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Richard Allen[1] The
third reading that is offered by Wood and Zizek is the
"familial" ... Here the birds no longer represent an evil
God or a collective natural force, but rather the main
character's overly involved mother. -
Robert Samuels[2] [I
propose] that this child-aversive, future-negating
force, answering so well to the inspiriting needs of a
moribund familialism, be thought [of] as
sinthome-osexuality ... -
Lee Edelman[3] The
images of Melanie moving along the wall in circling
movements and of her curled up on the sofa "recoiling
from nothing at all" heighten [the] sense of her
being under attack from her own emotions rather than any
external force. -
Susan Smith[4] The
titles show a war between nature and culture, with the
irrational and primitive vanquishing human
illusions. -
Camille Paglia[5] [T]he
last word on the subject of the film: "It appears that
the bird attacks come in waves with long intervals in
between. The reason for this does not seem clear
[as] yet." -
Bill Krohn[6] [1]
Allen, Richard. 'Avian metaphor in The birds.' The
Hitchcock annual (1997-98 issue): 50. [2]
Samuels, Robert. Hitchcock's bi-textuality: Lacan,
feminisms, and queer theory. Albany: SUNY Press, 1998:
126. [3]
Edelman, Lee. "Hitchcock's future". In Alfred Hitchcock:
Centenary essays, edited by Richard Allen and Sam
Ishii-Gonzalès. London: British Film Institute, 1999:
240. [4]
Smith, Susan. Hitchcock: suspense, humour and tone.
London: British Film Institute, 2000: 139. [5]
Paglia, Camille. The birds. London: British Film
Institute, 1998: 20. [6]
Krohn, Bill. Hitchcock at work. London: Phaidon
Press, 2000: 249. One way
or another, the above quotations from recent writing about
The birds (USA 1963) all allude to the film's
depiction of a drive or force that is irrational. I fancy
that some such force, at once life- and death-dealing, was
always Hitchcock's subject. Films such as The ring
(England 1927), Rich and strange (England 1932),
Lifeboat (USA 1944), The trouble with Harry
(USA 1955), and The birds provide its purest and most
vivid expression. In more concentrated form, it asserts its
presence in the Albert Hall sequence of The man who knew
too much (USA 1956
version),[7]
whose turbulent Storm Cloud Cantata contains these lines,
sung by the choir: [7]
Hitchcock had earlier used the circular Albert Hall as the
setting for both the climactic prize-fight in The
ring - a film whose punning on "ring" and "round" I
discuss in my book, The Alfred Hitchcock story
(London: Titan Books, 1999), p. 19 - and the Storm Cloud
Cantata sequence in the first version of The man who knew
too much (England 1934). All three scenes have a sense
of fatality and moment. (Note: any further citations from my
book will, as here, quote the page numbers of the UK edition
- I disown the cut and "simplified" US version.) [8]
For providing me with the words of the Storm Cloud Cantata,
I thank Hitchcock expert, Steven L. DeRosa. Both he and
Krohn (167-70) note that the 1956 film makes slight changes
to the words in the 1934 film. In what
follows I shall call such a force "Will", following the
usage of the German Romantic philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer
(1788-1860). Schopenhauer conceived Will to be the single
cosmic principle, a force or striving that is blind and
ultimately unknowable. I want to argue that, in the last
analysis, Hitchcock's films are about this Will and nothing
else. Of
course, there's a sense in which I'm on sure ground, so long
as I stick to Schopenhauer's concept, because Will is by his
definition all we've got. Thus, apropos The birds, it
doesn't matter to my argument that Robin Wood and Slavoj
Zizek downplay readings that interpret the birds as evil
deity or "collective natural force" in favour of one that
emphasises the hostility and fears of the hero's mother. The
play of human emotions - the main subject, too, of Susan
Smith's reading of the film - is just as much Will as the
undulations of the sea and the weather in Lifeboat,
or the movement of wind and wheeling birds in the Storm
Cloud Cantata. (Zizek offers a fourth, Lacanian reading, in
which the birds incarnate "the fact that, on the
[S]ymbolizing level, something 'has not worked
out'",[9]
but a matching interpretation is invited by Schopenhauer's
system, as I'll show.) What is so striking about the notion
of Will to a Hitchcockian like myself is how Schopenhauer
characterises it: Will is that which causes change and
suffering in the world, whose working in humans is largely
unconscious, and whose manifestations include all forms of
egoism, notably the sex drive, yet which also logically
provides the basis for Schopenhauer's aesthetic and ethical
positions, which are of the first order. Furthermore, as
I've indicated, the notion of Will pertains to all aspects
of the world, the visible as well as the invisible. For a
filmmaker, Schopenhauer's Weltanschauung may well
offer the closest thing to a "complete" or "natural"
philosophy.[10]
Finally, something else that's striking is how exactly
Schopenhauer's conception of music matches Hitchcock's
notion of "pure cinema": both concern the purest, least
mediated expression of Will.[11] In
turn, I see Hitchcockian suspense as making an audience
experience the Will, or an analogue thereof.
Schopenhauer had noted the same thing of music. In a
celebrated passage he wrote: "The effect of the
suspension [consists of] a dissonance
delaying the final consonance that is with certainty
awaited; in this way the longing for it is strengthened ...
This is clearly an analogue of the satisfaction of the
[individual] will which is enhanced through
delay."[12]
According to Christopher Janaway, many see this idea
especially reflected in Wagner's composition of Tristan
and Isolde (1865).[13]
So perhaps it's no coincidence that Hitchcock's favourite
composer was Wagner,[14]
just as his favourite painter was Paul Klee - whose
manifesto On modern art (1924) speaks of the artist
embracing "the life force itself" in order to emerge into
"that Romanticism which is one with the
universe".[15]
For his part, Hitchcock from about 1934 held to what he
called the "moving-around principle", whereby the ideal
cinematic form is the chase. He commented: "I don't know
why. That's the way it is. But just as the film - be it in
preparation, in the camera, or in the projection booth - has
to move around, so in the same way I think the story has to
move around also."[16] [9]
Quoted in Samuels: 126. [10]
Certainly a good deal more than the thought of Jacques
Lacan, as I'll discuss in the text. Actually, I'm strongly
reminded of how when Jean Renoir went to India to make
The river (USA/India 1950), he said that he had "been
a Hindu all [his] life". There are affinities in
Schopenhauer to both Buddhism and Hinduism, including the
tendency to see this world as a prison from which the human
spirit must be liberated, and the Hindu notion of "Brahman",
the one unchanging reality behind surface appearances.
Though Schopenhauer is typically described as a
philosophical "pessimist", his thought is far from imposing
puritanical and other restraints. The instance of the
life-celebrating Renoir is suggestive. Even more so,
perhaps, is that of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, on whom
Schopenhauer and Hitchcock (and Gustav Mahler, himself a
Schopenhauerian) were major influences. "Schopenhauer",
Fassbinder told an interviewer, "says that human existence
is worthless, to put it in a primitive way. Then you can
make a lot out of it. To know that human existence is
useless doesn't mean that one has to commit suicide. It
means all the possibilities are there. You can have a
wonderful time." (Quoted in Judy Stone, Eye of the world:
conversations with international filmmakers. 1997. My
apologies to readers: I don't have a page citation for this
quote.) German art and cinema since the early years of last
century (when Hitchcock encountered them) have often
contained oriental motifs. Also, in German Expressionism one
finds various "vitalist" concerns, such as the need to seek
an authentic existence - though the plays and films may end
pessimistically. For what it's worth, the physical
appearance of Dr Caligari in Robert Wiene's celebrated 1919
film was based on a late photograph of Schopenhauer. (S.S.
Prawer, Caligari's children: the film as tale of
terror. Oxford University Press.1980: 173.) In turn,
it's interesting to note how Hitchcock's Rich and
strange brings its English couple up against an oriental
outlook and thereby shows how inauthentic and "unexamined"
the couple's own existence is ... [11]
Christopher Janaway in his excellent and succinct
Schopenhauer (Oxford and New York: Oxford University
Press, 1994: 70-71), writes: "Schopenhauer's philosophical
theory of music ... remains one of the most striking
theories of the power of music to express emotion ...
