Doubling, Distance and Identification in the Cinema

P. Coates

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781349484690, 9781137396709
• eBook ISBN: 9781137396693
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Art General

This book argues theoretically for, and exemplify through critical and historical analysis, the interrelatedness of discourses on scale, distance, identification and doubling in the cinema. It contains analyses of a wide variety of films, including Citizen Kane, The Double Life of Véronique, The Great Gatsby, Gilda, Vertigo and Wings of Desire.

Chapter One

Doubles and the Shadows in Plato’s Cave

1.1 Summary

If distance, identification and doubling in the cinema are interrelated, the position of the spectator is one that is ‘neither here nor there’. This chapter unpicks this tissue of themes into such thematic plies as those of projection, the Sublime, display, point-of-view and mirroring, beginning with a comparison between Walter Benjamin’s theorization of the role of reproduction in modernity with the use of doubles and dolls in E.T.A. Hoffmann. It builds upon the work performed by Marina Warner in her Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds: Ways of Telling the Self, in particular developing her references to the cinematic qualities of the Brocken spectre in De Quincey’s Suspiria De Profundis. The Benjamin/Hoffmann comparison extends into the relationship between doubling and the confounding of near-far distinctions, achieved through the hand-held lens of the telescope in Hoffmann’s ‘The Sandman’ and the camera lens in Benjamin’s ‘Mechanical Reproduction’ essay. The doubling employed in Rouben Mamoulian’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931) gives an example of explicit filmic treatment of leitmotifs of Romantic provenance.

Questions of distance, aligned here with ones of display, magical and mystified viewing, spectator-positioning and 3-D, will recur later. With the partial exception of 3-D (though 3-D itself may be deemed relevant inasmuch as it raises the quotient of apparent ‘lifelikeness’ in the image) they establish the force field of Hoffmann’s short story, to which the seeming reality of the doll Olympia, and her actual animation by the projective fantasies of the watching student Nathanael, are central. Here, as in so many cases, the projection that closes a gap is illusory, as the continued real remoteness of the fascinating object renders its reading fatally susceptible to the delusions whose home Plato identifies as his allegorical cave. The analysis of the double and the doll begun here also incorporates consideration of the fetish, whose location at a distance initiates a theme pursued further in the next chapter. The doubling and fetishization pervading Hitchcock’s Vertigo belong to this complex, and will return in Chapter Four. Insofar as Madeleine is constructed by Elster, and then again by Scottie, the doll imagery of ‘The Sandman’ becomes pertinent again.

1.2 Fires in the Cave: Benjamin’s ‘absent-minded spectator’, the vertigo-effect and cinematic display

1.2.1 Notes on doubling, vertigo and the fetish

One model of the intertwining of doubling, vertiginous spectator-positioning and Romanticism may be found in Thomas De Quincey’s discussion of the Brocken spectre in Suspiria De profundis, whose quasi-cinematic quality has been noted by Marina Warner (Warner, 2002, p. 183). This section will seek to develop some of the implications of Warner’s insight. One might begin, for instance, with De Quincey’s initial description of the spectre’s relationship to spectators: ‘At first, from the distance and the size, every spectator supposes the appearance to be quite independent of himself’ (De Quincey, 1998, p. 154). In a move suggesting awareness of the degree to which psychological projection depends on the spectator, distance is intimated to be an illusory initial impression. Hence: ‘[b]ut very soon he is surprised to observe his own motions and gestures mimicked, and wakens to the conviction that the phantom is but a dilated reflection of himself’ (Ibid). De Quincey’s depiction of this spectator as part of a group suggests also that the presence of fellow-spectators, with (as in cinema) multiple figures entering the field of vision alongside the spectre, obscures its singular status wavering between ego ideal, ideal ego and the repressed. Similarly, the co-presence of others hides the extent to which this dream is one’s own: a concealment much like the dreamwork’s own chronic displacements and marginalizations of that which matters most.

Similar problems in perceiving distance pervade a key passage in Wordsworth’s The Prelude. Here the two-part movement described by De Quincey proceeds in the opposite direction, with the spectator’s apparent awakening declining in fact into deeper illusion, passing from definite sight to unacknowledged projection in quest of understanding of an alarming metamorphosis of an object. A shift of this kind is enacted almost prototypically in the ‘stolen boat’ episode of Wordsworth’s poem, located unsurprisingly in the isolation, night and childhood which remove possible checks on the power of fantasy. This conspiracy of circumstances prompts the emergence, or recrudescence, of the ‘credulous spectator’ whose persistence within us is posited by Christian Metz, a thesis apparently contested as mythical by Tom Gunning’s work on spectacle and display in early cinema, yet ultimately sidestepped by his slide from the ground of theory to a history that ignores the Metzian model of divided spectatorial consciousness (Gunning, 2009, pp. 737–8). And yet the true myth is surely that spectators are monolithically unified, know no internal conflict and lack an unconscious (in other words, fall short of full humanity).

