Hitchcock: The Industry

James Morrison

Department of English
North Carolina State University

 

Kapsis, Robert E. Hitchock: The Making of a Reputation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.

 

After more than twenty years, if we date its inception at the publication of Robin Wood’s Hitchcock’s Films (1965), the Hitchcock industry is still burgeoning. On and on they come in unstoppable waves, these dense treatises on The Master’s high vernacular or low comedy, on films re-released or securely canonized. Even if we dismiss those books that are patently “popular,” like Donald Spoto’s biography, or those that give Hitchcock only a sustained sidelong glance, like Slavoj Zizek’s Looking Awry, we are still left to contend with some two dozen ample volumes–this in the field of film studies that is itself barely twenty years old. The latest spasm of production alone has yielded at least three books, each from a university press: Stefan Sharff’s on Hitchcock’s High Vernacular from Columbia, Thomas Leitch’s Find the Director from Georgia, and now Kapsis’s volume from Chicago. What this largely academic enterprise lacks in the glittery trappings of, say, the mass-market Malcolm-X-drive–no Hitchcock caps as yet, no Hitchcock breakfast cereal–it makes up for with a certain scholarly self-consciousness. One is not surprised, then, to see at last a book about the industry itself.

 

Kapsis’s thesis is simple: The evolution of Hitchcock’s reputation since the late fifties has been intricately connected to general permutations in film aesthetics during the same period. The first chapter lays the study’s theoretical groundwork by adapting the sociologist Harold Becker’s concept of “art-worlds” to the field of film. Chapters two through five trace Hithcock’s reputation from its initial phases, where Hitchcock is understood as “mere entertainer” or “master of suspense,” through the efforts of Hithcock and his partisans to reshape his reputation into that of a “serious artist,” culminating in the director’s canonization in academe. Final chapters consider the effect of the “Hithcock legacy” on the thriller genre itself as well as on the career of Brian De Palma, then compare the making of Hitchcock’s reputation to that of the reputations of Hawks, Capra, Lang, Clint Eastwood, and, in the “art-world” of music, Vladimir Horowitz. The particular strategies Kapsis’s work values are not close-analysis or theoretical expansiveness (nor the rhetorical flourishes that usually accompany them) but comprehensive scrutiny and empirical doggedness. These last his work achieves, and the attendant clarity of his style would be unimpeachable if clarity were an end in itself, if relentless comprehensiveness guaranteed genuine comprehension. Clearly, the book’s subject has the potential to bring into focus key issues in contemporary film studies, from much-debated ones like the status of the auteur to little- discussed ones like the process of canon formation. But in spite of the value of some of its research, the book misses its most important opportunities.

 

The first problem is one of methodology. Kapsis negotiates Becker’s conception of the “art-world” with a version of reception theory he traces from Jauss through Wendy Griswold’s work. His first key assumption, then, derived from Becker, is that cultural products “are influenced by or imbedded in the immediate organizational, legal, and economic environments in which they are produced” (5); his second is that “‘meaning’ is produced or ‘fabricated’ by the interaction between reader and text” (8). In spite of the earnest conviction of these observations, neither is likely to strike occupants of the film-studies trenches as urgent news from the battle-front. What may be novel, though, is the sense in which Kapsis intends his inflections. In the first quotation, for example, “immediate” is the operative word, and refers not just to studios or audiences as “environments,” but even more “immediately,” to literal facets of production–e.g., conversations on the set during filming. Moreover, the “meaning” that gets produced, through whatever means, is seen to be a product of films’ embeddedness in these environments. Thus, elements of Hitchcock’s style that other critics have more conventionally seen as modernist gestures or personal insignia are conceived as Hithcock’s “practice of including unusual shots or sequences in his films for their calculated effect on the more serious critics” (25). A less romanticized vision of the auteur than that implied here is hard to imagine; but what’s an “unusual shot”? Who are the “serious critics,” and how do they get to be “more” serious than the others?

