierre Rottenberg commented in 1974 (Cahiers du cinéma 273), seem to be re-fighting the Civil War in their living-room.
Throughout An Eye for Hitchcock Pomerance demonstrates an understanding of people that is anything but clinical. He is at his most un-clinical whenever he is putting paid to stereotypical ideas about Hitchcock, as when he questions Evan Hunter's testy piety about refusing to write the honeymoon rape scene in Marnie , which led to his dismissal. 'I suspect Hunter's middle-classness could not bear to write the officially-sanctioned husband as a rapist,' Pomerance observes, 'yet had no problem countenancing Bernice Edgar's violation (since, unmarried to her attacker, she was fair game).'
The most important sentence in the book is an aside about the techniques used to make the spectator identify with little Marnie's own interpretation (and not the cliché Freudian one) of her primal scene: 'all of Hitch's work is about sympathy.' It is no accident that at this point Pomerance, a canny observer of the signals by which Hitchcock's characters read and write one another, permits himself for the only time in the book to use the nickname 'Hitch.' |
