Enduring film legend Alfred Hitchock is considered one of our
finest directors. Professor of the Humanities and Media Studies
Camille Paglia is a fan. During her exhaustive and thoroughly
entertaining lecture on the man some decry as misogynist at last
month's BFI celebration, she talked about his attention to detail
and how integral it was to the narrative arc of his movies as well
as commenting on how his subtle use of gender play, why she
considers Mad Men to be a big yawn and how he tricked the Hollywood
censors.
DIVA: You seemed to be saying that you were sad about
the death of symbolism and non-verbal narrative in contemporary
film which has occurred since Hitchcock's heyday. What do you feel
we gain with symbolism and lose with immediacy in
film?
Camille Paglia: What I love about Hitchcock is
his keen sense of body language-gesture, facial expressions,
reaction, choreography. He began his career in the 1920s in
silent films in London, and in my opinion, some of his greatest
scenes, which often have no dialogue, retain that contemplative
quality of silent film. Immediacy, to use your word, is part
of the heritage of improvisational cinema of the late 1950s and
'60s-from the hand-held camera of Jean-Luc Godard to the
experimental, seedy, live-action scenarios of Andy Warhol or Stan
Brakhage. Too many of today's films pretend to immediacy and
are in fact just riddled with tiresome visual clichés.
Directors are too self-conscious about being hip. So there is
very little authentic power of social observation. Artistic
energy has shifted to computer animation and big-budget
action-adventure or science-fiction films.
Since we seem to be heading towards a new era of
cultural/moral conservatism do you think we might see a resurgence
of this approach to film narrative?
CP: I don't agree with the polarity of Left
versus Right or liberal versus conservative. I think these
are old and outdated terms that need to be revised or
discarded. People act as if they are eternal categories that
came down from Jehovah on Mount Sinai, but they only emerged after
the French Revolution. What I do see in history is an oscillation
between tradition and innovation, with innovation sometimes going
so far that people become disconnected and disoriented. Then
there is a revival of tradition, through which people rediscover
their own cultural identity. I say in my new book, Glittering
Images, that the avant-garde is dead-it was killed 40 years ago by
Pop art, thanks to my hero, Andy Warhol, who absorbed commercial
themes and production methods into the fine arts. I wrote an
article about "the artistic dynamics of revival" for the Modern
Review in England in 1994-it's reprinted in my essay collection,
Vamps & Tramps.
You said Mad Men's Joan has nothing on Janet Leigh in
Psycho in her role as a seductress and it sounds as if you consider
Mad Men to be historically revisionist. Why do you think the
programme makers might be interested in selling us this particular
version of the 1950s/60s?
CP: It's just simple ineptitude-lack of that
acute power of social observation that Hitchcock had in
spades. Before making Psycho, he sent a crew to Phoenix,
Arizona to photograph exactly what young secretaries were wearing
and the kinds of rooms they lived in. So what we're seeing in
Psycho is as accurate as a Courbet painting of French peasants
hacking rocks. But beyond that, Janet Leigh is magnificent in
her muted, understated performance, precisely capturing the
decorous mask and sexual repression of that period. Mad Men
is a snarky mess-an anachronistic extrapolation of contemporary
assumptions backwards in time. I have never been able to
watch Mad Men for more than two minutes before snorting in disgust
and switching the channel. I lived through that period, and
believe me, there's nothing about that show-from the costumes to
the décor to the manners-that resembles the reality. There's
more authenticity in a Doris Day and Rock Hudson bedroom farce.
I agree with your view that the web can be a visually
impoverished medium and that you cannot develop the eye until it is
still - can you say more about this? And how you believe
Hitchcock's films can help in this endeavour?
CP: I love the Web and embraced it from the
start. For example, I was one of the co-founding contributors
of Salon.com in 1995, when the Web was still scorned by most
journalists. But Web design has not kept pace with the
radical expansion of this medium. There are very few major
newspaper sites, for example, that are elegantly or forcefully
designed. On the contrary, everything is tiny and crammed or
winking, popping, and blinking. Our eyes and brains have
adjusted-and more's the pity! So many great directors-from
Carl Dreyer and Cecil B. DeMille to Alfred Hitchcock and Ingmar
Bergman-were inspired by classic paintings. Film makers used
to let the eye LINGER on the almost sculptural figures on
screen. That slow, majestic pace produces almost a state of
trance. Well, that artistic world is over! We're
deluged in fragments-random bits flying at us from every
direction. I don't know how ambitious young artists will ever
learn how to construct important statements from this flux of
trivia that they're immersed in every day.
