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Ned Schantz
This essay participates in a perhaps paradoxical project of con- solidating some essential aspects of the Hitchcockian uncanny — paradoxical because the uncanny is no consolidating force — under the tent of bad hospitality. It is a site where, as we will see, the uncanny experience of “intellectual uncertainty” takes a dis- tinctively social form.1 Gathered there we can find Alfred Hitch- cock’s terrible and singular hosts — the Nazi mother in Notorious (US, 1946), Brandon Shaw in Rope (US, 1948), Phillip Vandamm in North by Northwest (US, 1959), and the surprisingly polite Nor- man Bates in Psycho (US, 1960) — as well as a gallery of less individ- uated bad guests, recurrent figures like the spy, the blackmailer, the double, and the prying camera itself. From their encounters issue the lost bearings, humiliation, and dispossession that define the world of Hitchcock as painfully small and uninhabitable if also, or even as a consequence, strangely open to new kinds of social claims. It is a world very much in transition, one in which ritual and manners no longer ease the navigation of social real-
Camera Obscura 73, Volume 25, Number 1 doi 10.1215/02705346 -2009 - 013 © 2010 by Camera Obscura Published by Duke University Press
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ity or guarantee status on terms not nakedly brutal and shame- less. Thus in Hitchcock’s work we have something approaching a systematic test of modern sociability, a test, moreover, in which a viewer ambiguously takes part as at once a guest and a host of nar- rative cinema.2 This is a capacious subject, but the present essay grows out of a particular problem a viewer has in feeling at home with a Hitch- cock film: a recurring instability in the diegesis at the level of the event, one that arises from the tendency of strong plot alternatives to overshadow certain key moments.3 Such alternatives insistently emerge in a precise context of failed hospitality — as the murder- ous enforcement of male spatial monopoly by the would-be master of his domain — and so powerfully that I find myself hard-pressed to resist their command on critical attention. Did Maxim not deliberately murder his first wife in the backstory of Rebecca (US, 1940)? He does in the novel!4 Does Johnnie not try to push Lina out of the car and over the cliff at the end of Suspicion (US, 1941)? Does Scottie not hurl Judy off the tower at the end of Vertigo (US, 1958)?5 To be sure, repressive forces such as censorship and the star system may account for the loss of these scenes, but we should not conflate an explanation of the cause with an explanation of the effects. And no doubt in each of these preliminary examples the line of defense would be distinct: in ascending order of suspicious- ness, Vertigo’s murder is not shown, Suspicion’s murder is merely attempted (perhaps ambiguously) and then denied, while Rebecca’s murder occurred in the past and is therefore only contradicted by the patriarch’s own testimony. But it may be such diversity that has kept the critical appreciation of this recurring problem dispersed and unformulated.6 To be sure, an alertness to the dubious status of Hitchcockian diegesis is already well in evidence in the founda- tional work of Robin Wood, who, in addition to dismissing Maxim’s story of Rebecca’s “accidental” death, has questioned the entire plot of Vertigo on the well-known basis that we never see Scottie get down from the gutter in the opening scene.7 But it is my hope that by focusing directly on what I call the shadow scenes of Hitchcock we might discern their operations more fully, which may lead in
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turn to some truly new discoveries. Such scenes crowd failed spaces of hospitality, where so much has been shut out. Defined most broadly as any scene felt but not seen, and therefore including scenes both elided and replaced, the Hitch- cockian shadow scene troubles narratological classification. One relevant concept might be that of the “disnarrated” as any event told expressly not to have occurred, but what I am talking about has nothing “express” about it; instead, these crucial nonevents are conjured powerfully by our own situational expectations and left to linger by the manifest incompleteness, confusion, or improb- ability of what seems in fact to occur.8 Neither can these flimsy cover stories consistently dissolve into the subjective imperatives of unreliable narration. As we will see later, even Rebecca’s Maxim de Winter, surely an unreliable narrator, hardly narrates Rebecca’s death by, or as, himself. And if the false flashback of Stage Fright (UK, 1950) confirms the power of the camera to narrate, the gen- eral disappointment with that same stunt shows equally that the scenes of most abiding interest demand a narration that is unreli- ably unreliable. It is also important to note that Hitchcock’s encroaching shadow scenes are by no means always singular but may well inti- mate a wild proliferation of alternatives. A useful example is Guy Haines’s night call in Strangers on a Train (US, 1951), in which the ambiguous terms of hospitality function as a kind of plot multiplier. Recall the situation: Guy (Farley Granger) is a cuckolded tennis star with political aspirations and an eye on a senator’s daughter as a spousal upgrade. Boarding a train at the start of the film, he meets a fan of his, the playboy Bruno Anthony (Robert Walker), who invites him to lunch in his private compartment. There Bruno’s personal insight and unrestrained imagination lead to a proposi- tion that Guy, to his later regret, treats as a joke: exchange murders, “crisscross,” with Bruno killing Guy’s wife, Miriam (Kasey Rogers), and Guy killing Bruno’s father ( Jonathan Hale). It is a proposition that importantly leverages Bruno’s hospitality, subjecting Guy to the law of reciprocity. As a master of denial, however, Guy avoids recognizing his own complicity when Bruno goes through with his
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Bruno (Robert Walker) in his father’s bed
end of the deal and strangles Miriam, but he is finally hounded by Bruno into taking action. And so one night Guy collects the gun Bruno has sent him, slips out the fire escape away from the police (shadowing him since Miriam’s death), and arrives at the Anthony estate as at once trespasser and invited guest. Will he kill Bruno’s father? In the novel, he does.9 Like Daphne du Maurier, Patricia Highsmith is not afraid to show how dangerous an ambitious man can be when threatened. In the film, when Guy arrives, Hitchcock introduces a major twist: instead of shooting into the father’s bed, Guy whispers a warning to “Bruno’s father” about his son, only to see Bruno himself rise up in bed in his father’s place, having caught Guy in his betrayal. Guy takes the opportunity to renounce Bruno, but we should see this gesture for the meaningless nonevent that it is, an empty performance of righteousness for the benefit of the audience, or for Guy as his own audience, since he cannot pos- sibly expect the implacable Bruno to acquiesce. Against this feeble spectacle no fewer than five powerful shadow scenes compete, each arising from a different interpretation of Guy’s purpose in being