Schopenhauer contends that the progression of musical notes
through time is immediately understood by the human mind as
an analogy of the progress of our own inner strivings
[i.e., will]." Cf one of Hitchcock's definitions of
"pure cinema": "pieces of film put together [in order to
create emotion], like notes of music make a
melody". [12]
Janaway: 71. [13]
Janaway: 71. [14]
To Mr and Mrs John Galsworthy, Hitchcock explained:
"[Wagner's] so melodramatic." (Taylor, John Russell.
Hitch: the life and work of Alfred Hitchcock. London
and Boston: Faber & Faber, 1978: 110.) [15]
Klee, Paul. Paul Klee on modern art. London: Faber
& Faber: Faber paper-covered edition, 1966: 43. Cf
Patrick Gardiner's Schopenhauer (Harmondsworth:
Penguin Books, 1967: 202): "[I]t [should
not] be forgotten that there have been artists and
writers, of whom in recent times Paul Klee and Rilke are
examples, who have spoken of their work ... in language
which is often close to that used by Schopenhauer ..." That
Hitchcock's favourite painter was Klee emerged when he was
interviewed by Charles Thomas Samuels. See Samuels.
Encountering Directors. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons,
1972: 239. [16]
Quoted in James Naremore (ed.), North by Northwest.
New Brunswick: Rutgers Films in Print, 1993: 179. In
other words, the cinema's dynamism reflects and extends that
of its surroundings. This may not be the most sophisticated
explanation of why cinema and Will are
allied,[17]
but it surely goes to the core of Hitchcock's method of
filmmaking. And it's empirically-based ("That's the way it
is"). Schopenhauer, too, had the capacity of "looking to
see".[18]
Further, Hitchcock made no bones to Truffaut about his
position: "Directors who lose control are concerned with the
abstract."[19]
It's clearly a mark of the hero-status of Mitch (Rod Taylor)
in The birds that he so quickly comes to terms with
what he calls "the bird war" or
"plague"[20]
by asking sagely, "It's happening. Isn't that a reason
[for not denying it]?"[21] Now, to
focus what I've been saying so far, I want to briefly
analyse the already-cited Albert Hall sequence in the remake
of The man who knew too much. To fully appreciate the
sequence, one must attend to both the words and the music of
the Storm Cloud Cantata, which the suspenseful events in the
auditorium reflect in an almost surreal way. The reader will
recall that Jo McKenna (Doris Day) has recently learned that
a foreign Prime Minister is going to be assassinated during
the concert; and that her young son has been kidnapped and
held hostage to silence her. What is she to do? For much of
the sequence she seems literally paralyzed, torn between
love of her son and a sense of duty to save the life of the
eminent person resplendent in his waistcoat and scarlet sash
in the dignitaries' box nearby. In effect, the issue here
is: what is the will of an individual against that of the
cosmos itself? Meanwhile, the cantata advances inexorably
towards its fateful cymbal-crash when the assassin will
fire: There
came a whispered terror on the breeze, And the
dark forest shook And on
the trembling trees came nameless fear, And
panic overtook each flying creature of the wild. And
when they all had fled Yet
stood the trees ... [17]
In CineAction 50 (September, 1999: 75), Steven
Schneider observes that Hitchcock "was a much better
director than theoretician". Hitchcock himself was uneasy
about his "moving-around principle". In the same interview
with Jean Domarchi and Jean Douchet (both of Cahiers du
cinÈma) as his definition quoted in the text, he
adds defensively: "That may well be a foolish association of
ideas" (Naremore: 179). Nonetheless, he intuited a certain
validity in his theory, and he made his films accordingly.
To be clear, I don't claim that Hitchcock (unlike, say,
Chaplin) ever read Schopenhauer, only that Hitchcock's
world-view resembles the German philosopher's in many
important points of detail. Nor have I attempted in this
article to suggest any but the most salient ways in which
the two men's outlooks overlapped, and the reasons therefor:
e.g., the concern of both with empirical reality, of
"looking to see". On how an interest in a "life-force" was
strong in England in the late 19th century and the first
part of the 20th century, see my article on North by
Northwest that's on the Web. The URL is
<http://www.labyrinth.net.au/~muffin/NxNW_c.html>.
For further thoughts on the "vitalist" philosophies of
Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Bergson, and speculation about
the pertinence and influence of these apropos Hitchcock, see
Mogg, The Alfred Hitchcock story: 4 and
passim. [18]
A valuable comment made by a British academic about
Schopenhauer, on a BBC study tape in my possession - but at
present mislaid, for which I apologise to my
readers. [19]
Truffaut, FranÁois. Hitchcock. New York: Simon
& Schuster, 1967: 64. [20]
This I take to be the film's pertinent nod to Albert Camus's
La peste (1947). [21]
I often tell myself that we exist in the midst of more (or
other) than nothing, and how that "something" is Will. Why
deny its existence (I ask myself)? They say that a fish
doesn't know it's in water, but surely we needn't be like
that fish - or like one of Plato's cave-dwellers, for that
matter? (Schopenhauer was much taken with Plato's fable.)
Then I ask myself whether Hitchcock had similar thoughts,
and I conclude that he did ... Of
course, the trees are part of Nature, or Will. The
fact that they remain steadfast in the face of the storm,
despite their "nameless fear", suggests the courage of Jo
who comes to the Albert Hall, and remains, because she knows
that it is her duty to stop the planned assassination.
Arguably, in her paralyzed condition, she simply surrenders
to what "will be".[22]
Yet we should note an ambiguity. Given the film's emphasis
on religion - besides other major human concerns like music,
social class, etc. - in both the Marrakesh and London
scenes, Jo's eventual wordless scream that deflects the
assassin's aim suggests a last-minute appeal to an entity
beyond language and/or the individual will, an entity which
(who?) promptly intervenes. That is, Jo's "whatever will be"
song early in the film looks like fatalism - appropriately,
she's visiting an Islamic country at the time - yet still
Hitchcock doesn't preclude the possibility of Divine
intervention. There's a similar ambiguity in, for example,
The trouble With Harry and The wrong man (USA
1956). On the other hand, the entity that Jo effectively
supplicates or invokes, and which may or may not have been
deflected from its own "predetermined" course, could well be
just Will.[23]
A "force of destiny", or kismet, seems often to be invoked
in Hitchcock, going right back to The ring and
beyond. Then
again, in the very act of her apparent surrendering to Will
and/or "what will be", Jo is humbled in such a way that her
own wilfulness is stilled, and that is precisely a situation
that Schopenhauer saw as offering a form of "release". An
ambiguous situation again arises, underlined by the closing
lyrics of the Storm Cloud Cantata: Finding
release the storm clouds broke and drowned the dying
moon. Finding
release the storm clouds broke - Finding
release! [22]
The song that we hear Jo singing energetically, if
fatalistically, to her son in Marrakesh, "Que sera, sera",
is a key to the film - including the foreign embassy climax,
where the song itself becomes the means of defeating
"what will [seemingly] be". Cf my hypothesis in the
present article, that The birds shows Will being
turned against itself, in order to obtain a form of
"release" ... [23]
Cf Edvard Munch's famous Symbolist/expressionist painting,
The scream (1893), whose subject Marina Vaizey (in
her book, 100 masterpieces of art. London: Peerage
Books, 1979: 98) describes as "[m]an at the mercy of
terrible forces beyond his control, forces within himself
maybe". When art director Robert Boyle was first informed by
Hitchcock of his intention to make The birds, Boyle
did some preliminary sketches inspired by Munch's painting
(Paglia:18). In the Albert Hall, Jo's scream is
surrealistically anticipated by the words of the cantata
about the "screaming" night-birds. A
general release - here the cloud-burst - that is also a
personal release - Jo's, for example - is entirely feasible
in Schopenhauer's epistemology, where the whole phenomenal
world remains subjective. He wrote, famously, "The world is
my representation".[24]
Likewise, in Hitchcock's subjective cinema, outer and inner
can scarcely be separated. But, further, Schopenhauer's
ethics are about self-surrender that leads to
enhanced perception and compassion. There's an analogous
situation in The birds. Another sign of Mitch's
"heroic" learning-curve is his strategic "surrender", at
Melanie's behest, to the pervasive presence of the birds.
