Back Down the Spiral

I've been without Internet for two days because I was uploading a video to YouTube. It's an update and expansion on my 2008 analysis of Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, you can see it here:

This wi-fi I have doesn't seem to like me uploading large files. It slows to a crawl whenever I upload a YouTube video and I'm unable to use the Internet for anything else while it's uploading.

It was in preparation for the video that I read Laura Mulvey's essay again. I'd read it back in 2008, too, and both times I expected to refer to it and never did. It's just not very good and has nothing particularly interesting to contribute to the conversation on Vertigo or anything else, it just creates some new jargon for already established concepts.

This afternoon, I spent a few hours in the art club where I teach. There's a really nice new crop of first year students who are all eager to spend that time drawing. It felt like heaven to-day.

Twitter Sonnet #1692

An even joint has split the arm to three.
A knowing cloud mistook the sea for ground.
A mind of wasps absorbed a lonesome bee.
Abruptly woods consumed a frantic sound.
The final card portrayed a lady's face.
Exact bananas cut tarant'la's U.
With expert care, the clinic grew apace.
A rainy day became distracting blue.
The waiting spiral held the cage in air.
A broken disk arrived at home to break.
Mistaken feet were glued to ev'ry stair.
And now a worthy tongue will speak for steak.
The spinning day concludes but hours late.
Magnetic sand debased the villain's slate.

Marnie Remains Marnie

The Criterion Channel has a collection of 1960s Alfred Hitchcock movies this month so I decided to revisit 1964's Marnie. I'd last watched it eleven years ago and I find my opinion really hasn't changed much.

I'm a little more receptive to the idea now that, in a relationship, one partner having the psychological upperhand might be beneficial. Marnie (Tippi Hedren) really does need help and it's hard to imagine a scenario in which she'd end up getting qualified professional help on her own. She's a thief living under assumed identities, she's pathologically afraid of men, and she has so little control over herself that she's sometimes immobilised by the sight of the colour red.

Mark Rutland (Sean Connery) doesn't render proper assistance, though. Well, he's not all bad. Most of the time he's kind and gentle and at least he does guide her on the path of self-analysis. His decision to rape her, however, doesn't seem helpful any way you look at it. I don't think her subsequent suicide attempt was well dealt with either. I suppose you could say that this was relatively new territory for Hitchcock and American cinema in general so covering these topics was bound to be awkward. This was also an era when Hitchcock came into the unfortunate habit of burdening his films with needless exposition and Mark's amateur psychoanalysing is all flat and dull.

Bernard Herrmann's score is great, though, and the visuals are sometimes lovely. And it's just nice to be in that world of Hitchcock for a little while.

Assumptions and Faith on the Run

A man is assumed guilty of murder by two young women and then is assumed innocent by another young woman, all without solid reasoning by any party. The title of Alfred Hitchcock's 1937 film Young and Innocent may have seemed redundant to audiences at the time, when youth was more often presumed to entail innocence than it does now, but then again the young man, who of course is a wrong man, constantly meets with presumptions that he's guilty. It's a neat and engaging example of many of Hitchcock's most familiar plot features--the wrong man on the run and the intelligent blonde woman who helps him, sometimes against her better judgement.

In Francois Truffaut's book-length interview with Hitchcock, the British director complained that a scene was cut from the American release of the film. The couple, Erica (Nova Pilbeam) and Robert (Derrick De Marney) find themselves at a child's birthday party where Erica's aunt Margaret is wandering the room blindfolded for a game of Blind Man's Buff.

The playful tension in the game happens to coincide with the more serious tension of the fugitive and his companion, trying to leave the room before they're detected. Hitchcock told Truffaut this scene was "the essence of the film." Otherwise, most of the movie is set in the countryside as Erica helps Robert to flee almost automatically.

She's the daughter of the Chief Constable and we see she's well known around the police station, her practical knowledge and sensibility, which she attributes to having acquired via the Girl Scouts, prompt her to step in to make up for the detectives' deficiencies, as when Robert faints after being told the murder victim had left him money. She immediately starts slapping his face on both sides.

Thought processes follow very little sense of reason as most people just seem to assume Robert is guilty. Who would doubt the words of the two girls who really did see Robert running away from the woman's body on the beach? Though it's possible Robert was running for help as he said he was, one doubtful interpretation after another accumulates so that by the time he's meeting with his Solicitor (J.H. Roberts) even he can't help peppering his language with indications he believes Robert is guilty.

The way Robert first escapes the police is absurd yet just plausible enough to be credible, something Hitchcock excelled at. When he's brought into the courtroom, someone sits him in the wrong seat, someone else assumes he's absent, everyone panics, and in the confusion he simply strolls out, hastily putting on some spectacles for a disguise. A policeman even assigns him to a search party.

There is an innocence in Robert's behaviour that must actually give the opposite impression. When Erica takes him to an old mill to hide, just automatically in her instinct to help the handsome young man, he jokes that he feels like "Bonnie Prince Charlie", grandson of the deposed James II who led a fugitive existence, still trying to assert his right to the throne. When she's shocked at his flirtatious and jocular manner, he replies with some sudden insight, "I can laugh because I'm innocent." However difficult his situation is, the tension created by the uncertainty of his guilt or innocence is an entirely external matter.

Of course, he becomes more desperate has the film reaches its climax, but it seems primarily out of his concern for Erica. There's a really nicely understated scene where they try driving into a disused mine and the car suddenly falls as the floor gives way. This is unaccompanied by any score and just quietly happens, like a dream. He and the other man in the car, an amusing hobo who starts to help them, escape almost immediately but she starts to sink with the car, desperately holding out her hand for him without screaming--it's all so intriguingly quiet.

