The Philosophical Hitchcock

“Vertigo” and the Anxieties of Unknowingness

Robert B. Pippin

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780226668246, 9780226503646
• eBook ISBN: 9780226503783
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

On the surface, The Philosophical Hitchcock: Vertigo and the Anxieties of Unknowingness, is a close reading of Alfred Hitchcock's 1958 masterpiece Vertigo. This, however, is a book by Robert B. Pippin, one of our most penetrating and creative philosophers, and so it is also much more. Even as he provides detailed readings of each scene in the film, and its story of obsession and fantasy, Pippin reflects more broadly on the modern world depicted in Hitchcock's films. Hitchcock's characters, Pippin shows us, repeatedly face problems and dangers rooted in our general failure to understand others—or even ourselves—very well, or to make effective use of what little we do understand. Vertigo, with its impersonations, deceptions, and fantasies, embodies a general, common struggle for mutual understanding in the late modern social world of ever more complex dependencies. By treating this problem through a filmed fictional narrative, rather than discursively, Pippin argues, Hitchcock is able to help us see the systematic and deep mutual misunderstanding and self-deceit that we are subject to when we try to establish the knowledge necessary for love, trust, and commitment, and what it might be to live in such a state of unknowingness.
 
A bold, brilliant exploration of one of the most admired works of cinema, The Philosophical Hitchcock will lead philosophers and cinephiles alike to a new appreciation of Vertigo and its meanings.
 

Prologue: Film and Philosophy

As the book title indicates, I am proposing a philosophical reading of Hitchcock’s Vertigo. My goal is to offer an interpretation that shows how the film can be said to bear on a philosophical problem, the problem I set out in this and the following section. This proposal immediately involves two enormous questions: what philosophy is, such that a film could be said to bear on it; and how an art object, a film in particular, must be conceived such that it could intersect with, bear on, philosophy. Several other unmanageable questions immediately arise. Stanley Cavell has said that what serious thought about great film requires is “humane criticism dealing with whole films,”1 and he later calls such criticism “readings.” But what are readings of films, especially “philosophical” readings?2

To try to address such questions in an opening section and then move on would obviously be foolish. But, given the proposal, some statement of principles (and nothing like a defense of the principles) is in order. So I briefly offer a summary of such commitments, but only that.

Consider first the conditions that must obtain for a cinematic experience to be an aesthetic experience, an experience uniquely directed at, informed by, a work of art. When we are attending to a work as a work of art, we could not be doing so unless we knew that this is what we are doing. Not all filmed narratives are works of art. There are home movies, orientation videos, documentary recordings, surveillance tapes, and so forth, and except in extremely unusual circumstances, we know when we are experiencing a filmed fictional narrative. An aesthetic experience does not simply happen to someone. It requires a particular mode of attending. This knowing-we-are-so-attending is nothing like a self-observation, an attending to oneself as an object. It is a constituting aspect of aesthetic attending itself, not a separate noting of that fact. It is in attending this way that we are, in George Wilson’s terms, “imaginatively seeing” what we are seeing.3 Or, at least, this is how I understand his claim, not how he puts it. That is, we are not seeing actors on a big screen and, in a second step, imagining them being fictional characters (that is how he puts it).

It is also not the case that attending aesthetically—of knowing what we are doing when we are experiencing, attending to, the work—is something that interferes with or competes with our direct emotional absorption in the plot. We can start watching a movie with the assumption that its ambition is merely to entertain us; we thus attend to it in such a way, take ourselves to be having such an experience. But then someone points out for us that there are elements in the movie that might be entertaining but also raise questions beyond plot details, questions that cannot be explained by that function alone. We then attend to the movie in a different way, a way I want to follow Wilson in continuing to call imaginative seeing, or, in the terms used above, aesthetically attending, but which now also requires interpretive work. We don’t, in such a case, lose interest in the plot and become interested in another issue. (The same sort of “parallel track attending” is possible in admiring the performance of an actor even as we follow and try to understand what the character is doing. The main point is the same. There are not two steps: seeing the actor and imagining the character.)4 We realize there are aspects of the film “we have not understood.” We can say, then, that the imagination or attending in question is not limited to an emotional involvement in the events we see (and in what might happen) and in the events and motivations in the world of the film, but it ranges over many elements, as we try also to imagine why we are shown things just this way. When that happens, we attend aesthetically in a different register, see imaginatively, an attending that now includes an interpretive task.

