TY - JOUR
AU1 - Boudana,, Sandrine
AB - Abstract As the representation of the press and journalists in fiction has potential impact on the public's perception, this paper more specifically examines this representation in Hitchcock's movies, which grant a significant role to newspapers and newspapermen in their narratives. In these movies, the press fulfills the ritual function that J. W. Carey (1992) and N. Couldry (2003) have emphasized in their work. The analysis of the 56 movies directed by Hitchcock points to an ambivalent representation of the press as an apparatus of the bourgeois order. Such depiction may reinforce this order by naturalizing it or, on the contrary, inspire sociopolitical contestation by showing its failures. This ambivalence is inherent in Hitchcock's art, which promotes a logic ofmonstrationrather than plaindemonstration. Newspapers and newspapermen are omnipresent in Hitchcock's movies. As Rae Hark noticed, “Hitchcock points the viewer toward a heightened scrutiny of press functions in the films through his cameo appearances in them. In Foreign Correspondent, we find the director walking down the street reading a newspaper (Figure 1), in Saboteur he is a customer at a news stand, and in Lifeboat he famously appears in before and after pictures in a newspaper advertisement for the weight-loss aid Reduco” (Rae Hark, 1999, p. 334). Figure 1 Open in new tabDownload slide Hitchcock and Joel McCrea starring the foreign correspondent in the eponym movie (1941) Figure 1 Open in new tabDownload slide Hitchcock and Joel McCrea starring the foreign correspondent in the eponym movie (1941) However, while over the past decades, Hitchcock's movies have drawn extensive and meticulous attention by critics and scholars, who have shown special interest in the recurrence of themes (e.g., the figures of the wrong man or the psychopath, the love triangle situation, the questions of matrophobia or scopophilia) and of motifs (from blondes to handcuffs, trains, or eggs) (Walker, 2006), as yet no study has focused on the recurrence of the press as a theme, and of journalists and newspapers as motifs. When mentioned at all in scholarly works, Hitchcock's treatment of newspapers and newspapermen is either evoked in passing or used to address a specific question limited to the analysis of a few movies. This is the case of Rae Hark's study of “The Press and Democracy in Hitchcock's World War II Anti-Fascist Films,” which focuses on a predefined political question and limits the scope of analysis to three movies (Rae Hark, 1999). It seems that, paradoxically, it is the omnipresence of newspapers and newspapermen on Hitchcock's screen that makes them invisible to critics and scholars. Yet, as I argue in this paper, examining the functions of the press in Hitchcock's movies enhances both our understanding of Hitchcock's cinema and our critical thinking of the role of the press, and of communication, in society. I contend that the press, as depicted by Hitchcock, fulfills the ritual function that media scholars such as Carey (1992) and Couldry (2003) consider so crucial to our comprehension of the role of communication and of the media in society. As Couldry has emphasized, rituals serve as much for masking inequalities and managing conflict as for ensuring social integration. From this perspective, by showing on screen the ritual functioning of newspaper production and consumption, Hitchcock's movies might be characterized as unmasking social injustices and political tensions. The central question raised here therefore is: Does exposing, in the sense of showing, rituals of press production and consumption lead to exposing, in the sense of disclosing, social and political issues? Hitchcock's art is characterized by the ambivalence of the act of exposing, as the literature on his work has acutely demonstrated in the case of representation of women (Allen, 2007; Modleski, 1988; Mulvey, 1975). When Hitchcock repeatedly shows women in a situation of oppression, it begs the question: Does he invite the viewers to share a sadistic drive or does he appeal to empathy and indignation? In their response, critics point to an ambivalence or ambiguity in Hitchcock's representation of women. The same question arises, this paper proposes, in the case of the representation of the press. Hitchcock's mise-en-scène of the ritual function of the press as masking social inequalities and maintaining political control over society does not necessarily constitute a committed social and political criticism, though, at the same time, the act of showing enables such a criticism to be formulated. As we will see in the last part of the study, Hitchcock plays with the ambivalence inherent in a pictorial transmission of messages: The image of society that he gives can be seen as both a critical reflection on society but also—because of the absence of a committed politics—as a mere reflection of society.1 In the conclusive discussion, I use the concept of monstration to shed light on this ambivalence. Three ritual functions of the press Within a conceptual framework drawing primarily on the work of media scholars who emphasized the ritual view of communication (Carey, 1992; Couldry, 2003), as well as upon the work of anthropologists and sociologists (Bourdieu, 1991; Durkheim, 1912/1995; Turner, 1974) who examined the social function of rituals, the analysis developed in this paper is organized around the three main approaches to ritual functions identified in the literature: integration, masking of inequalities, and management of conflict. Ritual is more than any habitual action or repeated pattern. It is an action, formalized or not, that involves “transcendent values” (Couldry, 2003, p. 3). When neighbors ritually meet and comment on the latest news, they signify their belonging to a community that values daily circulation of information about events happening within or outside their community. They also signify that they share, among themselves and with the media, a sense of what constitutes an event and of what is newsworthy. In that perspective, rituals refer to what members of a society have in common and they fulfill a function of integration (Durkheim, 1912/1995). But, as Couldry has argued, ritual should not only be “associated with claims that it produces, or maintains, social integration” but must also be connected “with the management of conflict and the masking of social inequality” (Couldry, 2003, p. 4). Rituals formalize categories and boundaries between categories (Turner, 1974) and, in doing so, they do not so much express order as they naturalize and legitimize it (Bourdieu, 1991). In the United States of the 1950s, for instance, men read newspapers while women read magazines (Kimball, 1959, p. 398). Men read newspapers because they naturally need to be informed about a world in which they make decisions and are influential actors; women read magazines because they only have to know about gossip, fashion, and cooking recipes, as their role is centered on, if not confined in, the household. I analyzed the representation of the press in Hitchcock's movies via the comprehensive study of visual and verbal references to newspapers and newspapermen in all of the 56 movies that Hitchcock directed. For each movie, I transcribed the ways in which