* [Salon.com (www.salon1999.com), April 18, 1996. Reprinted in The Italian-American Reader, ed. Bill Tonelli (2003).]
FILM
14
WOMEN AND MAGIC IN ALFRED HITCHCOCK*
Kim Novak and director Alfred Hitchcock on the set of Vertigo
With a spate of new movies being made about Alfred Hitchcock, charges about his reputed misogyny will soon be back in the air. There is abundant evidence of Hitchcock’s insistence on total and sometimes autocratic control of his productions as well as of his leading ladies. But misogyny is a hopelessly simplistic and reductive term for the passionately conflicted attitude of major male artists toward women. Art-making is not just a formal exercise but a quest for identity, a strategy of defense against turbulent reality.
Kim Novak as the enigmatic Madeleine in Vertigo
Hitchcock’s view of women is not politically correct. But his haunting films continue to gain power over time because of the profound depth and searing truth of his emotional world. What he records is the agonized complexity of men’s relationship to women—a roiling mass of admiration, longing, neediness, and desperation. Heterosexual men instinctively know that women have magic. Gay men know it and, through high fashion, ingeniously enhance it. Drag queens heartily mimic it. Most heterosexual women keenly observe, appreciate, and competitively monitor the magic of other women. Only feminist theorists, evidently, fail to see that magic—or they contemptuously dismiss it as a product of social conditioning and commercial manipulation.
Hitchcock’s great films of the 1950s and early ’60s show the tension between men’s fear of emotional dependency and their worship of women’s beauty, which floods the eye and enforces an erotic response over which a man has ethical but not conceptual control. Beautiful women are a fascinating conflation of nature and art. They often have an elusive, dreamy apartness, suggesting a remote inner realm to which a man can claim only momentary access. It is a theme in Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, Raphael’s Madonnas, and Leonardo’s Mona Lisa. It can be seen in more sexually perverse form in Rossetti’s florid somnambules and the drugged odalisques of Ingres and Renoir. Beautiful young men too may have that reserve and distance, as captured from Greek art to Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. Jean Cocteau saluted Wilde in declaring, “The privileges of beauty are enormous.” Similarly, Tennessee Williams’ Mrs. Stone says, “People who are very beautiful make their own laws.”
The two poles of Hitchcock’s erotic vision are woman as objet d’art and woman as devouring mother. One pleasures the eye, and the other assaults it. Hitchcock warned Janet Leigh before Psycho, “My camera is absolute.” His camera habitually frames woman as a gorgeous cult object whom he loves to dress and drape. We know from Edith Head that Hitchcock designed Grace Kelly’s clothes for Rear Window; everything was already specified, from color to fabric, in the script. He chose Kim Novak’s magnificently varied clothing for Vertigo, forcing a now-classic grey suit on her that she hated. He took Eva Marie Saint to Bergdorf Goodman’s, sat with her as mannequins paraded, and turned her into a fashion plate for North by Northwest. He shaped every detail of Tippi Hedren’s look in The Birds, including her makeup, jewelry, and mink coat.
Simultaneously in Hitchcock, there is a dread of the imperialistic power of mothers, who are often belittling, hectoring, or suffocating. The ultimate symbol of this is the mummified mother’s laughing skull in Psycho: horrific Mrs. Bates, with her flapping jaw, is the flip side of Rear Window’s chic Lisa Fremont, “who never wears the same dress twice.” Life’s eternal paradox is that all beauty vanishes, a victim of ruthless time. This process is particularly cruel to women, with their thinner skin. Feminism has decreed that rejection or marginalization of the aging woman is sexist. But the witch-crone is a universal archetype, registering an atavistic dread of loss of fertility, the life force itself. The Western career woman, peaking in competence and rank at menopause, is understandably indignant at being supplanted by the young and beautiful, but it is a hard law of nature.
Themes of sexual allure or fetishism are found in Hitchcock’s early films, such as The Lodger, where a serial murderer (“the Avenger”) is stalking blondes. Overt magic, however, begins with Rebecca, a Gothic romance where a beautiful dead woman’s spectral presence suffuses a gloomy house. Her obsessive guardian, Mrs. Danvers, keeps shockingly materializing, stock-still, near the nameless heroine, a timorous second wife. Mrs. Danvers is like an evil stepmother blighting a hapless fairy-tale princess. Even the mansion’s location is ambiguous: it is a state of mind, a climate of fear.