 

In registering such points, I mean to suggest that the seemingly “progressive” aspects of Kapsis’s methodology are built upon an extremely traditional base and become, therefore, themselves questionable. In spite of the presumed emphasis on shifting patterns of reception, Kapsis begins with a survey of Hitchcock’s career that would be perfectly at home in any coffee-table picture-book: “Both Rope and Under Capricorn] exploited technical means at the expense of narrative flow and neither one generated much business. It would seem that Hitchcock had temporarily lost touch with his audience” (25). In a study that claims to examine changing critical assumptions, it is not beside the point to ask what a “narrative flow” is, how “technical means” can disrupt it, and what this might have to do with audience response. In any case, the usual version of audience response to these films is that audiences found the first bombastic and the second dull. Should a current study simply reproduce this received narrative? More to the point: the “technical means” Hitchcock is exploiting in these films involve historically unprecedented play with the long-take sequence-shot. Indeed, promotion for the films emphasized the sequence-shot and the moving camera as novelties to draw audiences–“Come see Ingrid Bergman in the longest take in movie history!”–who still found the films bombastic and dull. The failure of this effort to manipulate reception complicates Kapsis’s claim that such efforts began late in Hitchcock’s work. More generally, his unreflective reproduction of standard surveys of Hitchcock’s career markedly undermines his later attempts to examine the assumptions on which such surveys might be based.

 

In fact, although Kapsis approvingly quotes Griswold to the effect that a cultural object “has no meaning independent of its being experienced” (9), he is prone to categorical assertions about the nature of certain films of Hitchcock. For example, he sees Psycho and Vertigo as “essentially anti-romances, violating many of the conventions and rules that were associated with the Hithcock thriller in the late fifties” (56) and later finds that Lesley Brill “correctly” (56) makes the same claim in The Hitchcock Romance (Princeton 1988). If the purpose of the study as a whole is to show how “changes in critical discourse over the past few decades have shaped the ‘meaning’ of Hitchcock’s works” (122), Kapsis’s own analyses are perhaps obliged to present themselves as interpretive acts that have similarly been shaped by prior discourses. Yet the normativity of his point here is startling in the context of his presumed methodology. Here the films are assumed to have certain attributes that audiences simply did not welcome; or, elsewhere, particular films simply were poor and were rightly recognized as such by audiences; or else particular films were really one thing but were incorrectly perceived by audiences as something else; and so on. In this instance, in any case, it seems clear enough that the “essential” quality Kapsis discovers in these films is to be distinguished from the provisional “meanings” other critics locate there.

 

If Brill is “correct” to find patterns of romance at the foundation of Hitchcock’s work, Robin Wood is apparently quite wrong to see Marnie as a fully-realized masterpiece (Wood’s category, not mine) instead of as the shoddy bag of goods most critics had earlier seen. Initial reviews of this film which Kapsis sees as the turing point in Hitchcock’s reputation history emphasized what they claimed was its technical ineptitude–ugly back-projection, awkward red-suffusions of the image, clumsy zoom-shots. Wood’s landmark revaluation of the film sees these elements as part of a complex design. But Kapsis, whose posture is ordinarily one of professorial equanimity, will have none of it. Presenting Wood as a dyed-in-the-wool auteurist (and missing thereby Wood’s inheritance from the work of F. R. Leavis), Kapsis lengthily quotes Wood’s argument and then, rather than engage it, blusters in an unwittingly comic rehearsal of thirty-year-old misconceptions of auteurism, “Wood’s point once again is that Hitchcock can really do no wrong” (128). In fact, Wood’s point is that the devices work in his analysis of the film and that they are part of Hitchcock’s German Expressionist heritage but are now perceived as anachronistic by popular audiences. In other words, Wood’s point is more attuned to shifts in viewers’ assumptions about film style than is Kapsis’s inarticulate rejection of it. More to the point, technical “deficiencies” are in no way isolated to Marnie in Hitchcock’s work. The Lady Vanishes, for example, makes absurdly obvious use of miniatures and Notorious contains examples of back-projection at least as obtrusive as any in Marnie. Given these facts and Kapsis’s thesis, the question he should be asking is why these “deficiencies” became an issue in the reception of Marnie when they did not in the reception of the earlier films.