newspapers and newspapermen manifested themselves: description of the item (e.g., legible content of the newspaper article, physical appearance and behavior of the newspaperman, transcript of his/her conversation), movement of the camera (e.g., close-up shot on an article, traveling on a street where a news stand can be seen), length and insistence of exposition (e.g., in passing as a background element or long fixed shot), as well as their context of manifestation (e.g., newspaper read at a table where the family is gathered for breakfast), and the larger place and role in the story (e.g., opening scene on a newspaper article that introduces a protagonist). Based on this material, I identified patterns that I further analyzed within the conceptual framework of the ritual view of communication.2 For example, the brief medium shot on a middle-aged man reading a newspaper at the breakfast table where his family is gathered (with no specific reference to the paper's content and no impact on the plot) points to a situation of newspaper consumption as a daily routine. Repetition of similar situations in Hitchcock's movies further points to a conception of newspaper consumption as integrated in bourgeois lifestyle and refers to a function of social integration. The study shows that the three ritual functions (integrating, masking inequalities, and managing conflict) of the press are expressed in Hitchcock's movies as follows: Omnipresent in public, semipublic or private spaces, newspapers are food for conversation among family members, neighbors, or colleagues, thus serving a function of integration. This integration can operate at the expense of individuals who are ostracized in the context of social dramas (Turner, 1974). Newspapers are thus also associated with deviance and, through their mise-en-scène, social hypocrisy and inequalities are unmasked. In particular, newspaper consumption divides genders. Yet one cannot speak of a critical function of this mise-en-scène as Hitchcock maintains ambivalence: Is his depiction meant as reflection of society or reflection on society? Via the routine production of “junk food news” (Jensen, 1983/2001), the press in Hitchcock's movies also appears as a locus of power that maintains control over society, through processes of surveillance or distraction. The press is here defined as an agent of power but not without ambiguity, especially when Hitchcock himself participates in propaganda efforts. Let us analyze each of these ritual functions before discussing the observed ambivalence in connection with the logic at play in Hitchcock's art. The function of integration Newspaper consumption as a shared daily ritual With a few exceptions (Jamaica Inn, Under Capricorn, Rope, I Confess), newspapers and newspapermen are omnipresent in Hitchcock's movies. They even play an important role in Lifeboat, while the whole story unfolds in a place cutoff from communication with the outside world. Newspaper articles often invade the screen, as the camera offers close-up shots on pages held by characters whose hands only are visible, as though they were holding the paper for us, the spectators, to read. Significantly too, some of the movies begin (Dial M for Murder) or end (The Wrong Man, Topaz) with a scene that grants prominent visibility to newspapers. Yet this invasion is inconspicuous in the sense that newspapers are so banal objects integrated in our routine life that we do not pay attention to them. They are omnipresent in public, semipublic, and private spaces. As part of the street landscape, they are either held by passers-by as an accessory comparable to hats or handbags, or waiting in news stands, or handed by salesmen. Newspaper readers also invade hotel receptions and public transportation, especially trains—which constitute a recurrent motif in Hitchcock's movies (Walker, 2006, pp. 373–387)—and also subways (Rich and Strange, The Wrong Man), boats (Lifeboat, Rich and Strange), or planes (Foreign Correspondent, Topaz, and Torn Curtain). Finally, they are part of the home setting, comparable to plants or family photo frames. In these instances, they are often thrown on a table or a couch to signify the normality of routine life. While newspapers circulate as common objects throughout the city, news circulates as a valuable object of conversation between family members gathered at the breakfast table, neighbors meeting at the grocery store, or colleagues sharing a workplace (e.g., The Lodger, Blackmail, Topaz). Here the newspaper maintains social cohesion by implementing a shared daily ritual. This function has been a central object of communication studies, especially as theorized by Carey (1992). Inviting scholars who focus their attention on “the transmission view of communication” to show more interest in the “ritual view of communication,” he argues that communication is the basis of human fellowship; it produces the social bonds, bogus or not, that tie men together and make associated life possible. Society is possible because of the binding forces of shared information circulating in an organic system. The following quotation reveals this tension and Dewey's final emphasis on a ritual view of communication: ‘There is more than a verbal tie between the words common, community, and communication. Men live in a community in virtue of the things which they have in common; and communication is the way in which they come to possess things in common. What they must have in common … are aims, beliefs, aspirations, knowledge—a common understanding—likemindedness, as sociologists say’ (Carey, 1992, p. 22). With the disaggregation of organic solidarity (Durkheim, 1893) characteristic of the Gemeinschaft3 (Tönnies, 1887/2001), newspaper consumption represents a common—altogether in the sense of universal and ordinary—activity that nourishes social interactions and participates in the creation of ersatz of communities. The newspaper as a metonymy for our mechanical society In Hitchcock's movies, newspapers are closely associated with industrialized mass society. Consumerism is represented through newspaper advertisements designed by Hitchcock. They are the advertisements that target the family man in The Wrong Man or the middle-class worker in Rich and Strange, or the advertisement for the weight-loss product, in which Hitchcock appears in before and after pictures (Lifeboat). What is sold in each case, it is suggested, is delusion. In The Wrong Man, the protagonist dreams of purchasing a Ford car when he cannot afford the service of a dentist who could relieve his wife's pain. In Rich and Strange, the newspaper invites the protagonist to change his “present circumstances” but when he does, it is only to get a sense, through the painful experience of seasickness and infidelity, of the weakness of his physical and marital condition. As for the weight-loss advertisement, one can have an idea of the irony involved when they know about Hitchcock's problematic relation to food and weight (McGilligan, 2003, p. 326; Walker, 2006, pp. 179–200). If advertisement sells individual fulfillment, on screen Hitchcock often uses newspapers in scenes that represent a homogeneous society, in which all individuals perform the same actions at the same time, in a mechanical way. This is the opening scene of Rich and