Archive: Book Reviews, Portals Special Issue
Hitchcock's Cryptonymies: Volume I. Secret Agents
Tom Cohen
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. ISBN 0-8166-4205-2 (hbk), ISBN 0-8166-4206-0 (pbk). 376pp. £17.50 (hbk), £34.65 (pbk)
Hitchcock's Cryptonymies: Volume II. War Machines
By Tom Cohen
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. ISBN 0-8166-4171-4 (hbk), ISBN 0-8166-4170-6 (pbk). 360pp. £17.50 (hbk), £34.65 (pbk)
A Review by Mary Valentis, State University of New York at Albany, US
In 1799, as Napoleon's soldiers were digging the foundations for a fort near the Egyptian town of Rosetta (el-Rashid), they unencrypted what came to be called The Rosetta Stone. Three ancient scripts or sign systems -- hieroglyphic, demotic, and Greek -- etched across the stone's surface in triplicate cued the French scholar Champollion to the fact that hieroglyphics 'recorded' the sounds of the native demotic script. Once decoded and deciphered, these transports and translations among visual, acousmatic, and logical languages repeated a material, human history from an ancient image to pre-historical language cultures that get reversed today in the current turn from book to global image culture.
On exhibit in the British Museum since 1802 when the English appropriated the stone after Napoleon's defeat, The Rosetta has since embodied a primal scene in the archive of reading and compressed what Deleuze calls "a cloud of virtual images" or possible reading futures that surround "every actual." (Dialogues, Columbia University Press, 1987: 148) Virtuals and unencrypted images that have attached themselves to the stone and its origins coalesce around war and reading: as French excavation and decipherment (Derrida); as global conflict -- Syriana and the bombed out El-Rashid Hotel; as the British Museum, epicenter of vast cultural agencies and mnemonic objects amassed during the age of empire building; and as language learning software sold today at airport kiosks and over the Internet under the name Rosetta Stone.
These same kinds of transports, signature sign systems, mnemonic relays, and compressed virtualities at work on the Rosetta are at play in Tom Cohen's groundbreaking, densely elusive yet revelatory new study of Hitchcock's cinematic archive. Hitchcock's Cryptonymies, published simultaneously in two, 'hyperlinked' volumes, Secret Agents and War Machines, "takes 'Hitchcock' as a Rosetta Stone," for "cinema's advent, its accelerating role in a teletechnic revolution, and its presumed death, as if at the hands of new media" (Agents 2). In addition to incorporating this historio-graphic allegory, Cohen's 'Hitchcock' becomes both a planetary, futuristic reading room and a platform for invention, a medium to rehearse what I will call a Nanotechnology of Reading that has implications for critical readers beyond the Hitch canon.
Both a science involving nanomachines that engineer atomic particles and a science fiction in the process of imagining its own possible futures, these 'technologies' of miniaturization, when troped as reading and applied by Cohen to the subcutaneous layers of Hitchcock's celluloid, precisely manipulate the director's micrological 'secret agents' and performatively animate the inter-filmic relays, syllables, pre-letteral marks, hieroglyphs, and over-determined images encrypted in these films. In other words, the pre-logical worlds of letteration and graphic markings, when mixed with stars and storyboards, take on a life of their own in this universe of memory systems.
The word 'Vertigo', for instance, aside from its obvious signification as the experience of simultaneous dizziness and free falling brought on by physical causes or emotional trauma, conflates verte, the French word for green, and igo. Green is nausea, 'nature', and Elster's wife's Rolls; it is a colourised signifier for the fog that surrounds Judy Barton dressed up as 'Madeline' and a copy of herself when she posed as the 'original' who never existed anyway. 'Igo' fuses 'I' and 'ego', or self, that when paired with nature cites or becomes a referent for the undoing of Enlightenment aesthetics and, in particular, the romantic sublime tradition.
'Green's' apogee in 'Vertigo' occurs at the site of the giant sequoias where Madeline and Scottie examine the sliced tree and its inner rings dating back to the Battle of Hastings in 1066. The sequoia "disclose(s) an archive" or a "tree pre-inhabited by a techne" (Machines 148). The nature/self binary de-couples and petrifies as nature itself is exposed already or always de-naturalised. Cohen explains: "So the vertigo motif is actually a predicate for the emptying out of a certain mock-romantic mimetic ideology in the name of the 'natural'; or 'nature' here is another name for a kind of transvaluation, the sequoia's rings sucking historical dates into the tree's graphic vortex, the trajectory of Hitchcock's diverse 'O-Men' (Johnny O, 'Roger O., Dick O)" (Machines)148.