Thinking to drive off some of the gathering crows, he picks
up a stone, but then immediately lowers it again when
Melanie ('Tippi' Hedren) protests at his folly, "Don't
Mitch, don't". At the end of the film, where a note of
compassion is very marked, the Brenners and Melanie are
spared (released) to live another day ... [24]
Schopenhauer's magnum opus begins as follows: "'The world is
my representation': this is a truth valid with reference to
every living and knowing being, although man alone can bring
it into reflective, abstract consciousness." See Arthur
Schopenhauer, The world as Will and Representation.
New York: Dover Publications (translated by E.F.J. Payne),
1966: Volume I: 3. And
again, Schopenhauer's notion of the world as Will applies in
another way to the Albert Hall sequence. The major human
concerns that figure prominently in both the Marrakesh and
London scenes are representative of "life". (Cf the
depiction of San Francisco in Vertigo [USA
1958], with its missions, forts, shops, and art
galleries: it's a city seen sub specie aeternitatis.)
Those concerns - religion, music, social class - all become
focussed during the performance of the Storm Cloud Cantata.
For instance, the very words of the cantata help evoke a
pantheistic form of religion (naturally the massed
choir is apt here); and the concert is attended by an
audience of dignitaries, the well-to-do, and the less
privileged classes. (The working-class is represented by the
Hall's staff, such as the elderly attendant who approaches
Jo for her ticket).[25]
Crucially, the sequence and its music "sum up" the film to
this point. Not only has the film itself been full of
Sturm und Drang - it is, after all, a melodrama - but
the concert by its own range and variegated nature
"parallels the world", as Schopenhauer had observed of
orchestral music generally.[26] [25]
Of Rear Window, Hitchcock told Truffaut (160) that
the view of the apartments from Jeff's window shows "a real
index of individual behaviour ... a small universe", and
explained that "[t]he picture would have been very
dull if we hadn't done that." For "dull", we might read
"without a feeling of significance" (a l‡ Goethe's
phrase, "the dignity of significance"). [26]
Janaway: 72. "The base is like the lowest grade of the
will's objectification ... inorganic nature ... The melody
on top is analogous to ... the intellectual life and
endeavour of man ... All the parts in between ... are the
various manifestations of will throughout [nature]
..." Janaway comments that "[t]his idea, though
fanciful, is a rather fine one", has often attracted
musicians to it, and that few other writers besides
Schopenhauer "have come nearer to the impossible achievement
of evoking [music's] pleasures in a purely verbal
medium". In fact, Schopenhauer's idea is no more fanciful
than Hitchcock's "moving-around principle": both ideas show
an intuition of something true about how the world
goes. Verbal
and non-verbal indications of Hitchcock's preoccupation with
"life" are everywhere, in and out of the films. The most
explicit may be what Fred (Henry Kendall) tells Emily (Joan
Barry) at the start of Rich and strange: "I want more
life - life, I tell you." The film, conceived in the same
cautionary vein as Lifeboat and The birds,
proceeds to enact Fred's wish and to thereby expose the
essentially subjective nature of what the term "life" means
to this (very) suburban English couple. A descendent of Fred
is "Scottie" (James Stewart) in Vertigo, whom Gavin
Elster (Tom Helmore) tempts with notions of "colour,
excitement, power, freedom", i.e., heightened
life.[27]
Like Fred, Scottie is soon deceived by a false anima-figure
(the "Princess", Madeleine - the latter sent by
Elster),[28]
and at the end seems likely to remain immured in a deadly
solipsism.[29]
To catch a thief (USA 1955) opens with a shot of a
travel poster proclaiming, "If you love life, you'll love
France." In an approximate reversal of the Vertigo
situation, John Robie (Cary Grant) inhabits a "travel-folder
heaven" on the French Riviera, and in the course of the film
successfully affirms his right to possess both it and the
beautiful girl, Francie Stevens (Grace Kelly), who offers
him her help. Another Cary Grant vehicle, North by
Northwest (USA 1959), contains near the end its hero's
line, "I never felt more alive." Like The 39 steps
(England 1935), the film is about a quickening process
undergone by its hero - and its audience - in what amounts
to a demonstration of Henri Bergson's theory of a "vital
force" that, if sufficiently intense, may give direct
experience of "freedom". Bergson's notion, a more inherently
optimistic version of Schopenhauer's idea of cosmic
Will,[30]
was hugely fashionable in the 1920s when Hitchcock was both
starting out as a director and mixing in the heady
atmosphere of the newly-formed London Film Society, whose
members included George Bernard
Shaw,[31]
H.G. Wells, film theorist Ivor Montagu, and others. That
Hitchcock always retained a keen conception of "life" as an
entity may perhaps be inferred from his boast to a
journalist in 1972 that his newest film, Frenzy
(USA), was indeed full of
"life".[32] [27]
Vertigo is one of several Hitchcock films that
attempt to give us a "Bergsonian" intuition of "life" as an
entity. I discuss this matter in the text. [28]
For what it's worth, several Japanese films (e.g.,
Mizoguchi's Ugetsu monogatari, 1953) contain ghostly
"princesses" who tempt ambitious, married males from the
path of virtue and right conduct. [29]
I say in The Alfred Hitchcock Story (149) that by the
end of Vertigo the mission tower has come to
represent much more than just a phallic symbol, approaching
something like Coleridge's "dread watchtower of the absolute
self". [30]
Solomon, Robert C. Continental philosophy since 1750: the
rise and fall of the self. Oxford and New York: Oxford
University Press, 1988: 108. [31]
The enormously influential Shaw, whose Complete Works,
including Man and Superman (1903), Hitchcock owned,
promoted the thought of both Schopenhauer and
Nietzsche. [32]
The same quantitative reckoning of "life" is evident in
Psycho when Norman remarks to Marion, "You've never
had an empty moment in your entire life, have you?", and
she, "a perfectly ordinary bourgeoise, as Hitchcock called
her, replies, "Only my share." But to
systematically observe the notion of a life-force that is
also a death-force evolving in Hitchcock's work, the best
place to look is the titles sequences of the films. Such
sequences in Hitchcock were almost never
static;[33]
however, it took time for them to advance from mere
symbolism to direct representation of an ambiguous
life/death force. Examples of the latter are the Saul Bass
titles sequences for Vertigo, North by
Northwest, and Psycho (USA 1960). In each, the
working of a mysterious and somewhat sinister force may be
felt, but equally each sequence fascinates because of the
sheer art and/or design invested in it. (Characteristically,
the life/death ambiguity runs right through North by
Northwest to its Mount Rushmore climax set amidst Gutzon
Borglum's carved faces of the American Presidents.) A
leap-forward for Hitchcock was certainly The ring,
from a story he wrote himself with elements borrowed from
E.A. Dupont's (suitably-named) Variete (1925). The
still-shot of the Albert Hall auditorium that's behind the
titles makes impressive use of Stimmung, mood
achieved by means of lighting. We see a distant, lit-up
boxing ring surrounded by unseen watchers. The intimations
of destiny anticipate the film's own Albert Hall climax - a
prize fight - and the Albert Hall sequences of The man
who knew too much (both 1934 and 1956 versions), as well
as the "fateful" titles sequence of Strangers on a
train (USA 1951). The latter sequence is set in the
domed entrance hall of a busy railway station. It's fair to
say that the circular shape of the Albert Hall, in
particular, is used by Hitchcock to imply that the people
and "forces" assembled there constitute a microcosm of the
wider world. [33]
I'm told that Hitchcock's first film as director, The
Pleasure Garden, had the titles overlaid by an
action-shot of a female dancer - though the sequence is
absent from the print I've seen. Which
may bring us to The Manxman (1930). In both the Hall
Caine novel (1894), loosely based on Tennyson's narrative
poem, Enoch Arden (1864), and Hitchcock's film, the
Isle of Man represents the world, a corrupted Eden. In the
first of many visual references in Hitchcock to the sea as a
symbolic force, the titles sequence shows waves breaking on
rocks. This evokes Will (see discussion of Lifeboat
below), a "force of destiny" whose complementary image is
the repeated view of a lighthouse and its revolving beam
seen later in the film. The lighthouse was apparently
Hitchcock's idea, for it's not in the novel, and it adds the
same possibility of intervention to forestall fate that
would be raised, albeit ambiguously, in The man who knew
too much. Darkness against light, or rather darkness
offset by light, is itself a motif suggestive of the
death/life nature of Will, and is ubiqitous in Hitchcock. An
instance is the opening shot of The 39 steps which
pans along an electric sign outside a variety hall at night.
