Some Thoughts on Alfred Hitchcock and Vladimir Nabokov page two
I have identified five major categories that I feel are useful in
comparing and contrasting the work of Hitchcock and Nabokov. They are
as follows:
Game Theory
The films of Alfred Hitchcock and novels of Vladimir Nabokov have both
been successfully critiqued using the theory of game playing. In the
introduction to his book Find the Director and Other Hitchcock Games,
Thomas Leitch lists a number of incidents in which games or the playing
of games have an important function in Hitchcock's films, but this
is not to argue that "games have a unique importance in Hitchcock's
work." To the contrary, he points out that "the importance of games for
Hitchcock is not their significance within the diegesis but their role
as a figure for the relation between the storyteller and his
audience..."7 By approaching the filmmaking process as a game between
the maker of the film and his audience, Hitchcock, in effect, bursts the
illusionary bubble of the diegetic world he has created and reminds the
audience, at least momentarily, that this is "just a movie" (as he
reportedly said to Ingrid Bergman once). Leitch goes on to discuss the
ways in which the game-playing technique of Hitchcock's films
established a pleasurable contract with the audience and how, over the
course of his career, he continued to redefine the rules of the
game.
Professor Alfred Appel, Jr. has also endeavored to explain Nabokov's
appeal in terms of the way the author used game-playing techniques with
his audience. In his introduction to The Annotated Lolita, Appel
writes "the process of reading and rereading his (Nabokov's) novels is a
game of perception" in which "the author and the reader are the
'players.'" Appel notes the elements of parody, coincidence and
techniques like the work-within-the-work that recur consistently
throughout Nabokov's novels.8 The effect for the reader of Nabokov is
the creation of an involuted imaginary world in which the experience of
reading the novel is tantamount to playing a game of intellectual cat
and mouse with the author.
Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed. She did. In point of fact,
there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, a
certain initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as
many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can
always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the
seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at
this tangle of thorns.
from Lolita, page 11
An excellent example of the "games Nabokov plays" is his 1962
masterpiece Pale Fire. The book is made up of a foreward by Charles
Kinbote, then John Shade's poem "Pale Fire," containing four cantos and
999 lines, and finally a lengthy commentary on the poem by Kinbote,
complete with index. Within the commentary, Kinbote weaves the story of
an exiled Zemblan King, which we take to be Kinbote's own story of
himself, and the counterwoven story of the clownish villian Jacob
Gradus, as he travels on an apparent date to assassinate the exiled
King. The novel, therefore, contains several layers of reality: the
reality of Shade's largely autobiographical poem (which contains little
reference to Kinbote's story), the reality of Kinbote's tale of the
homosexual King and his exile from the "distant northern land,"9 the
counterwoven story of Gradus, and finally, the hard to discern level of
"real" reality. Andrew Field notes of Nabokov that "many of his games
are games of structure (these are the ones you must solve to understand
the work properly)"10 and Nabokov gives us a key to understanding the
"real" reality of Shade's murder in Pale Fire: Kinbote rents his house
from a Judge Goldsworth, who has sent away a "homicidal maniac"11 to
prison. Gradus, the assassin, is this homicidal maniac who returns,
bent on revenge against the Judge, and who kills Shade purely by
accident, thinking he is Judge Goldsworth. By hiding what is "real"
beneath levels of artificial reality (keeping in mind that, in works of
art, all reality is artificial), Nabokov turns the process of reading
the novel into a convoluted game between reader and author: can we find
the key to unlock the secrets contained within Pale Fire?
Gradus is now much nearer to us in space and time than he was in the
preceding cantos. He has short upright black hair. We can fill in the
bleak oblong of his face with most of its elements such as thick eyebrows
and a wart on the chin. He has a ruddy but unhealthy complexion.
We see,
fairly in focus, the structure of his somewhat mesmeric organs of vision.
We see his melancholy nose with its crooked ridge and grooved tip. We see
the mineral blue of his jaw and the gravelly pointille of his supressed
mustache.
from Pale Fire, page 186
Hitchcock plays a similar game with his audience in Psycho (1960). At
first we, along with Marian, Arbogast, Sam and Lila, think that Mrs.
Bates is alive and living in the Bates home. Hitchcock toys with us by
suggesting a reality to Mrs. Bates through the use of a voice over and a
vertiginious camera angle as Norman carries his mother down to the fruit
cellar.
Next, we are given the Sheriff and his wife's version of
reality: Norman's mother died ten years earlier as the result of a
homicide/suicide with her lover. Finally, after Lila's investigation of
the Bates home, we "discover" the "real" reality: Norman killed his
mother and her lover but kept his mother's corpse around the house to
preserve her memory.
The final shots of the film, showing Norman
completely transformed into "mother," suggest another, deeper still
reality to the film. These shifting levels of reality suggest to us why
Hitchcock thought of Psycho as a "fun" picture—this film that is
largely concerned with the theme of voyeurism is an elaborate game of
discovering what is real and what is illusion.
The last shot, as Norman
(mother) grins into the camera, suggest we have had a delightful black
joke played upon us; but it is a joke that audiences apparently loved,
given that Psycho was Hitchcock's most commercially successful film.
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The films of Alfred Hitchcock and novels of Vladimir Nabokov have both
been successfully critiqued using the theory of game playing. In the
introduction to his book Find the Director and Other Hitchcock Games,
Thomas Leitch lists a number of incidents in which games or the playing
of games have an important function in Hitchcock's films, but this
is not to argue that "games have a unique importance in Hitchcock's
work." To the contrary, he points out that "the importance of games for
Hitchcock is not their significance within the diegesis but their role
as a figure for the relation between the storyteller and his
audience..."
Professor Alfred Appel, Jr. has also endeavored to explain Nabokov's
appeal in terms of the way the author used game-playing techniques with
his audience. In his introduction to The Annotated Lolita, Appel
writes "the process of reading and rereading his (Nabokov's) novels is a
game of perception" in which "the author and the reader are the
'players.'" Appel notes the elements of parody, coincidence and
techniques like the work-within-the-work that recur consistently
throughout Nabokov's novels.
Next, we are given the Sheriff and his wife's version of
reality: Norman's mother died ten years earlier as the result of a
homicide/suicide with her lover. Finally, after Lila's investigation of
the Bates home, we "discover" the "real" reality: Norman killed his
mother and her lover but kept his mother's corpse around the house to
preserve her memory.
The last shot, as Norman
(mother) grins into the camera, suggest we have had a delightful black
joke played upon us; but it is a joke that audiences apparently loved,
given that Psycho was Hitchcock's most commercially successful film.
