Mr. Peanut (50 page)

Otto aimed the remote at the projector and turned toward the screen. There was an image of Hitchcock himself, standing with a movie clapboard that read
Psycho
. “To my mind,” he said, “Alfred Hitchcock is the William Shakespeare of modern cinema. The comparison is apt on numerous levels, the least of which being that both are British artists. Really, it’s the sheer breadth of Hitch’s work, the variety of his menagerie, the range of his characters, his pathos, his comfort in genres from tragedy to comedy, slasher to satire, action film to farce, along with his relentless revolution of these forms, his playfulness with spectatorship, for instance, with the audience’s expectations—not to mention his output, his magnificent output! Nearly sixty films, spanning silents to talkies, black-and-white to Technicolor, even one or two in 3-D. And that doesn’t even touch on his work in television.”

A montage of images with no sound followed, clips from his films in black and white and then glorious color.

“Speaking of silents”—he laughed at his joke—“Hitch always said he was trying to achieve what he called
pure cinema
. He was trying to tell stories that were possible only in the medium of film. Because of his training as both a draftsman and silent filmmaker, he was wary of dialogue—not sound, mind you, he was wildly inventive with the use of sound. But it was the image, the image as a way of telling, that he was most interested in, and he left
nothing
to chance with the images he used. From the time he directed his first picture—
Number 13
, which was never completed—he storyboarded every shot before filming. Think about that level of intentionality.
Every shot!
He used to say that making a film was actually the
most boring part of the process, because in his mind he’d already made it.” Otto turned toward the screen, then back to the class. “He also said he didn’t like actors, that they were cattle.” Another sloppy laugh, a wipe of the mouth. “He owned cattle too. Cattle and oil fields. Hitch used them as tax shelters when he got really rich. I’m not making this up.” He looked back at the screen, back at the class. “Where was I?”

“Pure cinema,” someone said.

“Thank you.” He paused the montage on a black-and-white image: a taxi, filmed from behind, that had been swerving down a London street, and through two rear porthole windows the heads of the driver and passenger were visible.

“Take this shot here, from the
The Lodger
. Hitch’s English period, released 1927. A suspicious man moves into a rooming house. Pretty girl lives there with her family. Boyfriend’s a detective. Lodger might or might not be the serial killer who’s been murdering women all over London. He’s just killed again, so the city’s on high alert. And to show that everyone’s on the lookout, Hitch has this cab driving down a London street … ”

Otto hit play. The car swerved back and forth, the passengers leaning accordingly.

“Note that the two heads in the windows look like a pair of eyes looking back and forth, back and forth.”

They did, though Otto rewound and let the class consider the image again. “Of course my favorite example of pure cinema comes from a silent where the hero’s on a sea voyage. He gets drunk one night during a terrible storm, the boat pitching and rocking, and Hitch cuts to the deck, to passengers getting slammed left to right, right to left. And when his drunken hero appears, what happens? He walks the deck in a completely straight line.”

The class laughed.

“Let’s see. This is introduction day. What else do you need to know? I’ve taught this class so many times I don’t prepare anymore. Isn’t that sad?” Otto stuck a finger in the air. “Ah. Hitch was also a big-time practical joker. Loved to play jokes on his actors and his crew, could be a sadistic
bahstahd
. My favorite: he makes a bet with one of his cameramen that the man can’t spend the night alone on the soundstage, that he’d be too scared to make it till morning. Cameraman takes the bait. Hitch says, ‘All right, but to make sure you don’t leave, I’m going to handcuff you to this scaffolding here.’ The cameraman plays along. ‘But because I’m a good chap,’ Hitch says, ‘I’ll give you a flask of whiskey so you can calm your nerves when the spirits of darkness appear.’ The cameraman says he won’t need any because he doesn’t
believe in ghosts. ‘You will,’ Hitch says, then locks him up, and the crew leaves for the evening. When they come back the next morning, the man’s shivering and sobbing and covered in his own feces—Hitch having added a laxative to the bourbon. ‘The spirits scared him shitless!’ he proclaims.”

A ripple ran through the class as students looked at one another. Alice again turned toward David. He could feel his mouth hanging open like an idiot’s.

