Stephen King and Philosophy by Jacob M. Held

Author:Jacob M. Held
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2012-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Hotel Film

The theory of the heterotopia is to my mind most useful as a tool for both literary and film analysis. While literary texts may describe a heterotopian space in all of its power, the film narrative allows us to visualize the space as an actor. It is worth pointing out in this context Alfred Hitchcock’s frequent use of luxury hotels as settings for his suspense films. In Rebecca (1940), a wealthy English aristocrat falls in love with a young orphaned American woman in the lobby of a hotel. (Could it happen anywhere else?) In To Catch a Thief (1955), a retired jewel thief passes himself off as a midwestern American businessman in order to investigate a jewel theft, and it is in the hotel’s lobby and restaurant spaces that he perpetrates his deception of a rich American widow and her socialite daughter. In North by Northwest (1959), a businessman sitting in a hotel bar is mistaken for a known spy, creating the mistaken identity that sets the entire narrative in motion. A similar heterotopian space, the motel, is used compellingly in Psycho (1960), closely following Orson Welles’s sinister use of a motel setting in A Touch of Evil (1958).

It is interesting to examine all of these films in the context of what Geoffrey Cocks describes as the “hotel mode” in literature and cinema, a significant theme that, he argues, began with Stephen Crane’s 1898 story “The Blue Hotel.” In his monograph on Stanley Kubrick, Cocks situates The Shining within this literary and cinematic discourse on hotels. He claims that “between 1898 and 2001, there were made in the world no fewer than 289 films just on hotels per se,” and he identifies Grand Hotel (Edmund Goulding, 1932) as an important early example.[16] At the Grand Hotel people often are not what they seem: the baron is a hotel thief; Preysig, the upstanding businessman and family man, decides in desperation to lie to potential investors and to embark on an extramarital affair; the glamorous ballerina Gruschinskaya turns out to be lonely, insecure, and unsure of her popularity and her talent.

The hotel in Grand Hotel constitutes a heterotopia for a variety of reasons. In the film we witness social relationships being turned on their heads. For example, General Preysig, a wealthy capitalist, and Otto Kringelein, the lowly bookkeeper who until recently worked in Preysig’s factory, exchange social identities over the course of the film. In the heterotopia of the hotel, Preysig’s public persona is revealed as a sham. In this spatial context, he breaks the rules of his normal bourgeois life, lying to his business associates in order to forge a new partnership, attempting to initiate a sexual liaison with a young stenographer, and ultimately committing murder. He is led away from the hotel in handcuffs, disgraced and ruined, with the implication that this situation has allowed his true persona finally to emerge. At the same time, his former employee Kringelein experiences a rags-to-riches transformation, and leaves the hotel with the beautiful stenographer on his arm.

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