How to Watch a Movie (6 page)

So I saw
The Big Sleep
three times one Saturday during the first Hawks season at the London National Film Theatre. I didn't care about the plot—and it's a matter of famous history that Hawks didn't either. But I treasured being there with it and longing to be up on the screen in General Sternwood's hothouse, at the Acme book store as it closed for the afternoon, and in the car (or the shell of a car on a soundstage), where Bogart and Bacall gave up on snarly wisecracks at each other. They tried a kiss and went on from there.

5

WATCHING AND SEEING

K
eep your eyes peeled!” I was told as a child—it might be for unexploded bombs, Nazi spies, or sixpence on the street. I relished the advice and I have tried to live by it, and sometimes these days you have to be alert lest someone locked into their iPhone (one of the new body-snatched?) bumps into you. It
is
worth looking.

“Attention must be paid!” is the plaintive urging from Arthur Miller's play
Death of a Salesman
(1949), and what it calls for is our looking closely at this man Willy Loman, not simply for his own sake, but because he is a metaphor for changed times, and because not being noticed was already perceived as a threat of larger cultural invisibility. Willy's wife, Linda, tells their children: “I don't say he's a great man. Willy Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the
paper. He's not the finest character that ever lived. But he's a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He's not to be allowed to fall in his grave like an old dog.”

He is not just Willy Loman, he is a dying salesman in an economy where that plight will become salutary. Loman is as old-fashioned as Bob Cratchit; he was door-to-door and selling is now instant actual. Even if you've never seen
Death of a Salesman
, you likely get it from what I've told you. The play is a moral-social-literary tract that simply waits to be illustrated onstage—and I believe it's an overrated classic. But his wife has this sense of attention as a kind of moral duty: Did you really
look
at Loman? What color were his suit and his hat, his shirt and his tie? If you were directing it anew onstage, what wardrobe decisions would you make? Did Willy seem to walk OK or could you tell his feet were folding under him from carrying suitcases of samples up hopeless staircases? Look at his eyes. Oh, you can't quite see the eyes in the theater? Very well, perhaps we need a new medium, one that can break your heart with eyes and their sadness. In which case we'll need an actor who can do sad-eye. Dustin Hoffman?—too old. Lee J. Cobb?—dead. Brian Dennehy?—too robust. Philip Seymour Hoffman?—he played the role onstage not long before he died. Don't worry—the applications are lining up. Star actors are coming to audition, down-at-heel and melancholy. It's actors' sad-eye that has pumped pathos into attention.

In a book called
How to Watch a Movie
, do you really need this instruction in keeping your eyes open? We'll see.

As I write, I have just come back from walking my dog in the early morning at Crissy Fields in San Francisco. That is an expanse of meadow and shore that looks out to the water,
the Pacific, Alcatraz Island, and the Golden Gate Bridge. It is a walk I have done a few thousand times. Today, as on every day, I looked at the bridge with a facet of its brick color made amber or gold or pink (whatever) in the rising sun. I surveyed the water and the small waves coming in. I noticed some people I usually see on these walks, and I watched the dog. I also noticed the geese feeding on the grass; they are often there, fifty or so of the gray-black birds. I did look to see if the heron was there—he or she often is—but not today. I didn't see a coyote, but that slinky shape is there sometimes at dawn.

I looked at the bridge but I saw nothing—no collapse in its structure; no vehicle on fire; no one jumping off into the water. I looked at Fort Point, the tip of land beneath the southern end of the bridge, but I saw no hint of a blonde woman in a gray suit plunging into the water. So I didn't have to consider diving in after her, and that's a mercy if you have vertigo. When I got home, my wife asked, “Did you have a nice walk?” I said it had been grand. “What happened?” she asked. “Oh, nothing,” I replied.

A camera is helplessly open, yet it doesn't see things. We live in an age now of surveillance footage where a camera in a top corner of some location records any transgression against the emptiness of that space. (Do you remember Nina, the revealed betrayer, looking up at the surveillance in the last episode of the first series of
24
?) If you imagine the hapless observer who has to study hours and years of that footage, you know seeing could be soporific—until a stray coyote or a terrorist sidles through the space. You set up a camera, you adjust its lens, its focus, and its exposure (these are antique habits now) and it will “take” whatever is in front of it. We still trust that documentary fidelity, even though we know it is easy for the
cinematic system to manufacture imagery that has no provenance or authenticity and insert it in the space.

