obvious obfuscations
by Douglas Messerli
Eliot Stannard (screenplay, based on a novel and play
by Marie Bellec Lowndes), Alfred Hitchcock (director) The Lodger: The Story of the London Fog / 1927
Another murder has just been discovered on late Tuesday evening in
London, and the city is clearly up in alarm. Chorus girls, all decked out in
blonde wigs, are terrified; and why shouldn’t they be, when the Jack the
Ripper-like murderer, who calls himself The Avenger, loves “golden curls,”
which one of the theater marquees features in blinking neon? The blonde beauty
Daisy Bunting (June Tripp), who works as dress manikin, laughs at her
compatriot’s fears, but others play it safe by donning black wigs and
accessories that hide their golden tresses.
So begins Alfred Hitchcock’s
remarkable 1927 silent film, The Lodger:
A Story of the London Fog, a film, which, strangely enough, shows very
little fog and strays outside only on a few occasions. Given the long set-up of
the first scenes, wherein detectives come and go and the citizens of the foggy
city eagerly seek out the tabloid clues the murderer leaves behind, one might
imagine we are about to be presented a murder mystery, in which, before the
evildoer is revealed, we might discover why he calls himself The Avenger, what
he or she is avenging, and why his signature is surrounded within a triangular
figure. In fact, none of these important details are ever revealed in
Hitchcock’s film, and although the entire metropolitan London seems intent on
solving the case as quickly as possible, the director seems instead to loll
away his time on an extremely handsome lodger (the matinee idol, Ivor Novello).
Although Hitchcock does everything in his power to make us imagine that the
lodger, Jonathan Drew, might be the murderer, once the stranger has unraveled
his ridiculously coiled scarf, the audience is so awed by his presence that,
along with Daisy, we never once truly suspect he is The Avenger, despite his
moody, brooding behavior and his very suspicious activities—in particular his
charting of the killer’s victims with the pattern of the triangle of the
murderer’s calling card.
In short,
once the lodger shows up to rent a room in the Bunting house, we quickly
realize that this film is a complete obfuscation—of character, of genre, and of
narrative. One might primarily describe The
Lodger as a love story, given its slow-to-boil romance and one of the most
memorable kisses ever presented upon the screen (more of which later) if it
were not for the obvious fact that once Jonathan enters his new digs, he
politely demands the removal of all the all paintings of golden-haired
beauties—a truly unconventional way of wall decoration within the Bunting
household, which makes you wonder more about the owners than the new
guest—leading Mrs. Bunting (Marie Ault), her husband (Arthur Chesney) and even
Dasiy’s common-Joe detective boyfriend, Joe Chandler (Malcolm Keen), to joke
about the boarder’s “queer” ways and”
“gentlemanly behavior, which
combined with the open secret in the theater world of the day of Novello’s
homosexuality—so outrageously obvious to his theater friends that it might almost
make it appear as if his not nearly so pretty friend, Noel Coward, was in the
closet—most certainly strips him of his heterosexual gravitas. Strangely, what
all these quite obvious “false” signals accomplish is to do away with any
pretense of reality, and allow the viewers to sit back and simply enjoy the
yarn.
Joe awkwardly attempts to
intercede (he simply doesn’t like him, he declares), her father forbids her to
see the lodger, but it is her mother, who in her twisted, bourgeois imagination
begins to suspect that the intruder is something more than simply mysterious
that eventually sends everyone on the wrong scent, as their controlling
ambitions begin to outweigh common sense, exaggerating the lodge’s odd behavior
within the limited capacities of their imagination: the lodger must be the
murderer himself!
Hitchcock shows a chastened,
jilted Joe actually going through the process of something he has never done:
thinking. But what his thoughts create is a vengeful plot, which manacles the
now obviously innocent—since a few of the past events are finally revealed to
us, including the fact that his sister, dancing in his arms, has been The
Avenger’s first victim—and sends Jonathan on the run. By this time, however, it
is not only the Bunting family and friends who are determined to control events,
but the entire community which—having no possibility of perceiving realty—are
literally determined to strip the beautiful man of sexual allure by chasing him
down and crucifying him, like Christ, as he hangs on his symbolic cross of an
iron fence, his handcuffs caught within the steel spikes of the wall. By this
time Joe is told that the police have caught the real murderer (whom we never
see and learn absolutely nothing about), the Judas recognizes his tragic
mistake. He reaches the crucifixion scene almost too late, as Jonathan falls in
pieta-position into Daisy’s lap.