Giving a formulaic account of just what in the work “demands” such closer interpretive attending is not easy. At least it is hard to point to anything beyond this abstract appeal to “questions raised by the work,” which are not questions about plot details but are questions like, Why are we so often looking from below at figures in shadows in some film noir? Or, What does it mean that Gary Cooper’s character throws his marshal’s badge to the ground in obvious disgust at the end of High Noon (1952)? Or, Why does the director “twin” Grace Kelly’s wedding ring with that badge? Or, Why is Hitchcock so apparently indifferent to the obvious artificiality, the blatant, even comic phoniness of the back projection techniques he uses frequently in Marnie (1964)? It is even more difficult to present a general account of when those questions are distinctly philosophical in character.

The very idea of some fruitful intersection between film and philosophy remains a controversial one. Many academics who think and write about film, and a great many philosophers of all kinds, would dispute this view. No one can deny that interesting philosophical questions can be raised about film, such as questions about the nature of the medium, its distinctness as an art form, the nature of cinematic experience, its relation to theater and painting, and so forth. It is the idea that a film (or a novel or a poem) itself can be understood as a form of thought, especially a form of philosophical thought, that is not widely accepted. And this is an especially vexed issue for a special reason. One of philosophy’s chief topics is itself and the endlessly contested question of what philosophy is, whether there even is such a practice. Asking this sort of question about film puts us at the center of such centuries-old disputes. The idea of a film, novel, or poem as a form of philosophical thought is more recognizable among philosophers in the historical tradition who themselves had something close to this “complementary” view about philosophy and the arts, primarily but not exclusively philosophy and literature. Examples include Hegel’s treatment of Sophocles or Diderot in his Phenomenology of Spirit, Kierkegaard’s use of Don Giovanni, Schopenhauer’s theory of the philosophical significance of music, Nietzsche’s reflections on Greek tragedy and an “aesthetic justification of existence,” and Heidegger’s appeal to Hölderlin. In the case of Hegel, for example, art in general, together with religion and philosophy, is treated as part of a collective attempt at self-knowledge over time, and is viewed not as a competitor with religion or philosophy but as a different and indispensable way (a sensible and affective way according to Hegel) of pursuing such a goal. The notion is also not foreign to philosophers influenced by Wittgenstein, concerned with, as it is put, how we came to be in the grip of a picture of, say, the mind’s relation to the world, or our relation to each other, and how we might be “shown” how to escape that picture. (This is especially so with Cavell’s work, concerned as he is with various dimensions of skepticism and given his view that film is “the moving image of skepticism.”)5 The central question in Heidegger’s work, the meaning of being, a question about meaning in the existential not linguistic sense, is understandably a question that might be informed by how such a meaning might be “disclosed,” as Heidegger sometimes puts it, in a work of art.

However large and contested the topic, if this notion of “philosophic work” in film is to have some currency, we need a clearer idea of what might distinguish a “philosophical reading” of a film, and how such a reading might contribute something to philosophy itself.

As suggested above, we are sometimes prompted to ask what the director—or the collective intelligence we can postulate behind the making of the film—meant by so narrating the tale we are following.6 We want to know the point of showing us such a story at all, and showing it to us in just this way, with just this selection of shots, from which point of view at what point in the film, with just this selection of detail. In the same way that we could say that we understood perfectly some sentence said to us by someone, but that we cannot understand the point of his saying it now, here, in this context, given what we had been discussing, we could also say that we can understand some complex feature of a movie plot, but wonder what the point might have been in showing us this feature in such a way in that context.

