Vertigo, Borges and the deferral of death

The relationship between film and dreaming is a well documented one. In a darkened theatre, on our ipads and ipods, or in the comfort of our own living rooms our fantasies are projected on to a liminal non-space, a screen that offers up to us a surrogate existence, a life that we might desire, a story in which we might want to exist. For an hour or two we want to be trapped in this world (despite the urge to press pause and grab a beer if you’re watching in DVD); we identify with its stars (Dyer) or we fetishise the female form in voyeuristic pleasure (Mulvey). In these dreams, we can indulge our desires, our pleasures, enter an uncanny world that re-presents our own world, darkly, through its looking glass. And in absorbing the on screen world, in transferring its uncertainty and fear onto our own lives, we relinquish ourselves to masochistic abandon and the fear of death, the fear of the Other, the fear of loss,

The fear of falling.

Dreams and falling.

In Powell and Pressbuger’s A Matter of Life and Death, David Niven’s pilot falls to the ground and as he does so a new life opens up for him; in The Wizard of Oz, as the tornado hits her Uncle’s farm, Dorothy Gale’s fear of being swept into the air and dashed on to the Kansas fields elicits a dream to end all dreams. In Mulholland Drive, the fall and the dream are one, the descent into the Valley of Dolls and Death, the gunshot to the head that releases guilt and dreams, and the psychopomps that lead us to the Other world.

And then there is Vertigo.

Robin Woods and Chris Marker amongst others have made the tantalising connection between Vertigo, dreaming and the oneiric world. For Woods, everything in Vertigo that occurs after the opening sequence (which leaves Scottie Ferguson dangling from a San Francisco rooftop) is a dream; for Marker, the second half of the film is the anguished reverie of Ferguson’s diseased and guilt-ridden mind. Elsewhere, in his monograph on Vertigo Charles Barr draws comparisons with that other great ‘dream-falling’ narrative, Ambrose Bierce’s An Incident at Owl Creek in which a convicted man, at the moment of his being hanged, apparently escapes  only for the reader that the ensuing narrative adventure is merely the dying wish fulfilment of the hanged man. Recently, I read Jorge Luis Borges' short story The Secret Miracle in which the narrator, Jaromir Hladik ruminates on the idea that if reality does not coincide ‘with our anticipation of it’ then it is logical to surmise ‘that to see a circumstantial detail is to prevent it happening’. So, with his own execution imminent, Hladik begins to imagine the circumstances of his own death in the expectation that they will fail to materialise and as the report of the guns that are to kill him sound out, time stands still, long enough for Hladik to conclude a drama that he had constructed in his imagination. And when the drama is complete, Hladik dies.

Vertigo is less about Ambrose Bierce than about Borges’ Jaromir Hladik.

Cinema is masochistic; the deferred gratification of narrative pleasure, the fort/da of both image and tale contains within itself the jouissance of pain; in the masochistic longing of Hladik lie echoes (or foreshadowing, for Jaromir Hladik precedes Ferguson by two years) of Scottie’s own liebestod and our own agonies. In Borges' story, itself based on the premise of Zeno’s paradox against time in which a moving object can never reach its target because it first has to travel half its distance and so forth, the object of desire is the focal point of reflection, the point of almost zero in an always-disappearing perspective. Time, or the end of time, cannot be reached. The irony with Hladik is that once he completes the narrative that desires to be born in his imagination, the narrative that defers his death just as Scheherazade’s narratives deferred her own execution in that 1001 nights, then he dies.

And so Scottie Ferguson.

In Madeleine Elster, Scottie Ferguson finds his home, that place that all men desire. She reveals its presence to Scottie ("Remember that I love you") even at the moment that she takes it away. Home – unheimlich – the place where each man feels at home. The womb. The birth place. Good old Freud; we can always return to him can we not?

“I found myself in a district about whose character I could  not long remain in doubt. Only heavily made-up women were to be seen at the windows of the little houses and I hastily left the narrow street at the next turning. However, after wandering about for some time without asking the way I suddenly found myself back in the same street, where my presence began to attract attention.”

