Alan Taylor,
Jacobean Visions: Webster, Hitchcock, and Google Culture.
Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2007.
ISBN-13: 978-3-631-56227-7
US$41.95 (pb)
201pp
(Review copy supplied by Peter Lang)
Read from a film-critical perspective, at least, Alan Taylor’s Jacobean Visions: Webster, Hitchcock, and Google Culture is an avowedly and enthusiastically eccentric book. In his ‘Preface: 1993-2007’, Taylor describes the “twenty-first century impetus” of his book as “one that primarily foregrounds the significance of certain pedagogic initiatives in Media Education that breaches and thereby challenges traditional subject divides, laboured as they often are, like ‘Film Studies’, with their own institutionalised persona constraints” (p. 9). He eventually praises the Jacobean plays of John Webster – especially The White Devil(1612) – as exemplifying postmodernism avant la lettre because they employ multiple vantage points and rhetorics without privileging a stable (character or spectator) identity of a sort that ostensibly characterizes the moral satisfactions provided by the ‘Well Made Play’ of the late nineteenth century or its
‘Classic Realist’ offshoot that Hollywood is famous for manufacturing ad seriatim.
Indeed, Taylor takes theatrical ‘realism’ of the illusionist sort – by which (for example) painterly uses of perspective in backdrops and set design encourage a “monocular” (p. 37) vantage on dramatic action – to have epistemological (hence ideological) consequences, to the extent that seeing and knowing are conflated at the expense of real understanding. If the drama of deceptive appearances on view in Webster and Hitchcock – not to mention the endless ‘Second Life’ opportunities available to inhabitants of ‘Google Culture’ – depends on the supposed veracity of the visible or screenable, to the point where trusting in appearance is itself a sign of complicity, a form of reification, then self-reflexive critiques like those of Webster and Hitchcock may be exactly what the postmodern Media Education pedagogue should profess in our hyper-mediated “Panspectron Environment” (p. 172).
Taylor’s book elaborates ‘The Jacobean Vision’ across five chapters. His first chapter surveys “the critical histories of both Webster and Hitchcock” (p. 25), suggesting that each stood in opposition to a dominant tradition. Indeed, the same ‘British’ critical tradition (personified by William Archer, author of Playmaking: A Manual of Craftsmanship) that damned Webster for his “inconsistencies” of plot and indecorous “goriness” (p. 26) in the later nineteenth century also provided the ‘Well Made Play’ template that Hollywood took as gospel and that Hitchcock struggled to inflect in a modernist, ‘art film’ direction in the early and middle twentieth century. To the extent that Webster and Hitchcock each “emphasises the signifier” (in the words of Catherine Belsey; p. 32), they are both exemplars of “formalism”, apostles of “defamiliarization” (p. 33).
No wonder, then, that a post-Brecht generation should see a revival (or revision) of interest in both artists, most especially in the 1980s, when Hitchcock’s “Stewart quartet” (p. 142) was re-released and New Historicist literary critics (e.g., Greenblatt, Belsey) were rehabilitating the literature and culture of Renaissance England under the banner of Early Modernism. Taylor’s first chapter concludes by listing four features of Jacobean Dramaturgy that confirm this nascent modernity: its penchant for “double-vision” and mixed genres, its metafictional emphasis on artifice and theatricality, its use of “masques and alternative identities” (p. 47) to underscore the latter, and its thematizing of evil – in dissemblers and dissembled alike – as a basic condition of “the post-Lapsarian universe” where urban life and advanced communication technologies (movable type) demand “self-fashioning” in the absence of “eternal Christian verities,” which remain “beyond the grasp of the lost, fragmented characters” (p. 49).
Taylor’s third chapter, ‘Hollywood, Stewart, Hitchcock and MCA’, extends the ‘critical history’ of Hitchcock undertaken in chapter one, though with an emphasis on the ‘institutional context’ that echoes, on Taylor’s account, the “Machiavellian intrigues of a Jacobean Court” (p. 73). Though I find the studio/court analogy forced, Hitchcock’s power-status as producer at Transatlantic, Warner Bros., and Paramount doubtless had much to do with his (post-Selznick) ability to explore “a subversive streak” (p. 81) in, for example, the stylistic experimentation of Rope (USA 1948) and the even more overt reflexivity of Rear Window (USA 1954). Certainly the notion of Brandon as a wittily guileful malcontent in Rope seems aptly Jacobean; Taylor’s subsequent discussions of Rear Window and The Man Who Knew Too Much (USA 1956) as mise-en-abime parables of epistemological fixity and gender (in)flexibility are also helpful. But the heart of Jacobean Visions is the comparison of Webster’s The White Devil and Hitchcock’s Vertigo (USA 1958) that comprises chapters two (on Webster) and four (on Hitchcock) of Taylor’s study.