But human beings don't watch in the way of a camera. Go to the door, or the street, or the beach and try taking in the totality of what there is to be seen. You can't do it, for our attention notices particular things: the coyote, or the white goose. If that pretty girl (whatever pretty is) walks by, you notice her, you look at her, you focus on her, and you pan with her walk. You hope you're seeing her (as in looking into her) and you would not mind if she noticed that. For you would like to earn her attention. If attention has to be paid, it is encouraged by being noticed. “That guy was looking at me again today,” she may tell a friend. To which the friend replies, in a take-it-or-leave-it way, “Maybe he fancies you.”

Then there's a look on the girl's face that's so hard to describe—hopeful, dubious, wistful, ready—so we're going to need an actress. You can say to the actress, Well, tomorrow, when we do that scene, how would you play it? She may reply, You're the director, what do you want me to do? And in intriguing ways, this discussion is what a real girl might puzzle over while deciding whether she should look up at the watcher and give the hint of a smile, a germ of recognition, or of being noticed?

Any work that involves a camera must have the animating impetus of someone who watches and wants to see. In Alfred Hitchcock's
Rear Window
(1954) James Stewart plays a photojournalist, L. B. Jeffries, confined to his New York apartment because of a broken leg. He was injured taking one of the dangerous pictures for which he is famous. But now he is idle, bored, doing nothing except entertaining his girlfriend, Lisa (Grace Kelly); resist her suggestions about their getting
married or have a massage administered by the dry, tart Stella (Thelma Ritter). What would you do?

Well, you might read a lot of books or listen to music or watch television (this was 1954—he could have seen the Army–McCarthy hearings, that crucial step in Joe McCarthy's downfall), but movies in the 1950s felt it was tasteless to show a TV. So Jeff starts to look out of his window at the courtyard and the several apartments that are visible. He is a casual snoop, an everyday voyeur, just a laid-up cameraman, restless and amused by the lives he sees. He has a carefree narcissism in that, while staring at these strangers, he never realizes they can see him.

None of these people sharing the courtyard are his friends. But then his nearly vacant survey notices something—like that man in the doorway in
Las Meninas
. In one apartment opposite him, a man and his wife are always arguing—this is enough to convince Jeff not to get married. But then the wife is no longer there and the husband is behaving suspiciously. The photographer starts to watch or keep watch. He doesn't go to bed but stays in his chair in the dark, drifting off to sleep then waking—is he dreaming? Or has his empty-headed looking turned into a vigil so that now he sees enough to make him think the white-haired man across the way (his name is Lars Thorwald) has murdered his wife?

His policeman friend (Wendell Corey) mocks Jeff's theory, but it turns out to be right. As I said, this is a movie made in 1954 by Alfred Hitchcock, and nothing to complain about. Its great entertainment is also a study in watching that teaches us to look closely and that exploits our urge to see. But the spectacle has been set up with seeing in mind, so the factual strand is overlaid with fictional intent. The Thorwalds fit Jeff's imagination. Mrs. Thorwald (Irene Winston) is harsh-voiced,
with red-ginger hair and strained features. She is so far from the loveliness of girlfriend Grace Kelly. And Thorwald (Raymond Burr) is a trapped bear of a man; he feels too bulky for his apartment. He seems powerful, despite his noticeable white hair—and Raymond Burr had dark hair. In other words, the Thorwalds have been cast and dressed to fit Jeff's bill.

And while Hitchcock, more than most directors, is obsessed with particular pointed seeing, he organizes the seen thing to the point of claustrophobia. We are not in a real Manhattan courtyard, where fickle weather, stray birds, and unexpected and irrelevant incidents may occur. We are looking at an elaborate set (built in Los Angeles) where fate has been taken in hand. When Grace Kelly does something brave (like going over to the Thorwald apartment when it is empty to search for the wife's wedding ring), there is a shot of Jeff looking at her in which we realize he sees her in a new light. She isn't simply an empty-headed beauty. She has the right stuff. He will marry her—even if some husbands kill their wives. (Actually, the panorama of the courtyard presents several different aspects of marriage: the honeymooners behind drawn blinds; the sexpot dancer who has many gentleman callers while her husband is in the military; the elderly couple who exist in terms of their dog; two lonely people who long for companionship; the Thorwalds; and Jeff himself, happy enough to have Lisa stay the night but reluctant to be tied down.)

