Hidden Hitchcock by D. A. Miller

Author:D. A. Miller [Miller, D. A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780226374703
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2016-06-20T16:00:00+00:00

3.1 Crossover complete.

3.2 The two couples.

All of this happens in under three seconds. As an early iteration of the film’s theme of the Double, the brief encounter does everything to make itself hardly visible. Most viewers pay it little attention because Hitchcock’s quick, cluttered presentation obliges us to skim it, as nothing but a neorealist evocation of Manny’s daily surround. Yet no sooner are we, by whatever means, brought to notice the incident, than, with a click—with a shock—it falls into place as a hidden picture of whose deliberate design we are perfectly convinced. The matched costumes, the chiastic ballet, the overlong smile—none of these details seems to us haphazard, let alone their confluence at this moment of transition. And the fact that the incident has been doubled by a banal version of itself—performed by anonymous characters who, far from looking or dressing alike, are as normatively “different” as Woman is to Man (whose appreciative smiles at her are anything but enigmatic)—all this only increases, by antithesis, our sense of signifying intent. We have been given something marked “to be understood.”

Is it possible for any self-respecting Hitchcockophile to doubt what this thing is? Can such a one not recognize the plot-initiating device that, as a signature formal structure, has all the blatancy missing from it as a narrative event? No question, we are assisting at an observance of the Transference. In this ceremonial (best known from Strangers on a Train), two characters—one good, naïve, ordinary, the other evil, conscious, an outsider—accidentally cross paths, and the casual brush of bodies entails a fatal swapping of souls. Desires, compulsions, crimes—all transmigrate between the pair, so that the good character becomes afflicted with guilt, while the bad one becomes the voice of conscience (“But, Guy, it’s your murder”). To identify the Transference in the Arcade, then, is to know that, between the two men passing one other, something else is being passed—namely, the culpability Manny is free of before the encounter that attaches to him right after. In brushing against Manny, the Lookalike would have foisted on him, like so much stolen money, furtiveness itself.

This instance of the Transference thrills me. For one thing, I see the titular theme germinating, feel the whole film, which has been tediously sentimental until now, starting to gel as an authentic Hitchcock text. But I don’t simply recognize the Transference as a start-up device, like the footsie in Strangers or the confession in I Confess. I recognize it as a hidden start-up device, formed to frustrate optimum viewing, and disclosed only to the obsessive overzealousness of a viewer whom no amount of true-story rhetoric or location shooting can keep from looking more closely than he is asked to. My recognition thus attests to a passage of my own: I have crossed the pons asinorum of Hitchcockology—established my ability to prove the advanced, game-changing proposition (alas, so impossible for many to comprehend!) that Hitchcock’s apparently hyperlegible art is a secret art, and as such often almost invisible. In

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.