Hitchcock's Romantic Irony by Allen Richard;

Author:Allen, Richard;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PER004000, Performing Arts/Film and Video/General, PER018000, Performing Arts/Individual Director (see also Biography & Autobiography/Entertainment & Performing Arts)
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2007-11-16T16:00:00+00:00

There are a wealth of buried connotations, here, which are usually not spelled out but point to the Dionysian perversity concealed beneath the controlled Apollonian surface of the work. “Chicken Hawk” is Regency slang for men who like boys. “Choking the chicken” is slang for masturbation and implicitly links the activity of strangling to sex. Furthermore, it is rumored that in rural communities boys will strangle the heads of chickens in order to use the twitching, dying corpse to achieve orgasm.41 In this way the chicken discourse harbors a wealth of perverse connotations—linking masturbation, homosexuality, and death—that center on the obscene image of the rising chicken neck/phallus (“like Lazarus he ’rose”) that is actually given life by having its neck wrung. As D. A. Miller has pointed out, this is surely also the secret of the strangled corpse of David Kentley, whose lower body, cut off at the bottom of the screen in the moment of strangling “a tergo,” contains the obscene image of the phallus frozen in erection at the moment of death.42 This image is also implicit in the public death by hanging that ends Murder! and is alluded to in Hitchcock’s Regency gothic drama Jamaica Inn.43 The secret that is both revealed and concealed in Rope is not simply the corpse in the caisson, but the idea of “buggery,” in which the secret of the corpse itself serves to conceal, that is embodied in the unseen image of Kentley’s erect penis. The caisson with the corpse thus becomes a knowing, that is post-Wildean, embodiment of the homosexual closet.44

In Rope, Hitchcock, the director of the film, is in one sense like Brandon, the orchestrator of the party, and we the audience are witness to his virtuoso work of cinematic storytelling. The film is famously composed of eleven shots in takes that are up to ten minutes long, and only five of the cuts are obviously visible. The aesthetic of the long take is one that allows the representation of space and time by means of space and time: it seems to epitomize full disclosure or visibility. The camera is an all-seeing eye and ear that is eavesdropping in “real time” on the behavior of a particular urban elite of society homosexuals. But the fact that Hitchcock cannot actually depict the protagonists as homosexuals, and more specifically, cannot actually depict the activity that defines them as homosexuals, leaves us seeking evidence of something we cannot prove. This evidence is suggested, but simultaneously concealed, in the way in which the male couple comport themselves, interact, and inhabit each other’s personal space. In this sense, the elaborate camera movements of Hitchcock’s film itself are a “joke.” Rope shows the audience everything there is to see, including the murder of Kentley, except the corpse in the caisson that harbors the “dirty secret.” Furthermore, it is also a joke whose meaning is further disguised, as Hitchcock’s intentions often are in his official pronouncements, as simply the undertaking of a technical exercise that, it seems, has nothing to do with the content of the work.

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