Richard Allen,
Hitchcock’s Romantic Irony.
New York: Columbia University Press, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-231-13575-7
US$24.50 (pb)
295pp
(Review copy supplied by Footprint Books)
Looking over the history of film theory and criticism during the past fifty years, one cannot help being struck by the way nearly every methodology, from auteurism to psychoanalysis to feminism to industrial history, has found the films of Alfred Hitchcock fertile ground for exploration. Is this simply because the films are irresistible to most cinephiles or is there something about the way the director works that invites radically different interpretive paradigms?
Richard Allen finds the answer in the aesthetics of romantic irony, with its central credo, in the words of Schlegel, of “an absolute synthesis of absolute antithesis, the continual self-creating interchange of two conflicting thoughts” (qtd. p. 5) – both/and rather than either/or. This is to say that if one arrives at an idea about Hitchcock, that he is a misogynist, a sadist, or a devotee of the moving camera, someone else can muster all the needed evidence to prove that he is instead a feminist, a masochist, or a stylist grounded in montage. Allen sets himself the goal of articulating a poetics of Hitchcockian cinema organized around this rubric.
His taxonomy includes both “vertical” romantic irony, distinguished by the artist’s enunciation of his presence in the text, and “horizontal” romantic irony in which content and style feature a dialectic between opposites. All the dialectical conflicts he explores can achieve a positive, a negative or an ambiguous resolution. Two characters falling in love, for example, can engender a narrative of romantic renewal, one of ironic ambivalence, or one of ironic inversion. The book also pays careful attention to how Hitchcock constructs suspense, his use of the dark doppelganger found in Expressionism and the dandy found in Aestheticism, his penchant for black humor and his utilization of color as a symbol system. Again and again, though, Allen finds Hitchcock adopting the stance of the amoral aesthete whose favorite subject is the perversity of human sexuality. Whether this perversity repels or attracts depends upon the director deploying either his masculine aesthetic, which features “elaborate, playful aestheticized double entendres, until it erupts in horror late in Hitchcock’s career,” or his feminine aesthetic, in which “idealization through style serves as it were to ennoble desire” (p. 154). As Allen reads for sexuality expressed through style, however, he relies perhaps a bit too heavily on Freudian analysis. Although Hitchcock absorbed much of the pop-psychology prevalent in Hollywood in the forties and fifties and incorporated it in his semiotics, sometimes Allen overdoes the teasing out of symbolic phalluses and vaginas, as in this comment on a scene from Marnie: “This image of Marnie’s place of origin doubles as an image of the primal scene, the bright red walls of the house forming a vaginal opening, the gigantic phallic ship looming obscenely in the background as if forced onto dry land, and Marnie returning under its shadow as if she herself has taken the man’s place” (p. 220).
Taxonomies always risk becoming reductive, just a set of boxes waiting to be filled with examples and arranged in a series of binary oppositions. Hitchcock’s Romantic Irony skirts this problem but avoids it most of the time, thanks to the detailed and provocative close readings Allen gives to his exemplar scenes before depositing them in the requisite category. A more serious drawback of the methodology requires that Allen go over ground that others have already covered, so that there is not much of a sense of discovery for the veteran reader of Hitchcock scholarship. The one exception is the meticulous tracing of the color code, which Allen admits can seem almost obsessive but certainly opens up new avenues of inquiry not explored by previous scholars.
Overall Hitchcock’s Romantic Irony is an elegant disquisition on the director’s oeuvre, a convenient one-stop shopping place for students just being introduced to the major theories about the Master of Suspense. Allen generously credits those upon whose works he builds and shows a healthy self-deprecation about his own, for instance when he invites those already familiar with the basic tenets of romantic irony to skip over the pages in which he explicates them.
Of course, no Hitchcock aficionado would take him up on his offer, since the last thing he or she would want is to cut short the suspense.
Ina Rae Hark,
University of South Carolina, USA.
Created on: Sunday, 22 March 2009