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there, and each entailing a different distribution of the roles of hospitality:10
1. Warn the father — what he attempts but fails to do. In this scene Guy plays the good guest to the official master of the house, rejecting the validity of Bruno’s criminal invitation, and this fantasy becomes the cover story that earns him credit (in his own eyes, it seems, if not necessarily ours) for doing the right thing without assuming the risk of exposure that would actually entail. 2. Kill the father — again, the plot of the novel, which is about a very different kind of weakness than the film: the inability to resist a stronger will, rather than the inability to recognize the ferocity of one’s own. This version obviously reverses the distribution of the first shadow scene, with Guy acknowledging and indeed bringing about Bruno’s upstart status as the new master of the Anthony estate. 3. Sleep with Bruno — Guy’s attraction to Bruno is well established by the film and well rehearsed by its critics. This shadow scene is supported by another Hitchcock addition, an otherwise rather arbitrary appearance of a dog on the stairs as Guy ascends to the bedroom. When the dog’s growls give way to licks on a sudden cut, we have to wonder if this unexpected canine hospitality means that the dog recognizes Guy. Unlike murder, sex is repeatable with the same partner. Has this not been the first time? Perhaps Bruno is more welcoming than we know, and Guy’s betrayal all the greater. 4. Be killed by Bruno — Hitchcock establishes the tempting relief of suicide with great force in Rebecca. Here there can be no question that we feel Guy’s recklessness when he abandons the gun to Bruno and turns his back on him, and Guy’s giving in to suicidal self-pity does not seem out of character. If nothing else it is a way for Guy to resolve the tension of playing the indebted guest by casting Bruno definitively as the bad host. 5. Kill Bruno — the film’s true plot, carried out with fortuitous displacement by a merry-go-round, and in my view a more sinister plot than Highsmith’s version. It is more sinister because killing Bruno is in some sense more ruthless than killing Bruno’s father would be — not only because Bruno otherwise remains a witness against Guy, but also because in doing so Guy murders a part of himself. It is also more sinister because of the displacement itself,
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which maintains the spectacle of Guy’s undisturbed denial (he never owns up to the role of bad guest) and self-congratulatory heterosexuality, and which scatters destruction in a scene of carnage that claims at least one other life (that of the merry-go- round operator).
In this way accounting for shadow scenes can do a measure of jus- tice to the complexity of viewing, poised as it so often is in Hitch- cock between acceptance and dismay, expectation and incredu- lity. Nonetheless, the above analysis may not take us far past the kind of conclusions reached by familiar methods, including some exemplary psychoanalytic and historicist readings of Strangers on a Train.11 But what I hope to show in the bulk of this essay is that some of Hitchcock’s scenes of bad hospitality cast shadows a good deal longer — confounding the categories by which criticism con- ventionally circumscribes and masters a film — and that only by pursuing the viewer’s role in Hitchcock’s formal experimentation can we discover these scenes’ most far-reaching implications.12 Indeed, once Hitchcock’s camera starts moving, not many of a viewer’s bearings remain in place — not plot or character, not space or time.
A Tale of Two Tracking Shots: Cinema beyond Actors “I suppose I went mad for a moment. . . .” — Maxim de Winter, Rebecca
Let us mount an overdue comparison between two arresting moments in the Hitchcock universe, the ghostly tracking shots of Rope and Rebecca. Rebecca actually has several moments that might answer to that description if we include its famous opening approach to the Manderley estate and its partially replying conclu- sion, moments to which I will return at the end of this essay. But I am thinking specifically of the famous scene in the boathouse in which Maxim de Winter (Laurence Olivier) explains Rebecca’s death in the past to his confused second wife ( Joan Fontaine). The boathouse is a particularly vexed space, hotly contested at this
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moment between Maxim, its owner at least in name, and Rebecca, its former and uncannily current occupant. Maxim’s attempt to secure the meaning of the boathouse on his own terms triggers the eerie response of Rebecca’s ghostly tracking shot: as Maxim narrates, the camera traces her invisible past movements through present space. It is this technique that returns intriguingly in Rope a f t er the film’s ghoulish party, when the mastermind Brandon ( John Dall) demands of Rupert ( James Stewart), his more theoretical mentor, that he explain how he would have gotten rid of the film’s victim. And it is a bit of a shame that this formal echo has been neglected, even among rare critics, such as George Toles, who tie Rope a nd Rebecca together, and for both general and specific reasons. In general, any connections that can be established between these films may open up communication between the critical traditions entrenched around them: formalist and humanist, auteurist and feminist, gay and lesbian. More specifically, this formal repetition may constitute an impulse with implications for an understanding of shadow scenes: the will to look behind, through, or otherwise beyond an insufficiently hospitable screen. Certainly anyone aware of Hitchcock’s legendary contempt for actors might see in these moments an ingenious solution: in place of actors making scenes we have a dormant setting suddenly charged with potential as an image replete with personal objects exceeds the delimiting power of the narrating voice.13 Here is the dialogue from the boathouse scene, in which Maxim tells his second wife that he actually hated his first wife, Rebecca, and proceeds to unfold the preposterous story of her accidental death:
She was lying on the divan, a large tray of cigarette stubs beside her. She looked ill, queer. Suddenly she got up, started to walk toward me. “When I have a child,” she said, “neither you nor anyone else could ever prove it wasn’t yours. You’d like to have an heir, wouldn’t you, Max, for your precious Manderley.” And she started to laugh. “How funny! How supremely, wonderfully funny. I’ll be the perfect mother, just as I’ve been the perfect wife. No one will ever know. You ought to get the thrill of your life, Max, to watch my son grow bigger, day by day, and to know
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that when you die Manderley will be his.” She was face-to-face with me, one hand in her pocket, the other holding a cigarette. She was smiling. “Well, Max, what are you going to do about it? Aren’t you going to kill me?” I suppose I went mad for a moment. I must have struck her. She stood staring at me. She looked almost triumphant. Then she started toward me again, smiling. Suddenly she stumbled and fell. When I looked down, ages afterward it seemed, she was lying on the floor. She’d struck her head on a heavy piece of ship’s tackle. I remember wondering why she was still smiling. Then I realized she was dead.