Wordsworth’s episode startlingly exemplifies both an internal division in early (childhood) spectatorship and its reinforcement by a subsequent (adult) projection of credulity onto that earlier self, much like the view of early film spectators Metz ascribes to later ones (Metz, 1982, p. 73). Wordsworth describes his young self pulling away across the lake in the boat taken in ‘an act of stealth’ (l. 361): ‘I fixed my view/ Upon the summit of a craggy ridge,/ The horizon’s utmost boundary’ (l. 369–71). The motion of the boat destabilizes such fixity, however, as ‘from behind that craggy steep till then/ The horizon’s bound, a huge peak, black and huge,/ As if with voluntary power instinct,/ Upreared its head’ (l. 377–80). Although the realization that ‘the horizon’s bound’ has shifted works together with ‘As if’ to suggest a possible sudden conscious, ‘disillusioned’ realization of a true state of affairs, as in De Quincey’s description of the viewer’s perception of the Brocken spectre, the re-enactment of the boy’s sense that the peak is pursuing him plunges readers into what Bruce Kawin would call his ‘mindscape’ (here: a fusion of landscape and mind), his irrational, conscience-driven fear, as ‘growing still in stature the grim shape/ Towered up between me and the stars, and still,/ For so it seemed, with purpose of its own/ And measured motion like a living thing/ Strode after me’ (l. 381–5). Combining rational awareness that the shape is a thing, like any peak, with the sense that it is alive (three verbs at the start of three lines convey a powerful, punitive purposiveness), ensures its categorization as monstrous, like any ‘it’ that nevertheless defies the expectations of non-creatureliness embodied in the neuter and actually moves, seemingly self-willed, alliterations of ‘grim’ and ‘growth’ reinforcing the sense that its ascent can only be sinister. The repeated ‘still’ underlines the nightmarishness of its apparently continuing action. While brought into being by the boy’s rowing away from the shore, which gradually renders a hidden peak visible, it is truly animated by his projected fear of punishment for the ‘act of stealth’. Wordsworth’s evocation of the boy’s stunning by this experience, which prompts ruminations on ‘That spectacle, for many days (…) with a dim and undetermined sense/ Of unknown modes of being’ (l. 391–3), indicates the possibility that visual illusion may be something from which one does not wake but into which one plunges, as if by magic and as if into something like a metaphysical dream of an unsuspectedly animate world.

Much theorization of cinema, of course, has entertained the notion that its experience is dream-like: that the brain that works upon it is as Wordsworthian as rationally cognitive. In other words: it potentially is (has) a double. This possibility creeps into De Quincey’s subsequent comments on the Brocken spectre also, as he states that, in order to perceive the illusion, ‘the spectator must have his back to the sun’ and ‘makes (not knowing) that which he pursues’ (Ibid); words suggestive of a fusion of Plato’s parable of the cave, which has supplied analogies for cinema to both theorists (e.g. Jean-Louis Baudry) and filmmakers (e.g. Bernardo Bertolucci), and a spectator-positioning vis-à-vis delusion that anticipates the one central to Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), to be discussed further below. The sense of an illusion forged unknowingly accords more closely with the experience that engulfs the young Wordsworth than the one De Quincey himself had seen vanish in the light of reason. Is this in part because that light is not located in the individual but behind him, as in Plato’s cave and Bertolucci’s film?

The duality of real-unreal seeing described by Wordsworth and De Quincey is also temporally dual, the Janus-faced liminality of the time at which De Quincey places the Brocken apparition: in a June recalling an April in its turn ‘racing across both frontiers of May’; while a footnote linking it to ‘Paganism’ follows closely upon a reference to its making the sign of the cross, pointing forwards also to the Christianity that displaced pagan beliefs (p. 153). A similar duality is found in Kieślowski’s The Double Life of Véronique, which will return later in this book: Weronika sees Véronique as the French girl is failing to see her, being engaged in taking photographs that include many other elements; and Véronique only sees Weronika much later, in the form of a photograph, thanks to photography’s archiving of time. It is a duality that – like the dreams cast in the image of the Brocken spectre, and vice versa – is ‘not contented with reproduction, but which absolutely creates or transforms’ (p. 157), its relation to its prototype being not the exact one of a reflection but the malleable one of the shadow, cast out and reeled back in a fort-da game, as the waxing and waning image of the object whose shadow has fallen across it. This double is the ‘dark being’, regarding whom De Quincey says ‘the reader will see again in a further stage of my opium experience; and I warn him that he will not always be found sitting inside my dreams, but at times outside, and in open daylight’ (p. 157). In other words: this being, found both here and there, will always be substantially ‘neither here nor there’.