Strange that shows a mass of people exiting their offices at the end of a labor day. A very similar scene opens North by Northwest, when the camera distinguishes the protagonist from the mass exiting an office building. Not incidentally an advertising executive, the protagonist appears as a busy man able to perform multiple tasks simultaneously, including reading the newspaper. As for the mass of employees, they seem to wear the same suits, as if uniforms of the army of capitalism, while hats and newspapers are worn or carried as insignia. The novel The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (Wilson, 1955) was published 4 years and made into a movie 3 years before the release of North by Northwest, while Marcuse's One-Dimension Man (Marcuse, 1964) was published 5 years later. Newspapers work as a metonymy for the mechanical society that produces and consumes them. Interestingly, while the newspaper is a symbol of the mechanical society, news, especially human interest stories, by their mechanisms of projection and identification, responds to the individuals' desire to be comforted and to feel that they belong to a community—thus, fulfilling a function of aggregation (Maffesoli, 1988). In Hitchcock's movies, this function of aggregation is sometimes fulfilled at the expense of individuals identified as deviants: Social integration thus passes through ostracism. This is the case of protagonists wrongly accused (The Lodger, 39 Steps, Saboteur, The Wrong Man, Spellbound, North by Northwest, Frenzy). Further to their identification in the newspapers, these individuals are not only chased by the police but also by their fellow citizens who see them as a threat on society. This is also the case of women accused of “easy virtue” (Easy Virtue, The Birds). The press then acts as a catalyzing agent in these social dramas. The press as central actor of social dramas Turner defines social dramas as “units of harmonic or disharmonic process, arising in conflict situations” (Turner, 1974, p. 37). Although Turner specifies that social dramas are not crimes, his description of the four phases of public action involved in social dramas is highly relevant to Hitchcock's depiction of the way a man wrongly accused of a crime is treated by the press and his fellow citizens. The four phases observed by Turner are: The initial breach of a norm. This corresponds to the crime in Hitchcock's movies. A phase of “mounting crisis,”“during which, unless the breach can be sealed off quickly within a limited area of social interaction, there is a tendency for the breach to widen and extend.” This phase corresponds to the manhunt. In order to seal off the breach rapidly, the press and the citizens are called for contribution: Newspaper salesmen shout the news in the streets and the papers, circulating from hand to hand, display the photo and name of the deviant on their front pages. A phase of redressive action: “In order to limit the spread of crisis, certain adjustive and redressive ‘mechanisms”’ are brought into play. In Hitchcock's movies, the wrong man is found innocent and the real criminal is arrested or killed. A phase of reintegration or of recognition of “irreparable schism.” In the movies, newspaper headlines sometimes rehabilitate the wrong man who is reintegrated in his family unit and in society. However, this sort of reparation is often far from complete. In The Wrong Man's final scene, the protagonist goes to the psychiatric institution where his wife now lives and shows her the newspaper that establishes his innocence. Yet this action does not help her recover from her mental breakdown. And if rehabilitation is still possible for men wrongly accused of murder, there is no salvation for women whose reputation has been wrongly sullied. Here the “initial breach of a norm” (the alleged “easy virtue”) leads to a crisis (when the press makes the breach public) that calls for redressive action (under the form of a ruined reputation or a divorce), which is not followed by reintegration but by the recognition of “irreparable schism” (with the stigmatization of the divorcee). In Easy Virtue,4 it is by reading the newspaper that Mrs. Whittaker finds out that her fresh daughter-in-law is the sulfurous protagonist of a divorce trial largely covered by the press: “I knew this woman was concealing some vile secret!” she says, triumphant. In fact, the plot of this movie is entirely based on the destructive power of gossiping. In Hitchcock's movies, concerns about sex scandals are often expressed by jealous mothers who justify their interference by the idea that this sort of scandal brings shame upon the whole family. It is the voice of Mitch's mother in The Birds: “She's always mentioned in the columns, Mitch,” and later on, insisting: “Well, actually the newspapers said she was naked.” When the protagonist of Easy Virtue objects that her past “affects no one” but herself, her mother-in-law replies: “On the contrary, it will utterly disgrace us—it will make us the gossip of the entire countryside.” In this scene, the newspaper passes from hand to hand among the family members and this circulation is a synecdoche for the spreading of the gossip in “the entire countryside.” And here newspapers seem to leave no room for salvation. In Easy Virtue, Larita tries to escape: “Reporters—photographers—publicity … Larita sought to forget them all on the tolerant shores of the Mediterranean.” But her attempt turns out to be hopeless. In the last scene, exiting the court that has pronounced her second divorce, the heroin faces with dignity the photo-reporters armed with their cameras and launches dramatically: “Shoot! There's nothing left to kill.” This dramaturgic reference to the camera as a weapon is recurrent in Hitchcock's movies. It is actually not always purely metaphorical: In Saboteur and Foreign Correspondent, a murder weapon is concealed in a fake camera, while the protagonist of Rear Window uses the flash balls of his camera as a defensive weapon against the villain. The same press that cries wolf loudly in the social dramas that we examined might thus cover actual crimes. This idea is implied in instances when newspapers are used by Hitchcock's characters for purposes other than reading: to protect the face from the sun or the light (Rear Window, Sabotage), to wrap objects (Rear Window, Psycho), to fix things (Saboteur), to entertain oneself or others (the hero of Foreign Correspondent cutting newspapers in his office, the heroine of Dial M for Murder with her clipping activity or Uncle Charlie building a house with a newspaper in Shadow of a Doubt). All these apparently insignificant activities send us back to crimes. If Charlie5 builds a house with a newspaper, it is not so much to entertain his niece and nephew as to destroy an article that designates him as a serial killer. Charlie's suspicious behavior will incite his niece to go to the town library and find the incriminating newspaper. The objects wrapped in newspaper in Rear Window are the murder weapons and they will likewise arouse the hero's suspicion: “What's interesting about a butcher knife and a saw wrapped in newspaper?” he asks his girlfriend. Wrapped in newspaper in Psycho is the money stolen by Marion—a crime that will be punished with disproportion. The newspaper is also