You talked about fashion in Hitchcock's films, about his
obsession with his female stars' clothes and your belief that
fashion is an art form. I love fashion too but I wonder if you see
a tension here with the burden that is placed on women to
constantly be on display?
CP: I adore fashion, but I am not fashionable
myself. It's a tremendous art form that has flourished in
every important culture, from ancient Egypt and Babylon to imperial
China and Japan. In my reading of history, the beautiful,
fashionable woman symbolizes civilization itself. She is at
her maximum power and style during periods of relative peace and
prosperity. Please see, for example, Gone with the Wind,
where Scarlett O'Hara's Southern belle perfection gets tossed to
the wolves after the disaster of a lost war and the subsequent
economic collapse. All of a sudden it's calloused hands and
gowns thrown together from green-velvet window drapes! Yes,
women are currently the focus of fashion, but that is part of the
heavy heritage of the industrialized Victorian period, when men
were suddenly forced into boringly uniform black suits and hats,
like undertakers. My generation of the 1960s had a brief
period of male dandyism-thanks to the cheeky splendors of Mod
London-but it all went away again. Women should moderate
their complaints by sympathizing with the rigid strictures placed
on male dress today. A guy has to turn drag queen to enjoy
bright colors and sensuous fabrics! On the other hand, when I
happen on a display of ultra-fashionable shoes-as I did at the
Neiman-Marcus store at a suburban Philadelphia shopping mall a few
days ago-and see that the grotesquely high-angled and probably
crippling current models of Christian Louboutin are currently
priced at as much as $6000 [3776 pounds], I have to say that
something is going very wrong with our social priorities.
Conversely, you note the occasions (such as Grace Kelly
in Rear Window where Grace wears boyish clothes at the end of the
film) where gender role reversal occurs. Do you think Hitchcock was
among the most observant of directors at the time in relation to
gender-play?
CP: Hitchcock has been heavily criticized by
feminist theorists for his reputed "misogyny"-partly based on his
harsh treatment of some of his female characters (like the nude
murder victim rolled around in a dusty potato truck in Frenzy) as
well as his real-life leading ladies, like Tippi Hedren, who was
subjected to near torture at times. However, there are even
more examples of Hitchcock's undercutting of conventional
masculinity in his films, including numerous and very daring
evocations of male homosexuality, such as in Rope and Strangers on
a Train. Scenes of male subordination or eclipse run
throughout his major films such as Rear Window, Vertigo, and North
by Northwest.
I liked what you said about being 'in this moment of
diminished stardom with all these actors and their causes' - what
is behind this trend and how would you have them
behave?
CP: Truly charitable people do not publicize
their charities-a point made even in the New Testament. All
this preachy grandstanding-that's not the way artists should
conduct themselves. Today's actors need more quiet
self-cultivation and invisible observation of society and human
interaction. In the U.S., however, they're addicted to media
attention. Without the media, they don't exist. Their
agents and studios drive them to it-but without any the shaping
skills of the old Hollywood studio system, which knew how to create
and preserve stardom. Great stars should retain a sense of
mystery. There's no mystery left, that's for sure!
And finally, purses/handbags! I loved what you said
about them and how they represent different aspects of their
owners' character. I've often seen them in Hitchcock's films as an
allegory for the vulva but can you give a couple of examples (and
their meanings) that readers can look out for in other Hitchcock
films?
CP: The purse motif is at its height in Psycho,
The Birds, and Marnie. The purses are almost characters in
themselves who deserve to be listed in the credits! For
example, Marion Crane starts out in Psycho with a white purse and a
white brassiere, then shifts to a black purse and black brassiere
when she steals the fateful $40,000. In my 1998 book for the
BFI on The Birds, I followed the adventures of Melanie Daniels'
purse throughout the film. She's always dragging that thing
around, even in stressful situations where she should drop
it! There's only one moment (in the diner toward the end)
where she forgets it, and a waitress has to run after her with
it. I think that's Hitchcock's signal that for the first time
in her life, Melanie has transcended her own ego. In Marnie,
the vulval shape of the purse (particularly in the enigmatic
rearward shot on a train platform) is absolutely blatant. But
Hitchcock also played that game with women's
hairstyles-particularly the tightly spiraling blonde chignon
sported by Kim Novak as the false Madeleine in Vertigo.
Despite sporadic efforts since the 1960s to promote man-bags, the
fashion has never spread beyond gay men-whereas the women's purse
and handbag departments of every major store remain a cornucopia of
shapes, styles, and materials. The purse is clearly some sort
of obscure biomorphic symbol of women's secret, shadowy, womblike
power!
Camille Paglia's new book
Glittering Images - a journey through art from Egypt to Star
Wars (Random House) is published in October
