And on the textual level - more precisely, in marking the cardinal detail - North by Northwest realizes, to a telling perfection, Hitchcock's classic narrative model. That detail is, of course, in the director's recognizable vocabulary, at the same time the most important and the most unimportant: the MacGuffin. U North by Northwest is, to the ultimate consequence, revealing how it works and what is the ultimate reach of the MacGuffin as an eminent auteur's means for creating a vision, a narrative and a visual universe.
The MacGuffin is the performative center of Hitchcock's manuscript, the key motivator for starting or dynamizing the action, the signifier put to the test and drawing attention to itself only to conceal the signified that is created indirectly, through allegory and fiction, a fascinating enigma that is set up solely to an even greater and more ornamental mystery was described, in short a meaningless plot or detail that must provide meaning to the entire narrative procedure and what it contains, in itself and in associative linking.
The MacGuffin serves to expand the text both quantitatively and qualitatively, to enrich the texture of the film, to network the symbolic points as densely as possible, and this was, from the very beginnings, the director's favorite authorial procedure, something that gave his creations an aura of enigmaticness and elusiveness ( famous dictum: 'If the MacGuffin is not an apparatus for catching lions in Scotland, then there is no MacGuffin'), absurdity and abstraction, which is why the cinematic apparatus itself can become a mystical object of worship and analysis.
As the most famous examples tell us, such as the coded melody in The Lady Vanishes (The Vanishing Lady, 1938) or uranium bottles in Notorious (Notorious, 1946), the MacGuffin serves to cross the path of the hero and the path of the heroine, to direct the protagonists who - through the intervention of fate or divine irony - are placed in narrative touch completely to each other, in order to fulfill the ideological and narrative function of a classic (Hollywood) film. , as, in Hitchcock's case, a thriller or a spy film, with other authors screw ball comedy, western or musical, ultimately took on the characteristics of a melodrama that can cover all other generic frames.
That series of great fictional variations and persistent methodological repetitions, Hitchcock masterfully - another highlight! - brings in North by Northwest to the self-evident point, where the classic gray necessarily gets a metapoetic resolution. Spy secrets in North by Northwest, which set the action in motion and place the protagonist in a series of situations that necessarily lead him to find the required partner, are materialized in a pre-Columbian statue: the MacGuffin as a (phallic) object that circulates between the characters and thus narratively structures the hero's trajectories, although essentially no one thinks about to him, because other roles are crucial, those located in the psychological sphere (politics thus remains aside).
At the very end of the film, the exchange or handover of this precious, but practically irrelevant object, in the span of a few seconds (for that is the 'real' validity of the MacGuffin within a wider perspective) rapidly takes place, from Roger to Eva, from Eva to Leonard (who as a villain, but also a homosexual, stands in the way of a heterosexual couple), only for the police to intervene (in the end, of course, the object ends up proverbially in the hands of the Law) the statue falls to the ground, shatters and reveals that, all this diegetic time , but also throughout Hitchcock's time as an author, within it was: a micro-film, more precisely, a Film in itself. Thus the breaking of the figure of the MacGuffin 'gives birth', produces the film, what remains after the formal 'deconstruction' has been undertaken. MacGuffin, in fact, is 'nothing' other than - the film itself, when what is inside is revealed, its content and essence.
On the micro-level, he is a particular object (or device) that directs Hitchcock's narrative in the desired direction, on the meta-level he embodies the entire cinematographic apparatus, a dispositif of desire and fear, which interprets the human condition with a not at all paradoxical combination of classicism and aestheticism. The effectiveness of the classic narrative mechanism - as brilliantly shown by Hitchcock in North by Northwest - it rests not on his alleged realist rhetoric (Hollywood's poetic procedures are deeply artificial, and their realistic orientation is mere illusionism), but on the economy of signs in which the film primarily refers to (another) film: the film motivates itself, sets its own laws, ultimately, it itself becomes its signified.
But, at the same moment when one universal mechanism of film narration and one highly specific author's description are brought to perfection, when the process of enunciation and the object of the enunciated are crystallized in a paradigmatic proportion, a moment or manner of decline, or more precisely, decadence, which varies between the already active nostalgia and poetic resignation.
The only thing that cannot be repeated is perfection itself: that is why the next three Hitchcock films, Psycho (Psycho, 1960), The Birds (Birds, 1963) and Marnie (1964), although it is about three absolute masterpieces, it is actually the director's anxious, ambivalent reaction to the realization that the immediate classical elaboration has become - just after the cathartic climax - internally unattainable, that it is no longer inconceivable to (p)stand, without the author's irony and criticism, within the domain of classic narrative cinematography, which is why the modernist grayscale becomes necessary, and not just optional, that is, the author's preferred.
Moreover, through three films, Hitchcock precisely detects three modernist responses to the structural impossibility of further classical, therefore, transparent, coherent, ideologically compatible, comprehensible, completely readable storytelling: Psycho marks that impossibility on the formal level, The Birds on the level of meaning, a Marnie - within the territory that combines the fetishistic and the fantasy - on the plane of the basic narrative of a boy who meets a girl. At the same time, things are further complicated by the fact that the enunciator's inscription is parallel to the writing of the author himself in the text, which is already visible in the most striking figure of the director's publication: in his cameo 'insertions' into the symbolic regime.
Namely, while in the cameo for North by Northwest In a way, Hitchcock remains on the side of castration, therefore, he accepts the limitations of projection and identification, because the door of the bus closes right in front of him, which is why he, in the phantasmatic arrangement of the narrative, is denied, rejected, that is, left at a safe, contemplative, analytical distance in overseeing the journeys his heroes undertake, so far are his cameo appearances in the Psycho, The Birds and explicitly, that is, ecstatically in Marnie, always given in the most direct relationship - which is also effected through the staging of a joint shot - with the heroine who would have to ensure the ultimate goal - the creation of a loving couple.
It's as if excessive auteur scripture - an excess of artistic consciousness - blocks the given destination (destination and destiny) of the film story. The subject of the narration and the object of the narration are too close, which is why the cinematic diegesis, in contrast to the classic 'fluid' expression, remains 'clouded' by the desire that spills over the margins of the text, by fetishistic persistence as opposed to mimetic 'plausibility', by voyeuristic expertise that greatly exceeds respectable and utilitarian the limits of 'good' storytelling.
Unlike the fictional Roger from North by Northwest which, by the end of the film, will be completely sucked into the socio-erotic order, the 'real' Hitchcock at the beginning Psycho, The Birds i Marnie is only partially integrated, at the same time clearly included in the narrative, and again 'bare' without an illusionistic perspective: the director as Name-Author is expressed, among other things, through this modernist slippage, which is why all three films cannot reach, anyway the lost classical ideal.
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