Tuitions and Intuitions

Essays at the Intersection of Film Criticism and Philosophy

William Rothman

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781438475783, 9781438475790
• eBook ISBN: 9781438475806
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

William Rothman has long been considered one of the seminal figures in the field of film-philosophy. From his landmark book Hitchcock: The Murderous Gaze, now in its second edition, to the essays collected here in Tuitions and Intuitions, Rothman has been guided by two intuitions: first, that his kind of film criticism is philosophy; and second, that such a marriage of criticism and philosophy has an essential part to play in the serious study of film. In this book, he aspires, borrowing a formulation from Emerson, to "pay the tuition" for these intuitions. Thoughtful, philosophically sophisticated, and provocative, the essays included here address a wide range of films, including classical Hollywood movies; the work of "auteur" directors like Alfred Hitchcock, George Cukor, Yasujir? Ozu, and Woody Allen; performances by John Barrymore and James Stewart; unconventional works by Jean Genet, Chantal Akerman, Terrence Malick, and the Dardenne brothers; the television series Justified; and documentaries by Jean Rouch, Ross McElwee, and Robert Gardner. All the essays address questions of philosophical significance and, taken together, manifest Rothman's lifelong commitment when writing about a film, to respect the film's own ideas; to remain open to the film's ways of expressing its ideas; and to let the film help teach him how to view it, how to think about it, and how to discover what he has at heart to say about it.

PART I

A PHILOSOPHICAL PERSPECTIVE

1

WHY NOT REALIZE YOUR WORLD?

William Rothman Interviewed by Jeffrey Crouse

Where do we find ourselves? In a series of which we do not know the extremes, and believe that it has none. We wake and find ourselves on a stair; there are stairs below us, which we seem to have ascended; there are stairs above us, many a one, which go upward and out of sight.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Experience”

HOW FILMS THINK

JEFFREY CROUSE (JC): OVER THE COURSE of many years your writing has generated a wealth of ideas premised on the idea that the medium of film presents itself as a subject for philosophy. I’d like to dive right in, then, with a heavyweight yet intriguing topic: films and their own consciousness. So, I want to ask: What does it mean to say that a film has a ‘mind”? How can an inanimate object be said to have an “intelligence”? If we say a film has a “mind,” are we speaking figuratively, or naming an ontological aspect of it, or talking in a poetic sense? Or is the “mind of a film” something else?

William Rothman (WR): (Laughing) What’s topic number two?

JC: (Echoing his laughter) Yes, those were hardly soft lead-in questions.

WR: (his voice now serious) Are films inanimate objects? Are they objects at all? We don’t experience films as objects, any more than we experience dreams that way. To be sure, a reel of film or a DVD is an object. So is a human skull or perhaps even a brain. But we’re not objects, or if we are, we’re subjects as well. It may seem a mystery that films can express moods, feelings, thoughts. How it can be that we’re both objects and subjects—how we can have, how we can be, both bodies and minds—isn’t that a greater mystery?

JC: That elegantly leads to my next question. In so much of your writing, you reflect on the idea that films think philosophically. What do Hitchcock’s movies think about? What do they philosophize about?

WR: In Hitchcock—The Murderous Gaze, I argued that in a Hitchcock film, the nature and relationships of such human phenomena as love, murder, sex, marriage, and theater are at issue, and that the film’s reflections on these matters can’t be separated from the film’s reflections on the nature of the camera, the act of viewing a film, the author’s role, filmmaking as a calling, and so on. If whatever falls “under its own question” is philosophy, as Stanley Cavell believes, a film is thinking philosophically when it’s pondering the mysterious nature of its medium, or the powers and limits of the “art of pure cinema” (as Hitchcock liked to call his art), no less than when it’s pondering the mysteries of human existence. Then again, in a Hitchcock film such matters can’t really be separated.

JC: Why do you say that?

WR: I’ll give an example, but I’ll have to get to it by a bit of a circuitous route. In the late 1970s, when I was writing The Murderous Gaze, I was teaching at Harvard and in almost daily conversation with Stanley Cavell. Those were the days! He was then completing The Claim of Reason, his philosophical masterwork, and working on the essays that comprise Pursuits of Happiness, his seminal study of the classical Hollywood genre he calls the “comedy of remarriage.” At the time, it was de rigueur for film studies types, armed with the latest fashionable theory, to look down their noses at classical Hollywood movies, assuming they were instruments of bourgeois and/or patriarchal ideology—as such movies had to be, according to the theory. Cavell never looked down at the films he was writing about, never assumed he knew them better than they know themselves. By means of rigorous acts of criticism—that is, by attending to what the films themselves, in their own ways, are saying—his book presented a compelling view of the popular American cinema of the 1930s and 1940s as an authentic inheritor of concerns of nineteenth-century American Transcendentalism. This inheritance, Pursuits of Happiness argued, enabled American movies to reach their artistic high-water mark during that period.