the last piece of evidence which Norman Bates will get rid of when removing every trace of Marion's presence in his motel. This object is so banal that Norman does not notice its presence until a final check. Going several times back to the newspaper lying on the bedside table, the camera suggests that Norman is about to make a fatal mistake. The newspaper then becomes an element of suspense, in the sense that the tension is born from the fact that we see something that the protagonist does not, and yet should see (Morris, 2002; Zillmann, 1996, pp. 199–232). Through newspapers as false banal objects, Hitchcock thus gives a nod to his audience and turns them into his accomplice, as if saying: “You—and you alone—know what lies beneath the surface.” The function of masking social injustice The press as the instrument for covering dysfunction Hitchcock's ironic treatment of the press is also observable in the many scenes where newspaper reading is presented as morning ritual associated with family gathering at the breakfast table. Then Hitchcock suggests that the bright morning light under which this activity is performed actually covers dark secrets. This is the case of the opening scene of Dial M for Murder that introduces an apparently loving couple gathered at the breakfast table: A close shot on a newspaper article about a novelist invites the secret lover in, and soon teaches us to distrust the appearance of perfection. For the newspaper might just be a cover for dysfunctional individuals or a tool for society to hypocritically deny dysfunction. And conformism starts with family unity. In Rich and Strange,6 when the couple comes back home to restart a normal life after their trip vicissitudes, the maid welcomes them by saying that she prepared a nice dinner and brought them “all the newspapers.” By contrast, in Topaz, the pile of newspapers and magazines that obstructs the door when the French spy comes back home from his mission in Cuba represents an anomalous accumulation. It signals that his wife has left him, thus breaking family unity. Hypocrisy of conformism is more patent in Rebecca, in the contrast between Mr. de Winter's first wife, Rebecca, and his new bride. Rebecca appeared as an accomplished lady and it is only in the last part of the movie that the husband reveals that she had a vile character and was unfaithful. In opposition, the new bride is a genuinely kind person and devoted wife. Yet socially she appears as awkward. This is visually shown through her relation to the newspaper: Sitting at the breakfast table alone, she soon decides to leave the place but the butler catches her up to remind her that she left her newspaper. This reminder sounds like blame: The protagonist has broken a social convention. Later on, we will see her read a fashion magazine to try to match up to Rebecca, depicted as a fashion icon. These references to newspapers and magazines point to two dimensions of social criticism: the oppression of the individual by mass society that demands conformism and the oppression of women in patriarchal society. Newspaper consumption as reflection of patriarchal society Media consumption is clearly gender-differentiated in Hitchcock's movies: Men read newspapers while women read magazines. This observation sends us back to the significance of categories and boundaries in the ritual process: “Rituals do not so much express order, as naturalise it; they formalise categories, and the differences or boundaries between categories, in performances that help them seem natural, even legitimate” (Couldry, 2003, p. 27). In “Rites of Institution,”Bourdieu (1991) has shown that the rite of passage is not simply about the transition from boyhood to manhood but serves to define boundaries between the categories of men and women. The rite of passage excludes a category (women) for whom the boundary is not crossable. The underlying division men/women is reasserted in the boy's ritual transformation into a man. In Hitchcock's movies, only dysfunctional characters violate the strict gender categorization of media consumption habits. In Marnie,7 the female protagonist uses the classifieds of a Philadelphia newspaper to find a job. But she is a frigid woman whose mother has taught her not only to seek independence from men but to loathe them. In Psycho, when the detective arrives at Norman's motel, he finds him at the reception, having a snack and reading a book. If Norman does not read the newspapers, it is because newspapers are meant for people concerned with daily life and the outside world, whereas Norman is stuck in the motel. It is also because Norman is not really a man: He is not only impotent and dominated by his mother; he eventually becomes his mother. The strong gender divide in Hitchcock's movies has been analyzed by Marantz Cohen as a vestige of the Victorian age in which the filmmaker was born. The segmentation newspaper/magazine is tightly connected with the dichotomy male = action versus female = feeling (Marantz Cohen, 1995, p. 12). Newspaper reading is for busy men and decision-makers. By contrast, magazines are vain. In Rebecca, the close shot on a magazine's catchphrase is full of irony: “Beauty: The magazine for smart women.” But it is above all in Rear Window that this opposition is developed, through the opposition between Jeffries, a photo-reporter, and his girlfriend Lisa, who works for a fashion magazine. When Lisa tells the detective about her suspicion that a murder has been perpetrated, the detective reacts in this very patronizing way: “Look, Miss Fremont, that feminine intuition stuff sells magazines, but in real life, it's still a fairy tale.” And yet, Lisa will be the one taking action and running risk to solve the murder case, while Jeffries, immobilized by his broken leg, is a passive spectator. And this is not an exception. There are other instances of active women in Hitchcock's movies, notably in The Man Who Knew Too Much, in which it is the female character who foils the political assassination plot. Besides, if reading the newspaper can be the activity of hyperactive businessmen, like the hero of North by Northwest, it also turns out to be the activity of the unoccupied or the unemployed. This is the case of the father in Juno and the Paycock8 : While he is sitting in the living room, reading his newspaper and smoking his pipe, as a useless “peacock,” the mother is the one standing up, both literally (on her feet all day, working and taking care of the household) and figuratively (standing up for her children, especially her daughter after she announces her pregnancy). However, as soon as we begin to think that Hitchcock shows that women's role in society is underestimated, a last shot sends us back to the idea of the unalterable vain nature of females. In the last scene of Rear Window, as soon as Lisa sees that Jeffries is asleep, she trades a book titled Beyond the High Himalayas for the magazine Bazaar. The gender approach to newspapers and magazines consumption thus illustrates Hitchcock's ambivalence toward patriarchalism, and his permanent oscillation between backing up stereotypes and inviting us to their denunciation. This fundamental ambivalence has been emphasized by feminist critics (Modleski, 1988) who conclude that Hitchcock is neither misogynist nor sympathetic