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Mosaic (2012) - A fantasy of one's own: rooms in Hitchcock's vertigo and Baudelaire's prose texts

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Abstract

Throughout Charles Baudelaire's Le spleen de Paris, the narrative voice frequently refers to dreams, drugs, closed spaces, and hallucinatory projections that combine to blur the boundaries between reality and fantasy. [...]in "Les fenêtres," the narrative voice provides the following explanation: "Qu'importe ce que peut être la réalité placée hors de moi, si elle m'a aidé à vivre, à sentir que je suis et ce que je suis".

Article

This essay explores connections between Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo and Charles Baudelaire's prose texts. The main character of the film and the narrator of the prose texts are both confined emotionally in their own dreams and fantasies, but also physically, in a multitude of restricting, prison-like rooms that mirror the dynamic of the unconscious.

What constitutes the space of a room is under constant flux in Charles Baudelaire's prose texts, The Spleen of Paris. Rooms take many shapes and forms because they are born out of the intoxicated mind of Baudelaire's narrator, whose phantasmagorical voice runs through most of the poems. About a hundred years later, a similar voice is resurrected in the persona of Scottie, the main character of Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo.[1] Scottie, like the male narrator of the prose poems,[2] stumbles through a variety of fantasies and rooms. The latter can be physical or ethereal, but they all eventually materialize in a series of confining spaces in which Scottie and the narrator face continuous, and for the most part self-inflicted, punishment. The rooms are either real or imagined, temporal or atemporal, indoors and even outdoors, and each of them leads back to a futile, cyclical search for the eternally lost object. The topography of the rooms is designed to entrap Scottie and the Baudelairian male narrator in an endless labyrinth that emphasizes their inability to reclaim their respective lost objects, which pushes them to search for even more self-punishment.

The themes of isolation and solitude are underlined by the existence of two levels of confinement that run through both the film and the prose texts. The first level is physical: the two men find themselves enclosed in various rooms that resemble prisons. The second level of confinement is generated by the men's unconscious and by their unattainable fantasies. These two levels work in unison, unlike the essential conditions that drive Hitchcock's film and Baudelaire's prose texts. Scottie and the narrator-poet suffer from vertigo and spleen, respectively, which are both the result of two opposite movements happening simultaneously. In the case of vertigo, Hitchcock suggests Scottie's dizziness through a technical artifice: the camera backtracks while zooming forward. In the case of Baudelaire's spleen, there are two components working together: the physical aspect (the bile) and the emotional state of melancholy, but these two are opposed by the poet's yearning for the Idole, or the Ideal (l'Idéal). Departing from these common points that link the work of Hitchcock and Baudelaire, this essay explores the psychoanalytical questions of fantasy and the unconscious as they take shape in the various rooms of the film and the prose texts, and the construction of phantasmagorical spaces, which challenge existing notions of spatiality.

Henri Lefebvre's The Production of Space demonstrates that space is not just a form of perceiving, as Immanuel Kant defined it (space is both an inside and an outside experience as they relate to one's body), but also a social form. Lefebvre's social space is born through bridging the notion of space with the idea of state: "The State binds itself to space through a complex and changing relation that has passed through certain critical points" (224). These critical points evolve from the physical space of the State to a social space (such as state institutions where laws are communicated through the national language of the state), and finally to a mental space that "includes the representations of the State that people construct" (225). From the divergences and parallelisms between spaces of representation and representation of spaces, Lefebvre goes on to argue for the birth of many types of spaces: analogic, cosmological, symbolic, perspectival, and, finally, capitalistic. While I am not interested in the political aspect of his analysis of space, the last type of space, capitalistic space, is described as being both homogeneous and fragmented (233). It is this absurd split that I find fascinating in relation to my analysis of phantasmagorical rooms in Hitchcock and Baudelaire. In other words, since space proves to be quite malleable in Lefebvre's analysis, I believe that we can argue that part of our collect...

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Notes

  1. In Vertigo, Scottie has to follow around his friend Gavin's wife Madeleine, and he ends up falling in love with her. She commits suicide, and then Scottie is left feeling very melancholic. He runs into another woman, Judy, who reminds him a lot of Madeleine. He literally changes Judy to make her look exactly like Madeleine, only to then realize that they were the same person and he had been a pawn in his friend's plan to get rid of his real wife.
  2. I believe that the presence of the male narrator comes through more forcefully in the prose texts than in the verse. The strong male voice in the prose texts is a trait of the Parnassian movement in the 1850s and 1860s to which Baudelaire was closely associated, and which "genders" the poems as masculine in an attempt to undermine the overly feminine sentimentality of the first Romantics. See Gretchen Schultz's The Gendered Lyric: Subjectivity and Difference in Nineteenth-Century French Poetry (West Lafayette: Purdue UP, 1999. Print), especially 86 and 179.
  3. Foucault inverts here Plato's famous soma-sema dictum (the body is the prison of the soul).
  4. It is worth noting that feminine clothing is also frequently displayed in Baudelaire's "Le peintre de la vie moderne" (Lyriktheorie. University of Duisburg-Essen. Web. 15 June 2010), especially parts I, XI, and XII.
  5. Ross Chambers (The Writing of Melancholy: Modes of Opposition in Early French Modernism. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993. Print) constantly engages with mist, fog, and dispersal as a way to explain melancholy in nineteenth-century poetry (26).
  6. Raymond Bellour (The Analysis of Film. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2000. Print) believes that God's help is necessary in order to satisfy the subject's desire to kill and, consequently, his scopic drive (244).

Works Cited

  1. Baudelaire, Charles. Le spleen de Paris-La fanfarlo. Paris: Flammarion, 1987. Print.
  2. Benjamin, Walter. Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writing. New York: Schocken, 1986. Print.
  3. Bersani, Leo. Baudelaire and Freud. Berkeley: U of California P, 1977. Print.
  4. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986. Print.
  5. Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1985. Print.
  6. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage, 1995. Print.
  7. Freud, Sigmund. Basic Writings. New York: Modern Library, 1995. Print.
  8. Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton, 1978. Print.
  9. Lefebvre, Henri. State, Space, World: Selected Essays. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2009. Print.
  10. Modleski, Tania. The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory. New York: Methuen, 1988. Print.
  11. Paini, Dominique, and Guy Cogeval, eds. Hitchcock and Art: Fatal Coincidences. Milan, IT: Gabriele Mazzota, 2000. Print.
  12. Penley, Constance. The Future of an Illusion. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989. Print.
  13. Silverman, Kaja. The Threshold of the Visible World. New York: Routledge, 1996. Print.
  14. Starobinski, Jean, and Richard Pevear. "Windows: From Rousseau to Baudelaire." The Hudson Review 40.4 (1988): 551-60. Print.
  15. Truffaut, François. Hitchcock. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985. Print.
  16. Vertigo. Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. Universal Studios. 1958. Film.
  17. Wood, Robin. Hitchcock's Films Revisited. New York: Columbia UP, 1989. Print.
  18. Zizek, Slavoj. "Looking Awry." October 50 (1989): 30-55. Print.
  19. Zizek, Slavoj. The Plague of Fantasies. London: Verso, 1997. Print.
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