1.2.2 To enter in, to bring forth: the empty heart of the spiral

Ambiguous seeing of this kind recurs, in Vertigo, in Hitchcock’s virtuoso ‘vertigo-effect’, achieved through a simultaneous zoom in and track out, a key trope whose oscillation between distance and proximity encapsulates Scottie’s position with regard to Madeleine, who ultimately fuses both the remembered nearness of a mother, who is now remote in time, the distance of a construction devised to delude him, and an actualization of his inmost dreams – dreams held so close to his heart that he cannot see them, seeing ‘through the heart’ being tantamount to seeing through his blind-spot. Inasmuch as Madeleine thus becomes a fetish-figure, seeing the fetish becomes a seeing of one’s blind spot, which is possible only through embracing the death embodied in the double and so in a sense transcending death, as the fetish hides the most traumatic and death-dealing of images. Thus, as I have argued elsewhere (Coates, 2010, p. 144), Madeleine is a double for Scottie himself, as well as for the Judy who impersonates her, as becomes apparent in a moment coded as a ‘seeing without seeing’ by its placement within a dream: the moment at which it is Scottie, not Madeleine, who falls onto the roof of the San Bautista mission.

Using the terminology of Metz, Hitchcock’s ‘vertigo-effect’ clearly qualifies also as an instance of cinematic ‘fetishism of technique’, within which ‘the fetish, like the apparatus of the cinema, is a prop, the prop that disavows a lack and in doing so affirms it without wishing to’ (Metz, 1982, p. 74); a statement one could gloss as Metz’s probable reading of the nature and function of the early cinema’s ‘attraction’. The fetishized moment of spectacle, the moment held out and put on display, fixes the gaze through the spectator’s unconscious suspicion that all is not as it seems, that something may emerge from behind, beneath, or within the image. Indeed, this is bound to be the case, as film is a temporal artefact within which one frame, and then one framing, gives way to another, with its changing by a camera become fluidly mobile arguably being just as potentially alarming as one achieved by the montage that throws something else out of the dark. Any fixing is just such a fixation, simultaneously unhinged by suspicion, as informs Wordsworth’s ‘stolen boat’ episode. Within De Quincey’s prototypically Romantic description of the imagination’s capacity to secrete (‘make’) what it pursues the Brocken spectre functions rather as the vertigo-effect does in Hitchcock’s reworking of what Mario Praz terms the ‘Romantic agony’.

The opposed reactions involved in the projection of the fetish, and a consequent internal doubling in the spectator, have long been associated with two varieties of art: tragedy, and the Sublime. The mechanisms of tragedy have been described powerfully by René Girard as involving a mutual doubling between protagonists in a moment of social crisis (Girard, 1977). The experience of the Brocken spectre can be called one of the Sublime, which in general purveys a paradoxical self-affirmation through identification with an image of ruin. In the case of tragedy, the conjoined elements are the Aristotelean ones of pity and fear: the former, one might say, depending on a sense of distance from the sufferer on stage, who is held apart from the viewer by nobility and scapegoat status (if the isolated man, according to Aristotle elsewhere, in The Politics, is ‘a beast or a god’, the ruler is his godlike aspect, the scapegoat his animal one: ‘homo sacer’); the latter, on the possible dissolution of this distance. The theorization of both forms, from Aristotle to Kant, Burke, Schiller and beyond, concerns the nature and motivation of a desire for encounter with trauma. One might speculate that the form taken by this encounter fulfils two purposes: one originating in fantasy, one in ‘realism’. The spectator’s real-world knowledge testifies to the existence of suffering, which includes the pain of unbridgeable social distinction separating man from man within a hierarchical, aristocratically-controlled social system. The work of art may refer both to pain as a widespread human affliction, and to this particular historically determined pain. It can do so all the more effectively by subsuming the recognition of reality under a fantastic project which deflects the pain all people fear onto a single social superior: his or her nobility can cease to be a source of pain for the spectator (‘who does he think he is?’), as he or she undergoes a scapegoating that possibly aestheticizes the ritual elimination of an ageing or ineffective monarch. In the Sublime, distance no longer yawns between the onlooker and an arena, but is staged within spectators themselves, between them and their projections. This narcissism writ large (pleasure) is also the pain that tears part of the self from itself in order to place it on display as impressive Otherness, the spectacle being one of Titanic destruction.

In tragedy, display is for the public eye; in the Sublime, the eye may be individual and that of the mind. What, however, of cinematic display, which occurs both amidst an audience and yet may seek to deny that fact by shrouding fellow-viewers in darkness?