Magic is first acquired by a signature Hitchcock blonde in Rear Window, where Lisa (Grace Kelly) advances on her sleeping, crippled target Jeff (James Stewart) like a floating, dazzling apparition. As she looms like a goddess and leans down to kiss him, Hitchcock shook the camera, and he later double-printed several frames to make the moment more shimmering and dreamlike. As if in a masque from The Tempest, she summons up rich food by a snap of her fingers: a waiter from the 21 Club appears at the door with lobster and wine. Introducing herself with her three names (“reading from top to bottom,” as if on a triumphal column), she switches three lamps on—a ritualistic triplicate reminiscent of the witches of Macbeth. The deep structure is imprisonment: Jeff is her captive audience as she tries to mold him into a pliable consort and social ornament in “a dark blue flannel suit.” That there is something subliminally aggressive about her was confirmed by Hitchcock, who told an interviewer that Lisa is a “typical active New Yorker,” a class of women “more like men.” Meanwhile, Stella (Thelma Ritter), anticipating Midge (Barbara Bel Geddes) in Vertigo, is the wisecracking, pragmatic, and resolutely unmagical foster mother, satirizing Jeff, bossing him around, and slapping his flaccid muscles like a testy cook kneading dough.
In To Catch a Thief, Grace Kelly plays another ultra-fashionable young woman whose fabulous outfits set her apart from her environment even at Cannes. Francie Stevens seems to be coolly contained within her own mental zone. When she invites reformed cat burglar John Robie (Cary Grant) to touch her diamonds, the erotic charge is so intense that it seems as if her mana or divine energy is flowing through them. Hitchcock’s mischievous evasion of the studio production code is blatant (he called the background fireworks “pure orgasm”), but Robie does seem zapped and chained by some uncanny force. When Francie whizzes him along the Grande Corniche in her open sports car, his nerves and her confidence make her seem like a heedlessly impervious winged goddess kidnapping a boy toy. She is a tremendous prize, but as soon as he wins her, the film ends, as Hitchcock sardonically said, on a “grim” note: Francie exclaims about Robie’s airy country house, “Mother will love it here!” So dies the male dream of freedom.
Hitchcock’s magic is most overt in Vertigo, where the sexual woman is in league with the forces of nature and the death principle. Midge, the busy, capable professional, is a pleasant if teasing companion, but she completely lacks erotic mystique; worse, she even calls herself “Mother.” Vampirism by the dead is illustrated in Madeleine’s possession by her great-grandmother, Carlotta Valdes, a false tale in fact realized through the murdered Madeleine possessing the soul of working-class Judy (Kim Novak). Madeleine drifts through the labyrinth of San Francisco in a hypnotic bubble of seductive abstraction. That she belongs to the nonhuman world or has some special communication with it is suggested by her fleet passage in a green Jaguar (half vegetable, half animal) and her melancholy, tender address to a giant sequoia tree as “you.” The primal, elemental drama in sex is wonderfully portrayed by the ecstatic embrace of Madeleine and Scottie (James Stewart) against a rocky seascape at Cypress Point.
The central occult moments in Vertigo are Madeleine’s entrancement by Carlotta’s gravestone and portrait; Madeleine’s inexplicable disappearance at the Victorian-era Hotel McKittrick; her momentary vanishing in the sequoia woods; and the cosmetically transformed Judy emerging as Madeleine
’s ghost from a green fog at the Empire Hotel. Madeleine’s first appearance in the film is a spectacular tableau vivant: slow and stately in her black evening gown and green cape, she pauses in voluptuous, Olympian profile like a monumental objet d’art. Kim Novak’s sensational success with Vertigo’s supernatural subtext would carry over into Bell, Book, and Candle, where she rejoined James Stewart to play a Manhattan witch, and Robert Aldrich’s The Legend of Lylah Clare, where she is a naïve young woman possessed by the caustic spirit of a bisexual movie queen modeled on Marlene Dietrich.