During this narration, the camera not only traces Rebecca’s unseen movements but also takes inventory of her possessions along the way. More than the mentioned cigarette stubs, a tea setting, a magazine, and rumpled pillows hold our view. The effect certainly “dynamizes Rebecca’s absence,”14 in Tania Modleski’s words, and indeed the mind races to animate these objects in some scenic reality. Who else might have rumpled those pillows and smoked those cigarettes? Just how hospitable was Rebecca? In contrast, Maxim’s version of a bizarrely delayed and fatal fall remains at best difficult to visualize, so completely is it understated and over- shadowed. The corresponding moment in Rope occurs after the film’s party when Rupert returns to investigate his suspicions about David (Dick Hogan), the missing guest of honor, whom we know to be lying dead in the chest. At Brandon’s urging, Rupert narrates an approximation of the murder that opens the film, a murder whose end we have witnessed and know to contradict his description. Again the camera moves with his voice, tracing the itinerary of an unseen figure past objects bristling with cryptic significance:
At the appointed time, David would arrive. I’d walk slowly out of the room into the hall and greet him, tell him how fine he’s looking and so forth. And, uh, take his hat. And I’d bring him in here, make some small talk to put him at his ease, probably offer him a drink, and then he’d sit down. I’d try to make it all very pleasant, you understand. Philip would probably play the piano. Now, as I recall, David was quite strong. He’d have to be knocked out, so I’d move quietly around behind the chair and hit him on the head with something. His body would fall forward on the floor.
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The mind races to animate these objects in some scenic reality.
“I’d move quietly around behind the chair and hit him on the head with something.”
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And thus again we find ourselves in three scenes at once, a pres- ent scene of narration shadowed by two versions of the past — the one we have partly seen and the one Rupert cannily tells. Look- ing at the scenes from Rope a nd Rebecca together, it seems hard to dispute the striking resemblance of these moments, in which each film’s patriarch recreates the scene of a character’s death while the camera traces the victim’s invisible movements. It is a resem- blance that will have to be accounted for. But there are also significant differences between the scenes, beginning with the fact that Rupert narrates under immediate duress. Indeed, Rupert’s performance here courts danger, linger- ing unnecessarily on the taking of David’s hat, the clue he discov- ered when in leaving he put it on by mistake. The emphasis on the risk of Rupert’s present narration thus serves in turn to dimin- ish the haunting force of the victim David, who, unlike Rebecca, remains too much of a nonentity to make much of a ghost himself. Rather, as in Susan Smith’s reading, David functions as a kind of cipher through which any number of other ghosts come to occupy the chest and haunt the film.15 One ghost Smith does not mention, but that I consider a very interesting presence in Rope, is Rebecca herself — the uncontainable spirit of the earlier film. My claim that this ambient ghost turns up again follows on many other inter textual readings in recent studies of Hitchcock, though these read- ings usually turn on questions of repeated casting, such as Smith’s attention to Cary Grant’s progressively incompetent driving scenes through four films, John Orr’s descriptions of several actors’ “dip- tych” or “triptych effects,” or Amy Lawrence’s reading of Rope as a critical intervention in the star text of James Stewart.16 My reading is much closer to the analysis of Toles, whose theory of Hitchcock’s female gaze deliberately seeks out “the greatest possible resistance” as it makes a rare and difficult journey from Rebecca to Rope.17 But ultimately I find myself provoked to go still further by Tom Cohen’s meticulous attention to a number of unclaimed signifiers in Hitch- cock’s work, in this case the letter R itself, which Cohen says stands for “repetition.”18 Following the R f r o m Rebecca t o Rope, and specifi- cally to Rope’s troubled schoolmaster, Rupert, we see the striking repetition just discussed — a highly distinctive camera movement, the ghostly tracking shot. It is through this conspicuous camera-
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work, I would argue, that the ghost of Rebecca enters the later film. No casual visitor, Rebecca’s arrival has important implications for both films, for the vast body of work we call Hitchcock, and perhaps for the way we watch film, since by the time we follow Rupert’s nar- ration, we find ourselves tangled deep in an intertextual thicket of shadow scenes. Rupert’s scene of narration is shadowed not only by its own many rich and terrible possibilities but also by nearly all of Rebecca’s.
