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Postmodern Culture (2010) - Production Values: Fordism and Formalism in North by Northwest

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Abstract

This essay analyzes the aesthetics of capitalist economics at the threshold of the transition from fordist to postfordist modes of production. The essay organizes this analysis around a close reading of Alfred Hitchcock's 1959 film North by Northwest. At stake is the relation between aesthetic productions which engage the economic base and thematize this engagement. In making this claim, the notion of capital's "axiomatic"--a concept by which Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari designate the relative autonomy of the economic base--is employed to examine the way that, from as early as the 1950s, U. S. capitalism's prodigious industries of entertainment and popular culture began to change to ungrounded, flexible, representational economies. An instance of this shift is the emerging pre-eminence of advertising, which the essay finds signaled in the "value" attributed to Cary Grant's Roger O. Thornhill in the farcical spy plot. This value is referred to as "advertising agency," and signals the collapse of such discrete spheres as the economy and state, as well as of production and consumption. Because of its historical position and its content, North by Northwest is a remarkable text for investigating the transformation of twentieth-century economic modes to a dereferentialized form which we continue to inhabit.

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Footnotes

  1. ↑ See for instance: "Top T. V. Series of the Decade."
  2. ↑ There are also a whole slew of such slogans preceding this moment and these exploit the commodification of signs such as femininity ("here's some for your sweet tooth, and all your other sweet parts") and colonialism ("let's colonize 'The Colony' next week for lunch"), all to identify defined mechanisms for identifying the axiomatic of profit margin.
  3. ↑ On Hitchcock's notion of "pure cinema," see "On Style: An interview with Cinema," in Hitchcock 285-302.
  4. ↑ As Steven Jacobs has recently remarked, "by the late 1950s, clearly, tourism has become a Hitchcock trademark" (50).
  5. ↑ Cohen foregrounds the significance of Hitchcock's lightness in his essay "Hitchcock's Light Touch," in Hitchcock's Cryptonymies 2 (197-256).
  6. ↑ While Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek have been the most influential discussants of Hitchcock's relation to, amidst else, capitalism and its postmodern form, I have in mind more recent criticism. Many critics have more pointedly focused on the historically delineate relation between Hitchcock's understanding of America and its relation to politics and economics. See Millington 135-154; Corber; and Cohen, "Extraterritoriality: An In-House Affair at the Embassy of Ao—" in Hitchcock's Cryptonymies: Volume 1 (193-238).
  7. ↑ One could also cite, for instance, Franz Kafka's Amerika and Bertolt Brecht's The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. At this moment in the oeuvre, Hitchcock's films frequently and subtly thematize the tension between the meaning of "America" and its meaning according to its commentators. Neither Hitchcock nor the film's star Cary Grant is American—the latter, as To Catch A Thief's Francy (Grace Kelly) notes, is "unconvincing ... like an American character in an English movie."
  8. ↑ To my knowledge, there is no recorded instance of Hitchcock mentioning "Americanist cinema." However, I am not making the case for a causal connection. To identify Hitchcockian "Americanist cinema," one would have to unpack a figural concern with the technology of modernity and its place in the political geography of late nineteen-fifties America.
  9. ↑ One recent reconsideration of the MacGuffin that leans toward the idea of reflexivity that I critique here is in Walker 296-306.
  10. ↑ Rushmore conceals its own contextual history of consumer spectacle. When the film was made, the 1920s monument was already home to a whole network of consumerist fund generators for the Park's commission: "an antebellum mansion, waterslide, thirty-six holes of golf, sundry museums, and a surfeit of gift shops" (Taliaferro 159). Thornhill's assassination of his alter ego Kaplan takes place in the consumer space of the monument's canteen. The Hitchcock trope of consumer tourism—at least within the figural space of "America"—is tied into the commercial dimensions of the American geopolitical space. Hitchcock and his family on his first tour of America—in 1937, as part of a promotional tour for Sabotage (1936)—took in many of the sights of Washington, D.C., touring the capitol and other government buildings. On the Hitchcock family's Washington tour, see McGilligan 12.
  11. ↑ For a full account of their concept of the axiomatics of capital, see Deleuze and Guattari (222-261). I am not suggesting a knowing connection between Hitchcock's use of the word "axiomatic" and Deleuze and Guattari's use of the term in their Capitalism and Schizophrenia project. Rather, North by Northwest taps into and exploits precisely the entertainment formalism that Deleuze and Guattari so acutely diagnosed in late capitalist functioning. Overcoding uses its referent to accrue capital; when a formula of overcoding functions, it becomes fixed as an axiom.