in his representation of women. Or perhaps we should conclude that he is both. This is what Allen argues through his concept of “romantic irony,” which “describes the both/and rather than the either/or logic that governs the universe of Hitchcock's films” and “explains how it is that critics could construe Hitchcock's work both as an affirmation of the ideal of heterosexual romance and as a critique of that ideal” (Allen, 2007, p. xiv). Newspapers are a reflection of society, which can in turn inspire a critical reflection on society. But this critical function might be more apparent in instances where Hitchcock gives an active role to newspapers and newspapermen. Then the reference is not just metonymical as the press is given harmful agency. The function of conflict management News as an instrument of control through processes of surveillance and distraction Prior analysis of the role played by newspapers in the public actions involved in social dramas (Turner, 1974) has suggested that the press in Hitchcock's movies created visibility as a trap for the wrong man. Newspapers create a feeling of oppression by their ubiquitousness and their extraordinary capacity to circulate information rapidly and at large scale: “How will I know him?” the hero of North by Northwest asks. “He’ll know you. You made the Chicago papers too,” the interlocutor replies. There seems to be no escape possible as everybody knows everything about everybody. Hitchcock immerses his protagonists and his audience in a Panoptic society: “visibility is a trap” (Foucault, 1975, p. 200) through which modern society exercises its controlling system of power-knowledge. This idea is epitomized in scenes where heroes are fugitives playing hide and seek not only with the police, but with all the people surrounding them in public spaces, especially those holding a newspaper. This is exemplified in the famous and very similar Grand Central Station scenes, in The 39 Steps and North by Northwest. Newspapers turn everyone into potential informers for the police and sometimes into active hunters. The collective violence then depicted by Hitchcock resembles the mob behavior studied in social psychology at the turn of the 20th century (Le Bon, 1897/2002). The mob lynching the wrong man in The Lodger is not an assembly of citizens willing to do justice, but a mass stirred up by newspapers' obsession with murder stories. This newspapers' obsession is expressed with humor by the female lead character of North by Northwest, when she corrects the protagonist who gave her a fake identity: “No, you’re not. You’re Roger Thornhill … of Madison Avenue … and you’re wanted for murder on every front page in America. Don't be so modest.” One might notice here that he is not “wanted” by the police but by the newspapers. This remark confirms the active role of the press in the “discipline and punishment” (Foucault, 1975) system characteristic of modern society. For readers, murders covered by the press represent entertaining objects of conversation. At the end of the day, Hitchcock suggests, entertainment is what the audience expects of newspapers. Human interest stories, especially reports on murders or accidents, invade the papers' space. If some of the newspaper articles shown by Hitchcock's camera deal with political news (especially in Topaz), a large majority concerns advertisement, sports, gossip, and human interest stories, what Jensen (1983/2001) has termed “junk food news.” Reversal of the traditional hierarchy of news, which makes entertainment news appear as more important than political news, is treated with humor in The Lady Vanishes, when two British gentlemen lament that American newspapers give prominent coverage to the current bombings, on the eve of World War II, at the expense of the cricket game: “Not a word about cricket. Americans have no sense of proportion.” This idea of an invasion of sensationalistic news at the expense of political news has been theorized by sociologists who argue that this invasion functions as diversion: By invading the space that should be dedicated to political and social matters, the media divert the citizens' attention from them and thus generate a “democratic deficit” (Bourdieu, 1998, p. 16). And indeed, Hitchcock tends to present the press as an agent of power that numbs the citizens. “The authority of the printed word” Newspapermen appear as “agents of power” (Altschull, 1994) ready to sacrifice the truth on the altar of superior national interest. This is the case in North by Northwest, when the media back up the staged killing of the protagonist. The head of the secret agency further expresses his satisfaction, not without a dose of cynicism: “Mr. Kaplan's untimely shooting has now acquired the authority of the printed word. Everyone's been cooperating beautifully.” The media manage to impose their claim to truth as self-evidence for their audience, while in reality they serve law and order. Lies become the truth when uttered by the press: “You saw the newspapers. My fingerprints are on the knife. I'm a car thief, a drunk driver, and a murderer” (the wrongly accused protagonist in North by Northwest). Cameras play a crucial role in Hitchcock's idea of how deceptive appearances can be. This is notably illustrated by the famous scene at the United Nations in North by Northwest: “Cary Grant is photographed holding the knife that has just been used to stab the ambassador to the United Nations in the back (North by Northwest), and the snapshot shows him in the process of stabbing him, when it is precisely the opposite that is happening” (Dufreigne, 2004, p. 137). And Dufreigne concludes his study of the deceptive function of cameras by explaining that “the photograph is a fixed reflection of the real character, inanimate, and thus soulless” (Dufreigne, 2004, p. 137). Paradoxically, whereas Hitchcock insists on visual transmission of information to his audience, he also sends them this fundamental message: Do not trust image. Hitchcock as a propagandist Hitchcock thus generally gives a negative image of newspapers and newspapermen, especially photo-reporters. However, when he focuses on specific journalists who become protagonists of his stories, he tends to give a positive image of their personality and their professionalism. Jeffries in Rear Window, the protagonist's son-in-law in Topaz, and, above all, the foreign correspondent in the eponym movie are all brave professionals in quest for truth, and their occasional cynicism hides a heart of gold. This positive image seems exclusively reserved to war correspondents, in that Hitchcock's representation, far from being original, aligns itself with the image d’Epinal of war correspondent as the undisputed journalist hero in movies and popular culture in general (Annenberg, 2010). However, beyond the stereotyped representation, Hitchcock seems to make a point of discussing journalists' values and goals, as well as the dilemmas—especially the question of censorship—they are confronted with. His view is mostly developed and made explicit in Foreign Correspondent, throughout the film in general, and in more length and depth in the introductory conversation between the chief editor and one of his journalists. That Hitchcock, making an exception to the rule of supremacy of visuality