Women and Hospitality “Like the repressed object continually about to return, the invisible female guest goads the space for points of reentry.” — George Toles, A House Made of Light: Essays on the Art of Film
That it is Rope where this ghost alights delineates what I will call the Rebecca effect in a very particular context of failed modern hospitality. Dedicated to the approximate real-time depiction of a party in a sleek high-rise apartment, Rope puts a grotesque form of hospitality front and center, as Brandon, the lead killer, gathers David’s family and friends to cavort unwittingly around David’s dead body. And one of the questions Rebecca brings to Rope, as well as to Hitchcockian hospitality at large, is the still open question of whether Hitchcock’s work, as well as Hitchcock scholarship, can be said to welcome women fully, and what such hospitality might look like. Of interest here is Jacques Derrida’s essay “Hostipitality,” in which he argues that what is typically considered hospitality does not deserve the word — it is a restricted, conditional openness that is ultimately about the power to turn the stranger away, ultimately about hostility.19 True hospitality becomes not a matter of invita- tions but of visitations. It is therefore a gothic hospitality, the genre of Rebecca, which is to say, as Patricia White argues with needed bluntness, a genre “concerned with heterosexuality as an institu- tion of terror for women.”20 Indeed, Derrida describes hospitality in explicitly patriarchal terms, such that, for women, two implica- tions emerge, implications that will likely surprise feminists only in their starkness. First, as women traditionally offer hospitality under someone else’s name, the question arises whether women
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can properly be said to offer hospitality at all. Since hospitality is a system of reciprocity, this doubt may well cloud women’s prospects
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foisting himself on the beset couple in their cramped car, black- mailing them over Rebecca’s death, and devouring their chicken picnic. Importantly, Favell is the figure that would square Maxim’s triangle in the boathouse, adding still further shadow scenes, for Rebecca was expecting him when Maxim showed up. Thus Favell makes Maxim an unexpected guest on his own property, makes him a forbidding cuckold with little hospitality to offer his second wife, or indeed a viewer. In Rope, Rupert is a lot less like Maxim than he is like Favell: a witty, smoking bachelor who overstays his welcome. It is as such that his attempt to master the situation comes to be shadowed most strongly by unrealized scenarios. Indeed, part of the effect of the ghostly tracking shot may be to underscore that Rupert’s narration functions as a kind of palimpsest, writing over a host of transform- ing possibilities. What conjures such possibilities initially is a ques- tion of motivation similar to the one that trails Guy in Strangers on a Train, since Rupert makes his own ambiguous night call. Why does Rupert return to the apartment alone after the party? If he were Favell, he would be returning first and foremost to blackmail the killers, to watch them squirm as he pursues Favell’s vision of “how to live comfortably without working hard.” Favell’s unfettered sexuality suggests another reason Rupert would return alone, on what Toles calls “the venerable amorous pretext of returning to the penthouse to retrieve something that he left behind.”22 And here a past scene can be felt to return with some force; again, Rope’s opening scene of murderous sex or sexual murder that Rupert recreates incorrectly.23 One prospect of Rupert’s return is that we might see this scene unfold in its true form, since Rupert would be the logical replacement for the arbitrary David as the apex of that scene’s triangle.24 Moreover, knowing the fatal outcome of that scene, and knowing the risks Rupert is running in the present, we have to recognize the possibility that his reason for returning is ultimately suicidal — that like Rebecca, and like Guy, a part of Rupert would welcome death. Toles calls Rope “a tug-of-war between a female ghosting force, akin to Rebecca, and a male investigator committed to firm definition,”25 and it is precisely this unruly female element that keeps the meaning of Rupert’s character fundamentally open. It is
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worth adding that this ghosting force is more than akin to Rebecca. Returning to the claim that Rebecca herself enters the film Rope through the ghostly tracking shot, we might now approach the questions of what she is, and where she goes. What is Rebecca? More than a character, who after all enjoys merely a hearsay status in her own film, Rebecca is an arresting series of perceptual lures and recognitions, lures and recognitions that explode the concept of diegesis only to multiply its stakes in a refracting social phan- tasmagoria. She is indeed a ghostly tracking shot, and perhaps a glimmer of confidence, sexuality, or defiance in other women; she is the beckoning ocean and all its imagery (plenty of this in the boathouse), and she is above all the unloosed signifier R (some- times “R de W,” which means we had better look for her in Rear Window [US, 1954] as well).26 Where does Rebecca go? Into the chest is of course the first answer, joining David as his double. But this chest turns out to be quite a crowded space, for she is not the first female ghost to arrive there. Recall Brandon’s favorite bedtime story, “The Mistletoe Bough,” in which a bride hides playfully in a chest, only to be trapped by the spring lock. As David’s father con- cludes the tale, “fifty years later they found her skeleton.” Thus the chest evokes the female gothic as a long legacy of bad hospitality — as an interiority of traps within traps, since, after all, the story is a parable of marriage. Looking for Rebecca among the victims in the chest would feel a lot like three-card monte. The second answer to where Rebecca goes is into Rupert himself. Indeed, Rebecca’s near supernatural powers of possession are hard to miss in her eponymous film, especially in the scene at the boathouse. Maxim does not so much “appropriate Rebecca’s I,”27 as in Mary Ann Doane’s reading, as surrender his face and voice to the far stronger ghost. I thank my students, moreover, for the suggestion that the possessing spirit of Rebecca in fact transfers to the second Mrs. de Winter in this scene, as she will suddenly achieve a for-her unprecedented decisiveness and sexuality.28 Rupert would seem to be safer from such possession, tucked away as he is in another film, commanding his ghostly tracking shot in something more like his own voice. But the combined contagion of the letter R and the mobile camera may get to him nonetheless. Rebecca ends up in Maxim’s account “face-to-face with me, one
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hand in her pocket, the other holding a cigarette.” At the conclu- sion of Rupert’s narration in Rope, this posture is his as well. In what might have been a moment of culminating self-containment, Rupert finds himself possessed by a spirit that only an experienced viewer of Hitchcock could recognize. Far more than Maxim, and far more than Rupert the character might wish, Rupert the figure poses the question of a wider hospitality. It seems hardly enough, though, to learn, as I think Hitch- cock did, that Rebecca may cross our thresholds whether we wel- come her or not. To be sure, she carries a special significance, and Hitchcock criticism still has a lot to learn from François Truffaut’s insight, developed brilliantly by Modleski, that with this film some- thing essential in Hitchcock is born, right down to its still often unwelcome feminine implications. Beyond a longer guest list, Rebecca demands attention to the persistent shuffling of social positions in the face of arbitrary narrative configuration and fixed outcome. To feel the Rebecca effect is to feel, long after the film is over, the inescapable vulnerability of our scenes, our stories, and ourselves to visitation and estrangement — a vulnerability that, far from dissolving into distancing modernist stylistics or a premature
Rupert strikes Rebecca’s pose.