And of course the variety hall is a further emblem of
"life", anticipating, for example, the Mardi Gras parade
that was to have opened To catch a thief - only rain
necessitated a switch in emphasis to the already-mentioned
travel sign, "If you love life ..." The
title of Lifeboat is no more fortuitous than the name
of its Nazi villain, Willi (Walter Slezak). What is being
invoked is Friedrich Nietzsche's notion of a
"will-to-power", derived in turn from Schopenhauer's
teaching that the primary manifestation in humans of the
cosmic Will is "will-to-life".[34]
Will is chiefly symbolised in the film by the surrounding
ocean. (Cf in this respect another 1944 film, Lewis Allen's
The Uninvited [USA], in which the sea is
called "a place of life and death and eternity too".) The
sea's vicissitudes, and the weather's, prove unpredictable
and "irrational", like the human drama played out in the
lifeboat by its human occupants. Fittingly, when the "ersatz
Superman", Willi, fails to share his secret water supply,
what betrays him are the drops of salt water, sweat, on his
forehead. He has tried to embody will-to-power, but it was a
"perverted" notion to begin with. Hitchcock sees that beyond
the individual's will there's a universal Will, to which
everything is finally subject. As I phrased the matter in my
book: "[Schopenhauer] did not speak of a
will-to-power in nature. That was a "perversion" introduced
by Nietzsche. The Nazis then in turn "perverted" Nietzsche's
concept by making "will-to-power" a dogma, a political
imperative."[35]
Revealingly, a famous remark of Hitchcock's, about how
"everything's perverted in a different way", is pure
Schopenhauer (though it might be mistaken for
Nietzsche!).[36]
When I examine The birds below, I'll suggest that
such a remark offers a key to the film, including its stance
of compassion. [34]
Nietzsche's notion of will-to-power is implied in the title
of John Buchan's The power house (1912); and the
novel, which immediately preceded the same author's The
thirty-nine steps, critiques the warped ambitions of its
Nietzschean villain - who is a prototype of Hitchcock
villains like Tobin in Saboteur ( USA 1942) and
Vandamm in North by Northwest. See Mogg (book):
70. [35]
Mogg (book): 89. I would argue that Hitchcock's critique of
Nietzsche, though not without ambivalence, puts the director
on Schopenhauerian bedrock. As for politics, Hitchcock once
told Richard Schickel that it incorporates some of man's
meanest attitudes to man. Schopenhauer might have endorsed
that sentiment. [36]
Note, though, that Hitchcock refers to "everything", not
"everyone". His remark was made to the editors of
Movie (UK). The
deathly aspect of the ocean is especially emphasised
in the Lifeboat titles sequence, showing the mother
ship foundering.[37]
An image of a tilting funnel is accompanied by a roar as the
water sweeps over the ship, extinguishing the flames of its
boiler. Years later, for the spy thriller Torn
Curtain (USA 1966), Hitchcock constructed a matching
titles sequence in which a flame burns fiercely on the left
of screen, representing the sun and "life", while on the
right, a succession of the film's characters struggle to
avoid being smothered by a swirling grey
mist.[38]
At the film's end, the main couple (Paul Newman and Julie
Andrews) are seen huddling for warmth in front of an
electric radiator and pulling around them a "pessimistic",
mist-grey blanket, which finally fills the
screen.[39]
Meanwhile, half-way through the film, a protracted death
scene - that of the doughty Communist security guard named
Gromek (Wolfgang Kieling) - has emphasised, in Hitchcock's
words, "how difficult it is to kill a man". Effectively, it
puts us right "inside" Will, which Schopenhauer, modifying
Kant, said is directly knowable in just one special sense:
namely, our experience of it flowing through our own
bodies. Again,
the titles sequence of Spellbound (USA 1945) finds a
significant echo years later in a titles sequence proposed
for The trouble With Harry but not used. In the
Spellbound sequence, accompanied by the eerie music
of the theremin, leaves blow from a tree in Vermont,
signalling the working of a force that inflicts mutability
on the world. That force is neither malign nor benign - or,
rather, it is both. Its death-dealing aspect would seem to
be defied by the psychiatric institution optimistically
named "Green Manors", where the film-proper begins, but the
wider world soon asserts
itself.[40]
The same theremin passage accompanies each of the anxiety
attacks endured by "J.B." (Gregory Peck) after he meets
Constance (Ingrid Bergman). Given the growth and healing
that J.B. undergoes during the film, albeit not without
suffering, the motif here in its very ambiguity seems
Schopenhauerian. And so it is with a similar idea informing
the comedy The trouble With Harry. Originally the
film was to have begun with a time-lapse sequence showing
the growth to maturity of a single maple leaf (again the
setting is Vermont), from the merest protuberance of a young
bud to a full-blown leaf whose palm would have
"color[ed] down from the scarlet fingers to a paler
red, deep orange and into yellow". The veins of the leaf
would finally have darkened and stiffened, "holding
[it] up with Autumn's regal pride before the death
of winter".[41]
In the event, this somewhat Walt Disney-ish sequence was
replaced by a series of sketches in the
faux-naÔf style of Klee, done by artist
Saul Steinberg (1914-99). The sting-in-the tail now became
the image of a dead body.[42]
What the film-proper then proceeds to show is a set of
charmingly amoral, i.e., lively, characters
negotiating a particularly adventurous day and coming to
terms with their mortality. The film repeatedly hints at the
approach of winter.[43]
But, also repeatedly, a church bell rings in the background,
unremarked by the characters.[44]
So perhaps once again an invisible Divine intervention may
have occurred along the way. Then again, maybe
not! [37]
It had to be a mother ship, of course! Analysing
Vertigo in my book (149), I refer to Goethe's
Faust, Part II, with its realm of "the Mothers", and
cite Camille Paglia's remark (in her outstanding Sexual
personae: art and decadence from Nefertiti to Emily
Dickinson. London: Penguin Books, 1991: 257)
that, "[t]he male struggles through his sexual
stages, returning to the mother even when he thinks himself
most free of her". My book, passim, notes the
presence of the Great Mother behind many of Hitchcock's
films. Hitchcock probably read Faust (cf Alfred
Hitchcock, Hitchcock on Hitchcock. Edited by Sidney
Gottlieb. California and London: Uni. of California Press
and Faber & Faber, 1995: 144). Goethe and Schopenhauer,
let's note, were contemporaries and friends. [38]
Cf Paglia, Sexual Personae: 40: "Mythology begins
with cosmogony, the creation of the world. Somehow out of
the chaos of matter comes order. The plenum, a soupy
fullness, divides itself into objects and beings." And cf
this observation of Schopenhauer's: "In Buddhism the
world arises as a consequence of an inexplicable clouding of
the heavenly clarity of ... Nirvana after a long period of
quietude. Its origin is thus ... fundamentally to be
understood in a moral sense, notwithstanding the case has an
exact analogy in the ... origin of the sun in an
inexplicable primeval streak of mist." (Arthur Schopenhauer,
'On the Suffering of the World'. In Schopenhauer: essays
and aphorisms, edited by R.J. Hollingdale.
Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1970: 48.) There are
references to cosmogony in other Hitchcock films, notably
The trouble With Harry. [39]
The grey blanket stands in contrast to the multi-coloured,
tartan blanket beneath which the same couple had disported
themselves at the start of the film. In the entry on Torn
curtain in my book (172), I note another such dichotomy:
"In Richard Wormser's novel of the film, based on Brian
Moore's screenplay, the Countess [Lila Kedrova]
says, "I am an old woman. But there is la vie left in
me. Lots of la vie." The film suggests as much by
giving her a colourful scarf. By contrast, the East Berlin
scenes are generally drab." The grey blanket at the end of
the film also recalls the ends of Number seventeen
(England 1932) and Psycho. [40]
There are pre-echoes here of Vertigo, with its
tall-standing sequoias, "always green, ever-living"; as for
mutability, this was always a Hitchcock theme, as discussed
in the text. [41]
My thanks to Richard Franklin, who loaned me a studio copy
of the screenplay, from which this extract is
taken. [42]
The titles sequence of The trouble With Harry has
lately been added as a playable item (minus sound) to Steven
L. DeRosa's admirable website, Hitchcock and His
Writers. The URL is <http://members.aol.com/writingwithhitch/troublewithharry.html>.
