ABSTRACT
Teaching relationships in real schools, after all, rely heavily upon the impossible ideal of 'knowing' at the center of transference. The effects may be closely related to the lessons the teacher practices, but even in their fidelity to the message of the teacher they may deliver an outcome impossible to predict or even understand. Alfred Hitchcock's Rope illustrates the latter possibility, insofar as the horror it brings to the screen is premised upon the students' active and literal realization of their teacher's intellectually appealing, but morally damnable lessons. Accountability measures participate in a nave fantasy of control at the heart of much educational policy, in which whatever problem can be measured today might one day be fixed. The scene of the murder ideologically reproduces the quasi-Nietzschean revaluation of moral values and noble distance that Rupert taught the boys and that he glibly reproduces at the cocktail party, to the horror of the dead boy's father.