This allows me to put the point in an even broader way. Visualized fictional narratives, movies, can be said to have many functions, can be said to “do” or accomplish various things.7 They please, for example, or they are painful to watch, but painful in some odd way that is pleasant as well. We can also say, in a straightforward, commonsense way, that some films can be means of rendering ourselves intelligible to each other, rendering some feature of human life more intelligible than it otherwise would have been. This can be as simple as a clearer recognition that, say, some aspect of the implications of a violation of trust is as it is shown. This might require in some cinematic presentation of this drama, a narrative about a decision to trust in a situation of great uncertainty,8 and this narrative might show us what is generally involved in such a decision, and what “follows” from the violation, what “backshadowing” effects it has, what it portends for the future, all in a way that a brief philosophical example in a discursive account could not. Now, if the question is what the director (or, again, the collective intelligence we can postulate behind the making of the film) meant by so narrating a tale, sometimes the answer will certainly be that he, or she, or they, meant only to be narrating the tale, because the tale is in itself entertaining, thrilling, hilarious. But some films can be said to attempt to illuminate something about human conduct that would otherwise remain poorly understood. The point or purpose of such narrating seems to be such an illumination. There is some point of view taken and not another; and so there is an implicit saying that some matter of significance, perhaps some philosophical or moral or political issue, is “like this,” thereby saying that it is “not like that.” And one other way of rendering intelligible or illuminating is to show that what we might have thought unproblematic or straightforward is not that at all, and is much harder to understand than we often take for granted. Coming to see that something is not as intelligible as we had thought can also be revealing. (Bernard Williams once wrote that there can be a great difference between what we actually think about something and “what we merely think that we think,”9 and great literature or great film can make clear to us in a flash, sometimes to our discomfort, what we really think. In the same way that a film noir’s credibility and illuminating power might throw into doubt that we ever really know our own minds, and so can challenge what many philosophical theories assume.10 Hitchcock’s Vertigo might disturb settled, commonsense views about what it is to understand another person or be understood by him or her, or about how we present ourselves to others in our public personae.)

If at least part of what happens to us when we watch a film is that events and dialogues are not just present to us but are shown to us, and if the question this fact raises—what is the point of showing us this narrative in this way?—does not in some cases seem fully answered by purposes like pleasure or entertainment, because something of a far more general, philosophical significance is intimated, some means of understanding something better, that all of this occurs in an aesthetic register, in our attending aesthetically to what is shown, then that much larger question, of a film’s philosophical significance, with philosophy understood in some sort of traditional way, is obvious. This issue is, admittedly, quite a specific one. Movies also enter a complex social world, charged with issues of hierarchy, power, gender roles, social class, and many other fields of significance, and they can also come to mean a variety of things (across historical times) to different audiences in ways never anticipated by the makers of the film.11 But one perspective need not exclude others, and the test for any perspective is the quality of the readings that result from looking at a film one way rather than another, readings that stay in close touch with the films. Not that it plays any prominent role in what follows, but I am taking my bearings from the way art came to matter to philosophy in Hegel’s philosophy and in the tradition that philosophy inspired,12 and I am happy to let everything ride on whether some illuminating sense can be made of this one film within such a perspective. So I concentrate on the reading and not the theoretical background.

Such an approach faces an obvious problem already noted that must be addressed at least briefly. How could such a visualized fictional narrative, concerning such particular fictional persons and particular fictional events, even or especially when marked out by an aspiration that is aesthetic, bear any general significance? Generality, we know, is a matter of form, and it is possible at least to imagine that the events we see are instances, perhaps highly typical and especially illuminating instances, of some general form of human relatedness.13 Shakespeare, for example, would not be able to portray so well Othello’s jealousy unless the origins and conditions and implications of jealousy itself were also somehow at issue, shown to us in however particular a case. But how might such a level of generality be intimated by a narrative with a very concrete, particular plot, and what would explain the illumination’s relation to some truth, not to mere psychological effectiveness? (A film after all can be powerfully compelling, can suggest an ambition to reach this level of generality, and, if the director is technically talented, can carry us along with this point of view, only for us on reflection to realize that the point of view we had initially accepted is in fact infantile, cartoonish, pandering to the adolescent fantasies of its mostly male fans.)

This example suggests a set of further examples that are recognizable philosophical questions but do not seem to admit of anything like Socratic definitions, or necessary and sufficient conditions for their having the determinate meaning they do. Many involve so-called thick concepts that require a great deal of interpretive finesse to understand whether the concept is even applicable, and how we might know in some complicated context or other whether it is relevant at all. I mean moral issues like, Does this count as a violation of trust? Should that consequence have been foreseen? In this particular situation of wrongdoing, who (if anyone) is morally blameworthy and why? When rightly blaming someone, when is it wrong to keep blaming him or her? Who might seem to be, but finally not be, blamable? How does such seeming and distinguishing work? What does forgiveness require before it is reasonably granted? (Is it ever reasonably granted, or is it beyond reasons?) Who, under what conditions, is worthy of trust, and who is not? How would one decide that? What is an acceptable risk...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue: Film and Philosophy
• 17.  The Revelation
• Footnotes
• Index
• Plates