(As instructed on the page, "Click the photo for the Flash
intro".) [43]
Notice, for example, the painting of a wintery scene above
the mantelpiece in Jennifer's house, offset - perhaps in
denial - by vases of colourful autumn foliage. [44]
Cf the similar use of a church bell's recurrent - and again
unremarked - ringing heard in To catch a thief, and
the ambiguous scene set on the steps of the Fairvale church
in Psycho (a scene deleted from Gus Van Sant's 1998
version of the film). Ambiguity
is the very essence of Shadow of a doubt (USA 1943),
the last film I want to comment on before turning to The
birds. The titles sequence showing couples dancing the
Merry Widow Waltz might seem to be all about "life", but its
sinister strain is unmistakable. Hitchcock presumably wasn't
joking when he once said that with a little effort even the
word "love" could be made to sound
ominous.[45]
Schopenhauer had emphasised that "life" and "love" are
simply products of the larger Will, in which creation and
destruction go hand in hand. And such a notion is the almost
tangible premise of Shadow of a doubt, as it had been
of The lodger (England 1926). In both films, the
general idea is to repudiate by the end the kind of
"incestuous atmosphere" that George Orwell, for one,
detected in the typical endings of 19th-century novels.
Hence, in Shadow of a Doubt, we have the symbolic
business with the ring that Uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotten)
gives his niece and namesake, young Charlie (Teresa Wright),
on arriving to stay with her family. At first, she is happy
to accept this "betrothal", seeing it as the answer to her
prayer for a "miracle",[46]
and Uncle Charlie as "the one right person to save us".
Later, though, the gift awakens in the teenager a sexual
instinct for which her earlier restlessness has prepared
her. Her eventual ruthless rejection of her uncle - but not
of the ring, which she takes with her to Jack Graham
(MacDonald Carey) - thus signifies the working of Will and
change, but with a characteristic Hitchcockian ambiguity.
The connotation is again of a corrupted garden, or "lost
paradise", here represented by the idyllic small town, Santa
Rosa, California, where Charlie's family
lives.[47]
Sadly, Charlie could not have known that her dandyish uncle
would turn out to be not just a gigolo but a serial-killer
preying on wealthy widows! Yet in the larger scheme of
things, perhaps he really does "save" his niece's family.
And young Charlie will always know that she remains
spiritually bonded to him, exactly as Schopenhauer's
conception of the noumenal would have
it.[48]
One atypical 19th-century novel does come to mind: Emily
Bronte's Wuthering Heights (1847), containing
Catherine Earnshaw's fervent cry, "Nelly, I am
Heathcliff!" [45]
Truffaut: 218. [46]
Cf Manny's prayer in The wrong man - which appears to
be granted when his double is apprehended across town
shortly afterwards. Later, the nurse in the sanatorium
speaks of "miracles" that "take time". Hitchcock's
understanding of the categories of space, time, and
causality is Schopenhauerian, and is discussed in the
text. [47]
Santa Rosa was used in Irving Pichel's Happy land
(USA), later the same year. In 1986, it featured in another
feel-good movie, Francis Coppola's Peggy Sue Got
Married (USA). [48]
Ultimately, in the realm of Kant's unknowable
Ding-an-sich ("Thing-in-itself"), which Schopenhauer
equated with Will, we are all one single entity. That
ultimate realm is the noumenal. But of course our essential
subjectivity blinkers us, and confines us in effect to the
realm of appearances, the phenomenal. I discuss a few of the
implications of this in the text. Hitchcock's
The birds represents the third story by Daphne du
Maurier (1907-89) that he filmed. Both Jamaica inn
(England 1939) and Rebecca (USA 1940) had contained
more than a touch of the Gothic - Rebecca, notably,
being a mix of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre (1847)
with ingredients drawn from later works like playwright Sir
Arthur Wing Pinero's His house in order
(1906)[49]
and espionage novelist E. Phillips Oppenheim's The great
impersonation (1920) - and one can detect the same
modified Gothic spirit in The birds, albeit with most
of the external trappings removed. I shan't attempt here to
analyse how the Gothic novel and Schopenhauer's
contemporanaeous emphasis on such things as Will and the
Sublime overlapped, though there are passages in Mary
Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), for example, that
invite such a study. What I would like to do - I
trust without sounding smug - is to quote something that
Bryan Magee, an authority on both Schopenhauer and Wagner,
wrote of Tristan and Isolde. According to Magee,
"[p]assage after passage in the text is
[demonstrably] poeticized Schopenhauer, and for
anyone familiar with Schopenhauer the verbal imagery is
unproblematic throughout the work - but alas, only for
someone familiar with
Schopenhauer".[50]
Mutatis mutandis, it seems to me that a similar
remark is justified about The birds, which I'll now
try and show. Note that Hitchcock's film itself cites
Tristan and Isolde by way of suggesting the
sublimated yearning of schoolteacher Annie Hayworth (Suzanne
Pleshette) for the unavailable Mitch ... [49]
Pinero's play also has much in common with Noel Coward's
Easy virtue (1925), filmed by Hitchcock in 1927. See
my book:17. [50]
Magee, Bryan. The philosophy of Schopenhauer. Oxford
and New York: Clarendon Press and O.U.P., 1983:
361. The
titles sequence of The Birds is in the two-of-a-kind
category. The credits of Jamaica inn were visibly
eroded by waves; those of The birds appear to be
pecked away by swooping and darting birds. In each case, the
working of Will is symbolised by the sea and/or the birds.
Following the credits, The birds opens in a San
Francisco pet shop. To tease Melanie, Mitch asks her,
"Doesn't this make you feel awful ... keeping birds in
cages?" She replies, "Well, we can't just let them fly
around the shop, can we?"- thereby missing (or evading) his
point. That point proves crucial. Both the film and its
trailer remind us that birds have been caged, shot at, eaten
and otherwise abused by humans throughout history. In other
words, we're again being told of the working of Will, more
precisely human egoism and rapaciousness, exactly as
Schopenhauer had characterised those
things.[51]
Schopenhauer understandably came to regard Will as a cruel
joke, best turned against itself, notably with the help of
art or music.[52]
Accordingly, I see The birds as an almost literal
enactment of that thought. As Mitch leaves the pet shop, he
says that it's time Melanie found herself "on the other end
of a gag, for a change". He gets his wish - writ
large. [51]
He wasn't the only one to do so, of course. Nature turns the
guilt of murder back against humans is the poem Whistling
Jack (1929) by John Shaw Neilson. The bird of the title,
an Australian grey butcher-bird, may be an emissary of God,
the human narrator thinks by the end. Humbled, he
acknowledges the truth of such lines spoken by the bird as,
"But for a million cruelties you would not be
alive." [52]
Cf Janaway: 92. Next,
consider Schopenhauer's notion of the Sublime. Actually, the
notion is Kant's, but Schopenhauer gives it a special twist.