 

Instead, Kapsis treats the reader to a protracted examination of the film’s production file, which body of knowledge “simply fails to support” (131) Wood’s argument. According to the production files, as Kapsis reads them, it seems Hitchcock “sought external reality but technical mishaps ensued” (129). In turn, this information “points to how the auteur critics’ expectations of finding artistic purpose and consistency in the works of their favorite auteur directions [sic] could lead to exaggerated claims about a film’s implicit meanings” (129). It is worth noting that Wood himself deals explicitly with such critical issues at the outset of his study, albeit in a fairly standard New Critical way: “What concerns (or should concern) the critic is not what a film is ‘really intended’ to be, but what it actually is” Hitchcock’s Films 13). Wood even goes on to quote Lawrence’s “Never trust the teller–trust the tale,” an epigram in which, to judge from the fact that he first misquotes it then wrongly attributes it to Joseph Conrad, Kapsis himself does not put much stock. In the context Kapsis had appeared to be trying to establish, in any case, the notion of an “erroneous” (130) reading of a text is a troubling one. Wood’s valuation of organic coherence is here simply opposed to Kapsis’s modulated empiricism where the real issue had formerly seemed to be the social, aesthetic or other causes of such interpretive differences. For Kapsis, the issue is (as usual) simple: “Wood’s polemical agenda led him astray” (130). Similarly, treating feminist reinterpretations of Marnie, Kapsis hopes to determine which are “most faithful to the Marnie text” (139), obviously contradicting his earlier presumption that meaning is contingent on reception.

 

Kapsis’s treatment of auteurism, in general, further illuminates methodological problems in his study. His version of auteurism is monolithic and simplified, and he posits auteurism as both cause and effect in the making of Hitchcock’s reputation. Perhaps assuming (wrongly, if so) that the implications of auteur theory have been played out fully in film studies, Kapsis treats the topic at its basic level by implication, and his references to it are dispersed broadly across the text. One of the results of this is an elementary form of repetition characteristic of Kapsis’s style. Each time he mentions auteurism, he does so as if introducing the topic but, at the same time, as if it had already been adequately explicated. Hitchcock’s reputation as a “serious artist” is strengthened “during the 1970s when the auteur theory dominated film studies” (122); the growing pedigree of horror movies is “a trend traceable to the rise of auteur theory in the late 1960s” (162); it was “during the early sixties that . . . auteur critics actively sought to elevate Hitchcock’s stature” (216); Hitchcock’s standing “improved in the sixties as the auteur theory came to dominate both journalistic and academic discourse in the cinema” (228); and so on.

 

This atomization of the topic makes it nearly impossible to extrapolate from the argument a clear view of what Kapsis thinks auteurism is, but in any case he gives no sense of the roots of auteurism in structuralism, of the crucial debates among early auteurists or of its complex evolution, or indeed of the very aesthetic of auteur theory. Kapsis’s schematic conception of auteur theory consists of two elements. First, “according to these critics, the individual ‘auteur’ was the sole source of a film’s meaning: the artist’s personal vision transcended ‘reality,’ ‘history,’ and ‘society'” (224-25). Second, in “advancing their views, the auteur critics constructed a new pantheon of directors wherein certain directors were singled out for special praise while the rest were demoted or ignored” (216). The first of these claims is redolent of a popular take on auteurism, deriving from a reading not so much of Bazin, Rivette, Chabrol and Rohmer or Godard (to say nothing of Levi-Strauss!) but of Pauline Kael. In fact, cine- structuralism (as it was sometimes called in the seventies) insists on the impossibility of “transcending” “history” and so on; it is, indeed, because all forms of human communication are seen in this model as rigidly controlled by predetermined structures that the auteurists find it possible to attend in the first place to genre films, which in this context are no more “formulaic” and therefore no less “serious” than any other predetermining structure. Yet so unaware does Kapsis seem of the crucial connection between auteurism and structuralism that he regards genre criticism as opposed to auteurism rather than as a crucial component of it: “the auteur viewpoint rather than a genre orientation framed much of the critical discourse on Topaz” (105). If auteur theory means nothing more than seeing “the director as a major source of meaning” (228), then American film criticism has been auteurist from its inception to the present.