Freud’s repeated return to this spot is described as ‘uncanny’ and losing one’s way, ‘in the woods’, ‘groping around in the dark ... searching for the door’ can all be seen as part of this ‘unintentional return’. But how unintentional? There is, in Freud’s anecdote, a sense that ‘there the doctor must administer to himself’ his own psychoanalysis and that Freud’s return is not unintentional at all. It too is a deferral, the impulsive compulsion to repeat of the unconscious mind, a deferral of jouissance, a masochistic desire to revisit scenes of shameful desires.

And so Scottie must relive his own shameful desires. Haunted by the memory of Madeleine he falls into the abyss of memory and become fixated on the one thing that can perhaps free him from his despair – Carlotta’s necklace, the red ruby, a blood red ovoid wound with all its Freudian symbolism.. Good old Scottie: Scottie who chased pain, who dangled over its precipices; Scottie who withdrew from his relationship with his mother, Midge. And so, in his dream fever, when we the spectator sees the necklace not once but two three times, in that moment, Scottie’s diseased brain conjures up a narrative of desire that will allow him to achieve its fulfilment.  Just as Hladik weaves a ‘lofty, invisible labyrinth’, often returning to the original version before reworking the story just as his physical universe has come to a halt, so we can read into the second half of Vertigo a re-working of the first.

All we know about Scottie at the beginning of the second part is that he is in a state of total catatonia, that he is ‘somewhere else’, that it ‘could last a long time’ (according to the doctor), that he loved a dead woman ‘and still does’ (according to Midge). Is it too absurd to imagine that this agonizing, though reasonable, and obstinate soul (‘hard-hitting’ says Gavin), imagined this totally extravagant scenario, full of unbelievable coinci­dences and entanglements, yet logical enough to drive one to the one salvatory conclusion: this woman is not dead, I can find her again? (Chris Marker, Free Replay)

And so Scottie reworks the narrative of the first part of the film into the dream-narrative of the second part, for in his deferral of Death, Scottie is toying with us all; the story he has conjured up for himself is a nightmare, ending in the uncanny repetition of the first narrative, a woman, Madeleine, falling to her death on the burnished tiles that skirt the roof of Mission San Juan Bautista. And so the film ends, just as the second part ends. In his dream state, Scottie has at least managed to climb the stairs, to overcome the acrophobia which condemned Madeline to her first death. Now he looks on at the scurrying, beetling figures below, still lost in his dream, deferring his death once more.

The Graduate and The Male Gaze

Laura Mulvey’s influential 1970s essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema discusses the idea of the ‘male gaze’ in classical Hollywood cinema. The concept of the male gaze rests on the idea that women are objectified for the pleasure of men and that women on screen are enjoyed in voyeuristic pleasure by male observers both in the narrative of the film and in the audience. In fact, according to Mulvey, the cinema satisfies a primordial desire in all of us which is – to look. 

Mulvey’s theory rests on the three aspects of ‘the gaze’ in both the narrative world of the film and the social contexts in which a film is viewed.  

1.       The gaze of the characters at each other

2.       The gaze of the camera

3.       The gaze of the spectator 
 

The Gaze of the Characters at Each Other

First, let’s take point number one. Mulvey’s argument is that in classical Hollywood films, we are encouraged to see the world through the gaze of a primarily male protagonist, mainly because of the dominance in Hollywood editing of the combination of objective and subjective shots. Hitchcock built a theory of editing around this (via Lev Kuleshov and the associative editing of the Russian Formalists) – see this youtube clip http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCAE0t6KwJY to see how Hitchcock reveals his manipulation of the edit to emphasise the gaze of the male protagonist and determine the spectator’s response to this gaze.

Look for at these two shots from The Graduate

In this sequence, we see first a shot of Ben looking and then a shot of what he sees, in this case Elaine who is leaving home for Berkeley. Throught the obscured point of view shot, the spectator is placed securely in the position of a watching Ben. Of course, there are many eye-line matches from Ben to other objects in the film but for Mulvey the dominance in Hollywood cinema of shots involving a man looking at a woman is exemplified here and for Mulvey, this look is deeply sexualised and shows that men’s pleasure of looking is very much bound up with desire.  
 
According to Mulvey, when we watch a film we do two things (sometimes at the same time).