According to Kant, the contemplation of something
potentially destructive, viewed from the vantage point of
present safety, brings a pleasurable sense of
elevation.[53]
In the case of The Birds, such a notion might be said
to combine with Wordsworth's well-known definition of poetry
("emotion recollected in tranquillity") and Hitchcock's
definition of "suspense" as like the judicious thrill of
riding a roller-coaster, to help generate that film's
beautiful terror.[54]
Schopenhauer's version of the Sublime would add another
slant. A sense of the sublime, he said, corresponds to the
serene abandonment of all willing, the highest of human
states.[55]
He wrote of tragedy: "What gives to everything tragic ...
the characteristic tendency to the sublime, is the dawning
of the knowledge that the world and life can afford us no
true satisfaction, and are therefore not worth our
attachment to them".[56]
At first hearing, I dare say, that doesn't exactly suggest
The birds - though the idea certainly permeates
Tristan and Isolde and would seem to be at least
mooted by Vertigo.[57]
Nonetheless, from Schopenhauer's insight about attachment
and its opposite, non-attachment, he derived compassion as
his supreme ethical imperative; and compassion, as already
noted, and discussed below, is a keynote of the end
of The birds. We shouldn't allow the characteristic
ambiguity of Hitchcock's endings to blind us to possible
inferences never quite drawn within the films themselves
...[58] [53]
Janaway: 69. [54]
Cf AndrÈ Breton's notion of "convulsive beauty"
achieved in Surrealism by means of irrational
justapositions. Lautreamont's phrase about "the chance
encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a
dissecting table" - adopted by the Surrealists as a
catch-cry - is exemplary. It also seems to me to catch an
essential quality of The birds. The irrational or
unlikely juxtapositions (the mannequin-like Melanie rowing
serenely across the bay, say) invites a certain aesthetic
distance in the viewer even as the narrative suspense draws
the viewer in, while the sense of impending disaster,
perhaps apocalypse, lends a note of the sublime. Hitchcock's
mastery was very much a matter of his awareness of these
effects and his facility at playing the film and the
audience like a musical instrument - or Will. "[I]n
the fiction film the director is the god; he must create
life", Hitchcock told Truffaut (70). [55]
At such times, Schopenhauer felt, a word like "Nirvana" may
seem appropriate, though he emphasised (at the end of Volume
I of The world as Will and Representation) that the
word itself is meaningless, an evasion. [56]
Quoted in Janaway: 69-70. [57]
On Tristan, see, for example, the excerpt quoted by
Magee: 360: "To us who have looked lovingly/on the night of
death/and been entrusted/with its deep secret/the day's
illusions - /fame and honour/power and profit - /have the
glitter of mere/dust in the sunlight/into which it disperses
..." As for Scottie (James Stewart) in Vertigo, the
whole idea (I would argue), as established by the opening
scene, where Scottie clings to the guttering, i.e., to life,
is that he is not detached, not
free. [58]
According to Joseph Stefano, Hitchcock ruthlessly deleted
moments in Psycho that seemed to invite compassion
for wasted human life, such as a shot of Marion's corpse
showing her buttocks. Stefano thought the shot achingly
beautiful and pleaded for its retention, but Hitchcock
evidently preferred that the story alone carry the meaning.
A note of compassion is present at the end of The
birds, but inferences about the way we devalue life (an
earlier joke about Bloody Marys notwithstanding), or whether
life has positive value to start with, are essentially left
to the audience to draw ... Here's
a related consideration. A paradigm of the films is that
they quickly shift locale from the everyday world to a realm
where extraordinary events happen (but which patently
remains subjective - other people may be glimpsed still
going about their business, unheeding). Vertigo,
North by Northwest, and Psycho are like that,
and so is The birds, in which radio broadcasts keep
reminding us that the bird attacks are, for now, relatively
localised. The paradigm doubtless derives from adventure and
thriller fiction: Erskine Childers's celebrated The
riddle of the sands (1903)[59]
and John Buchan's best-seller The thirty-nine steps
(1915) both begin with their respective heroes bored in
London, though events soon propel them to more exotic
locales. But it's an emphasis on the subjective -
revealingly, in Hitchcock the exotic may be confined to just
one apartment (for example, Rope [USA 1948])
- that lets the films raise issues concerning "that which
lies beyond". Those issues are seldom spelt out in the
films. Rather, they are felt as something faintly surreal,
hinting at what Leonard (Martin Landau) in North by
Northwest calls "ceiling and possibilities unlimited".
The inchoate desires of the Nietzschean thrill-killers in
Rope - homosexuals like Leonard, let's note - come to
nothing except death.[60]
But the surreal note has been sounded in that film from the
moment that Brandon (John Dall) and Phillip (Farley Granger)
arrange to serve a meal from a chest containing their
victim's body to his unsuspecting family and friends. From
that point on, the film plays like an animated version of a
painting by, say, Magritte,[61]
one of several Surrealists influenced by Freud - who wrote
in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1921) that
"[t]he aim of all life is
death".[62]
Yet the best person to explicate Hitchcock films like
Rope and The birds is surely Schopenhauer, who
himself influenced Nietzsche, Freud, and the
Surrealists.[63] [59]
For the influence of Childers's novel on Hitchcock's
Foreign correspondent (USA 1940), see my book:
75. [60]
Lee Edelman has a point - however verbose and blinkered, as
discussed in the present text - when he associates in
Hitchcock homosexuality and the death-drive. [61]The
threatened assassin (1926-27), say. [62]
Quoted in Simon Wilson, Surrealist Painting. London:
Phaidon Press, 1975: 5. [63]
Various commentators, among them Janaway and Magee, have
detailed the impressive spread of Schopenhauer's thought.
See, for example, Janaway, Chapter 9 ('Schopenhauer's
influence'): 100-07. Schopenhauer's influence on Nietzsche
is at its most apparent - and positive - in Nietzsche's
first book, The birth of tragedy (1872).
Schopenhauer's influence on Freud was initially indirect
(via other writers, like Eduard von Hartmann). Freud
eventually acknowledged the similarities in their thought,
but claimed, "I read Schopenhauer very late in my life".
(Janaway's dry comment on this [107]: "One almost
hesitates to point out that Freud must have known at some
level what to avoid reading, in order to preserve this title
to originality.") Wilson (5) notes of the Surrealist
painters how Freud "provided an endorsement for
[their] predilection for erotic and macabre subject
matter, particularly in combination ... [P]aintings
by Ernst and the early work of de Chirico became the models
and point of departure for a whole group of Surrealist
painters, Magritte, Delvaux, Dali among them." But Wilson
(4) also notes that Ernst had taken particular
inspiration from de Chirico (1888-1978), whose
"metaphysical" painting he had come across early in 1919. In
turn, as Aniela JaffÈ tells us, de Chirico had been
"deeply influenced by the philosophies of Nietzsche and
Schopenhauer" (Aniela JaffÈ, 'Symbolism in the visual
arts'. In Man and his Symbols, edited by Carl G.
Jung. London: Aldus Books, 1964: 255). De Chirico wrote:
"Schopenhauer and Nietzsche were the first to teach the deep
significance of the senselessness of life, and to show how
this senselessness could be transformed into art ... The
dreadful void they discovered is the very soulless and
untroubled beauty of matter." (Quoted in JaffÈ/Jung:
255) Part of
the surreal import of The birds is to the effect that
there's more than meets our eye - or maybe less - but we're
powerless to substantially change that state of affairs.
Further, Hitchcock's remark about the film, that it shows
how "catastrophe surrounds us
all",[64]
is both surreal and decidedly Schopenhauerian, much like his
remark that "everything's perverted in a different way". For
Schopenhauer, the relation between these two statements
would be that Will causes suffering, which is pandemic (he
defined situations of suffering very broadly, as everything
from natural disasters to boredom), and that we're all part
of the whole, whether we acknowledge this fact or not. We're
all just Will, and it's illusory to think that we're
separate entities, though illusion is inevitable because
each of us remains subjective.[65]
Schopenhauer took from Kant the twin notions of reality and
appearance, the noumenal and the phenomenal, the one and the
many. He called them Will and Representation. And because we
each consist essentially of Will, and nothing else, there's
a sense in which we're each responsible for, and part of,
the suffering in the world. The famous Hitchcockian motif of
"transfer of guilt", first noted by the French critics, is
an expression of this truth, that in a sense we're all one
and interchangeable. We're all variants - "perversions" - of
the one Will, though of course those variants are themselves
ephemeral and even illusory. Furthermore, for Schopenhauer,
and I suspect for Hitchcock, all visible aspects of the
cosmos, including rocks, storm clouds, outboard motor boats,
telephone boxes, and, yes, birds, are but manifestations, at
different "grades of objectification", of the
Will. [64]
Cf Schopenhauer: "Just as the boatman sits in his small
boat, trusting the frail craft in a stormy sea that is
boundless in every direction, rising and falling with the
howling, mountainous waves, so in the midst of a world full
of suffering and misery the individual man calmly sits,
supported by and trusting the principium
individuationis, or the way in which the individual
knows things as phenomenon. The boundless world, everywhere
full of suffering in the infinite past, in the infinite
future, is strange to him, is indeed a fiction."