Cohen's readings of Hitchcock's cinemaginary attempt to de-frame (yet have clearly introjected) modernist, ocularist, auteurist, psychoanalytic templates -- the 'usual suspects.' They strive for originality even as they disclose its impossibility, and, for the most part, succeed in having it both ways. As Cohen deciphers and decodes what Walter Benjamin called the camera's "unconscious optics", frame by frame, his readings are stylish, impassioned, thick -- migrating back and forth from literary theory into the hybridized field of visual studies and culture. He tracks a (theoretical) line of flight through Nietzsche's Zarasthusian solarity, Walter Benjamin's de-auracized cinema, Derrida's allosemes, graphematics, and spectrographics, Abraham and Torok's notion of cryptonymy, and McKenzie Wark's 'virtual geographies'. Cohen acknowledges his precursors such as William Rothman whose biography The Murderous Gaze (Harvard University Press, 1984) revealed the persistent 'barcode series', Zizek's 'sinthomes', and Deleuze's 'demarkings'. Their readings gesture in the direction of cryptonymies, but Cohen is dismissive of the latter two as coitally interrupted commentaries.
His closest correlative, via Derrida's introduction, is to the 'wild psychoanalysis' of Abraham and Torok in their book, The Wolf Man's Magic Word: A Cryptonymy (University of Minnesota Press, 1987). That book's method invents 'cryptonomy' as a way to read Freud's own undecipherable reading site, itself a 'Rosetta', called The Wolf Man or A Case of Infantile Neurosis. Space doesn't permit an extended reading of Derrida's gloss of the "wolf man's magic words" as decrypted by Abraham and Torok. Suffice it to say that their methodology of decipherment, like Cohen's, involves the hunting down of etymological sediments or allosemic elements of words for encryptions or buried secrets. These encryptions, in turn, reveal a network. Networked secrets hyperlinked in words or sounds, or syllables, or visuals, once decoded, animate and are 'embodied' performatively, whether at work in the Wolf Man's 'fantastic memory tableau' or in the 'screen' memories of a Hitchcock film.
In his introduction to the Abraham and Torok book, Derrida explains that: "the allosemic pathways in this strange relay-race pass through non-semantic associations, purely phonemic contaminations" and "these associations in themselves constitute or parts of words that act like visible and/or audible bodies of things." (Wolf Man's xlii). Abraham and Torok define cryptonymy as "a way of reading that is distrustful of the presumed transparency of words themselves and even of the motivations behind revealing a secret. In fact, according to cryptonymy, secrecy and revelation are not oppositional but one in the same"; (Wolf Man's 43). The trajectory here is from modernist interiority to its disappearance and reification in postmodernist 'extreme' exteriority; in other words, from Dora's reticule, a Victorian purse nervously fingered by Freud's famous patient that signified a secret genital/bisexual correlative in her 'case' history, to Marnie's yellow pocketbook which Cohen reads as a literal floating signifier for "pre and post-gendered" genitality:
It [Marnie's yellow purse] is perhaps cinema's most succinct undoing of the imaginary of the phallus, since by circulating as countermytheme of a freely detached and mobile vaginal entity, one expanding with folds and allied to the pink book pages that serve as background for the credit sequence, the alliance of a privileged signifier with the phallic order is simply suspended (Machines 72).
Cryptonymies: Volume I. Secret Agents, lays out the terrain of micrological subversion and identifies the primal scene for reading Hitchcock 'teletechnically'. An aperture that cuts through the 'fog' of moviemaking and marks future media empires, this 'inaugural' cameo in The Lodger (1927) cites Hitchcock as the master of teletechnic transport and duplication presiding over the machinery of Benjaminian "art in an age of mechanical reproduction." 'Hitchcock' appears in that first cameo sitting "in front of a giant media factory, in a glass booth as news editor amid typographic machines and crushing gears, to the relay of mass papers and trucks and wireless relays. That is the installation at the core of a telemedial empire."