Even in 1954, the courtyard in
Rear Window
never felt like an actual place. Hitchcock built it for convenience and to facilitate shooting as the plan of a place. That's how “décor” is a distillation of meaning or a caption, as well as a location. Hitch was not impressed by realism, or always mindful of it. All his life he used back projections when even an untrained
audience could see and feel that artifice. He didn't care. He chose every item that we would see, arranged and composed them like parts of a theorem because he worked on the principle that everything we could see we would interpret. We are like Jeffries in that way: we see costume, hairstyle, or a way of walking, and we start to read those things into some pattern or meaning. Most movies partake of that logic in a relentless way that is sometimes the opposite of documentary liberty. The whole thing, the view, is a setup.

And yet, there are moments even in
Rear Window
when documentary presence breaks through. When Lisa hunts for that ring, and when Thorwald starts to return, the suspense is based on the spatial reality, the way we see Thorwald and Lisa in the same apartment, with her life under threat. When Lisa flutters her hands behind her back to show Jeff—she knows he is watching—the ring she had found and put on her own finger, there is an insouciance, a cockiness, an impudent grace about the way she does it that is just Kelly; it's what we love about her. Now, Hitch was directing her, and he might have directed her more closely. But if you recast Lisa with Kim Novak (another Hitchcock actress of that moment), I think the gesture would be more awkward, more shy, more afraid, maybe. This is speculation, but it is a way of suggesting how many unique, natural things there can be—pieces of documentary, if you like—in any contrived and controlled movie.

But the moment Lisa has waggled her fingers, freedom is brushed aside by willful selection. For Thorwald notices the gesture, and traces the line of sight back to the apartment where Jeff is watching. He gazes into the film's camera with an unforgettable mixture of reproach and malice. It is the first time anyone in the courtyard has noticed Jeff—or us. So
Thorwald at last knows who has been spying on him and tormenting him, and who may bring him to justice.

Thorwald works his way through the building, searching for Jeff's apartment. We are as afraid as Jeff; we fear the worst. And that's where Hitch pulls a clever trick. The trapped beast in Thorwald opens the door, looks into the dark, and asks, “What do you want of me?” He is menacing, but he is pathetic. His question is unexpected, and it's fair to hear it as Hitch asking the voyeurs in the audience, Well, what
do
you expect of this wretched man? What obligation does the voyeur have to the thing spied on? Hitch barely hesitates over this question. He hurries into the climax and the contrived business of Jeff holding Thorwald at bay with exploding flash bulbs. But there, sixty years ago, the question was raised, and it means more now—why are we watching and what do we think we see? More than that: do we give the thing being seen a chance?

Now, I am not suggesting that Thorwald in
Rear Window
deserves to be excused or pardoned, just because he had a shrewish wife and a nagging spy on his trail. But consider watching or questioning in a larger context. In 1954, more or less, Americans were told that when they looked at Soviet Russia they saw an enemy; when they looked at Communism they easily imagined Reds under the bed or the threat of infiltrating power able to possess their own nuclear weapons; when they looked at Indochina (as it was known then) wasn't there the potential for a domino theory of Communist influence in southeast Asia? The most powerful and prosperous country in the world, the United States, was being warned to feel edgy or insecure—no matter that the Soviet Union and nationalist movements in Indochina had so much more to be afraid of. Communism means next to nothing now as a present
danger. But our public discourse, our watching, which had lately acquired television as a new way of seeing, was loaded then with messages and anxiety, so that the things being seen had little liberty to ask, Can't you see us for what we are? What dominating threats will be as faded away fifty years from now as Communism?

Today, the means of survey have become so much more thorough and expensive. We are realizing that our own state is so nervous it is inclined to watch us, too, and not just other nations. When watching is allied to technology, it knows very few restraints. So the pressure on “seeing,” as in trying to understand, becomes greater and far harder to sustain.