Schopenhauer (1966): Volume I: 352-53. [65]
In other words, "we're all in our private traps", as Norman
says in Psycho, and none of us is completely free
(perhaps not even the saints or geniuses among us, whom
Schopenhauer felt have what it most takes to escape Plato's
cave). Here,
then, are specific Schopenhauerian ideas that seem
demonstrated by The birds. (a)
Boredom. Ordinary existence consists of pain and recurring
boredom and of our efforts to alleviate that
condition.[66] [66]
Cf Janaway: 6 - and my note above about novels by Childers,
Buchan, et al. Shadow
of a doubt begins with both Uncle Charlie and his niece,
young Charlie, lying on their respective beds, bored. The
birds begins as a bored playgirl, Melanie, meets a
successful but mother-dominated young lawyer, Mitch, in a
pet shop, and they engage in by-play which immediately spins
out of control when a canary escapes from its cage. The
general picture of everyday life that Hitchcock paints is of
(concealed) suffering and (nominal) contentment precariously
balanced in order to render existence reasonably tolerable.
Schopenhauer put things similarly: [67]
Quoted in Janaway: 67. It's
difficult to think of any Hitchcock film that doesn't begin
with a character or characters bored or actually suffering.
Think of Fred and Emily at the start of Rich and
strange, or even of wealthy Julia Rainbird (Cathleen
Nesbitt) at the start of Family plot (USA 1976)
yearning to make contact with her long-lost nephew so that
she may ease her conscience for having once expelled him
from the family. "How did you know about my troubled sleep?"
she naîvely asks Madame Blanche (Barbara Harris) -
when all Blanche would have had to do is read Schopenhauer!
Hitchcock's final film is a testimony by the master showman
and metaphysician to how he had always profoundly understood
audiences' need to temporarily escape their lives. "It must
look real but it must never be real", he once explained of a
Hitchcock film. A sense of relevance is necessary, of
course. So a Hitchcock film invariably implies parallels
between its characters (or, on occasion, escaped canaries)
and the audience.[68]
And hence the notable subjectivity of the films which, like
Hitchcock's "moving-around principle", turns out to have an
analogue in the wider world as described by Schopenhauer.
"The world is my [subjective]
representation." [68]
Mitch likens the canary to Melanie: "Back in your cage,
Melanie Daniels." She, in turn, represents the audience's
own initial complacency, though we scarcely realise it at
the time. Numerous Hitchcock films begin with implicit
parallels to the situation of the audience. For instance,
the camera may move from a cold exterior (Number
seventeen, Spellbound, Torn curtain) to an
interior that promises warmth and/or excitement (a
supposedly deserted house in which a light is mysteriously
moving; a sanititorium in which patients are playing at
cards - a nice Expressionist touch; a ship's cabin where a
couple are having sex beneath a blanket). (b)
Humankind is at one with the natural world. There is only
Will. Schopenhauer
wrote: [69]
Quoted in Janaway: 31. In an
astonishingly modern insight (one of many), Schopenhauer
insisted: [70]
Quoted in Hollingdale: 189. Throughout
The birds, Hitchcock draws pointed analogies between
humans and birds, from the twittering of the pet shop owner,
Mrs MacGruder (Ruth McDevitt), and the bright eyes and
head-tilting of Melanie and Mrs Brenner (Jessica Tandy), to
the (stylised) murmuring and chuckling of the massing birds
and the ironic moment when Melanie becomes "caged" in a
telephone box. Yet as
a symbol of Will itself, the birds with their
"motives" remain shadowy or obscure. Which is as it should
be, given that Schopenhauer felt that only in special
circumstances can we even begin to "know" Will. (To Kant, of
course, the Thing-in-itself was by definition unknowable.)
When Zizek suggests that the birds incarnate "the fact that,
on the [S]ymbolizing level, something 'has not
worked out'", he might just as well, it seems to me, invoke
the fact that we're all bound in subjectivity, i.e., what
Schopenhauer called the principium individuationis,
and therefore are denied full understanding of our
condition. As I'll say in the final section of this essay,
Zizek's Lacanian readings of Hitchcock, when not merely
wilful, often seem to me to be capable of being subsumed by
a Schopenhauerian reading. Both Schopenhauer and Lacan were
Kantians, let's remember ... (c) The
principium individuationis (principle of
individuation). Reducing Kant's "categories" of cognition to
just two or three, Schopenhauer said that we have an inbuilt
capacity to perceive and comprehend all sense data in terms
of time, space, and causality, though these are not
inherent characteristics of reality, i.e., Will,
itself.[71] In
other words, we experience the world subjectively, as
phenomenon, and not as it is in itself, as noumenon. For all
we know, there may be much about the cosmos that eludes us
entirely and always will do so (whatever scientists
believe to the
contrary),[72]
simply because we do not have the mental categories to begin
to grasp "that which lies beyond". Symbolically, Hitchcock's
birds function as emissaries from that other side, putting
us in our place. [71]
Cf Janaway: 24 and 31. [72]
Cf the thought of Martin Heidegger. Professor Richard Polt,
who recently co-translated into English Heidegger's 1935
lectures, "Introduction to Metaphysics", said in an
interview: "One of Heidegger's main points is that science
and technology are built upon something that cannot be
understood in scientific or technological terms. Poetry and
art, for instance, might be ways of reaching that deeper
truth, that experience of the world that is pre-scientific."
('Being Martin Heidegger', interview with Richard Polt by
Ralph Brave, November 13, 2000, on the <www.Salon.com>
website.) For what it's worth, Solomon, Continental
philosophy since 1750: 167 observes that "[i]t
would seem that [Heidegger] agrees with Schopenhauer
and Wittgenstein, that in the end one should be silent - or
at least very obscure." But
what is most salient about Hitchcock's (intuitive?) grasp of
the principle of individuation is how he makes it work for
him in his films. Take the categories of time and space.
Given that these are mental categories whose
characteristics we "project" onto the outside world (perhaps
it's instructive to recall that physical time and space are
said to be other than we actually perceive them: e.g.,
curved), Hitchcock artfully gives them full rein in his
films. Those films become more substantial and satisfying as
a result. There's an illuminating account by Hitchcock's
long-time art director, Robert Boyle, about the sequence in
North by Northwest where Thornhill (Cary Grant)
arrives at the spies' house near Mount Rushmore: He
has to come in the house, he has to see the airfield, he
has to see the balcony inside the house, and he has to
see [Eve's] bedroom inside the house, to let him
know what the girl was doing. It's worked out from the
need of the scene.[73] [73]
'Robert Boyle in conversation with Sheila Benson', on the
American Movie Classics website, no date. (I visited it in
October 2000.) The URL is <http://www.amctv.com/ontheair/blocks/hitchcock/interview1.html>.
In the same "conversation", Boyle calls Hitchcock "the most
collaborative filmmaker" he ever worked with. "He talked to
everybody" Boyle continues; "he'd talk to his driver about
things. His door was always open and he was always asking
people how they felt. He would tell you a scene, and most
often it was so brilliant that you didn't bother to
criticize it, and then he'd ask you how you felt about it.
This wasn't just me; it was anybody, the person who served
the doughnuts and coffee on the set he would talk to about
the script, about the story. I think one of the reasons was
that he was very, very attuned to the audience, and
everybody was an audience. It was something that was uncanny
about him; he made movies for the audience because he was
the audience." This sort of insight offered by Boyle I find
richly rewarding and suggestive about Hitchcock's work,
rather more so than (nine times out of ten) pages of theory.
It confirms, for instance, Hitchcock's empirical bent, his
capacity for "looking to see". It also seems to confirm how
closely Hitchcock had his finger on the collective
will of an audience. This
sort of thing - telling a film in terms of the audience's
need to orient itself and be prepared for events, i.e.,
matters of space and time - came easily to Hitchcock. The
spies' house is itself located for us spatially by the
(occluded) taxi ride Thornhill takes there from hospital in
nearby Rapid City (it is enough that the dialogue
establishes for us Thornhill's exact itinerary); while in
temporal terms, the house's Frank Lloyd Wright look locates
it within the modernist setting of the film overall. Similar
considerations inform The birds. At the start, a
street corner in San Francisco is located for us in time and
space by means of glimpsed travel posters (including one of
the Golden Gate Bridge) and airline signs, by familiar icons
(a cable-car, the Dewey Monument commemorating an event in
the Spanish-American War), by a flock of gulls "heading
inland" (as Mrs MacGruder is heard to observe), and so on.