The Lodger's subtitle, A Story of the London Fog, evokes for Cohen the "particles and pointillistic markings on which what is called light hangs" and "seems to name all of the material logics that precede the mimetic premises cinema conjures as a spectral machine"; (Agents 43). In other words, the fog of cinema, like Hamlet's father, is the ghostly medium that makes real the procession of images that orchestrate material events. One also thinks of 'utility fog', a nano-technological term coined by Dr J. Storrs Hall, Research Fellow of the Institute for Molecular Manufacturing, to describe how 'a swarm' of interlocked nanobots ('foglets') can shape-shift and virtually form themselves into anything. Hitchcock's 'foglets' emerge out of The Lodger's cinematic vapors to produce a virtualized after-life for cinema or cinema's ghost relayed into digitalized image culture.
Cohen's reading software comes packaged with what, in section two of Secret Agents, is called 'A Users Guide:' which is a series of semi-glossed markers that make up the various visual and linguistic circuits that seem to be at work beneath the surface of these films. The most significant of these are the 'bar' series, read as "an irreducible signature of prefigural alteration and spacing" (Agents 50) and inserted into names such as Judy Barton or Detective Barton, used as a noun such as the Oak Bar at the Plaza Hotel or the Bar at the Top of the Mark in San Francisco, and of course imaged in the ski tracks of Spellbound (1945), the iron fences of The Man Who Knew Too Much (1954), the graphic bars that open Psycho (1960) and so on. There is also the 'Mar' series, "a counter-signature to the 'bar series' that locates a nonvisible order upon which all visible effects are projected" (Agents 58).
Like the 'Nina' that caricaturist Al Hirschfeld sequestered in every one of his theatrical drawings for the New York Times, the 'Mar' series encrypts itself in each Hitchcock work as Mark, Marlow, Marnie, Marion, Mary, Marvin, and Margaret. 'Mother' is another shiatsu point or citational node for reading Hitchcock's signature markings; for Cohen 'she' is non-gendered, anti-Oepidal, and non-psychoanalytic, the death mother of de-auracized cinema: "the non-site where all inscription stands to occur." B.M. denotes the British Museum, blackmail, the Rosetta stone, the inscription on the female Charlie's ring in Shadow of A Doubt (1943), anality, and so forth.
The readings in Volume One reel through Hitchcock's films in the British cycle, contextualizing and framing each one as a distinct exemplum of a particular Hitchcockian allegory. These allegories are not representational, that is traditional, as Cohen articulates in his reading of Sabotage (1936); rather, they are performative allegories, Benjaminian, and hyperactive since they carve interventions and mnemotic incisions into the perceptual fabrics and historical memories of these films. As an elaboration of this distinction, Sabotage's Detective Ted Spenser, the precursor to Robert Parker's detective, 'Spenser for Hire', is a citational 'hit' for Cohen on Edmund Spenser, poet of the Faerie Queene, the crown jewel of the British allegorical tradition.
The war between the 'home state' and the foreign powers in these films is archival. Espionages and intrigues are merely window dressing, a chocolate factory in Sabotage disguising a spies' post office, a front or Macguffin for the titanic battles taking place at nano-logical levels of Hitchcock's films. Behind the scenes, within the camera's unconscious, the real war being contested is between languages: the languages of the book -- mimetic, Copernican, visual -- and the replicated, black-holed, kinesthesia of cinematic expression.
Cinema wins out in the end of course. Blackmail (1929) allegorizes the shift from 'silents' to talkies, Sabotage cites cinema's annunciation of the animeme or electric animal of animation. Secret Agent (1936) sends the photogenetic, Shakespearian actor, John Gielgud, and Peter Lorre on a mission to uncover and trap what turns out to be secret agency itself and the identity of Marvin, the figure for the origins of cinematic language. The Man Who Knew Too Much loops back and forth between the first, black and white version and the colorized copy of the second film that repeats the first, as the eternal return of excess, this time with a focus on the family or 'in-house' cinematic affair -- a movie about making a movie.
In 'Volume Two', War Machines, 'Hitchcockian' cinema turns from nanotechnology into touristic video game, perhaps akin to the notorious 'Grand Theft Auto' and particularly the 'San Andreas' version of the game with its encrypted virtual sex scene. For Cohen, the Hollywood period films are swarming with machines (and prostheticized birds) that bomb, blast, terrorize, sink, and 'shit on' the book, romance, the family, the human, sex, gender, and most particularly Mother. Under Cohen's reading regime, the most familiar of the middle and late Hitchcock films, along with their critical archives, their actors and characters 'live' in and act out the after-life of a spectral cinema. Sometimes queered, or at least in need of Viagra, these sexually ambivalent specters populate the films like ghosts driven from Freud's case histories: exhibiting photophobia, vertigo, and frigidity, symptoms of a de-auracized cinema and conflated sexualities. As Cohen remarks:
Variations and combinations shift. In Frenzy, references are made to 'Dick-O Blaney' as if two genital shapes were interfaced, mirrored in the fetish necktie with its circle-collar and dangling tie. In Family Plot Lumley promises Blanche in bed a 'standing ovation' where an erection is interfaced with an 'O' figure marked as female (ovarian). Tropes are circulated that retire the binary war of genital markers, become invertible spaces or topographic folds, like Marnie's purse (War Machines 76).
