Hitchcock's Appetites

McKittrick, Casey. "The Hitchcock cameo: Fat self-fashioning and cinematic belonging." Hitchcock’s Appetites: The corpulent plots of desire and dread. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. 43–64. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 28 Sep. 2021. <http:// dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781501311642.0006>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 28 September 2021, 05:54 UTC. Copyright © Casey McKittrick 2016. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher, and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. 2 The Hitchcock cameo: Fat self-fashioning and cinematic belonging t the height of his popularity, Hitchcock was perhaps as renowned for Athe cameo appearances he made in his fi lms as he was for the fi lms themselves. While the cameos went largely unremarked by American audiences in the 1940s, by the early to mid-1950s, spectators had learned to look for the director ’ s brief appearances. 1 At this point, the game of searching for the director became de rigueur for moviegoers, so much so that Hitchcock worried that the preoccupation with “ fi nding Hitchcock ” was detracting from his audience ’ s narrative engagement, and consequently made sure to place these cameos early in the fi lm. David Sterritt, in his The Films of Alfred Hitchcock , is one of the fi rst Hitchcock critics to appreciate the complexity of the textual play that Hitchcock ’ s cameos occasion, both as visual markers of the director ’ s relation to his own characters and to the diegesis of his making, and as symptom of his personal need to engage with his textual world and have that engagement witnessed by his audiences.2 Sterritt glosses the contributions of two scholars who have likewise taken seriously the semiotics of the cameo: Tom Ryall ’ s observation that the cameo constitutes “ that most familiar mark of Hitchcock ’ s personalization of his fi lms, ” generating savvy “ qualities of self-consciousness ” that depart from the purported “ anonymity ” associated with classical cinema; and Ronald Christ ’ s characterization of the cameos as instances of parabasis , moments of “ illusion-breaking ” dramatic rupture, as in Greek comedy ’ s choral direct address to the spectator. 3 In his incisive account of the Hitchcock cameos, Sterritt makes the case for their signifi cance beyond personalizing signature and parabasic disruption, reasoning that in addition to providing “ self-publicizing jokes and ironic punctuations, ” and apart from their “ illusion-breaking qualities, ” the cameos HHitchcock.indbitchcock.indb 4433 228-04-20168-04-2016 112:41:142:41:14 44 HITCHCOCK’S APPETITES also disclose “ Hitchcock ’ s deep-seated wish not only to speak through , but to become physically integrated with , his fi lms. ” He persuasively elaborates on the nature of these directorial wishes, fi rst asserting Hitchcock ’ s desire to not only “ wink and wave at the audience, ” but to sardonically “ comment on the action in some small, sly way ” ; second, noting Hitchcock ’ s “ wish to approach and ‘ keep an eye on ’ his characters” ; and third, describing a “ signal to his audience (which normally receives the message on a subliminal level) that he is the presiding spirit of his fi lms. ” 4 Sterritt adds that the cameo, together with the presence of cinematic “ surrogates ” for Hitchcock — sometimes characters, sometimes object which bespeak a Hitchcockian point of view in his physical absence — evince his desire for a kind of fusion with the fi lm ’ s world. In addition to Sterritt ’ s astute assessments of the functions, both psychic and narrative, of the Hitchcock cameo, I would like to suggest in this chapter that his cameos generate what I will call a mesogetic space , meaning that his appearances are “ intrusions ” that do not rupture the diegesis entirely, nor do they stand squarely outside it in discrete isolation. 5 Rather, the cameos occupy a narrative middle ground that generates both irony and intimacy. That is, the cameo performs in both directions, within and outside of the narrative ’ s space, permitting the kind of intertextual readings that enhance Hitchcock ’ s fi lmic role through a consideration of how he signifi es as celebrity in the world of the spectator. 