In North by Northwest, Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint) has a suavely impenetrable composure that recalls Madeleine’s deceptive magnetism. Eve’s languid charm is almost armored, as when she fends off the suspicious police in her train compartment—a virtuoso face-off that surely inspired the brilliant police station interrogation scene in Basic Instinct. Throughout this exchange, Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant), with his cryptically sexual name (phallus plus Venusberg), is trapped in a folding bed, to which Eve holds the stolen key. He has become a homunculus, smothered and smashed (breaking his sunglasses). This movie too has a deflating mother, who chides and ridicules the elegant hero in public.
Psycho revives Rebecca’s haunted house, now inhabited by another dead woman, a tattered fetish preserved in a fruit cellar—like the shrunken heads of Hitchcock’s Under Capricorn. Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) is like a devotee of the pitiless goddess Cybele, whose priests castrated themselves and dressed in her robes. There is a ritualistic formality in the way Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) dresses herself, pirouetting in her formidably structured brassieres, now white, now black. The frightful shower murder is like a ceremonial purification and slaughter, a blood sacrifice to a jealous local goddess who will brook no rivals. Mrs. Bates vampirically lives through her psychotic son, her skeletal face being briefly superimposed over his at the end, as we hear her crotchety voice usurping his inner thoughts.
In The Birds, mothers are either coldly absent, coldly present, or chokingly intrusive, as when an itinerant mother, in the name of protection, oppressively injects her own hysteria into her children at the diner. Its capricious heroine, Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren), moves with exhilarating speed through the landscape in her spring-green suit and sky-blue sports car. Is she in mystic synchronicity with nature? Does she carry a curse that triggers the bird attacks? Birds do seem drawn to her, as when they ominously gather behind her on the schoolyard jungle gym. Something occult seems implied by a gull killing itself against a front door under a full moon, beneath which Melanie and Annie Hayworth (Suzanne Pleshette) stand frozen.
But Hitchcock renounced his magic after the ordeal of Marnie, where he reportedly made crude overtures to Tippi Hedren and then maliciously sabotaged her career. This clumsy literalization of his artistic ideals, which were primarily voyeuristic, broke the spell. Hedren was the last of his glamorous blondes. But Hitchcock’s sexual magic lived on in film after film which he influenced. We see it in Anita Ekberg strolling through night-time Rome in La Dolce Vita; in Delphine Seyrig as the chic mystery woman of Last Year at Marienbad, Accident, and Daughters of Darkness; in Stéphane Audran as a predatory sophisticate in Les Biches; in Catherine Deneuve as a dangerous daydreamer in Repulsion, Belle de Jour, and The Hunger; in Sharon Stone as a tauntingly mysterious adventuress first seen on a high patio over rocks and water in Basic Instinct. It is even in Visconti’s Death in Venice, where Aschenbach (Dirk Bogarde) trails a beautiful boy through pestilent streets as the soundtrack surges with Mahler.
Hitchcock’s acute sense of women’s magic paralleled that of the Surrealists, who intrigued and influenced him. Like Salvador Dalí, whom he commissioned to design the dreams for Spellbound, Hitchcock was prankish, uxorious, and ruled by an outspoken wife. Like René Magritte, Hitchcock dressed in a bourgeois suit and presented an impassive face to society. A critic said Magritte painted “transparent enigmas”—a perfect description of Hitchcock’s films, with their sparklingly lucid surface and disturbing secret sorcery.
* [From 39 Steps to the Genius of Alfred Hitchcock, ed. James Bell, a book of essays accompanying the British Film Institute’s retrospective, “The Genius of Hitchcock,” at BFI Southbank, London (August–October 2012).]
15
THE WANING OF EUROPEAN ART FILM*
On the culture front, fabled film directors Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni dying on the same day was certainly a cold douche for my narcissistic generation of the 1960s. We who revered those great artists, we who sat stunned and spellbound before their masterpieces—what have we achieved? Aside from Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather series, with its deft flashbacks and gritty social realism, is there a single film produced over the past 35 years that is arguably of equal philosophical weight or virtuosity of execution to Bergman’s The Seventh Seal or Persona? Perhaps only George Lucas’ multi-layered, six-film Star Wars epic can genuinely claim classic status, and it descends not from Bergman or Antonioni but from Stanley Kubrick and his pop antecedents in Hollywood science-fiction.