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deconstruction, intensifies all representation. Unsettled by Hitch- cock’s formal echoes, we play the surprised host to a surge of unac- commodated social claims.
False Dawns “That can’t be the dawn breaking over there.” — Maxim de Winter, Rebecca
The Rebecca effect does not dissipate as Hitchcock films achieve closure, which at any rate is so often abrupt and perfunctory. There is no hope, or indeed no danger, of making the shadow scenes go away and restoring regimes of bad hospitality. To under- stand this fact we must take shadows literally and observe a power- ful tendency in Hitchcock’s use of light. Like a host turned tor- turer, Hitchcock disrupts our circadian rhythms in many of his films, exploiting the power inherent in a darkened theater. Along with the music, these light games establish a baseline of mood and disorientation from which all good readings inevitably, if not fully consciously, proceed. There is the lost day in Shadow of a Doubt, when the niece Charlie, having discovered crucial evidence of her uncle’s guilt in the library at 9 p.m. on Friday night, sleeps until dinner the following evening. There is the hard glare of Notori- ous, lit like a hangover, whose many painful sunny scenes finally give way to a privileged darkness as the reformed couple leaves the murderous Nazi husband to meet his doom in the brilliance of the house. And there is L. B. Jefferies’s night shift in Rear Win- dow, an exhausting oscillation of fevered speculation and lapsed vigilance. The film finally has to break the man’s other leg just to get him some rest, which at the end is still occurring in the middle of the day. If our subjection to these effects as viewers is never perfectly mimetic — indeed, both Shadow of a Doubt and Rear Window draw the viewer’s obviously waking attention to the sleeping protagonists — then perhaps this relief only projects our anxiety for ourselves onto the characters. In general it seems that circadian disruption underwrites two classic Hitchcockian affects: the humiliating paranoia that one’s suspicions will look silly in the
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light of day; and a feeling of nightmare that goes well beyond the occurrence of terrible events to the question of one’s own dubious wakefulness and even of one’s very capacity to wake up. Throwing both the perceiver and the perceived into doubt, such conditions make shadow scenes inevitable — and true closure impossible. And it is Rope’s celebrated real-time darkening of the New York skyline that arguably represents the most profound circadian disruption of any Hitchcock film. Indeed, it is only at first glance that the rhythm of light and dark in this film appears remotely natural. We begin in the daylight outside a window, only to cut quickly to a reverse shot of David’s murder in the semidarkness behind drawn curtains. After the killers hide him in a chest, they open the curtains and prepare to host their macabre little affair. It is during the party that the exterior light dims, only to return after- ward in a pulsing glare of alternating green and red neon signs. Thus the film’s pattern is actually light-dark-light-dark-light, with each shift marking a major transition in the film. Indeed, the first flash of green occurs during Rupert’s night call when he removes the rope from his pocket and commits himself to confronting the killers, and its persistence through the final tableau casts Rupert’s closing arguments in a rather perverse light. Wood reports feeling a profound relief when Rupert opens the window to fire the shot that summons the police, but I am not sure I have felt this relief.29 It is not visible on Rupert’s face, and it is surely not to be felt in that sickly green and red light, which would seem instead to confirm Cohen’s argument that Hitchcock undoes “a fraudulent metapho- rics of light as knowledge in Western thought.”30 More compelling, then, is D. A. Miller’s claim that the film’s late-arriving law-and- order discourse fails to advance convincingly beyond might makes right and that the camera that guarantees the diegesis by refus- ing to blink during the film’s ballyhooed long takes becomes — in its final retreat to a safe distance with the whole scene in front of it — “so total a prick.”31 Rupert does not get the truth, he just gets the gun, his investigation never probing the depths of gothic hospitality. Hitchcock’s most literal and dramatic false dawn is the end of Rebecca, an event that places its closure under similar doubt.
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This unsettling light breaks on Maxim and his loyal friend Crawley (Reginald Denny) as they return from London with their stories straight, having just learned from Rebecca’s doctor (in a scene of five men) that she was not pregnant with another man’s child but cancer-ridden — a story that, could it truly banish the shadow story, would retroactively remove her threat to Maxim’s paternity as well as his guilt over her death, since she was a goner anyway. But as Maxim and Crawley drive along, Maxim admits he “can’t get over the feeling something’s wrong.” Then a tree casts an omi- nous shadow across the road, and they quickly grow aware of an unnatural light:
maxim: (brokenly) Wha — What’s the time? crawley: Well, this clock’s wrong. It must be three or four — why? maxim: That can’t be the dawn breaking over there. crawley: It’s in the winter that you see the Northern Lights, isn’t it? maxim: That’s not the Northern Lights — that’s Manderley!