Cohen's insistence that Hitchcock uses as a prop or passes on (in the sense of not buying) Freud's Oedipus by passing through or beyond it, as in surpassing, again sets up an extreme makeover of Mother, Freud, Lacan, and the gaze in Psycho. Psycho, for Cohen, is "ground zero in Hitchcock. It reads and re-writes every other film." (War Machines, 89). More particularly, this reading collapses 'the Oedipal theatre' in which sexual and gender identifications supposedly congeal, and then goes on to 'transvestite' the Freudian family romance and its secrets. Norman, a diva-ed Clytemnestra dressed to kill in the fruit cellar, is a man impersonating a mother who "cannot be personified or given a place." Instead 'Mother' is a displacement of a primal scene manque, an indentation on the bedspread of a cinematic house already emptied of its originality.
Marnie too is a cinematic stand-in whose glacial sexuality 'McGuffins' for her status as a celluloid (blond) copy and acts as a trope for cinema "voided of the rituals of sexuality altogether,"( Machines 77). Her 'mar' name alone sets off a series of memory screens that front for a chain of signifying mother links. In fact, 'Marnie' proffers a series of false fronts, including a patriarchal institution like a publishing house, that beards for what Cohen calls a 'secret eunarchy'; a horse named Forio that suggests a Laurentian sex animal but whose loops and twists refer to film rather than love-making; and flashbacks and post-traumatic memories front for the mechanics of making movies.
Tom Cohen concludes his Hitchcock study with an extensive reading of what has generally been considered a fluff piece, To Catch a Thief (1955). Spread over two inter chapters and a long chapter, his reading includes a mock Socratic dialogue between Cohen the critic and an imaginary reader that doesn't quite work. What does work extremely well in this re-evaluation is Cohen's notion that To Catch A Thief is not just a pleasant romp on the Riviera. Rather, from its opening shot of the travel folders behind glass, Thief plays out a dis-enfolding and ultimate disappearance of the Real (in the Baudrillardian sense) or the cat disclosed as another version of Mother.
At the same time it nullifies the Real, the film enacts a reification of sex and seduction as crystallized in the business with the stolen jewels and reveals Hitchcock as a master of literary pyrotechnics of the sort familiar to readers of Harold Bloom and his theory concerning the 'anxiety of influence'. For Cohen, Hitch's fireworks shot off over the Mediterranean in the window behind Grace Kelly and Cary Grant are not clichéd tropes for sexual climax. In fact there is no arrival at pleasure in this mise en scene: "jouissance is another fake ad in the travel window" (Machines 238).
Rather Hitchcock's bursts of cinematic fireballs, aligned with the sea and sun, purloin James Joyce's humble pyrotechnics that arc above the lame Gerty McDowell, fantasy object for Leopold Bloom's ejaculation in the Nausicia section of Ulysses. Cohen's 'cryptonymies' link this Joycean filch to a signature scene system that includes Homer, Mother, nature, modernist poetry, and the atomic bomb that "sucks up its entire archival network with dizzying and mocking superficiality" (Machines 236). Similarly, the masked ball attended by Grant in black face carrying a parasol cites the house of Paramount and anticipates thoroughly deconstructed movie sets as those in David Lynch Mullholland Drive (2001).
Hitchcock's Cryptonymies are not for everyone. Cohen's reader must be theoretically sophisticated and have a passion for Hitchcock's films. His reader must be willing to suspend disbelief and plunge fearlessly into the black holes of citalogical cinematics and allegorical hyperperformativity -- the movie underworld of reels, celluoids, rolling cameras, sutures, cuts, microfilm. One can toss out this extremely detailed, impeccably researched user's guide and bail out of this micrological 'wonderland' in order to perpetuate a sentimentalized, Judy 'Bartoned' version of Hitchcock. Or one can engage with these texts and their demands by moving deeper into the nanoworlds of this curiouser and curiouser cinema.