“Of course, if Hitch had been making a movie of his little practical joke,” Otto said, “he’d have injected it with suspense. That was his favorite weapon. The Master of Suspense, people called him. No director until Hitch and even afterward, except maybe De Palma, played with the audience so sadistically. Can someone define suspense for me?”

Students looked around once more, and a girl to David’s right raised her hand. “It’s when you’re waiting for something to happen,” she said. “Waiting anxiously.”

“You the character or you the viewer?”

“The viewer.”

“And why are you anxious?” Otto asked.

“Because,” she said, “the thing that’s going to happen is … bad.”

“Okay, but to whom?”

“The character.”

“Agreed. But why are
you
anxious?”

“Because … ” she said. “Because you can’t do anything about it.”

“Why can’t the actors?”

“Well … ” She thought for a moment. “Because they don’t know.”

“Exactly,”
Otto said. “They don’t know, but you do. And that’s how Hitch created suspense. It was simple, he said: the audience must be informed. They’ve got to know something the characters don’t. If he were to have filmed that practical joke we’d have seen Hitch filling the flask with bourbon, pouring in the Ex-Lax, shaking it up. He would’ve shot it in close-up as he walked toward his victim, flask looming in the foreground. He’d have shown himself cuffing the poor bastard to the scaffolding and then pulled back as the cameraman took a long swig. ‘Bottoms up,’ Hitch would say. Then he’d pull away even farther to a high shot, showing the fellow was teeny-weeny now that the medicine was down his gullet. And he would’ve filmed the rest of the night from the victim’s point of view, always stretching for a bucket just out of reach, the one Hitch had placed there just to be gratuitously cruel … No music, of course, just the natural sounds.” Otto put the back of his hand to his mouth and made some wet raspberries.

Disgusted laughter. Howls.

“How could he have filmed it in the dark?” David called out.

“Excuse me?”

David raised his hand. The professor cupped his ear toward him, and Alice turned around.

“I said, how could he have filmed it in the dark?”

“Excellent question! What’s your name?”

“David.” He glanced over at Alice.

“Hitch would’ve overlooked that little detail. He used to say he wanted to tell a completely unbelievable story with inescapable logic.”

Otto ran another black-and-white montage: bridges spanning marshlands of what looked like New Jersey dissolving to Joseph Cotten lying on his back in a darkened room. And: more bridges—London Bridge this time, in color—and then a dead woman floating facedown and naked on the Thames, a tie around her neck. The Golden Gate Bridge: Jimmy Stewart beneath it, carrying a drowned woman in his arms.

“A couple of important biographical notes,” Otto said. “First, and this is probably the most famous Hitchcock anecdote there is: When he was a boy, his father, a grocer, told him to come along, then turned him over to the police for no reason whatsoever and had him locked up in jail for a while. ‘This is what we do to bad boys,’ his father said, leaving him there—not for long but long enough. I don’t go in much for psychological interpretations, but Hitch’s being a Catholic added to this little trauma, and he not only developed an extreme fear of police in particular and a hatred of authority in general but also, you can imagine, an exacerbated sense of original sin, convinced that punishment for something you thought or did was just around the corner. Because we’re all criminals anyway, aren’t we? You aren’t yet, of course, because you’re young and unmarried, whereas I’ve been married for years and regularly dream of murder!”

More chuckles. More images. Cary Grant taken at gunpoint by two men in the Plaza Hotel. Next, him running through Grand Central Station. With Eva Marie Saint now, on Mount Rushmore, sliding down Lincoln’s nose. A man hanging from the torch of the Statue of Liberty; another guy grabs him, a sleeve tears, he falls. A man—a mere speck seen from above—fleeing the United Nations.

“Speaking of marriage,” Otto said, “in 1921 Hitch meets Alma Reville, a young woman doing continuity—a film editor, in essence, though I love that old term, continuity. They start working on films together, date briefly, and he proposes. On a boat, no less. Romantic, you’re thinking, but he does so during a storm. While Alma’s seasick belowdecks. I’m not making this up. Wanted to ask while her resistance was low, he explained. Apparently
after he asked her to spend her life with him, she puked. Ladies and gentlemen, if you ask someone to marry you and the person pukes, that’s a sign.”