over verbality, concedes such long dialogues to explicate his protagonists'—and his own—views on journalism prove the importance granted to these views. In this conversation, the ideal war correspondent is defined, in opposition to the “intellectual type,” as someone able to get to the facts because he has no preconceived ideas; his mind has not been perverted by an ideology: “I want a reporter. Somebody who doesn't know the difference between an ism and a kangaroo.” Yet, ultimately war correspondents do not escape from serving as agents of power. It is the case of François (Topaz) when he passes information obtained by interview on to his father-in-law, a secret agent spying for the Americans, in the Cold War context. More disappointedly, it is also the case of Jones (Foreign Correspondent) when, in the movie's last scene, the patriotic speech that he delivers from a radio station in London turns him into an instrument of propaganda. This scene, which has actually been written by a different scenarist at the last minute to replace the original ending, sounds phony and the speech is not in line with the character. This is Hitchcock's sacrificial contribution to the war effort, as Spoto pointed out: “Like Charles Chaplin's impassioned plea at the end of The Great Dictator (made the same year), Foreign Correspondent breaks the rules of dramatic logic and structure to make its political and social point” (Spoto, 1999, p. 234). This sacrifice has to be understood not only in the political context of World War II, but in the more particular context of Hitchcock's personal experience of the war. Indeed, in 1940, Hitchcock had just left his native England to work as a director in Hollywood and “the British press and a significant portion of the film and theater community unleashed a storm of protest” against him: “Hitchcock's former employer had called him a deserter” (Spoto, 1999, p. 235). That is also why, although, as Rohmer and Chabrol insisted, Hitchcock was “ordinarily not at all a ‘committed’ auteur’,” he “made an exception where Nazism was concerned” (Rohmer and Chabrol, 2006, p. 120). Such compromises add ambiguity to the ambivalence of what we may call Hitchcock's critical gaze on society and politics—an ambivalence notably pointed out in his treatment of the gender issue. Discussion: How Hitchcock's logic of visual communication accounts for the observed ambivalence In this last part of the paper, I want to argue that, beyond the contingencies of Hitchcock's particular involvement in the political intricacies of his time, the ambiguity of Hitchcock's critical gaze has first and foremost to do with the ambivalence inherent in the gaze, that is, in visual communication. Indeed, in accordance with his philosophy that “whatever is said instead of being shown is lost upon the viewer” (Truffaut, 1985, p. 17), Hitchcock tries to communicate with his audience visually rather than verbally. His references to, and uses of, newspapers on screen are thus another illustration of his well-deserved characterization as a great “cinematic visualizer” (Spoto, 1999, p. 517). Understanding Hitchcock's art of visual communication is all the more significant since the past decades have witnessed an expansion of the place and role of visual messages in the communication process (Sturken & Cartwright, 2009; Lester, 2005). Visual expression of the protagonists' psyche and of plot complications Influenced by German expressionism and Russian expressive realism, Hitchcock uses elements of montage and of visual representations, such as colors and facial expressions, to convey the emotional states of his protagonists. This is particularly the case with men wrongly accused of murder or lovers involved in a problematic triangle situation—all of whom are confronted with violent internal conflict. As Truffaut (1985, p. 20) put it, Hitchcock belongs to the society of “artists of anxiety.” Elements of visual representation, newspapers are thus used to introduce protagonists and their psyche visually instead of verbally. Close-up shots on newspaper articles provide the viewers/readers with the name, occupation, and circumstances of life and/or death of several characters. More importantly, the mise-en-scène of newspapers gives the audience access to the characters' secret fears and aspirations and foreshadows plot complications. This sort of mise-en-scène is offered in the movie The Paradine Case. In this love triangle story, the jealousy felt by the wife is conveyed by a play of the camera between her subjective gaze and a newspaper article on her husband and his female client. The cross-fade between the tortured face of the protagonist's wife and the newspaper photograph of the protagonist with the caption “Mrs. Paradine's counsel visits her in prison” implies the following causal logic: The wife is informed by the press that her husband, who had been out of town for days, decided, upon his return, to go directly to the prison to visit Mrs. Paradine instead of going home first. For her and for the audience—but for no other newspaper reader—this information betrays her husband's feelings for Mrs. Paradine. When her husband comes back home, she hastily hides the newspaper under the couch, as if hiding her shameful jealousy, thereby revealing it even more clearly to the audience. The husband's notice of the presence of the newspaper eventually leaves them both embarrassed, as if the newspaper were material evidence of his betrayal. Whereas no word has been uttered, the feeling of jealousy is so clearly conveyed by the movements of the camera and the facial expressions that viewers have no room for alternative interpretations. In his paper “The Tutor-Code of Classical Cinema,” Daniel Dayan offered a similar analysis of Velasquez's painting Las Meninas: “The painting proposes not only itself but its own reading. The spectator's imaginary can only coincide with the painting's built-in subjectivity. The receptive freedom of the spectator is reduced to the minimum” (Dayan, 1974, p. 27). Monstration and demonstration Can this logic of subjective gaze imposed on the viewers be extended to social and political criticism? Is representation of gender divide in press consumption, for instance, the equivalent of a denunciation of discrimination against women? In other words, by exposing, in the sense of depicting, rituals of newspaper consumption, does Hitchcock expose, in the sense that he denounces, social injustice? As previously mentioned, Hitchcock was not a committed author. If Hitchcock was influenced by expressionism, he also found a source of inspiration in British social realism documentary (Ryall, 1996, pp. 18–32). And this suggests that when he shows abused women in his movies, it is neither to support patriarchalism or feminism, neither to call for status quo or for change, but only because women are abused in reality. In an attempt to solve the question reflection of or reflection on society, I will refer to the concept of “monstration” as developed by Daniel Dayan.9“Monstration” is a “performance that calls for and modulates attention” (Dayan, 2009, p. 25). It designates “acts of showing,” in the way one speaks of “speech acts” (Dayan, 2009, p. 19): … the monstration of suffering involves a performative dimension (Austin, 1962). It deploys the ‘behabitives’ of condolence. It calls on the ‘verdictives’ of denunciation. To victims, the monstration of suffering expresses regard. To perpetrators, the same images are a slap in the face (Dayan, 2006, p. 26). Interestingly, Dayan argues that the same images can call not only for different interpretations but for opposite “gaze acts.” Yet, this does not mean that images are open to any interpretation or that they do not resist some “gaze acts.” This paradox can be solved in the comparison between monstrations and demonstrations. According to Dayan, A demonstration is a monstration that serves as proof. It is an ostension (derived from the Latin ostensio, the term ostension belongs to the liturgical vocabulary where it designates the ritual display of religious objects such as holy relics) that serves to close an argument (Rosental, 2007). Yet, opposing demonstration to monstration suggests that there are monstrations that make no point, that obey no purpose, that are gratuitous. I believe this is wrong (Dayan, 2009, pp. 25–26). If a monstration does not necessarily serve as proof, it is not, for all that, gratuitous as it is an act of showing that calls for a “gaze act.” In the same way as the monstration of suffering can express regard or outrage, the spectacle of women in a situation of oppression in Hitchcock's movies may express regard or sadistic pleasure of domination. In fact, it probably expresses both, given Hitchcock's repeated resort to irony, as this paper has previously emphasized. This sense of irony reaches a peak in the role that Hitchcock gives to the press in the construction of a privileged relation with his audience. Newspapers' role in the construction of a privileged relation between Hitchcock and his audience Hitchcock gives us, that is, his audience, privileged access to information (Truffaut, 1985; Webber, 2008). Like Jeffries, the protagonist of Rear Window, we are Peeping Toms with inner access into the characters' homes and darkest actions and thoughts. We even have superiority over Jeffries, as we spy on him too. A central part of the pleasure experienced by the audience stems from this play on who knows what, and from the audience's top position in the hierarchy of information. At the base of this hierarchy, we find newspaper readers who get partial or false information from journalists. Hitchcock's protagonists are better informed than journalists because they are the actors of the reported events. That is how, in The Birds, the female protagonist, caught in the town under attack, calls her father, who happens to be the owner of a major San Francisco newspaper, to give him an update on the situation in the field. Newspapers seem to be content with appearances and with taking stock of the situation without trying to understand the causal logic. For example, in Topaz, newspapers report on the geopolitical crisis and, later, on its resolution, without any idea of the ins and outs. By contrast, Hitchcock gives his spectators access to what is happening behind the scene. Likewise, newspapers are full of reports on accidents that we know actually hide crimes or resulted from criminals' failed attempts on the hero's life: This is the case of the villain who falls from the bell tower in Foreign Correspondent, the one who falls in a ravine in Family Plot, or the pilots who crash their plane on a truck in North by Northwest. In each case, the action resulting in the death is followed by the image of a newspaper article presenting the event as a regrettable but, all in all, meaningless accident. If journalists fail to get their facts right, it is mostly because they rely exclusively on official sources. This position is epitomized, in Foreign Correspondent, by the character of Stebbins, whose recipe for longevity as foreign correspondent is: “Cable back the government handouts and sign them ‘Our London correspondent'.” Newspapermen are thus followers depending on the government or the police. Yet the police themselves are often mistaken, as repetition of the wrong man situation demonstrates. The wrong man is a fugitive harassed not only by the police, but by the press and its readers. We, the audience, on the other hand, know that the protagonist is a victim of injustice and is put in danger, and we feel empathy for him. However, Hitchcock occasionally misleads us as well, by making the protagonist appear as a suspect (The Lodger, Frenzy), before revealing his innocence and inviting us to side with him against the rest of the world. And so Hitchcock plays with his audience. We, the spectators, know more than any of the characters: We know more than the protagonists, who know more than the authorities, who know more than the journalists, who know more than the citizens—and yet sometimes we know less than we think. This is all the more exciting that information appears as a crucial asset that can be used and misused. This is the case when the villain gets information in the newspapers about the protagonist's private life and uses it to perpetrate his crime to the protagonist's detriment. For example, in Strangers on a Train, that is how psychopath Bruno comes to propose the exchange of murders. He boasts himself: “Ask me anything, I got the answer. Even news about people I don't know. Like who would like to marry whom when his wife gets her divorce.” Annoyed, the protagonist replies: “Perhaps you read too much.” Privileged access to information is key in the mechanism of Hitchcockian suspense, as notably analyzed by Dolar in his well-named paper “The Spectator Who Knew Too Much” (Dolar, 1992, p. 129). Our access to information that is denied to the protagonist leads to an anticipation of action, which, in turn, leads to the tension known as “suspense.” To summarize Hitchcock's system, the hierarchy of information can be schematized from top to bottom, as follows: But here lies the irony: Viewers of Hitchcock's movies are better informed than readers of Hitchcock's newspapers, who are being lied to. Yet in the real world, that is, outside the fictional world built by the filmmaker, movie audience and newspaper readers are one and the same public. From this we can infer that Hitchcock implicitly says to us: “You are being lied to, in the same way as the fictional readers of my fictional newspapers are deceived.” Hitchcockian fiction tells us that our reality is made of false appearances. From that, one could deduce a more militant message that would be: “Don't be a fool and wake up!” This unveiling function can be considered the mission of intellectuals in general and of media critics in particular. Yet Hitchcock's movies do not convey a constructed sociopolitical criticism. Instead, Hitchcock leaves the spectator with a sense of irony: “You are being lied to but there is not much you can do about it. As a citizen you might be condemned to the same passivity you experience as a spectator. So just entertain yourself.” Conclusion This study has emphasized Hitchcock's ambivalent treatment of the press as part of the dominant social and political systems. The ritual modes of newspaper production and consumption point to a role of the press as apparatus of the bourgeois order or as agent of power and instrument of propaganda. Yet Hitchcock's depiction of these press functions seems to oscillate between the poles