The Murderous Gaze approached Hitchcock films primarily through the prism of authorship, but it noted that the “Hitchcock thriller” could also be viewed as a genre comparable to, yet distinct from, the comedy of remarriage. One distinguishing feature is the prominent role Hitchcock thrillers accord the film’s author—that is, Hitchcock himself. Another is that a murderous villain plays a key role as well. Although Hitchcock villains are characters who reside within the projected world alongside other characters, I think of them as also standins for Hitchcock himself. Hitchcock villains, masters of the art of murder, are his accomplices in artistic creation. And Hitchcock, master of the “art of pure cinema,” is their accomplice—or they are his—in murder. This is one reason, I might add, that Hitchcock thrillers incorporate the stylistic signatures (what I call “tunnel shots,” “////”’s, curtain raisings, eclipses, white flashes, frames-within-frames, profile shots, symbolically charged objects, and so on, which The Murderous Gaze catalogues). These “signature motifs,” as I think of them, provided Hitchcock a means to declare his authorship and link his role as author with that of his murderous villains.

Virtually every Hitchcock thriller, each in its own way, raises and addresses such questions as, What, if anything, legitimizes taking the life of another human being? What, if anything, makes killing anything other than murder? How, if at all, does the act of killing change the person who performs that act? But for Hitchcock, as for his great near-contemporary Jean Renoir, the imperative of fighting the Nazis gave such questions special urgency in the years leading to World War II. To defeat the likes of Nazis, we had to kill. Does killing murderers make us murderers?

JC: Precisely. If we do kill, what does that make us?

WR: Yes. If by killing we deny the humanity of our enemies, what, if anything, makes us superior, morally, to them? Shadow of a Doubt (1943), for example, doesn’t condemn Charlie (Teresa Wright) for killing her Uncle Charles (Joseph Cotten), who opened her eyes to the reality that she has within herself, as he does, the capacity to kill. Hitchcock believed there is a difference, morally, between Charlie’s act of killing and those of Charles. But what is that difference?

That the camera is like a gun, that it’s an instrument of violence, is an idea that haunted D.W. Griffith. Unable to reconcile the Victorian morality his films preached with the dark side of his art, Griffith tried desperately to deny to his viewers, and to himself, that his films had a dark side. For Hitchcock, however, as for Renoir, the camera’s affinity with villainy raised questions about his own art that were so deep, so troubling, that they provided his work with an inexhaustible subject. “Does killing murderers make us murderers?” is an age-old question. In a Hitchcock film, it becomes a question about the “art of pure cinema” as well.

And that is the example I promised—I told you I’d get to it by a roundabout route—of the inseparability in Hitchcock films of pondering the mysteries of human existence and pondering the conditions of their own art. That Hitchcock’s acts of artistic creation are metaphorically equivalent to murders is a quintessential Hitchcock idea. At the time I wrote The Murderous Gaze, I believed it was the quintessential Hitchcock idea.

JC: You no longer believe this?

WR: No. But these matters are complicated. Hitchcock was drawn to the dark, fatalistic worldview encapsulated in the line from Oscar Wilde’s “Ballad of Reading Gaol” that he never tired of invoking: “Yet each man kills the thing he loves.” But he was equally attracted to the incompatible worldview exemplified by comedies of remarriage. In the lecture course on moral perfectionism Cavell began offering at Harvard in the mid-1980s (and which twenty years later he was to make the basis of Cities of Words), he gave a name to this way of thinking: “Emersonian perfectionism.” And he declared himself to be an Emersonian perfectionist.

As you know, Jeff, I’ve been working for a while on a new book about Hitchcock. One of its central claims is that striving to overcome or transcend the conflict between these two worldviews became the driving force of his work. Hence the book’s title: Must We Kill the Thing We Love? Emersonian Perfectionism and the Films of Alfred Hitchcock. In tracing the trajectory of Hitchcock’s relationship to Emersonian perfectionism over his long career, my new book discovers a complicated dialectical progression that ultimately culminated in Marnie (1964), in which, as I’ve learned to see it, the Emersonian side of Hitchcock’s split artistic personality decisively prevailed—at a moment when Emersonian perfectionism was all but completely repressed in Hollywood.