The de Winter mansion is on fire. Maxim finds his second wife safely on the lawn, but as they embrace and turn to the confla- gration, the once-dawning happy ending recedes, along with her hope, born back at the boathouse, that they could live with “no secrets, no shadows.” Indeed, two shadows in particular obscure their prospects. The first is, again, the scene in the boathouse, which returns now as something conspicuously forgotten. Maria Tatar has recog- nized the boathouse as a version of Bluebeard’s bloody chamber32— indeed, our introduction to this space of patriarchal violence occurs tellingly when a second wife’s curiosity overcomes a hus- band’s prohibition. And we must not forget this building’s distant location on the beach below the cliff, because this location means that it may well survive the final fire. With this possibility survives the theme of serial killing, which not only menaces the heroine’s future (since Maxim will have to kill another wife to fulfill Blue- beard’s legacy) but may also unsettle the past once we have started applying pressure to cover stories. After all, is it not more than a little convenient that an unclaimed female body turned up just
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when Maxim needed to bury Rebecca?33 If not murdered by Maxim himself, perhaps this necessary piece of social detritus represents the handiwork of Crawley and thus a shadow story between men, a story that to emerge fully would require the further scapegoating mechanisms of Strangers on a Train.
Lost Scenes, Lost Cameras “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” — The Second Mrs. de Winter, Rebecca
The other shadow between the couple at the end is the still dan- gling narration of the film’s beginning, a female voice-over that initiates the film’s first tracking shot, up the drive in search of Manderley. By the time this searching camera returns to brave the final fire, there is good reason to assume that in this shadow lurks the heroine’s lesbian desire. Thus in White’s reading, “the cam- era seeks out . . . the lingerie case that Danvers embroidered for Rebecca as it is licked by the flames that are consuming Mander- ley. The large angular ‘R’ on the case is the film’s lesbian signa- ture.”34 This social content complicates Cohen’s reading of the R as standing for repetition and offers a clear explanation for the present concern with how to look at a diegesis in which “we can’t always believe our eyes” (72). In White’s understanding of Rebecca as a gothic narrative, “the heroine’s look is central yet unreliable, precisely because the female object sought by her gaze is with- held” (72). But if, as Modleski argues, Rebecca does not disentan- gle from men so easily in the story,35 it is also not clear that lesbian identity could exhaust the raging signification of the letterR . The lesbian reading is surely a welcome one, but it is difficult to see how it accounts for all of Rebecca’s clamoring shades. There is more to be said about the ending of Rebecca, though it certainly does require our thinking finally about Danvers, Rebec- ca’s servant and the film’s great lesbian witch. As the camera pre- pares for its final penetration of Manderley, it lingers at the window, framing the figure of Danvers in shadow amid the roaring flames of the fire she reportedly started. This dramatic shot accomplishes
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several things. It further anchors the tracking shot to the opening by recalling a line from the monologue, in which a cloud “hovered an instant like a dark hand before a face.” If this return thus enacts something of the formal closure that is a property of all circles, it does so in terms of what seems like an ominously suspended threat, a threat that now lands on a particular loss of face. Indeed, the shot of Danvers also foregrounds the social problem of recognition at the heart of narrative cinema, as the face demands a recognition that is a matter of both perception (who is that?) and ethics (what does she want from us?).36 If thanks to context we have no trouble recognizing Danvers-in-silhouette as the same Danvers of the pre- ceding frames, then perhaps that knowledge flatters our powers of perception. But an ethical recognition of Danvers is difficult with the film framing her as its mad arsonist and scapegoat.37 Thus if the ending feints at closure and intelligibility, it is in a way that may well make us wonder whether a dark hand hovers before our f a c e. In blotting out Danvers’s face, the shot achieves one more thing, which is to foreshadow the death of the film’s last visible character that is seconds away, a death in which we will oddly par- ticipate. As the camera enters the burning house toward Danvers, a horrible sound draws her gaze up. Then, in a sudden point-of-view shot, the roof falls in on her, and on us. With this roof collapses hos- pitality as a patriarchal institution, the institution Danvers never really served (she came to the house with Rebecca) and ultimately undermined. Feeling my way through this scene, I am sorry to sug- gest that this brief alignment with Danvers has little to do with some last-ditch sympathy for her plight, but rather exploits her posi- tion to bring home our own devastated shelter. And yet the camera survives, and the film continues for a few more seconds. As we track in on the flaming bed of the sexual woman, it is hard to imagine an image more densely shadowed with wild scenes. But this ultimate and vital sociability can only be felt from an absolute technologi- cal remoteness, as the cinema beyond actors becomes a cinema without people. Alone with this uncanny camera, we ghosts and machines seek Rebecca’s heat from a place of coldest modernity. And I would suggest that a similar desolation has animated Hitchcock’s camera all along. Let us therefore consider the ghosts
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of Rope a nd Rebecca one last time, this time leaping into the past to join David and Rebecca at the moments of their doom, because there is more at stake than the routine haunting of the present by the past. Indeed, the Hitchcockian uncanny is such that attempts to illuminate shadow scenes seem always to cast new shadows in turn. Thus as these characters live their final seconds, we must say with equal conviction that they are haunted by the future, the future that both requires and overshadows their deaths. Trapped in this too-bright future is Hitchcock’s camera, and for these brief moments it is not immortal, or all-seeing, or even knowingly search- ing. It is for once no total prick, Peeping Tom, or smug host. Rather, it is lost — lost among mute and sinister objects, lost among charac- ters who lie and forget, lost in uncanny repetition and intellectual uncertainty.38 Lost — and turning to us, cinema’s haunted ghosts and hosting guests, for real hospitality.