of legitimization and contestation. By contenting themselves with visual representation, Hitchcock's movies might impose the extant situation as natural. However, by making flaws visible, Hitchcock's movies seem to incidentally invite us to a critical reflection on society. This indecisiveness of the critical function has to do with the ambivalence inherent in the logic of Hitchcock's art. It is because Hitchcock communicates his view visually, instead of verbally, that his message can oscillate between two poles: Visual depiction of sociopolitical order can reinforce this order—by naturalizing it—or may, on the contrary, inspire contestation—by showing its failures. Far from constituting a flaw in Hitchcock's work, this ambivalence refers to a logic of monstration that proves to be powerful in the sense of irony that it expresses. Here lies Hitchcock's most valuable contribution to our understanding of the role of communication in society. It is not his archetypal, if not stereotyped, depiction of the press or of the bourgeois world that enhances our comprehension of this role, as much as his way of showing how visual communication works in monstrating, rather than demonstrating, the flaws of our society. Acknowledgment I am grateful to Scott Selberg and Magdalena Sabat for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. Notes 1 " There is, of course, no such thing as “a mere reflection of society” insofar as mediatization implies construction of the real. What I mean here is simply that Hitchcock may claim to avoid charging his visual construction of the social with an ideological message and, instead, pretend to describe society as it is. I develop this point further when I discuss Hitchcock's visual mode of communication (see p. 25). Hitchcock necessarily proceeds to a “visual construction of the social and social construction of the visual,” as Mitchell put it (2005, p. 345). To be convinced, it is enough to observe that, in all his movies, he portrays an archetypal society, be it in the England of the first decades of the 20th century or in 1970s' America. 2 " The methodology adopted here is similar to the “hermeneutic approach” that Matthes and Kohring identified as one of the methods used for the “measurement of media frames”: “There are a number of studies that try to identify frames by providing an interpretative account of media texts linking up frames with broader cultural elements” (Matthes and Kohring, 2008, p. 259). In this case, the “broader cultural elements” are constituted by the rituals and their functions. One example of frame identified in this study and linked up with ritual functions is the gender divide. I acknowledge the limitations of this methodology, in particular the “selection bias” pointed out by Matthes and Kohring (2008, p. 259). However, this approach allows for a well-documented study that is not possible with strict content analysis. Furthermore, if alternative interpretations for the observed patterns are always possible, they would complete, rather than contradict, the interpretation that I proposed within the framework of ritual functions. For example, I found that newspapers in Hitchcock's movies are mostly filled with what Carl Jansen (1983) has called “junk food news” (see p. 20), that is, human interest stories, advertisement, and sport. I interpreted this pattern by referring to the ritual function of conflict management: These news items are meant to distract the citizens' attention from political and social problems and therefore serve to maintain the political and social status quo. This interpretation does exclude other kinds of explanations, for instance, that Hitchcock suggests that the press industry is primarily interested in offering stories that sell (rather than informing the public or promoting democracy) or that readers value this sort of story more than “serious” topics. If my interpretation is limited to the ritual functions framework, it is not, for all that, arbitrary. Indeed, it is based on the identification of patterns (in my example, it is the domination of junk food news) and it does not discount contradictory elements. I recognize that in a few movies, such as Topaz, political news are given prominence and I explain this exception by the movie's plot line: Topaz is a Cold War spy story in which political news play a crucial role (whereas in the other movies, the news is not central to the story). 3 " The German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies (1887) defines two models of social organization: Gemeinschaft (community), in which individuals are closely tied (family, friends living in the same village and sharing the same traditions and religion), and Gesellschaft (individualist society) where people are associates essentially motivated by self-interest. If Tönnies analyzes the historical transition from one model to the next, he contends that Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft are normal types and that actual social organizations present a mix. Tönnies' work has notably influenced Durkheim (1893) who argues that community is the cement that makes possible the division of labor in society. 4 " Easy Virtue (1928) is the story of Larita, a woman whose reputation has been ruined after her husband got his divorce on false charge of adultery. Larita escapes to the French Riviera, where she meets a man and soon marries him. But her new husband's family finds out about her past, forcing her to divorce again. 5 " Shadow of a Doubt (1943) tells the story of a serial killer, Charlie, who, hunted by the police, decides to hide at his sister's. Charlie's niece, who admires him, becomes suspicious when Charlie destroys a newspaper that might have betrayed him. The niece finally discovers her uncle's dark secret and kills him in self-defense. 6 " Rich and Strange (1931) is the story of a middle-class couple who decide to live a life of ease and go on a cruise after they inherited a fortune. But from seasickness to swindle, troubles do not end and they end up regretting their past routine lives. 7 " Marnie (1964) tells the story of a habitual thief whose boss, Mark, forced her to marry him in exchange for his silence. Mark helps her confront her traumatic past to solve her kleptomania and frigidity. 8 " Juno and the Paycock (1930) takes place in the slums of Dublin during the Irish Civil War. A mother strives to hold her family together but has to witness its destruction: Her unemployed husband drinks up the family's finances at a pub; her daughter is impregnated by a man who whisks her away; and her son, an informer for the Garda Siochána, is executed by the IRA. 9 " Daniel Dayan seems to apply the concept of “monstration” strictly to television, while cinema would follow a different regime of communication. However, I find this concept useful in the interpretation of what is at stake in the logic of Hitchcock's art. References Allen , R . ( 2007 ). 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TI - The Ritual Function of the Press in Alfred Hitchcock's Movies
JF - Communication Culture and Critique
DO - 10.1111/j.1753-9137.2012.01134.x
DA - 2012-06-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/the-ritual-function-of-the-press-in-alfred-hitchcock-s-movies-ykjPvlmbI8
SP - 273
VL - 5
IS - 2
DP - DeepDyve
ER -