Tragically, very few young people today, teethed on dazzling special effects and a hyperactive visual style, seem to have patience for the long, slow take that deep-think European directors once specialized in. It’s a technique already painfully time-bound—that luxurious scrutiny of the tiniest facial expressions or the chilly sweep of a sterile room or bleak landscape. What my generation was passionately responding to in European films was their sexual candor and their low-budget protest against the peachy Technicolor artifice and forced jollity of mainstream Hollywood film-making in the Marilyn Monroe/Rock Hudson/Doris Day era, with its postwar myths of ever-imperiled virginity and ideal marriage.
I’m not sure who, if anyone, still views movie-going as a quasi-mystical experience. As a college student in the mid-’60s, I saw the movie screen as a door into another world. When Roman Polanski’s hypnotic Knife in the Water was shown in my very first semester at Harpur College (the State University of New York at Binghamton), life seemed to change overnight. Jean Cocteau’s Orphée, a surreal modernization of the Orpheus legend in existential Paris, sent me staggering out speechless under the twinkling upstate stars.
Other indelible memories: the grinding of the collapsing stone balustrade in the baroque gardens of Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad. The night wind eerily stirring the spray-painted green trees in the London park of Antonioni’s Blow-Up. The column of army tanks ominously rumbling through the city street in the unknown land of Bergman’s The Silence. The life-giving waters of the Fountain of Trevi suddenly stopping in Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, stranding Marcello Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg mid-kiss.
When Antonioni’s plotless L’Avventura was shown at Harpur, the entire theater emptied within a half hour—except for the front row of me and my friends, transfixed by the aquiline profile of a very anxious Monica Vitti, her blonde locks tossed this way and that, as she searched a desolate Italian island for her capriciously absent friend. When I saw Bergman’s Persona at its first release in New York in 1967, I felt that it was the electrifying summation of everything I had ever pondered about Western gender and identity. The title of my doctoral dissertation and first book, Sexual Personae, was an explicit homage to Bergman. On a British lecture tour for the National Film Theatre in 1999, I asked to sleep with Persona—whose five reels, like holy icons, rested in two silver cans next to my bed.
But art movies are gone, gone with the wind. In some cases, what once seemed suggestive and profound now feels tortured and pretentious. For example, why should the rivetingly super-sophisticated Jeanne Moreau have to drive her car off that damned bridge at the end of François Truffaut’s Jules and Jim? It’s factitious and absurd. All of the major European directors hit the skids in the ’70s. I for one had little interest in late Bergman, Antonioni, or Fellini, who seemed to decline into pastiche and self-parody. With Bergman in particular, the austere turned sentimental. But why
should any artist have to compete with his or her peak period? We should be satisfied with the priceless legacy of genius.
Art film as a genre has waned with the high modernism that produced it. The premiere modernists—from James Joyce, Marcel Proust, and Virginia Woolf to Igor Stravinsky, Pablo Picasso, and Martha Graham—were rebelling against a hierarchical, authoritarian tradition which suffocated their youth but whose very power energized their work. They became larger from what they opposed and overcame. Today, anything goes, and nothing lasts.
Ingmar Bergman’s creativity was certainly stimulated by the overly cerebral, puritanical Protestantism in which he was raised. In film after film, he militantly made space for emotion and intuition, usually embodied in elusive, charismatic women, whose faces his inquiring camera obsessively searched. Bergman’s artistic drive was inextricable from the religious impulse.
Now, in contrast, aspiring young filmmakers are stampeded toward simplistic rejection of religion based on liberal bromides (sexism, homophobia, etc.). Religion as metaphysics or cosmic vision is no longer valued except in the New Age movement, to which I still strongly subscribe, despite its sometimes outlandish excesses. As a professed atheist, I detest the current crop of snide manifestos against religion written by professional cynics, flaneurs, and imaginatively crimped and culturally challenged scientists. The narrow mental world they project is very grim indeed—and fatal to future art.
My pagan brand of atheism is predicated on worship of both nature and art. I want the great world religions taught in every school. Secular humanism has reached a dead end—and any liberals who don’t recognize that are simply enabling the worldwide conservative reaction of fundamentalism in both Christianity and Islam. The human quest for meaning is innate and ineradicable. When the gods are toppled, new ones will soon be invented. “Better Jehovah than Foucault,” I once warned.
Provocations Page 11