Likewise, Bodega Bay is located for us by Melanie's drive
there up the Coast Road[74]
and by a further motor tour of its environs she makes after
she arrives. Particular significance is given the red
mail-box outside Annie Hayworth's house. It serves as an
emblem of her own and Bodega Bay's relative isolation in
terms of distance and time from San Francisco; we're also
told that the mail in this part of the world often fails to
arrive! By contrast, Melanie is repeatedly associated with
telephones and telephone boxes (as well as her late-model
Aston-Martin car). But finally, after a telephone box
affords her only brief respite from the birds' onslaughts,
such "social distinctions" are made to seem less important.
This is one of the ways the film makes us aware that "it's
all One" ... [74]
Cf Marion Crane's drive to the Bates Motel in Psycho,
which likewise for the audience establishes a California
ambience at a visceral level, thereby lending subsequent
events added "realism" and conviction. (d) The
"principle of sufficient reason". This central idea of
Schopenhauer's holds that nothing is without a reason or
cause for its being, or at least that we all think that way,
quite literally.[75] [75]
Cf Gardiner: 69. It
follows from what I've been saying that Hitchcock is out to
show his audience up, or anyway to make us surrender to his
suspense - which is a close analogue of Will. (When
Thornhill in North by Northwest says, "I never felt
more alive", he is speaking for us.) An "outflanking
technique" is constantly at work in The Birds, as
when the ornithologist Mrs Bundy (Ethel Griffies) humbles us
with her remark that "birds have been on this planet since
archeopteryx". But nowhere does Hitchcock use the technique
more tellingly than in the matter of causality. The film
teases us with possible reasons for the bird attacks,
starting with "a storm at sea" (noted by Mrs MacGruder),
which really explain nothing. Like Will itself, which they
help symbolise, the bird attacks are simply a given. Mitch
is well on the way to the right attitude when he observes,
"It's happening. Isn't that a reason?" But the film must
first contend with the all-too-human response represented by
the hysterical mother (Doreen Lang) in the Tides Restaurant.
Turning directly to the camera, she tells the audience, "I
think you're the cause of all this!" Her
accusation epitomises the principle of sufficient reason at
work. Faced with what is inexplicable, she seeks both a
scapegoat and a way out. In subjective camera, she
accuses Melanie/us of being evil and the cause of the bird
attacks. Self-delusion was seldom more succinctly portrayed;
furthermore, I find the moment to be as ontologically true,
in its own way, as the scene of Jo McKenna's enforced scream
in The man who knew too
much..[76]
But of course there's more to it. The way in which the
moment implicates us, the audience, is both apt and
unsettling. For we do cause the bird attacks to happen, in
at least two ways. First of all, we watch the film, and even
pay money for the privilege, because we want the
birds to "do their stuff". Hadn't Hitchcock teased the
public by announcing, with apparent scant regard for
grammar, "The birds is coming!"? Accordingly, we may
be said to will the birds to come. But also, as we
watch and enjoy the chaos wrought by the birds, we
nonetheless follow the principle of sufficient reason and,
like the mother in the restaurant, seek a cause for the bird
attacks that is outside ourselves. This is highly wilful of
us. As Schopenhauer would say, both the need for an
explanation and the actual reasons that we find are, in the
final anaysis, quite as subjective and self-serving as our
wilful pleasure in watching the birds wreak their havoc -
the fire in the Bodega Bay township, for
instance. [76]
The earlier scene, too, concerned a lone individual, a
mother, confronting the working of an impersonal principle
or force, Will. (e) All
knowledge is subjective. When
Rupert (James Stewart) at the climax of Rope
exclaims, "Did you think you were God, Brandon?", I take him
to be asserting the above Schopenhauerian truth. We can
never know "that which lies beyond". The noumenal exists but
we are forever barred from it. (Appropriately, Rupert is in
the same room as the two killers, and the climax is
accompanied in theatrical fashion by the flashing
colours of a neon sign outside the window
...)[77]
To accept this truth, taught by Kant and Schopenhauer, and
never disproven (though often
ignored),[78]
is to learn humility - and perhaps compassion. Rupert
doesn't altogether learn these things, to judge by
his vindictive screech at the end, "You're going to die,
Brandon". Though he speaks of the world as having hitherto
been a dark and mysterious place, he seems too concerned
with exculpating himself not to cling to an element of
self-deception. Again this is what Schopenhauer would have
predicted, given the basically egoistic nature of human
willing. [77]
Cf my book: 105: "The film's finale ... takes place while
the room is flooded by red, green and white light from a
neon 'STORAGE' sign just outside. Hitch likened this to a
musical effect. He probably took it from the novel Enter
Sir John (1929), on which Murder! was based,
where the three colours evoke Harlequin. Its use in
Rope may imply that the three characters are all
'merely players' and that there's little essential
difference between them - for all that Rupert tries to deny
it." [78]
That is my understanding. However, answering a question of
mine to the 'Film Theory' forum on the Internet recently, a
correspondent, Kenneth Mackendrick, began by noting that
Slavoj Zizek retains the Kantian idea of the noumenal, and
added that "he reads it through both Schelling and Hegel ...
(and, of course, Lacan)". [Schopenhauer, by the way,
despised Schelling and Hegel, especially the latter, calling
them charlatans!] But Mackendrick would question whether
Kant remains unrefuted: "I'd go so far as to say that anyone
who takes issue with the Cartesian ego takes issue with Kant
..." By the
time Hitchcock made The birds, his own level of
insight had deepened. Of the striking high-shot of Bodega
Bay when the birds attack the town centre, he gave an
explanation to Truffaut in purely pragmatic terms: it was
intended to show the topography of the town in relation to
"the sea, the coast, and the gas station on fire, in one
single image".[79]
Emotionally, though, the shot carries its own
considerable meaning. One could easily be reminded of a
moment in Turgenev's story, Ghosts, as described by
his biographer: [79]
Truffaut: 221. [80]
Quoted in Magee: 381. Here's a related point. The last part
of the quotation, referring to "creatures who have [but
lately] emerged from the slime", reminds me of the
famous opening of a novel that Hitchcock studied at school,
Charles Dickens's Bleak House (1853), and
particularly this passage: "As much mud in the streets, as
if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the
earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus,
forty feet or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up
Holborn Hill." In my book (145), I suggest that Dickens's
novel considerably influenced The wrong man (another
work about a seemingly interminable legal process), which
has more than one reference to (slow and imperfect)
evolution. In the same vein, The birds has its
reference to archeopteryx. All of which fits with
Schopenhauerian "pessimism", and the extensive and
near-invisible (therefore humbling) working of a
time/space/causality nexus ...
19,830 words
Abstract
| Printer
version
Preliminary
reading
[B]irds
seem to combine the absence of emotion with irrational
drive and therefore epitomize blind nature in
contradistinction to the human, and this makes them ideal
figures for those forces which are destructive of human
social life.
Introduction:
Sturm and Drang
Yet
stood the trees
Around whose head, screaming,
The night-birds wheeled and shot
away.[8]
"Vital"
titles
The
birds
This
is the life of almost [everyone]; they will, they
know what they will, and they strive after this with
enough success to protect them from despair, and enough
failure to preserve them from boredom and its
consequences.[67]
only
[Will] is thing in itself ... It is the
innermost essence, the kernel, of every particular thing
and also of the whole. It appears in every blindly acting
force of nature, and also in the deliberate conduct of
man ...[69]
One
must be blind, deaf and dumb ... not to see that the
animal is in essence absolutely the same thing that we
are, and that the difference lies merely in the accident,
the [perceiving] intellect, and not in the
substance, which is
[Will].[70]
That
was really worked out. By the time Cary Grant gets up and
sees the car come in, we have gone completely around the
house and we know exactly where everything is. We know
that it's cantilevered, that it's on a high place; we
know that you can drive a car up there and then we set up
a situation where we can put Cary in a very precarious
situation, in which if he's discovered he'd be lost, but
also a position where he can see everything.
There
is ... a direct reminiscence of Schopenhauer in the
description ... of the earth as seen from above, when the
humans look small and unimportant and are locked in
eternal struggle with blind forces which they cannot
control - creatures who have [but lately] emerged
from the slime that covers the earth's
surface.[80]
