Sunday, October 1, 2023

THE NATURE OF STORYTELLING PT. 2

I've responded to the "anti-superhero" remarks of Martin Scorsese on this blog a couple of times. The first time, my basic conclusion was that Scorsese was most invested in what I'm pleased to term  "the mythos of the drama." This is why, in his 2019 remarks, he places such great emphasis on whether or not a given piece of cinema concerns "the complexity of people and their contradictory and sometimes paradoxical natures." Elsewhere, while speaking of the enormous allure of the films of Alfred Hitchcock, he notes:

The set-pieces in NORTH BY NORTHWEST are stunning, but they would be nothing more than a succession of dynamic and elegant compositions and cuts without the painful emotions at the center of the story and the absolute "lostness" of Cary Grant's character.

This quote relates well to the observation I made in my second essay, which didn't really examine Scorsese in depth, though I did reference my personally articulated concepts of artifice and verisimilitude:

...the director's main target, "franchise films" within the superhero genre, belong more to the category I've called "artifice" than to "verisimilitude." Works in the category of artifice are by their nature more aligned with generating meaning, when they do so, by examining literary tropes rather than consensual reality.

 

Now, Hitchcock did not make "franchise films" in the sense the term is usually employed, in which the franchise offers the audience either continuing characters (Spider-Man, Antoine Doinel) or a series of roughly analogous stories linked by some umbrella concept or theme (Tales from the Crypt). But the Master of Suspense certainly used a situation beloved by espionage stories: that of "fugitive, while seeking to prove his innocence, must seek to prevent catastrophe." This situation can be fairly deemed a "trope" insofar as it has been used, and probably will continue to be used, by many authors to get audiences to invest in the fictional events.



Now, Scorsese says that without the "painful emotions" transmitted to the audience by the Cary Grant character, NORTH BY NORTHWEST would only be "a succession of dynamic and elegant compositions and cuts." There's no knowing that this would be the case, for all we can't "un-see" the version of NORTHWEST that we know. But one may fairly wonder if that less emotional version would have looked like Hitchcock's first major version of the aforementioned artifice-trope, 1935's THE 39 STEPS. 





I have not read, and am not likely to read, John Buchan's 1915 novel. Still, the summation I've read of the book makes it sound identical to the situation of Richard Hannay in the 1935 movie as embodied by Robert Donat: that Hannay is pretty close to being an emotional cipher in terms of dramatic intensity. 



And yet, it seems to me that Hitchcock's 39 STEPS is still a great movie, even without "painful emotions," and I also think it's more than the sum of its compositional shots.  It took a relatable, if artificial, situation and engrossed the audience in the outcome of the protagonist's seemingly insoluble dilemma-- often by adding elements foreign to the book, like the romantic angle. Near the movie's end Hannay has tracked the titular spy organization, the 39 Steps, to its base of operations at the London Palladium. There Hannay the ordinary man has an extraordinary insight: the spies plan to use a performer with exceptional memory (also a movie invention) to memorize vital state secrets for transportation elsewhere.

Trouble is, the London police are there too, and they're about to pull Hannay out of the crowd surrounding Mister Memory's stage. On all sides, audience-members are challenging the performer to answer any question put to him: fine details about atomic weights or historical dates and the like. Mister Memory meets every challenge, answers every question put to him, until Hannay, almost in the clutches of the cops, yells to the performer, "What are the 39 Steps!"

The crowd of fair-goers don't have any idea what Hannay is talking about, but they see Mister Memory hesitate at Hannay's inquiry, and they all take up the chant, "What are the 39 Steps?" The viewing audience doesn't know what goes through Mister Memory's mind, for he's even more of a cipher than Hannay. But as if the man can't help responding to a question to which he knows the answer, Mister Memory speaks the literally fatal words, "The 39 Steps is an organization of spies," just before his compatriots shoot him. And his death liberates Richard Hannay.

I've never seen Martin Scorsese say anything about THE 39 STEPS, but I think it impossible that a cineaste like him could avoid loving this scene. And if I am correct on that point, I argue that he wouldn't be loving the scene for its compositional rigor, and he certainly wouldn't be loving it for any character's "contradictory and paradoxical nature." 

He would be loving it because it's a vital part of a puzzle that makes the whole picture come clear. It's a picture that has nothing to do with verisimilitude, with the way people live their lives.

But it has everything to do with artifice, the way people wish they could live.

On a side-note: though Hitchcock did not make franchise-films by the definition I've used above, John Buchan's Richard Hannay enjoyed four more novels after the success of his debut, though as far as I can tell no one ever adapted any of the other Hannay-adventures. And the success of Hitchcock's adaptation of Robert Bloch's PSYCHO eventuated in Bloch doing two sequels to his novel, neither of which were adapted for the other three movies (and teleseries) in Universal's "Norman Bates franchise."



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