I almost wish Hitchcock might
have left him upon that cross with the mass murderers tearing him to shreds;
for certainly it would made a powerful statement, implicit in all Hitchcock
films, that we are all truly guilty of all culture’s worst offenses, a fact, reiterated
from the German Expressionist ideology (whose influence is very obvious in this
film) that “everyman is a murderer.” But, as I’ve written elsewhere, the great
English-born director, with his good-boy ethics and Catholic guilt, finds it
nearly impossible to end his films in moral disorder. Despite a kind of nervous
breakdown, Jonathan recovers to reclaim his Mary Magdalene, whisking her away
to his wealthy penthouse in order, apparently, to marry her, with her parents
checking out the place and settling into what will clearly become their
favorite chairs by the fireplace.
The story
is not really much about desperately seeking the Avenger, but a tale about who
will win in the search to love and control—and Hitchcock’s tale is very much
about “control”—the beautiful woman at the work’s center. Although her loving
parents are obviously determined to keep her safe and protected within in the
limited confines of their kitchen and firesides, Daisy is a slightly loose
cannon, a woman clearly of age, who dresses up each day in beautiful gowns, and
who, despite her low-class background, has had a taste of better living. Joe,
to whom the parents look to wrap her up in a convenntional marriage, is a
jovial and friendly lunk, who sentimentally signals his love to her early in
the film by cutting out hearts from Mrs. Bunting’s cookie dough; when she
pretends to reject him, he breaks the heart in half, expressing his doughy
reality all too explicitly. Daisy’s parents clearly encourage the couple’s
mocking love-making, skittering away whenever they feel they might be in the
way, and welcoming Joe openly into their kitchen and hearthside.
If the
stranger in the room above is mysterious, he is also, in his romanticized expressions
of suffering (limitations of Novello’s acting ability which Hitchcock surely
encouraged), and his dramatic pacing’s over their heads—which Hitchcock
deliriously advertises by turning the ceiling into a glass walkway so that we
might literally see those vigorous back and forth strides—totally appealing to
the caged-canary the ordinary Daisy feels herself to be. Before her family and
Joe can even blink, she has insinuated herself into the lodger’s quiet retreat,
playing chess with him as if the true battle were not a game of the intellect
but of the heart.
Each
character responds in his or her own way. An innocent gift of a dress Daisy has
been modeling, given her by Jonathan, is angrily returned to the sender by
Daisy’s father. Assigned to The Avenger case, Joe, decked out with a new set of
handcuffs, attempts to place them on Daisy, making it clear to her and the
audience what their life together might truly represent. When the final kiss
between them occurs, it is a slow moving approach of the lips filled with such
fear, sexual illicitness, lust, and danger that it is nearly unbearable.
Frankly, that kiss between the gay Novello and the slightly tipsy Tripp is more
romantic than any smooch between Boggie and Bacall or Garbo and anyone else on
the screen. When, upon another Tuesday night, Joe catches the new lovers upon a
bench, and tires once again to interrupt their love making, Daisy breaks off
her relationship with ordinary life.
The
observant movie-goer might note, however, that the view from the lovely windows
is that with which the movie began: the neon blink of “golden curls.”
Certainly, our new Prince has won his “golden curls,” but at what cost to the
blonde bride we are never told. Might she become, given the film’s sub-text of incestuous
infatuation, merely another beloved sister? And what crime was that avenger
avenging?
Los Angeles, June 20, 2015
*Despite
Hitchcock’s seemingly perceptive dictum that the villains of film must be
handsome and debonair simply so they might be allowed to approach their
victims, he might have learned his lesson in this film which he had latter to
rediscover in Suspicion: an extremely
handsome (gay or bisexual actor, in this case Carey Grant) cannot be believed
to be the murderer. Even in Rope, we
want to forgive the Farley Granger figure for his involvement in what is
primarily John Dall’s crime. It is hard as human beings to truly believe that
evil could lurk behind the beautiful exteriors of such beautiful women and men.
Hitchcock kept trying to expose that weakness in human perception, and
succeeded, certainly, with Anthony Perkins (another gay man) in Psycho. It is quite fascinating to
realize, accordingly, that if Hitchcock casted many of his films with icily
frigid, but absolutely beautiful blondes, he cast them also with gay men or
with heterosexual men (like James Stewart, Robert Cummings, and Henry Fonda)
who were such straight-laced figures that they existed outside of the sexually aggressive
male stereotypes.
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