Hitchcock / Van Gogh

In the third scene of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Gavin Elster asks his old college pal Scottie (Jimmy Stewart) to spy on his wife, because, Elster says, in what we later learn is a set-up, he suspects she’s been possessed by a dead woman. In a film with scenes of death, murder, and suicide, this early scene is a quiet one: a scene of exposition, to prepare the high drama to come. The scene is, nevertheless, unsettling. That’s due, in part, to the spooky topic of supernatural possession. But it’s also due to the editing. The timing of some of the cuts seems “off.” It’s hard to explain—I’m no film theorist—but some of the cuts seem to come too soon, or too fast.

Of course the cuts came exactly when Hitchcock wanted them to: the question is what his purpose was, in defying “naturalistic” editing conventions. This question is perhaps easy to answer. The not-quite-rightness of the editing—a feature of the scene’s form—augments the not-quite-rightness of the scene’s content. The possibility Elster broaches, of supernatural possession, is unsettling. A feeling of uneasiness is the fitting response. The editing functions to intensify this feeling, beyond the level that simply hearing Elster’s speech might produce. What’s cool about all this is that it works: an uneasiness, induced by a formal property of the film, is taken by us, the audience, to be (part of) the uneasiness we feel about what Elster said.

It’s a bit of a magic act; how’s it done? Kendall Walton floats some relevant suggestions, in his paper “Projectivism, Empathy, and Musical Tension.” Set film aside and start with reality, and the question of how we come to know the character or personality of someone sharing our train, or lunchroom. Sometimes our evidence is obvious and easily-stated: he’s yelling, or throwing punches; that’s how we know he’s arrogant, or aggressive. But we often know such things, even when we can point to no such overt behavior. One might say we know by sensing the “vibes,” but that’s just an invitation to elaborate. Walton suggests that we sometimes perceive a person's character—say, their arrogance or aggressiveness—by perceiving the effect their presence has on us:

I [may] recognize someone’s arrogance or pompousness partly by noticing the resentment or irritation I feel toward him. A person’s aggressive manner shows itself in the defensiveness it arouses in me or in my feelings of intimidation.

Crucially, one might experience that irritation or defensiveness even if, to all appearances, the person has made no big moves nor done anything wrong. One picks up on small, subtle cues, using an ability programmed into humans by eons of evolution as a social species.

This “knowledge of things through their effects on yourself” exists in other domains as well. Sometimes, we know someone is in danger from obvious and easily-stated external evidence: say, that piano, poised to fall on them. But often we know in another way: from the anxiety that perceiving their situation causes us—even if we cannot pinpoint the source of that anxiety.

This is the basis for the cinematic technique Hitchcock employs. Suppose that, in normal cases, a response R (say, anxiety) can ground in us knowledge that the situation we are perceiving is X (dangerous). Then, if by some means or other the filmmaker can induce R in us, they can count on us to “project” X-ness onto the scene of the film. The editing makes us uneasy; we attribute to the world of the story features to which that uneasiness is a fitting response.

This, of course, is one of the main purposes of film music. Darth Vader is sinister and scary in the way he looks, and the things he says and does. But our response to him is heightened by the sinister power of John Williams’ “Imperial March.” The “extra” fear the music inspires, is then projected onto Vader himself, making him scarier than he would be with no soundtrack, or with “Rainbow Connection” playing in the background.

In the Hitchcock case, there are independent grounds for finding the Elster scene unsettling: the suggestion, again, of supernatural possession. Can the mechanism just described result in features being projected into a fictional world, that have no independent ground there? To switch media: one may portray, in a painting, a nervous man, by showing him doing nervous things, fidgeting, sweating. Can one portray a nervous man, not by showing him manifesting nervousness in his appearance in any way, but only by inducing, through “formal” means, nervousness in the viewer? Walton suggests the answer is yes. He mentions Van Gogh’s Self-Portrait of 1889.

Van Gogh, Self-Portrait (1889)

Walton does not think that Van Gogh, in the painting, is wearing a tense expression (it’s at best ambiguous); nor is there anything else depicted in the scene—a suspicious stranger, doing suspicious things—to which uneasiness might be a fitting response. Yet Walton finds himself uneasy when looking at the painting. So what is causing his unease? Walton suggests that it is

features of the paint on the canvas: the busy brushwork in the background and on the jacket, the choppiness of the strokes on the face and beard.

This was one of Van Gogh’s great discoveries: a way to pattern his brush strokes, so that through their formal features—not (just) through what they depict—they can cause a response, in this case, uneasiness. But the aesthetic alchemy is yet to come.

Walton claims that, in the Self-Portrait, the subject (Van Gogh) is himself uneasy. But what makes Van Gogh (as shown) uneasy, is not that he is shown in an uneasy posture; it is not anything about how he looks. What makes him uneasy is that we, the viewers, are made uneasy by the patterning of the brush strokes, and this uneasiness is then projected onto the subject of the painting. The “mechanics” of this projection are as before: our feeling is taken to be a fitting, or anyway a natural, response to what we see. Now humans by nature are susceptible to “emotional contagion”: we tend to pick up the emotions of those around us. Hanging with your downer friend can bring you down, which is why you might improve your mood by switching company, to the one who’s always smiling. Walton’s uneasiness becomes Van Gogh’s uneasiness, then, because it is interpreted as something caused, through emotional contagion, by the emotional state of the person shown in the painting.

So if I once cast aspersions on the idea that the formal features of a poem could represent the mental state of the speaker, I guess I take at least some of it back.