ABSTRACT
Thanks to the high quality of the critical literature that has grown up during the past half century around Hitchcock’s sixtieth birthday film North by Northwest (1959), it is possible to recognize this perennially popular movie as a film text whose multiple meanings are paradoxical and contradictory.1 The mountain of analysis, for a contemporary commentator, is now as daunting as Mount Rushmore was for Cary Grant’s Roger Thornhill in 1959 when he complained that he did not like the way Theodore Roosevelt was looking at him. (This was just before Roger would have to scale the monument himself.) Ever since the English Canadian critic Robin Wood made serious Hitchcock analysis fashionable with his 1965 book, Hitchcock’s Films (now in its third edition: Wood 2002), it has been customary to assume that though a comedy, North by Northwest, along with other films from the same period, like Vertigo (1958), invites a developmental reading in which the insights and values of psychoanalysis would not be out of place. Although Wood himself softpedaled the theme (and was ahead of his time in questioning the ethical appropriateness of the head of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) as its ultimate father-figure) the movie’s highly sequential scenario (see Appendix) does lend itself to a Freudian understanding of the middle-aged hero’s passing through a series of developmental stages to confront an unconscious mother complex that can finally only be resolved by encountering and submitting to patriarchal imperatives. (The most exhaustive reading of the film’s strategy along Oedipal lines has been that of Raymond Bellour (1975), whose 116-page Lacanian exegesis leaves no image untested for evidence of Roger’s need to undergo symbolic castration in order to be accepted as a legitimate male by other Americans also operating under the Law of the Father.)
Against such depth psychological certainty, there has been a deconstructive counter-movement which takes its cues from the many centrifugal elements that anyone who has seen the film cannot fail to have experienced and puzzled about: Ernest Lehman’s parodic scenario, with its manic energy carrying its central characters across America in a series of zigs and zags and hops;2 Cary Grant’s extraordinary comedic capacity, the equal of Hitchcock’s own, which enables the star to talk back to and at the same time physically burlesque any
seriousness that might gather around the events of the story, however threatening to his own interests they may be; and the mad fandango of Bernard Herrmann’s score, which underlines the propulsive, zany energy of the director’s carefully choreographed filmmaking. Those following these hints at the level of style of a counter-narrative have seen North by Northwest as much more subversive than a comedy about castration anxiety: they find it to be an assault on meaning itself, at least at the level of cultural signs supporting established values. They regard the film as a send-up of the grand heroic story in which the consolidation of Roger O. Thornhill’s character is ostensibly “inscribed.” Postmodern critics like Geoffrey Hartman (1985), Frederic Jameson (1992), and Christopher D. Morris (2002) point out that Roger himself confesses that his initials stand for ROT, suggesting a decomposing identity that is hollow at the center. (Roger tells Eve Kendall, the woman he meets on the “Twentieth-Century Limited” train he takes to Chicago, that the “O” stands for “nothing.”: Lehman 1999: 78.)3 From the standpoint of these skeptics, the narrative, though filled with symbolic hints, finally dangles over an empty ground, signifying an existential void even more daunting than the castration anxiety that psychoanalysts have tried (in the style of therapeutic interpretation) to diagnose.