Notes
I thank Tania Modleski, John Bruns, Derek Nystrom, Monique Morgan, Hilary Schor, and Patricia White for their highly generous advice during the writing of this essay. 1. “Intellectual uncertainty” is Ernst Jentsch’s explanation for what brings on the uncanny, though this explanation is best known for being rather dubiously rejected by Freud in his own essay on the subject. See Ernst Jentsch, “On the Psychology of the Uncanny,” 1906, trans. Roy Sellars, Angelaki 2 (1995): 7 – 16; and Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” 1919, in On Creativity and the Unconscious, trans. Alix Strachey (New York: Harper and Row, 1958), 122 – 61. For a discussion of Freud’s attempt to refute Jentsch, see Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny (New York: Routledge, 2003), 39 – 41. 2. A similar ambiguity may account for Hitchcock’s coy public persona, where through cameos or television introductions he installs himself as the elusive host of modern media. 3. I can only assume that similar effects can be observed elsewhere in film and other narrative media. Edward Branigan claims something like this when his consideration of forking-path films
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like Run Lola Run (dir. Tom Tykwer, Germany, 1998) and Sliding Doors (dir. Peter Howitt, UK/US, 1998) leads him to conclude that “within any film narrative lie alternative plots and failed stories” and that “all films thus have ghosts.” Edward Branigan, “Nearly True: Forking Plots, Forking Interpretations: A Response to David Bordwell’s ‘Film Futures,’ ” SubStance, no. 97 (2002): 110, 111. But the doubtful uniqueness of this problem to Hitchcock is less important to me than the way in which his films call attention to it and draw out its implications. Readers may wish to be reminded of how the term diegesis h a s come to be used in film studies: it refers simply to the implied world of the film that the characters inhabit. As we will see, shadow scenes challenge our ability to settle into the diegesis as a comfortably sealed interior.
4. Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca (New York: Avon, 1971), 266. 5. I thank Laura Brightwell for challenging my complacency about this particular scene. 6. Slavoj Žižek has briefly considered Hitchcock’s endings with respect to “this notion that other possible outcomes are not simply canceled but continue to haunt our ‘true’ reality as a specter of what might have happened,” focusing in particular on Notorious a n d Psycho. See Slavoj Žižek, “Is There a Proper Way to Remake a Hitchcock Film?” in Hitchcock: Past and Future, ed. Richard Allen and Sam Ishii-Gonzáles (London: Routledge, 2004), 267. As I hope to make clear, more can be seen if we do not confine ourselves to a consideration of endings, though closure indeed remains a crucial problem.
7. Wood writes of Rebecca, “Maxim de Winter, having killed Rebecca (we must I think accept the logic of the narrative against the ‘evidence’ of an accident imposed on it to pacify the censor), can relate only to a child-wife who unquestioningly adores him.” Robin Wood, Hitchcock’s Films Revisited, rev. ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 232. He writes of Vertigo, “We do not see, and are never told, how [Scottie] got down from the gutter: there seems no possible way he could have got down. The effect is of having him, throughout the film, metaphorically suspended over a great abyss” (110 – 11). Maria Tatar has found evidence that Rebecca in fact tries to tip the viewer off to the fact of Maxim’s guilt, noting his marked vagueness about his own actions as well as the possibility of a typical Hitchcockian
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irony — especially for viewers of Rope — in having the heroine use a suspicious piece of rope as a leash for the dog. Maria Tatar, Secrets beyond the Door: The Story of Bluebeard and His Wives (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 84. 8. For discussions of the disnarrated, see Gerald Prince, “The Disnarrated,” Style 22 (1988): 1 – 8; and Robyn R. Warhol, “Neonarrative; or, How to Render the Unnarratable in Realist Fiction and Contemporary Film,” in A Companion to Narrative Theory, ed. James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), 220 – 31. Both Prince and Warhol note how this technique will often be used to approach the same sort of charged subjects that may get relegated to shadow scenes.
9. Patricia Highsmith, Strangers on a Train (New York: Norton, 2001), 153. 10. These scenes multiply further if we also consider Bruno’s possible motivations for being there, which certainly include the full Oedipal menu as well as various designs on Guy. 11. See, for instance, Sabrina Barton, “ ‘Crisscross’: Paranoia and Projection in Strangers on a Train,” Camera Obscura, nos. 25 – 26 (1991): 74 – 100; John Orr, Hitchcock and Twentieth-Century Cinema (London: Wallflower Press, 2005); Michael Walker,Hitchcock’s Motifs (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005); and Wood, Hitchcock’s Films Revisited. All of these detail some of the complexities of the bedroom scene. 12. Gilles Deleuze has made the largest claim for how Hitchcock involves the viewer, to the point that “including the spectator in the film . . . brings the cinema to completion.” Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 204. The idea of shadow scenes could be seen as a refinement of Deleuze’s corollary idea that “in Hitchcock, actions, affections, perceptions, all is interpretation, from beginning to end” (200). 13. I am intrigued by how Tom Cohen describes Hitchcock’s objects in terms of hospitality: “Objects are hosted, seem marked, yet refuse assigned contents and dissolve into citational networks; after their passage through a sort of ‘spies’ post office,’ they reemerge elsewhere, become host.” Tom Cohen, Hitchcock’s Cryptonymies, 2 vols. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
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Press, 2005), 1:45. But I would stress that if an object can indeed display the social versatility of acting as both guest and host, then only the assigned content “dissolves” (the cover story, let us say), not the urgency of content itself (social relations and events). Perhaps a different liquid metaphor would help: instead of a chemical solution that permeates Hitchcock’s films, dissolving symbols into nonmeaning, we find objects whose fluidity bears on an increasingly submerged viewer as a kind of ear-shattering social pressure.
14. Tania Modleski, The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2005), 50. 15. Smith cites “Selznick, Phillip, Janet, the two absent mothers and even Hitchcock himself” as occupants of the chest. Susan Smith, Hitchcock: Suspense, Humour, and Tone (London: British Film Institute, 2000), 72.
16. See Smith, Hitchcock, 71 – 72; Orr, Hitchcock and Twentieth-Century Cinema, 122 – 29; and Amy Lawrence, “American Shame: Rope, James Stewart, and the Postwar Crisis in American Masculinity,” in Hitchcock’s America, ed. Jonathan Freedman and Richard Millington (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 55 – 77.
