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March 2000, Week 4

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From:
Ken Mogg <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Film and TV Studies Discussion List <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Tue, 28 Mar 2000 09:52:00 +1000
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For anyone interested, here is how the thread spun off from the 'Evil
heroes' discussion on Screen-L has developed on the Home Page of the
Hitchcock Scholars/'MacGuffin' website.  (I know that a lot of Screen-L
users can't easily access the Web.)  Some readers, too, may be
interested in the link to a droll, and quite excellent, explication of
Schopenhauer's notion of sexuality and the life-force ('Will') that is
included here.

- Ken Mogg (author, the UK edition of 'The Alfred Hitchcock Story' -
beware the cut and 'simplified' US edition, which I disown!).
http://www.labyrinth.net.au/~muffin
-------------------------------------
March 21 One of the academic film sites on the Internet is currently
noting the presence in certain films and plays of the 'evil hero' or
'evil protagonist'.  One correspondent writes: 'I have been thinking
about Monty Clift in A Place in the Sun [1951].  Why do we consider him
the hero, when he commits a crime?  Why don't we feel pity for poor
Shelley Winters? ... Very problematic film.'  Indeed it is - quite
Hitchcockian in fact.  Hitchcock seems to have been impressed by it
(interestingly, it has plot parallels with his own Strangers on a Train,
also 1951), and cast Clift in his next film, I Confess (1953).  Another
correspondent writes: 'Evil heroes ... are not impossible.  Two
examples: Richard III [any version], has held the popular imagination
since the late 1500s because the audience finds a guilty pleasure in the
treachery of Richard III.  The Talented Mr Ripley (1999) has much the
same appeal.  Tom Ripley, as intended by Patricia Highsmith, his
creator, is an almost noble esthete whose life-style is supported by
fraud, treachery, and murder, all of which are disregarded by the
audience.'  Yes, and again such protagonists are typical of Hitchcock's
films, where the life-force (or life-essence), in all its amoral
permutations, is constantly on show.  ('Everything's perverted in a
different way',  Hitchcock once said, sagely.)  Bruno in Strangers on a
Train actually speaks of 'harnessing the life-force', which is very
quixotic of him.  Then there are are the various characters in The
Trouble With Harry (1955), whose amoral escapades are accompanied by
images of the turning seasons.  (That film's originally-intended titles
sequence, of a maple leaf budding, growing, and shrivelling in death,
would have underlined the idea of a life-force.)  Hitchcock himself
could never quite explain why audiences should identify with someone
like Marnie, and want her to get away with her crimes, but clearly
there's a defiance by such characters of an over-civilised, repressed
society.  Significantly, Marnie (1964) has a strong 'zoological (or
'biological') motif running through it ...

March 22 No sooner had I written yesterday's entry, above, than I was
gratified to see a further posting on the subject of 'evil heroes'
appear on the academic film site I mentioned.  It was written by JD of
Kyoto, Japan, and reads as follows: 'Literature and film are filled with
evil heroes, aren't they - the problem for Milton, as for others, was
that the devil was so much more attractive than the good [characters].
Isn't the answer to this that humans respond more to vitality than
morality?  In other words, exemplifying the life force seems to carry
much greater weight than being an exemplary human being. In modern
civilisation we are so used to defining ourselves as moral citizens that
we forget or are totally unconscious of more innate instincts.  Or
perhaps it's an unconscious realisation that good and evil are very
dubious concepts...'  Yes, and something else I was going to say
yesterday was that not only individual characters in Hitchcock (Bruno in
Strangers on a Train, the 'conspirators' in The Trouble With Harry,
Marion in Psycho) exemplify the life-force, but so do many of the films
themselves - notably the lively 'picaresque' thrillers like The 39 Steps
(1935), Saboteur (1942), North by Northwest (1959), et al., all of which
have defining moments which show us individuals cut off from 'life'
(e.g., the crofter's wife yearning for the lights of the city, a very
Murnau-esque scene, in The 39 Steps; the hermit in the woods in
Saboteur; the lady in the hotel room at Mount Rushmore in North by
Northwest).  More tomorrow.

March 23 An excellent book on Hitchcock, often overlooked, is Elisabeth
Weis's 'The Silent Scream: Alfred Hitchcock's Sound Track' (1982).
Here's a quote from early in the book (p. 17): 'Hitchcock does not take
for granted the conventional functions of [the language, music, and
sound effects tracks of a film]; there is an intermingling of their
functions in many instances.  In three films where Hitchcock eliminates
musical scoring, for example, he uses sound effects to much the same
atmospheric effect: wind in Jamaica Inn (1939), waves in Lifeboat
(1943), bird cries in The Birds [1963].'  Something I find interesting
about this observation, in the light of our recent discussion of the
life-force (that is also a death-force) in Hitchcock, is that these
three films all exemplify the presence of a 'force' (as Weis's
description itself indicates) from the opening titles onwards.  In
Jamaica Inn, the wording of the titles is visibly washed away by
breaking waves, just as the wording of the titles of The Birds is pecked
away by diving birds.  And in Lifeboat (whose very title is significant,
of course) the flames and smoke from a sinking ship's funnel are
dramatically extinguished by the waves that wash over it (a similar
effect is used for the titles sequence of Torn Curtain, where fog and
steam soon smother the sun-like flames burning on the left of screen).
'Life against death' is what Hitchcock's films are invariably about, and
that contest is typically identified with nature and the working of a
natural force ...

March 27 On this topic of the life-force in Hitchcock's films, and the
matter of why 'evil heroes' are often so much more fascinating than
'good'  characters (March 21 and 22, above), reader JG has several
interesting comments.  'For me,' he writes, ' the clearest demonstration
of this is in the Disney cartoons, where the evil stepmother is far more
interesting than the heroine.  Perhaps that is because the evil
stepmother gives free rein to her desires and greed (feelings which we
all secretly share) and the heroine is basically self-satisfied:  Snow
White was just as happy singing to the squirrels as she was dancing with
Prince Charming.'  An amusing thought!  No doubt the Disney artists were
instructed to tone down - or eliminate - the sexual nature of Snow
White, whereas, as I've often noted here, the philosopher Schopenhauer
stressed that the essence of the life-force (the cosmic 'Will', or, in
humans, our 'will-to-life') is sexual, through and through.  JG seems to
pick up on that idea when he adds: 'in a Schopenhauerian twist, the
waiflike Sleeping Beauty couldn't hold a candle (or a spindle) to the
evil queen who could transmogrify  into an 80-foot-tall dragon at
will.'  (Sounds suggestive!)  Turning to Hitchcock, JG makes this
comment: 'a prime example of how a "natural" soundtrack indicates the
presence of a life-force is in Rear Window [1954].  Contrast the
claustrophobic silence of Stewart's apartment with the ambient noises of
the courtyard and the traffic beyond, where Stewart's fantasy life
(which is, of course, the locus of the only real life in the movie)
takes place.'  Excellent point, for indeed so often in Hitchcock a film
begins - and continues - with the hero feeling cut off from 'life', even
though 'life' always remains effectively a subjective matter (as
Schopenhauer told us) .  More on this tomorrow.  Meanwhile, here's a
link to a brilliant new exposition of a connection Schopenhauer saw
between Will and suffering:  Sex and Schopenhauer.

----
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