 

Kapsis’s conception of the auteurist canon, or “pantheon,” is even more disturbing because of its implications for his concpetion of canonicity itself in the project as a whole. For Kapsis, taste seems to be a purely whimsical phenomenon. Thus, according to Kapsis, the first generation of auteurists slap together an apparently arbitrary “pantheon” while the next generation simply “countered the established pantheon with one of their own choosing” (217)–with no effort made to account for or even discuss the choices. Why are “certain directors” singled out for “special praise”? Because they are auteurs. How do we know they are auteurs? Because they have been singled out. Favoring Hitchcock, Hawks, Ford, Lang, and Welles, Kapsis tells us, the auteurists “dismissed as second- or third-rate” Huston, Wyler, Stevens, Zinneman, and Wilder. Kapsis is partially right to suggest that the first group is valued because “despite having worked within the old Hollywood studio system, [they] had somehow managed to retain in their work a personal vision” (217). However, he does not even attempt to account for the “dismissal” of the others (nor to prove that dismissal, especially pertinent in the case of Wyler); nor indeed could he do so in the terms of his simplified account of auteurism. The auteurist dismissal of Huston, for example, is predicated on structuralist assumptions. Because they see Huston as naively believing he can “transcend” genre, by among other ways adapting idiosyncratic literary texts to film, the auteurists reject him.

 

Kapsis’s work yields no mechanism by which to examine the social or aesthetic causes of cultural change. He is interested only in the effect of cultural change (and even that in only a simple way), and thus does not ask, as he observes shifts in Hitchcock’s reputation, how and why what Pierre Bourdieu would call the rearrangement of cultural capital takes place. Bourdieu’s monumental work Distinction provides what are currently the definitive ways of discussing the sociology of cultural value, and Bourdieu’s notion of cultural capital and its relation to social capital is one Kapsis might profitably have engaged, especially given Kapsis’s intent to inflect film studies with modes of thought from sociology. Specifically, Bourdieu argues that the “bourgeois” aesthetic is to be distinguished from the “popular” aesthetic by way of the latter’s demand for participatory interaction and the former’s distanciation, its separation from ordinary, non-aesthetic dispositions. Such a distinction bears obvious relevance to a discussion of a mass entertainer’s being co-opted by or crossing over into “serious” art, but Kapsis proceeds as if such distinctions were self-evident. With no such framework in which to function, then, repeated references to texts that “straddled the line between popular genre movies and films with a more elitist intent” (246) can only seem windy and vacant.

 

The author’s conception of “reputation” itself is impoverished by inattentiveness to– paraphrasing Bourdieu–modes of appropriation of art-works across cultural strata. Kapsis’s study uses as its chief evidence journalistic reviews and critical articles, with occasional references to box-office figures. Much work in reception theory, of course, challenges the validity of such evidence as a gauge of a film’s reception, and many of the most interesting studies have relied on other kinds of evidence, such as advertising, non-critical journalism, letters to editors from “average” citizens, or public-relations documents. (Janet Staiger’s Interpreting Films [Princeton 1992] will serve as a model in reception studies for years to come.) Arguing that Hitchcock’s reputation is reshaped from that of professional ghoul to that of “serious artist,” Kapsis begs key questions about levels of culture: Who says when an artist is “serious”? Once Hitchcock is canonized, is his work then unavailable to popular responses? In Kapsis’s version, once the auteurists lay claim on Hitchcock, his days as a “mere entertainer” are over. But his simultaneous canonization in Blockbuster Video stores (as the only director, until lately, to have his own category) or on cable TV, flanked by Patty Duke, Donna Reed and other luminaries of Our Television Heritage suggests otherwise. Yet Kapsis’s version of the Hitchcock reputation remains, like most of his categories, cosily unitary. The British may still hold Hitchcock to the standard of his “early British thrillers” because they “lack the training in film studies of their American counterparts” (157), but we Americans know better.

 

The appeal of reception studies is its capacity to situate texts within very specific cultural contexts. Not only is Kapsis inattuned to links between cultural practice and social categories, however, he is indifferent to the strata across which a reputation may be defined (that is, a “reputation” is not only one thing at any one time) and the molecular responses to which it is subject. Thus his work is as thoroughly insulated from authentic cultural analysis as the formalism it was meant to replace.