The authority Taylor cites in adducing the Jacobean features of The White Devil employs “the Baroque Tradition of pictorial representation” (p. 44) to model the kind of effects Webster sought and achieved – assaulting the senses (in Taylor’s words) “through sensationalist displays of high emotion and melodramatic grandstanding” while simultaneously assaulting the intellect “through an informed and self-conscious working of resolute dramatic irony” such that “the safety of a reliable narrative frame disappears” (p. 44). That this description so readily pertains to Vertigo – with ‘Madeleine’ as the grandstander (especially in her kiss-by-the-sea scene with Scottie) and Hitchcock as the ironist, most especially when he (and Judy) reveal Elster’s plot to the viewer well in advance of its discovery by Scottie – confirms the aptness of the comparison. So too does the film’s lingering Mediterranean/Catholic iconography (‘Baroque’ was originally applied to seventeenth-century Italian architecture by nineteenth-century art critics, and The White Devil, like many Elizabethan and Jacobean plays, portrays Italy as a site for political and sexual/dynastic intrigues of a sort not far removed from the patriarchal back-story we get in Vertigo).
My brief discussion of Taylor’s Webster/Hitchcock comparison has thus far privileged Hitchcock as the better known term. Indeed, in its 1993 onset, Taylor’s project was exactly designed with the goal of engaging Webster via Hitchcock, who was “called upon to help answer certain pedagogic concerns in introducing Jacobean Drama to a student readership unaccustomed to such narrative trickery” (p. 172). Taylor’s subsequent decision to recast the analogy along historical lines – to the point of claiming that “the Jacobean interest in personae over persona has a direct impact … on the content of Hitchcock’s films” (p. 28), in the total absence of any evidence that Hitchcock or any of his primary collaborators ever read Webster or saw any of his plays performed – is a reason for taking
Taylor’s interpretive claims with more than a little skepticism.
For that matter, it is striking that Taylor says next to nothing about Shakespeare, where at least one has Stanley Cavell’s Hamlet-inspired analysis of North by Northwest (USA 1959) to work with, not to mention Robin Wood’s numerous references to Shakespeare in his analyses of Hitchcock, starting with his comparison of Psycho (USA 1960) and Macbeth (1606) as far back as 1965. Truth be told, part of the eccentricity of Taylor’s Jacobean Visions involves its endearing passion for detailing the formal similarities between Elizabethan/Jacobean dramaturgy and cinematic narrativity – essentially, the way each can jump around in space and time without regard for classical unities – though that has been the bread and butter of the ‘Shakespeare on Film’ sub-discipline for decades. (Indeed, Robin Wood has compared Welles to Shakespeare and Webster, though at Webster’s expense, in Personal Views: Explorations in Film.)
I am no longer sufficiently well-versed in the critical literature on Webster to offer a judgment of Taylor’s analysis of The White Devil, beyond saying that it displays all the features Taylor predicted it would in his first chapter. (I will venture the judgment that Taylor’s admirable passion for Hitchcock criticism – metonymically equating Vertigo criticism and ‘Film Studies’ tout court [pp. 22-23] – may have blinded him to other sectors of the Film Study field.) But I am hardly of the view that the White Devil/Vertigo comparison is unproductive. The allegorical sense in which Elster’s tutelage of Judy in the role of Madeleine amounts to a play-within-a-play depiction of Hitchcock’s tutelage of Kim Novak in the role of Judy-and/as-Madeleine raises issues of identity, artifice, and voyeurism congruent with those staged in The White Devil, though in the latter bloodlust and deceit are amplified by an excessive number of murder plots and methodologies. (Taylor is particularly good on discussing the ‘duality’ of Novak’s performance – as both Judy and Madeleine – on subsequent viewings of the film.) And the surrealistically ‘sensational’ elements in Webster – the stabbings and poisonings, the ghosts and conjure shows – are certainly matched by Hitchcock’s uncanny use of sharp-edged VistaVision color effects and by the expressionistic nightmare sequence, with its disintegrating cartoon bouquet, Scottie’s as-if severed head, the pulsing sounds and colors, the falling body, the open grave.