1.We identify with the characters onscreen (which can be called NARCISSISM) or

2.We look at the characters with erotic pleasure (which is called VOYERURISM)

Think of the montage set to the music of Scarborough Fair in The Graduate. There are multiple shots of Ben alone gazing at Elaine; the music is wistful, melancholic and we are persuaded to feel sorry for Ben, to feel his sense of loss (this is narcissisism). So in this sense, Mulvey's theory makes absolute sense - or does it?

Interestingly (and fittingly for a film that was influenced by the French New Wave and should perhaps transgress traditional cinematic values) there are many times when we don’t follow Ben’s point of view, when the camera refuses to show us what he looks at. For example, when Ben is on the travelator at the airport during the opening scene, the camera tracking him as he moves forward, blankly, towards a future uncertain, he turns to look at a woman who passes by on the other side but we do not get the accompanying eye-line match, suggesting that this look was not a desirous gaze. A few moments later, as Ben approaches the glass doors that will lead him out of the airport concourse, he waves and smiles at invisible bodies (parents perhaps?) beyond the shot and again we do not cut to the object of his gaze. These instances of an audience’s frustrated look help us feel Ben’s own sense of alienation and claustrophobia. Is this a contradiction to Mulvey's theory of the gaze? Perhaps, but these shots in which we are intricately linked to Ben's movements and his place in the frame merely serve to bind us closer to the male protagonist. In fact, during the entire film, the  audience is forced to see the world from Ben’s perspective (after all he is the main protagonist) and this is conveyed not by the eye-line match but by the over-the-shoulder shot which reveals the world from Ben’s standpoint if not his visual eye-line. In this way, we are not Ben but we are very much on his shoulder and part of his world.

The Gaze of the Camera

By claiming that the gaze of the camera also favours a masculine perspective is not difficult to imagine. Think about how many film directors are male, how many film studios are owned by men, how the companies financing the studios might well be owned by men and you can see that a PATRIARCHAL SYSTEM is in place to make the male gaze the dominant one. In this memorable shot from The Graduate, we see Ben ‘trapped’ beneath the apex of Mrs Robinson’s bent knee. Although the focus of the shot is clearly Ben and the symbolism suggests a dominant and aggressive female sexuality, Mrs Robinson’s leg is objectified: it frames the shot and the camera is placed in a sexually suggestive position. There are other moments in the film when a woman’s body is objectified: the scene in the Whisky-a-Go-Go when we see the stripper , the shot of Mrs Robinson’s stockinged leg in the room at the Taft Hotel. All of these encourage a woman’s ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’ (as Mulvey calls it) and suggest that the gaze, even when it is not taken from Ben’s point of view, is male.

The role of lighting also serves to highlight women as an object to be gazed at. Lighting systems were specifically designed to emphasise a female star’s body, with high key lighting bathing Hollywood icons such as Rita Hayworth and Marilyn Monroe in bright, dazzling glory. Other forms of lighting, low key lighting, for example, have served to emphasise the contours of a woman’s body or face: look at his image of Marlene Dietrich in which top lighting is used to bathe her face in an angelic glow but serves to leave the rest of her body shrouded in darkness, offering connotations of a dual persona  - the Madonna and the whore  - which Dietrich of course often presented in her films.

In The Graduate, lighting is used effectively to endow Elaine with an innocent glow, drawing our (and Ben’s) attention to her. But it’s not only Elaine. And in the second shot, look at the way that our focus is kept on Mrs Robinson whilst Ben is in shadow.

 The Gaze of the Spectator
Although Dustin Hoffman is the star of the film, it is the women whose bodies are objectified and fetishised for the gaze of the viewing audience. Elaine, Mrs Robinson and of course the stripper are all presented as objects of Ben’s gaze and, through the positioning of the camera and lighting, the audience are persuaded to see the world through his eyes. We cannot escape what the camera puts in front of us. The publicity material for the film foregrounded Mrs Robinson’s stockinged leg, with Ben looking down on this object of desire. This famous image points up what Mulvey called fetishisation. To fetishise something is to focus obsessively on an object that is part of the thing that threatens us: in this way, one can reassert power and control over the thing itself. Men, scared of being ‘castrated’ (psychologically that is) by a woman will fetishise its body parts (you’ve heard the rather crude phrase – “I’m a breast man” or “I’m a legs man” – well, there it is!). By refusing to recognise a woman as ‘a whole’ then man reduces her to a fragment. Look at these two shots from the scene when Mrs Robinson ‘traps’ Ben in Elaine’s bedroom:

