Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/camera-obscura/article-pdf/25/1 (73)/1/486724/CO73_01Schantz.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 Hospitality and the Unsettled Viewer: Hitchcock’s Shadow Scenes 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 1 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/camera-obscura/article-pdf/25/1 (73)/1/486724/CO73_01Schantz.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 2 • Camera Obscura 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 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/camera-obscura/article-pdf/25/1 (73)/1/486724/CO73_01Schantz.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 Hospitality and the Unsettled Viewer • 3 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 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/camera-obscura/article-pdf/25/1 (73)/1/486724/CO73_01Schantz.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 4 • Camera Obscura 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 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/camera-obscura/article-pdf/25/1 (73)/1/486724/CO73_01Schantz.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 Hospitality and the Unsettled Viewer • 5 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.