Taylor’s main point, in both cases, is that such artistry “conforms to a rigorously calculated design” (p. 105), however poorly that design accords with a particular era’s viewing protocols. And the inference that apparently follows is that such artistry both deserves sustained attentiveness (rather than consumerist dismissal) and can serve ethical and epistemological purposes, however tragically. “The truth” revealed in Vertigo, according to Taylor, “is plainly in the untruth” (p. 130), which is to say in the Lacanian emptiness of the impossible real, an unexplained and unexplainable horror.
At this point Taylor more or less ‘segues’ (one of his favorite if more irksome verbs) into his concluding chapter on ‘The Post Modern Fallout’. I will have to let the vocabulary of this review stand as confirmation of Taylor’s various engagements with the discourse of postmodernism, though let me add a few names and terms to indicate the range of nuance and reference he seeks to include: Jameson, Blade Runner (USA/Singapore 1982), Reagan, Simulacra, Avatars, Rumsfeld, Googling, Cyberspace, Barbarism, Zizek, et cetera. Though each of his chapters uses numbered sections, Taylor’s fifth chapter has two parts, the first devoted to extending the Hitchcock story into the post-1980 period by reference to more recent scholarship and Hitchcock-inspired films and art exhibits and boxed DVD sets, the second part of chapter five emphasizing the “Lacanian vertigo” (p. 165) induced by the intersection of “post-Capitalist business formulae” (p. 161) and the digital virtuality of the World Wide Web.
Where the “Jacobean Dramaturgy” of multiple perspectives and rhetorics employed alike by Webster and Hitchcock gains its ethical force as a critique of “monocular” realism, the anxiety attendant upon the World Wide Web involves its evocation of an effortless “Jacobean text” (p. 170), a “permanent state of on-line mystification” (p. 170) where “protean uncertainty has itself become habitualised” (p. 170). Though well aware of Sherry Turkle’s Life on the Screen picture of the internet as a utopian “transitional space” (p. 168) where we can “[invent] ourselves as we go along” (p. 150), Taylor is more inclined to fear its encouragement of an “Alzheimer’s culture” (p. 175) in which a “lack of critical awareness” (p. 178) leads to a collapse of image and source, of signifier and signified.
In which context, then, Taylor concludes by describing Webster and Hitchcock as “Media Educationalists of the first order” (p. 183) – in Hitchcock’s case, by endlessly reminding us “that it is, after all, ‘only a film’” (p. 184). Though Taylor doesn’t put it this way himself, his effort at linking ‘Webster, Hitchcock, and Google Culture’ effects a kind of reversal. Where Webster’s Jacobean dramaturgy, in Taylor’s analysis, employs luridly shocking and melodramatic events to challenge viewer habits, to induce a species of perspectivism and skepticism, ‘Google Culture’ involves perspectivism run amok, ‘self-fashioning’ gone perversely berserk. So the examples of Webster and Hitchcock no longer matter so much for their formal innovations or rigorous undercutting of viewer expectations – as attractive as those qualities evidently remain for practitioners of ‘Film Studies’ – but as parables of consequences, as morality plays. The tortures and murders and power plays in Webster and Hitchcock “serve as token and vivid pedagogic reminders of the human cost” (p. 184) of failing to become or remain “critical” (p. 182) of the hyper-saturated media environment we inhabit.
Despite its seven-word title, Taylor’s Jacobean Visions is clearly a book about Hitchcock, though it may find appreciative readers among Media Educationalists. As a book chiefly about Hitchcock, though Hitchcock as cultural force and avatar, Jacobean Visions infuses some of the enthusiasm of old-style cinephilia into the more au courant if not world-weary discourse of postmodernism. Though Taylor’s ideas, on his own account, underwent a lengthy period of consideration and development, his book seems breathlessly urgent. (That urgency did not, apparently, extend to proofreading. Taylor’s documentation is too often inaccurate or lacking.) The timeliness of Taylor’s book is confirmed by the recent publication of Richard Allen’s Hitchcock’s Romantic Irony, which also inscribes Hitchcock within the postmodern context, even while contesting or displacing the category. Though Allen’s book will likely get top billing, and will deserve it, Taylor’s Jacobean Visions: Webster, Hitchcock, and Google Culture, its flaws notwithstanding, is a worthy and helpful supplement.
Leland Poague,
Iowa State University, USA.
Created on: Saturday, 20 September 2008 | Last Updated: Sunday, 26 April 2009