If an image inscribes an implicit viewer in the firmly cantered manner of Renaissance painting, as posited by 1970s film theory, can a film really be said to do likewise, as the auditorium holds a multiplicity of seats and hence viewer positions? If the screen is conceptualized in Metzian terms, through the metaphor of the mirror, does it become a horror-film mirror, encountering only a void, like the one facing a vampire, as the central seat in the auditorium need not be occupied, and certainly cannot be taken by the majority of spectators? Is the look of the screen itself aimed too precisely at a viewer who does not exist, except perhaps as the producer or director in the centre seat during the screening of rushes, or does it create a vortex that sucks in even viewers scattered around the putatively ideal viewing-position? The spiral is, of course, the reverse of display, sucking in rather than bringing out. This is also (something to which I will return later) a key trope of Weimar cinema, central to its analysis by Siegfried Kracauer (1947), and of course to the Hitchcock film mentioned above.

If there is such a spiral, would a Wittgenstein (and children and movie-buffs, those other spectators Roland Barthes reports as preferring ‘to sit as close to the screen as possible’? (1995, p. 420)), sitting by preference in the front-row, tumble into its funnel also? Or does the inherent mobility of the frame preclude any valorization of centrality, so it becomes immaterial where spectators sit, rendering those spectators themselves in a sense immaterial, disembodied; if one likes (to borrow a phrase from Gilberto Perez, and possibly in the teeth of phenomenology): ‘material ghosts’? Is the implicit audience, albeit scattered around the auditorium, in fact split, mentally still in the mockingly-named ‘Gods’ area from which it has descended physically, and hence humbly willing to accept a non-ideal viewing position, rather than insisting on the privilege of the connoisseurial viewer of a painting (who can also, if necessary, wait in line in a museum before that position becomes free)? Is the close-up a compensation for a bad view, or one’s lack of an opera glass? Or does an ‘ideal viewpoint’ no longer exist, its singularity blown apart by the power of the crowd? Is the spectator in fact the ‘absent-minded examiner’ mentioned in Benjamin’s ‘Artwork’ essay (perhaps – though Benjamin’s phrase is somewhat enigmatic – in the sense that the field of vision contains too many elements, comparable to students at desks, to permit a universally attentive overview)? After all, although spectators themselves tend to occupy preferred positions, right-wingers do not necessarily sit on the right-hand of the auditorium nor rationalists necessarily at the back – even though, in the cinemagoing practices of my youth, the impecunious would occupy the cheaper front rows. Does this make it possible to link Wittgenstein’s preference for front seats to his asceticism, his desire to slough off the privileges of his family’s fortune? Alternatively, if early filmmakers (such as Kenyon and Mitchell) took cameras to towns to film crowds they hoped would turn up at evening screenings to see themselves, rendering what the early twentieth century termed ‘the masses’ both the film’s audience and – as Siegfried Kracauer would argue – one of its ideal subjects, all viewing positions would indeed appear to be privileged equally. In other words: even an apparently documentary recording of the image of a crowd would (in a fusion of modernism and realism that will return later) be implicitly cubist, a bouquet of multiple viewpoints. At least one fragment of the exploded cubist object could be carried away by each crowd member, the one most relevant to him-/herself. Everything would be scattered away from a centre, which in this case would be the eye of that other vortex, the whirlwind whose abduction of Dorothy metaphorizes her initiation into, or seduction by, the attractions of colour film, and allegorizes that of the spectator.

1.2.3 Displaying the unconscious? Baudry, Carroll and Plato’s Cave

For display in the classic sense to exist, there has to be a clear sense of directionality, of the degree of the object’s visibility from various vantage-points, some of them usually more expensive than others. One may wonder therefore whether it is possible to speak of display in the case of film, except when accompanied by a lantern lecturer, as the filmmakers see their films cast out to unpredictable destinations, messages in bottles. If so, does the ‘display’ of a film genuinely imply a screen as inclusive as a wide-angle lens, causing the traditional tendency for mainstream cinema screens rather to widen than to assume greater height (Eisenstein’s hated ‘creeping horizontalism’), or is the central position still privileged, even if on occasions empty? As screens do indeed tend rather to widen than become higher, is this an implicit expression of a medium-specific and democratizing unwillingness to adopt the height-based structures that inscribe privilege? How important is the difference between the position ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Neither Here nor There
• Chapter One: Doubles and the Shadows in Plato’s Cave
• Chapter Two: Extensions of the Self
• Chapter Three: Doubling, Distance and Instruments of Perception
• Chapter Four: In and Out of the Shadows of Noir
• Chapter Five: Cowboys and Aliens
• Works Cited
• Index