Not one of Hitchcock's best or best remembered films, it's nonetheless great. It's available on Amazon Prime.

Twitter Sonnet #1219

In Martian shops the candy tastes of war.
The lane is dusted red for summer thoughts.
But spring was counted late inside the bar.
A round of drinks dispatched the job to lots.
The pictures here are all of pointing gloves.
No finger touched the land in faded years.
A hopeful settler brought a dozen doves.
They now with coos collect on empty piers.
At dawn, some figures stirred 'neath icy crags.
The heat increased as beams of sun advanced.
At eight, a soldier's shadow slumps and sags.
As red horizon haze remotely danced.
A dozen men encamped between the hills.
On whom some silent things imposed their wills.

The Dizzy Reality of the Screen

Last night I went to see the greatest movie of all time, Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, in a movie theatre. Well, it's the most current number one in Sight and Sound's poll of critics worldwide. It's certainly my favourite movie though I've always felt weirdly uncertain that it deserves that top spot more than Citizen Kane, partly because I know very few people who like Vertigo that much. Generally the reaction I see is people think it's okay but don't quite understand what the fuss about.

I was hoping to get some impression of the audience's reaction last night though, as it turned out, it was a blessedly quiet crowd of about twenty five people, nearly all women, ranging in age from mid twenties to mid forties, from what I could tell. Whether or not they liked the movie, they were good movie-goers who kept quiet for the most part and I was able to thoroughly enjoy the experience of the film. I wish it'd been louder, I was hoping for Bernard Herrmann's score to really blast in the opening credits but otherwise I have no complaints about how it was shown.

Fathom Events is screening Vertigo in cinemas for its sixtieth anniversary. It also happens to be the ten year anniversary of the week I spent obsessively watching it over and over before I wrote this analysis in 2008. I stand by all my opinions in that analysis and I think it's one of the best things I've written. But one of the great things about Vertigo is my perspective is different every time. Like the protagonist in Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys, who watches Vertigo in one scene and explains the movie is different now because he, the viewer, is different now, I find myself responding to different things.

I'm more interested in religious symbolism now than I was ten years ago and I found myself thinking about how Hellish Elster's office looks. That desk looks like it was carved from the bloody flesh of tortured souls. A lot of people talk about how green is used in the film but there's a lot to be said about its use of red, too. There's the black cherry wood in the McKittrick hotel and the intense, almost magenta wallpaper at Ernie's, the restaurant where Scottie first sees Madeleine.

When I wrote my analysis in 2008 I spent a lot of time reading what other people had written about the film and tried not to repeat anything but I'm not doing that to-day. So maybe it's already been pointed out but it occurred to me last night that Judy's fate at the end being caused by the sudden appearance of a nun may be seen as an act of God. Scottie's finally broken free of all the illusions and the manipulations to reach the moment of clarity that cures his vertigo. One could say that a benevolent God watching this said, okay, he's done enough, now I'll take Judy off the table so he won't be tempted to go back into that cycle. But there doesn't seem to be anything good in Judy's death--a repeat of her apparent death earlier in the film, it seems mainly to be confirmation that Scottie's trapped in a cycle instead of breaking free of one.

It's a deliberately frustrating and uncertain ending, not unlike the ending of the new season of Twin Peaks. In both cases, we have a detective character traversing hazards of dream and illusion in an effort to save a woman who may or may not be real, a journey that questions the criteria for what we regard as reality. Having recently watched Mississippi Mermaid, I was compelled to think of how important Vertigo was to the French New Wave filmmakers. Like Godard continually thwarting audience expectations by abrupt changes to the score in Pierrot le Fou, Hitchcock continually plays with what audiences expect from a movie and uses those expectations to make the audience a part of the story. He sets up Scottie as a hero and thus makes us complicit in his deviance, he sets up a spirit possession plot and then dashes it aside because, after all, that's a bit fantastical, right? What were we thinking?

But is Carlotta's ghost really a hoax or is its reality simply in a different and deeper form than we're conditioned to expect? The effect of Carlotta's haunting is there, the paradigm of freedom defined by the control of others is set up by her story, and the pattern of dominated people trying to dominate others has an echo in the idea of Carlotta, victim to the whims of a man in life, controlling the fates of men and women after her death. The lack of any explicit proof of her haunting, aside from possibly Scottie's attention being drawn to the necklace in his dream, is in a weird way integral to the power she asserts. Just as "Madeleine" holds so much influence for not truly existing.

Last night I was struck by this pair of shots as Judy and Scottie discuss her dream that leads them to San Juan Bautista:

Hitchcock keeps cutting back and forth between the two. Judy and Scottie are in two different places but their faces are placed in almost exactly the same relationship with the lamp. Like Scottie's dream where he falls into Carlotta's grave or when he falls onto the roof the shot seems to suggest he and Madeleine are the same person. One could say that Madeleine is the joint creation of Elster, Elster's unseen wife, Judy, and Scottie but primarily Judy and Scottie. It's like a masque written by Elster about his wife in which Judy is the actress and Scottie is the audience/participant. Or maybe more accurately, it's like a Dungeons and Dragons campaign written by Elster, Judy is the Dungeon Master, and Scottie is a player. Scottie isn't a passive audience and Judy isn't simply a performer of written lines, they're both creating the story. The lamp is a little clearer next to Judy's face but it's closer and blurrier next to Scottie's--she gives him the dream, raw material, he interprets the dream and comes up with a plan of action based on it.

Yes, I guess this movie will always be fresh for me. It was an incredible pleasure seeing it on a big screen. The incredible visuals, apart from any interpretations of them, are wonderful to experience in themselves. I love these two consecutive shots as we watch Judy and Scottie leave the forest and then we see Judy at the beach by that twisted tree: