This review essay is forthcoming in Film Quarterly, Spring 2009.
Richard Allen, Hitchcock’s Romantic Irony. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. $74.50 cloth; $24.50 paper. 295 pages.
David Sterritt
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Hitchcock’s Romantic Irony
By Richard Allen
Half a century after Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol inaugurated Alfred
Hitchcock studies with their 1957 monograph, Sir Alfred remains the
all-time-favorite filmmaker of sophisticated cinephiles. Few have been
more consistent in their interest or judicious in their ideas than
Richard Allen, coeditor of the esteemed Hitchcock Annual and
author/editor of various Hitchcock books and articles. In the opening
pages of his perceptive new study, Hitchcock’s Romantic Irony, he
stakes out clear positions on theoretical issues subtending his
approach. He is not against interpretation, he assures us, but he
rejects the “bad” kind, in which meaning is made, in favor of the
“good” kind, in which meaning is discovered. The proper guide and goal
for interpretation is poetics, a “practice of descriptive
generalization” (xii) that clarifies the patterns of style, content,
theme, and form in a filmmaker’s work; here Allen follows the lead of
film scholar David Bordwell, and one measure of this book’s success is
its avoidance of Bordwell’s fussiness – the arguments don’t lose sight
of Hitchcock’s cinema as a set of living, vibrant experiences that
operate on sensual and affective levels as well as abstract and
intellectual ones.
Rejecting the false dichotomy of
Hitchcock as enthralling (immoral) showman versus Hitchcock as earnest
(moral) philosopher, Allen places him in the (amoral) category of
“romantic-ironist,” committed to a both/and logic (xiii-xiv) that
simultaneously affirms and criticizes the norms, ideals, and values
that circulate through his narratives. Suspense and pitch-dark humor
are romantic irony’s main vehicle, and aestheticism is its main
stylistic mode (xv). This aestheticism, closely linked to Hitchcock’s
fascination with perverse sexuality, can take a “masculine” form, as in
Rope, which uses style to distance sexuality in the manner of a joke,
or it can assume a “feminine” form, as in Rebecca, which uses style to
figure the “sublime allure” of perverse subjectivity (xvi). In a North
by Northwest, romantic irony gives birth to transformation and renewal;
in a Suspicion it breeds an all-embracing ambiguity; in a Vertigo it
fosters “a downward spiraling trajectory of negation and descent”
(xiv). However many shifting shapes it takes, the near-ubiquity of
romantic irony accounts for both the unity and the diversity of
Hitchcock’s work.
Allen elaborates these ideas in the
book’s main sections, one on narrative form and one on visual style. He
expends (too) many words tracing the pedigree of romantic irony from
Friedrich Schlegel, who never used the term, to various
twentieth-century critics who tease out distinctions within romantic
irony – between objective and subjective modes, lateral and vertical
inscriptions, romantic and ironic components. Allen then rehashes the
well-worn Hitchcockian contrast between suspense and surprise, relating
the former to problematics of knowledge, fear, and the way Hitchcockian
narratives can seduce beholders away from their ordinary ethical
standards, as when we root for Bob Rusk of Frenzy to find his missing
tiepin. In subsequent chapters Allen rebuts poststructuralist claims to
Hitchcock as a poet of the empty signifier; discusses Hitchcockian
dandyism and some films’ commentary on the relationship between
representation and referent, à la The Picture of Dorian Gray; makes the
case for German expressionism as a key influence on Hitchcock, with
arguments less developed but more keenly focused than John Orr’s in
Hitchcock and Twentieth Century Cinema (Wallflower Press, 2005);
contemplates what Slavoj Žižek calls the Hitchcockian Blot, an
incongruous “stain” that signals the immanence of a “chaos world or
shadow world” (140) that threatens our habitual reality; and analyzes
the emotive, dramatic, and semiotic roles of color in Hitch’s
mise-en-scène. Allen manages all this with intellectual acuity and the
kind of authorial modesty that allows him to aver, notwithstanding his
obvious dedication to Hitchcock’s artistry, that the likes of Topaz and
Torn Curtain have weaknesses that “ultimately fail to do justice to the
unique cinematic intelligence [that these films] nonetheless manifest”
(250).
I said earlier that Allen clearly lays out his
theoretical positions, but that doesn’t include any examination of
auteurism, which is obviously at issue in any study of films by a
single director. He may feel that auteur criticism no longer needs a
fresh apologia every time a director-based book comes out, or that the
practice is uncontroversial when applied to a filmmaker of such
prodigious creativity; and the fact that he locates such steadiness of
theme, form, narrative, and style in Hitchcock’s work is itself a
defense of the auteurist perspective. Allen’s conclusions would stand
on even firmer ground, however, if he had set forth a rationale for his
auteur-based approach, and if he’d taken note of instances that call
Hitch’s authorship into question, as when Paramount vetoed his
last-minute scramble to recall the prints of Vertigo so the crucial
confession-revelation scene could be removed. Along the same lines,
Allen has little to say about most of the brilliant collaborators –
Robert Burks, Ben Hecht, Henry Bumstead, and so on – who made important
contributions to Hitchcock masterpieces, although he does quote the
half-baked theories of Technicolor consultant Natalie Kalmus at
surprising length. But these aren’t major complaints, and my other
quibbles with the book are smaller still – minor inaccuracies,
occasional oversimplifications, and omissions of interesting material,
as when he links the opening camera movement in Psycho to Hitch’s
often-used bird imagery without mentioning its origin in a “fly on the
wall” motif that was mostly excised from the final screenplay.
None of which should dissuade Hitchcockians from digging into this
carefully researched and artfully written book; thanks to its fine
scholarship, critics will be tracing the ramifications of Hitchcock’s
romantic irony for a long time to come. Unity within diversity.
Both/and. Criss-cross. “Isn’t it a fascinating design?” as Hitch
rhetorically asked vis-à-vis Strangers on a Train. “You could study it
forever.”