Jump to: navigation, search

Borrowers and Lenders (2013) - Last Night I Dreamt I Went to Sleep No More Again: Intertextuality and Indeterminacy at Punchdrunk's McKittrick Hotel

Details

Links

Abstract

This essay examines Sleep No More's citationality to consider which of its many intertextual references are mere Macguffins and which, by contrast, open up substantive interpretive potential. The essay focuses on the production's appropriation of Hitchcock and of early modern Scottish witch trials, concluding that its most suggestive citation is of Vertigo's McKittrick Hotel, a site which, like the McKittrick frame-fiction of Sleep No More, decidedly frustrates hermeneutic closure.

Article

The opening line of Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca, "Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again," posits a ruined English estate as encoded dream content. The line is spoken in voiceover by the unnamed protagonist of the film, the second wife of Maxim de Winter. From guileless young ingénue, Mrs. de Winter develops across the film's narrative first into knowledge, then selfish satisfaction, and finally complicity as she becomes an accessory-after-the-fact in her husband's disposal of his first wife, the eponymous Rebecca. When she returns in her dream to the burnt-out shell of the estate, it is a feral Manderley that has been reforested by wild surrounds, its former civilized beauty and "perfect symmetry" flickering elusively through the thick of nature's "long tenacious fingers," which have "encroached upon the drive" that leads to the house. At once dreamer and analyst, the speaker enters the past by moving beyond the boundary of consciousness to transgress the iron gates of the estate and follow the once-distinct, but now "poor thread" that winds back to the great house: "Like all dreamers," she says, "I was possessed of a sudden with supernatural powers and passed like a spirit through the barrier before me" (Hitchcock 1940). As the flashback narrative of the film unfolds, we come to understand the Manderley of her dream as the architectural expression of lost innocence entangled in a thorny overgrowth of homicidal violence, erotic transgression, and guilt.

Sleep No More likewise takes Manderley for its starting point. From the check-in counter and coatroom, guests of the McKittrick Hotel follow a winding, nearly pitch-dark hallway to the Manderley Bar, where they're greeted by a maître d' whose mannered welcome announces their entrance into the alternative world of the production. The hallway itself proves a crucial transition, like a fall into the fog ...

Notes & References

  • Hitchcock, Alfred, dir. 1960. Psycho. Perf. Anthony Perkins, Janet Leigh. Shamley Productions.
  • Hitchcock, Alfred, dir. 1940. Rebecca. Perf. Laurence Olivier, Joan Fontaine. Selznick International Pictures.
  • Shakespeare, William. 1997. Macbeth. In The Norton Shakespeare. Edited by Stephen Greenblatt et al. New York: Norton.
  • Souvenir Program 2011. Sleep No More.