Sadly, Emersonian perfectionism was in the ascendancy in Hollywood only for a brief period that coincided almost exactly with Franklin Roosevelt’s “New Deal.” It was no accident, then, that David Selznick brought Hitchcock to America when he did—at the precise moment Hitchcock’s ambivalence toward Emersonian perfectionism was matched by that of a Hollywood, divided against itself, that had begun to repress it. That process of repressing Emersonian perfectionism accelerated during World War II. McCarthyism completed the process. I’m not suggesting that this progressive worldview simply disappeared from the American screen, or from America. It never has. By the 1950s, though, it had been almost completely submerged by the triumvirate of consumerism, suburbia, and television—and, let’s not forget, the “military/industrial complex” President Eisenhower warned us about (just before he left office, when it was too late for him to do anything about it). Emersonian perfectionism was to resurface, within American culture, in rock ’n’ roll and in the Civil Rights Movement, and only belatedly, and relatively feebly, in Hollywood. But that story is too depressing. Let’s change the subject.

JC: OK. I understand that what Cavell calls “Emersonian perfectionism” is a species of moral perfectionism, which is a persistent tradition of Western thought, from Plato’s Republic to Wittgenstein. The generalized, shortcut way I’ve always understood moral perfectionism, minus Cavell’s prose or the depth of his insight, is that it is the philosophical exploration of what it means to be or realize your best self.

WR: Yes, but isn’t simply a philosophical exploration of what “realizing one’s best self” means. It’s also a commitment to realizing one’s best self, to walking in the direction of what Emerson calls, in his essay “History,” the “unattained but attainable self” (Emerson, 1987, 5). Emerson undertook to transform philosophy from a merely theoretical enterprise into a practical enterprise, a moral enterprise. His goal was to change the world for the better.

As Cavell makes clear, moral perfectionism isn’t a theory of moral philosophy comparable, say, to Kant’s deontological view that there is a universal moral law that enables us to determine rationally whether an action is right or wrong; or to Mill’s utilitarian view that the good action is that which will cause the least harm, or the greatest good for the greatest number. Moral perfectionism is what Cavell calls an “outlook” or ‘register” of thought, a way of thinking about morality expressed thematically in certain works of philosophy, literature, and film—works that take it to be our task as human beings—our deepest wish (whether or not we know this about ourselves) and our moral obligation—to realize our humanity. The moral questions couples in remarriage comedies address, for example, in the witty give-and-takes that are among the glories of world cinema, aren’t questions concerning what they ought to do, what would be best or right for them to do. Rather, they’re questions about how they will live their lives, what kind of persons they aspire to be.

DEMOCRACY ON THE MARCH

JC: Can you expand on this a bit with reference to particular films?

WR: Let’s start with Bringing Up Baby (1938). In the course of the film, Susan (Katharine Hepburn) teaches David (Cary Grant) that every day and every night is to be lived in a festive spirit. He had thought that a brontosaurus skeleton meant the world to him, but when she causes it to collapse into a heap of bones he knows that she has helped him achieve a new perspective. It’s a philosophical perspective insofar as the knowledge it makes possible is self-knowledge, the self’s awakening to the reality that it is in the process of becoming. To become himself, he must abandon himself, for there is always a new perspective to achieve, a greater circle to be drawn, a further step to take. In discovering what he thinks, what he seeks, what really matters to him, he discovers who he has been, who he is, what kind of person he wishes to become. Discovering what we think, achieving a new perspective on who we have been, is thinking, in Emerson’s view. For Susan, as for Emerson, thinking has a moral dimension. What she helps David discover is that he should think, he must think, must give expression to his thoughts, must marry thought and action. The thought that we must walk in the direction of the “unattained but attainable self” is the heart and soul of Emersonian perfectionism.

In comedies of remarriage, a woman and man pursue happiness not by overcoming societal obstacles to their marriage, as in classical comedies, but obstacles that are between and within themselves. What is at issue isn’t simply whether they’ll marry or remarry, but whether they can create together a kind of marriage that will be a relationship worth having. Hence, comedies of remarriage pose philosophical questions about marriage itself. What is marriage? What if anything validates a marriage, given that a couple can be married according to church and state, but not have a true marriage by the higher standards of the genre?

The Philadelphia Story (1940) makes it explicit that such questions about marriage are also questions about what it is to be human, questions about human relationships in general, questions about community, and thus questions for, and about, America. At one level, The Philadelphia Story is a summary statement as to why we should join the war against fascism already raging in Europe. What is worth fighting for, the film is saying, isn’t America as it is, a place where a cynical magazine can pass off a phony “man of the people” as a great American. What we must fight for is a “more perfect union” that doesn’t yet exist. That dream was still alive, though imperiled, in 1930s America, as it was in Emerson’s time. It is still alive today—and still imperiled.

JC: I’ll second that. From the way you’re speaking, I gather that you think of yourself an Emersonian perfectionist.

WR: Now I do. I think I’ve always been one, without having a name for what I was. I’m so grateful to Cavell for giving me a name for what I believe, for the way I think, the way I write! Working on my new book has really brought home t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Introduction: How John the Baptist Kept His Head, or My Life in Film Philosophy
• Part I A Philosophical Perspective
• Part II Studies in Criticism
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Back Cover