The spectator sees Mrs Robinson’s body through Ben’s eyes in a series of flashed shots that reveal breasts, stomach and hips: the woman’s body is fragmented. Now you could argue that Ben certainly doesn’t feel in control at this point: however, Ben fears Mrs Robinson’s body parts and the camera emphasises these parts to the audience in an explicit and comical way.  

Problems with Mulvey...
What happens when we look at  men?

For Mulvey, the male role in films was an active one. Men’s role in films is ‘to do stuff’ – fight, chase, investigate whereas women tend to slow down the narrative (they prevent the man from facing his destiny by getting him to fall in love, or they put things in the way of the detective by offering him sex instead of solutions – see films noir). Here The Graduate seems to contradict Mulvey’s theory. Ben doesn’t do much ‘acting’ in the first half of the film: in fact, he spends his time drifting along in much the same way as he sleeps on his sun lounger in his parent’s pool and it is Mrs Robinson who is the ‘actor’, the catalyst for his own action. Perhaps Ben’s non-action is his action, so to speak. The film is a rites-of-passage narrative: Ben only reacts when he sees the pain he has caused Elaine in the Whiskey-a-Go-Go. Until then, he has been infantilised, beginning a journey of non-discovery; the ultimate objective for Ben is to find a future that doesn’t scare him and Mrs Robinson prevents this, shunting him into a world of bodies and sex.   

And what about women who watch the film? Well, Mulvey says that women are either forced to identify with the ‘objectified female’ and measure herself against male expectations, or they inhabit a male point of view of the world and judge the female characters through his eyes.

The Male Body
But what about male bodies? Does Mulvey’s argument about the male gaze extend to viewing the male body? Mulvey didn’t discuss this in her essay but many cultural theorists have done so since. Placing the male body on display in films appears to feminise him, turn him into an object of ‘the gaze’. To counteract this, whenever the male body is naked, it is often engaged in ‘masculine’ activities such as combat, or it is being tortured or injured in some way. If you look at the opening scene to Saturday Night Fever, John Travolta’s character is strutting along the streets of Brooklyn, immaculately dressed and carefully coiffured: to all extent his body is quite ‘feminine’. However, to counteract this, he carries a tin of paint which points up a more masculine trait and, to emphasise his manly appetite, he orders two pizza slices and devours them with atavistic pleasure.

So let’s look at Ben. On several occasions we see Ben’s body. Look at these two shots.

In the first he is lying on the sun-lounger and the dazzling crystals of light suggest that his body too is being put on display for our pleasure. However, we can see that he holds a can of beer; moreover, the can is placed in quite a suggestive place and draws our attention to his crotch which suggests his phallic power. In the second shot, once again we see Ben in a female space: the bathroom. He is naked to the waist and joined by his mother which not only links to his infantilism but adds to the femininity of the shot (think of the moment when Ben goes to the student halls and talks to the college boys – they are all together in the showers, not afraid to share their bodies with each other). However, can you see how Ben’s masculinity is confirmed by the liberal application of shaving cream and then, a little later in the scene, he nicks himself with the razor drawing  blood from his  hand? Once again, the male body is ‘marked’ to avoid it being too feminine.

On the whole, it is interesting to analyse The Graduate from Mulvey's theory of the male gaze. Through it's objectification of Mrs Robinson, the eye-line matches from Ben to the female body, his voyeuristic 'pleasure' in watching Elaine all seem to connect with the theory. But there are problems: in many shots, Ben is the object of the gaze (although we have argued that his 'to-be-looked-at-ness' is qualified by clearly masculine motifs); also, Ben is more often than not sharing the shot with either Elaine or Mrs Robinson, thus implicating the spectator in their own voyeuristic pleasure.