  12. ↑ The objects Thornhill throws at the window to attract Eve's attention were designated as coins from Lehmann's shooting script onwards (153).
  13. ↑ Jacobs provides full details of the design of the Wright-inspired set (297-313).
  14. ↑ Metatextually, commodity spin continues here. Cary Grant's former acrobat star persona comes into play. As in To Catch a Thief (1955), it is Grant's performance of his own persona that effects this rescue. What is on display and for sale here is the personal history of Archibald Leach, the acrobat turned movie star. Postmodern Americanist cinema reinvents the sacrificial expenditure of woman in the Hitchcock heroine and her cinematic commodification.
  15. ↑ See also Manlove's recent reconsideration of Mulvey's account.
  16. ↑ My use of the term "montage of attractions" refers to Sergei Eisenstein's foundational film theoretical concept. Eisenstein's montage theory asserts that juxtapositions produce a conflictual dialectic that both collapses together as a synthetic totality and cites a chain of associated connections (35-52). As Eisenstein puts it, "the cinema is made up of juxtaposition and accumulation ... of associations ... associations that produce, albeit tangentially, a similar (and often stronger) effect only when taken as a whole" (36).
  17. ↑ Cohen, Hitchcock's Cryptonymies, 1: xi. For a useful summary of de Man's idea of the "material event," see Warminski. For a useful application of de Man's notion of materiality to cinema and to Hitchcock, see Cohen, in Material Events 114-152.
  18. ↑ Arrighi gives a useful account of the various abandonments and reinstallations of the gold standard after 1929 (269-300).
  19. ↑ Pre-Columbian art consistently signifies not only commodity circulation but simulacral form. The authenticity of pre-Columbian works from the nineteen-fifties to the present has been called into question many times. See McGill, "Pre-Columbian Works Could Be Fakes."
  20. ↑ Gerald Vizenor underscores the way indigenous identity has become a commodified simulation in late-capitalist American society. He reads signifiers of "Indian-ness" as markers of "manifest manners," pretended and performed inventions of a Western image of the American native that cannot be reappropriated but only unsettled through insisting on the unstable trickery they inevitably unleash. Such figures as the pre-Columbian statue in North by Northwest can be read as such commodified forms of manifest mannerism. See Manifest Manners; and "Aesthetics of Survivance," in Survivance 1-24.
  21. ↑ Like the body in the assembly line, the cars that Norman Bates feeds to the swamp behind the modernist drab of the Bates motel are, as Leland Poague has noted, associated with Fordism. The license plate of Marion Crane's car, which reads NFB, can be read as "Norman Ford Bates," because the company's logo is present "in nearly every frame wherein the license plate is readable .. . metaphorically shoving the car's FORD logo in our faces," and implying "the familial relation of crazy Norman and the father of American assembly line capitalism" (Poague 344).
  22. ↑ Jameson has limned the "geopolitical aesthetic" of the film's Cold War moment, arguing that the transformation of private spaces like bedrooms and restrooms into spaces of public intercourse worries the political unconscious of the film's understanding of the private/public distinction. As I argue here, and as Jameson recognizes, where the film displays awareness of its Cold War context it does not refer only to its politics but to the interweaving of politics and economics. See Jameson, 47-72.
  23. ↑ "[G]et rid of by throwing away or giving or selling to someone else." Dispose, v. Oxford Dictionaries Online, 2d.
  24. ↑ File-footage of Saint's appearance is included in a documentary produced for the DVD edition of North by Northwest (1959; 2004)
  25. ↑ Geddes had been criticized in 1934 by the director of the Museum of Modern Art for pandering to consumer demand. MoMA's director leveled the accusation of a "blind concern with fashion," calling Geddes's designs a "streamline pencil sharpener by one of the highest paid industrial designers" (Meikle 179-187). The director's criticism is symptomatic of a wider concern amongst functionalist designers at the Museum that commercial industrial design meant to "stimulate sales" as Meikle puts it, by rendering serviceable goods "'obsolete' in appearance" (180).
  26. ↑ In both Vertigo and North by Northwest, female characters at turns apply their talents to industrial design (Midge Wood) and perform them as fronts for other intentions, commodifications, and desires (this is true of both Kendall and Wood insofar as she is played by Bel Geddes). In either case, this performance underscores the celebrity status of those designers whose work is featured in the film, for instance Bel Geddes, Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe; the film's initial audience could well have been aware of this celebrity.
  27. ↑ Marx, "The General Form of Value," Capital 1:157-162.

Works Cited

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