He laughed and wiped his mouth.

“Needless to say, it wasn’t what you’d call a happy relationship. They were great working partners. She tightly controlled people’s access to him, including producers, friends, the public in general. Hitch was as shy as he was a showman. She kept him well fed—she was a great cook, evidently—and comfortable and productive. But they were more like brother and sister, and this lack of intimacy was cemented during Alma’s pregnancy. Hitch became disgusted with her transformation into, shall we say, a large woman. Not that he should’ve complained, being large himself—and more on that later—but after the birth of their daughter, Patricia, who became an actress herself and is wonderful in
Strangers on a Train
, he supposedly never had sexual concourse with his wife again. Now, you’re young, all of you, you’re not married, so you can’t imagine this sort of thing, but Hitch, in response to this life of celibacy, developed very intense fixations on his stars, more often than not on beautiful blondes. If you’re brunette in a picture of his, you’re going
down
. But idealization and the dangers of perfection became major themes, and more on that later too. But what a list of women they were: Madeleine Carroll, Ingrid Bergman, Janet Leigh, Eva Marie Saint, Kim Novak, Tippi Hedren, to name just several. Who can blame him for falling in love? And most of all with Grace Kelly—a real nympho apparently. Go ahead, report me to the administration. I’m too old to be fired or become PC. Anyway, before she bedded a man she’d disappear into her bathroom and then emerge completely naked, so perhaps there’s hope for me yet …

“I’m forgetting something. Let’s see. Oh,
food
. Hitch and food. He struggled mightily with his weight his whole life. Fluctuated wildly. Would lose a hundred pounds just like that and gain it right back. Topped well over three hundred at his heaviest. Hunger, for him, was a form of suspense, the most elemental form, I think, next to dangling from a high place. He said he could never have an oven without a window because if he cooked a soufflé and had to wait until the timer went off to see if it had fallen, the suspense would kill him. And it was a replacement—food was, I think—for his lack of sex. He had to fill up that void, as we all try to, right? I fill mine with love. I fall in love once a year. Drives my wife crazy. Now … ”

Onscreen, women were being stabbed in showers, choked in chairs, strangled on trains, murdered in the reflection of eyeglasses; they were thrown off church towers, attacked by seagulls, by lovers, or by strangers in
the privacy of their apartments, Grace Kelly by a man emerging from behind a curtain while she talked on the phone.

“We need to go over some film terminology,” Otto said. “Take a sheet from each of the stacks I’m passing around. The second is the syllabus. But before we get into film grammar, I want to give you one important term plus some visual motifs to bear in mind. If nothing else, write these down even if you drop this class, because once you’re aware of them Hitch’s work will open up like a flower.

“So, the MacGuffin. Stated simply, this is what gets the story rolling but then fades in importance after it’s introduced. Take
The 39 Steps
. The hero, Hannay, meets a woman at a local London music hall who claims to be a spy hunted by assassins. They’re after her, she says, because she’s discovered a plot to steal British military secrets and something called, of course, the 39 Steps. She’s murdered that night in Hannay’s apartment, so he’s got to prove his innocence while racing all over Scotland and London trying to figure out the secret, which naturally has nothing to do with what the movie’s about. What it’s about is the hero and heroine’s struggles to trust each other. Which is the beauty of the MacGuffin, because once you learn what it is you can immediately get busy ignoring it.

“Next, stairs. Stairs are always significant in Hitchcock’s films. A character’s decision to make an ascent reflects a central moral choice, a commitment, a willingness to endanger himself or herself for someone beloved, a literal and figurative striving for a higher ground. And mirrors. He uses them to suggest doubleness, and this symbol becomes even more fraught when his work turns darker during his later films, so mirrors in
Notorious
mean something very different from mirrors in
Vertigo
or
Frenzy
.

“And mothers. Mothers are absolutely central to his work. There’s the loving but oblivious mother in
Shadow of a Doubt
, then the terrible mothers of
Notorious
and
Psycho
and all the men who are still boys and love their mothers too much. See
North by Northwest
or
The Birds
. A man who loves his mother too much is someone who can never love his wife enough.