 

California Dreaming - The Graduate

Much has been made of The Graduate's lack of engagement with the real issues of the sixties - its failure to make any reference to Vietnam, the Berkeley campus protests or even the summer of love which occurred on its very doorstep - but, having returned to the film recently to prepare for teaching a Film Studies class, I was struck by the absence of references to work or employment, and in a film which posits success on the meritocracy of sixties USA, I found this rather curious. But before I go on to this, let's back track a little.

I don't believe that films should reflect every aspect of the era in which they are produced: doing so can very quickly date a text and although of interest to historicists perhaps, it can produce some cringeworthy effects. Easy Rider, although a film that helped turn Hollywood on its head, can feel alienating to a young audience. I have been teaching Dennis Kelly's DNA recently and I was struck by the absence of contemporary references in the play: there is a text about an alienated gang of youths in the modern world and not once do they get their phones out. There is something 'future proof' about the the elision of such contemporary references and I think that The Graduate falls into such a category. It doesn't have to be a news bulletin to situate itself in its baby boomer world, instead the sixties seems to permeate through its own particular, well, DNA. Maybe Foucault might have something to say about this: his episteme or the unconscious structures which underpin the production of knowledge in a particular period might be one way to see the mode of discourse within the film and that the conflicts between the two generations, Nichol's deployment of New Wave cinematography, the contrasting soundtrack that marries Simon and Garfunkel's pop-folk with the muzak of the Taft Hotel, the incongruity of a Jewish New Yorker playing an upper-middle class WASP all combine to give the film its own discourse of transgression.

And yet, where is the work? There is talk of work, yes: the future is plastics says one of Mr Braddock's friends, as if he were an oracle providing Benjamin with the seeds of his own downfall. And there are people at work: the stripper, the mechanic, the priest, the bell-boys and receptionists, but all these are there to serve the purposes of the protagonists. None of the main characters are defined by their particular occupations (we do learn that Mr Braddock and Mr Robinson are business partners but what their business is remains unclear) and therefore roles in society, despite Ben's father's anxieties about what his son is going to do with his life. It as if the idea of work has been excised from Benjamin's vision of the world, as ephemeral as the dancing crystals of light that reflect from the dream-like surface of the pool on which he floats. Work is for others, to provide the hero with the tools required to assist him in his quest: the way to the church, a room for the night.

 One way of exploring this absence is to see the film as a projection of Benjamin's own sleeping mind, perhaps. Nichol's locates the film's stylistics firmly within the observational range of Ben. We never venture from his viewpoint (Nichols did shoot some footage and voice overs that deviated from this but they never made the final edit). It is as if Benjamin is stuck in a dream-world where life revolves around desire and the transgression of the prohibitions that surround it. The first shot in the film is an extreme close-up of Benjamin as he sits immobile on an aeroplane about to touch down in Los Angeles. Nichols then zooms out to show us the rest of the cabin and Ben loses himself in this little crowd. He sleepwalks along the travelator and the film then jump cuts to another shot of Ben, his head in front of a fish tank, submerged, drowning. There are many scenes in which Benjamin is sleeping or relaxing: on the sun lounger in his parents’ pool, for example; in front of the TV whilst Mrs Robinson moves past in a hazy blur. Scenes involving glass, mirrors, all suggest Ben’s alienation, yes, but they also suggest a screen behind which Ben sees his own life unfolding in a steady procession of roles that he might or might not fulfil.

Compare the opening shot with the closing two shots. Ben’s head fills the space to the right hand side of the screen and in the penultimate shot the left side of the screen is filled by Elaine’s angelic presence. Now look at the next shot: it is taken from a 180 degree reverse of the previous shot. For logistical purposes (to get the surprised/amazed faces of the other faces into the shot, perhaps), Ben is turned slightly to his right and there is a clear physical space existing between Elaine and he that was not present in the preceding shot. Perhaps, in a fantastical reading of the film (just as, say, some critics have suggested that the events of Vertigo all occur in Scotty’s imagination as he dangles precariously from the San Francisco rooftops – just how did he get down from there?) one could imagine that the events between Ben on the aeroplane and Ben finding himself next to a beautiful woman on a bus all occur in Ben’s imagination. Perhaps.