6 Hitchcock ’ s presence in the mesogesis infl ects the fi lm text, as Sterritt allows, in order to provide nuance to, or commentary on, the world of the fi lm. It also projects outward, to convey to the audience a momentary ironic confl uence of fi lmic and extra-fi lmic realities, and the sense of Hitchcock ’s solidarity with, and more importantly, belonging to the cast and the characters of his production. The cameo ’ s gestures “ outward ” toward the audience were important to Hitchcock, I argue, in their imparting a sense of tradition and continuity across the course of his cinematic career. As his many anecdotes about the origin of his cameos demonstrate, his continuation of the cameo appearance throughout his career pays reverent homage to his early days of small English ensemble productions, in which he felt a fraternal part of a creative collectivity. This is a feeling he did not always experience in some of his larger, more sweeping American productions, where the crew was exponentially bigger and dispersed. The cameo then nostalgically brought him back in touch with these early experiences of ensemble and fraternal teamwork. By extension, the cameo as a tradition in his fi lmmaking marked his place in a collectivity which became more diffi cult to conceptualize in his later, high-budget, widely diffuse American productions, which sprawled due to evolving technologies, the scope of his projects, and the exponential growth of production crew. In addition to their bridging the modesty of his HHitchcock.indbitchcock.indb 4444 228-04-20168-04-2016 112:41:142:41:14 THE HITCHCOCK CAMEO 45 early productions with the grandiosity of his later ones, these cameos were important to Hitchcock, in that his appearances constituted proof of the cinematicity of his body. Sterritt writes of Hitchcock ’ s need for “ participation ” in his cinematic world. I elaborate on this “ need ” by suggesting that, though Hitchcock ’ s corpulence and his generally unconventional appearance foreclosed the possibilities of occupying the dramatic or romantic centers of his fi lms, he still sought validation through performance on the silver screen, however marginal or fl eeting. Through his cameos, Hitchcock became of the screen , not just the wizard behind it, and thus, received a sort of legitimation that salved the insecurities stemming from his bodily difference from the stars he directed. In short, the Hitchcock cameo is as much a profession of cinematic belonging as virtuosic signature. When asked about the origin and purpose of his cameos in an interview of the mid-1940s, Hitchcock said: It all started with the shortage of extras in my fi rst picture The Lodger . 7 I was in for a few seconds as an editor with my back to the camera. It wasn ’ t really much but I played it to the hilt. Since then, I have been trying to get into every one of my pictures which must be 18 or 20 by now. It isn ’ t that I like the business but it has an unholy fascination that I can ’ t resist. When I do, the cast and the grips and the camera men and everyone else for miles around gather to make it as diffi cult as possible for me. But I can’ t stop now. 8 When prompted to speak about the origins of the cameo in interview situations, Hitchcock usually reiterated this same scenario — that, at the time of The Lodger , productions were quite small, and that the frame often needed to be fi lled by faces and bodies; thus the crew (including the director) would assume extra roles, and, therefore, necessity was the mother of the cameo. His daughter Patricia would often tell a similar version of the story in interviews. His evocation of the simpler circumstances of his early fi lms, characterized by modest and makeshift means, and intimacy among cast and crew, is one reason I am drawn to the explanation that his cameo appearances in later fi lms were a ritual that demonstrated homage to and remembrance of his days of fi lming in England before he became the “ Master of Suspense. ” Also evident in Hitchcock ’ s recollection of his early cameos is an endearing coyness that partially masks a joy he clearly derives from making an appearance. He tries to establish a reticence through his preemptive remark, “ It isn ’ t that I like the business, ” but he then describes a repulsion-attraction to the idea of performance — in his words, an “ unholy fascination ” that he “ can ’ t stop. ” His inclusion of the angle of the “ cast and the grips and the camera HHitchcock.indbitchcock.indb 4455 228-04-20168-04-2016 112:41:142:41:14 46 HITCHCOCK’S APPETITES men ” colluding to “ make it as diffi cult as possible ” bespeaks a sort of hazing, but a kind of loving hazing that at its core confers a sense of belonging. It is this conferral of belonging that the ritualization of the cameo guarantees, from the back of his head in The Lodger , to his silhouetted profi le in Family Plot forty-nine years later. In this chapter, I argue that Hitchcock ’ s cameos are ritual enactments of his belonging to the cinema, a means of consolidating authorial identity, and a vehicle for textual commentary. In what follows, I also perform a close reading of several noteworthy cameo appearances that, in my estimation, mark the fi lms in important ways. I will then put forward a typology of the cameo, explaining certain modes of enunciation in which they operate to install Hitchcock as both auteur and fraternal cinematic performer.

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