17. George Toles, A House Made of Light: Essays on the Art of Film (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001), 209. 18. I say provoked because Cohen’s observational prowess seems to come at the price of a disturbing relationship to feminism. His preference for a performative understanding of gender in film over the “timid” feminist concern with identification might have more credibility were it not for the implications of his own performance, which consigns feminist critics to a three-page ghetto in the introduction to the first volume (and they fare no better in the second) to be passed over as Cohen pursues his argument primarily in the company of men (Cohen, Hitchcock’s Cryptonymies, 1:7). 19. Jacques Derrida, “Hostipitality,” trans. Barry Stocker with Forbes Morlock, Angelaki 5 (2000): 3 – 18. 20. Patricia White, unInvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 64.
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21. For an extensive discussion of female hospitality that includes an excellent summary of its roots in Western traditions, see Tracy McNulty, The Hostess: Hospitality, Femininity, and the Expropriation of Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). 22. Toles, House Made of Light, 221. 23. It is not possible for me to describe this opening event without equivocation since reading D. A. Miller’s account of it in “Anal Rope,” Representations 32 (1990): 114 – 33. Indeed, as I understand his reading, it turns this scene into another crucial and even primal shadow scene: a scene of gay sex that has undergone the mutilating distortion of a homophobic visual regime to appear as a crime that Miller can only place in quotation marks: “murder.” 24. When Brandon’s assertion that “people like David just occupy space” echoes in Rupert’s faux polite remark “don’t let me be in the way,” we should not only hear the film’s insistence on David’s replacement in the social triangle but also perhaps a further wish for a cinema beyond actors.
25. Toles, House Made of Light, 224. Toles’s idea is that it is the rope itself that is feminine, in part because of its elasticity, and in part because of its positioning in a metonymic chain in which the red-colored word Rope of the title returns in the color of Janet’s dress and in the film’s light (211). I hasten to add that Toles’s rich argument suffers considerably from summary, a vulnerability that may be an inevitable consequence of the commitment he shares with the present article to exploring “a Hitchcock film’s alternative realm of truly vertiginous interpretive freedom” (225).
26. Rear Window does not have an equivalent tracking shot that I can find, but the signs of Rebecca might be detected in the basic corpse-in-a-box theme (as the chest becomes a suitcase), as well as in the performance of Grace Kelly. Indeed, her famous hovering close-up, less beautiful than sublime, may be as close as Hitchcock comes to showing an image of Rebecca. Thanks to Monique Morgan for suggesting the link to Rear Window, and again for helping me think further about how Kelly’s Lisa Fremont extends the Rebecca effect to her film by usurping Jeff’s role as host and sexual initiator.
27. Mary Ann Doane, The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940s (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 174.
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28. Rebecca’s famous scarcity of representational resources (the heroine has no name and Rebecca has no image) could contribute ironically to the possession reading — without enough names and faces to go around, perhaps a merger is required to endow a female figure properly.
29. Wood, Hitchcock’s Films Revisited, 357. 30. Cohen, Hitchcock’s Cryptonymies, 1:212. 31. Miller, “Anal Rope,” 131. To be clear, Miller’s argument is that Rope opposes the heterosexual male to both women and gay men so as to be “covered front and back” and therefore, like the camera, impenetrable (128). I detect only a minor conflict between Miller’s reading of the conclusion and Toles’s argument that in this film and others “Hitchcock’s camera reaches furthest when it becomes . . . a ghost with a female name” (Toles, House Made of Light, 230). It seems to me that they largely agree on the terms of what Toles calls the film’s “tug-of-war” and only disagree about what wins (224).
32. Tatar, Secrets beyond the Door, 84. 33. In what I can only understand as further evidence of Hitchcock’s sophisticated misdirection, he himself calls attention to the existence of this dead female body as a problem, but only for the pedantic viewers (known as “the plausibles”) who would wonder why there was not an inquest, rather than as further evidence that we are in the vicinity of murderous masculinity. François Truffaut, Hitchcock, rev. ed. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985), 128.
34. White, unInvited, 225n10. 35. Modleski, Women Who Knew Too Much, 146. 36. The problem of social recognition frequently takes the form of the double in Hitchcock, where physical and situational resemblance inspires the fear of replacement. But in the context of hospitality, we can see past the fear of replacement to the flattered status beneath, since that fear presumes one has something to lose. For Danvers, Rebecca remains singular and irreplaceable — the loyal servant has already lost everything. 37. For what it is worth, we do not see Danvers set fire to Manderley, and any belief that she does so rests on the word of the second Mrs. de Winter plus one insinuating camera cutaway as Maxim
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and Crawley make their drive home. In that shot, we see Danvers holding a candle with a crazy look on her face, but I would merely point out that it is not logically impossible for Danvers to have set down the candle and gone to bed, only to wake and find the house on fire. I would even name, if I could, the second Mrs. de Winter as a possible alternate suspect. 38. Focused understandably on the richness of the gothic reading of Rebecca, Tatar expresses mild surprise that Hitchcock names “Hansel and Gretel” rather than “Bluebeard” when asked by Truffaut about the story’s roots in fairy tale (Tatar, Secrets beyond the Door, 82). My own surprise is that Hitchcock invokes “Hansel and Gretel” merely as an example of how “children’s fairy tales are often terrifying,” rather than as one of the great stories of being lost (Truffaut, Hitchcock, 131).
Ned Schantz is an associate professor of English at McGill University. He is the author of Gossip, Letters, Phones: The Scandal of Female Networks in Film and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). This essay is part of an ongoing project on Hitchcockian hospitality.
“. . . like a dark hand before a face.”
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