Hitchcock's bubbles

In Robin Wood’s 1981 intro­duc­tion to his sem­in­al study of Howard Hawks, Wood cites “an extreme and habitu­al self-consciousness” as a char­ac­ter­ist­ic of mod­ern art, one to which he has an ambi­val­ent response; cit­ing Losey’s Eve, a film he expresses a qual­i­fied admir­a­tion for, he enu­mer­ates sev­er­al shots con­tain­ing an “insist­ence on sig­ni­fic­ance.” The most egre­gious, to Wood’s mind, being a “waste of a whole cam­era move­ment” to show the view­er that a char­ac­ter in the film is read­ing Eliot.

“This kind of thing is so ali­en to Hawks that I am almost at a loss to find any­thing in his films suf­fi­ciently like it to make dir­ect com­par­is­on pos­sible,” Wood con­tin­ues. “[B]ut there is one such moment in Red Line 7000. Julie (Laura Devon), the sheltered young­er sis­ter of a race-team man­ager, sits wait­ing for her lov­er, one of the drivers, who has in fact left her. She waits most of the night, with an opened bottle of cham­pagne on the table before her, and when her broth­er comes to find her, and tells her he has seen her boy-friend out with oth­er women, she looks at the bottle and mur­murs that the bubbles are all gone. It’s not a pro­found bit of sym­bol­ism, but the point is that Hawks does­n’t treat it as if it were. It arises nat­ur­ally from the scene[…]”

The scene, and Wood’s descrip­tion of it, crossed my mind recently when I watched a restored ver­sion of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1927 melo­drama The Ring, play­ing tomor­row night on the big screen of the Harvey Theater as part of BAM’s present­a­tion of nine silent movies by the mas­ter dir­ect­or. The Ring is an unusu­al Hitchcock pic­ture in sev­er­al respects. For one thing, it’s the only Hitchcock pic­ture for which he is cred­ited as the screen­writer; for anoth­er, it’s not a sus­pense or crime pic­ture but rather an odd romance in which an up-and-coming box­er has to cope with an imposed romantic rivalry. The movie’s sexu­al polit­ics seem a mix of the ten­or of the times and Hitchcock’s own dam­age, and will no doubt prove scin­til­lat­ing to some latter-day observ­ers, but are not the con­cern of this consideration. 

There’s an extent to which what may be con­sidered sym­bol­ism and what is in fact meta­phor may smear into each oth­er, the way chocol­ate smears into pea­nut but­ter. Near the cli­max of The Ring, the prot­ag­on­ist, Carl Brisson’s Jack, wins an import­ant bout, and he and his cronies repair to his place to cel­eb­rate. The absence of Jack’s wife, known in the film only as “The Girl” (Lillian Hall Davis, and what did I tell you about the pic­ture’s sexu­al polit­ics?) is noted, but Jack assures the fel­las that she ought to be back soon. In the mean­time, cham­pagne! Jack pours it out. 

What then fol­lows, in a mat­ter of mere seconds, via a series of meticulously-executed dis­solves, is a visu­al account of the bubbles going…

…and going…

and there they are, gone. And in the event you needed more emphas­is on the lit­er­al, meta­phor­ic­al, and per­haps sym­bol­ic fact, Hitchcock dis­solves once more, to the whole tray of flat drinks. 

(N.b., the screen cap­tures here are from a 2007 DVD issue of the film, not the excel­lent res­tor­a­tion BAM will be run­ning.)  What Hitchcock accom­plishes with this effect, the eco­nomy of which belies what must have been some pretty elab­or­ate pre­par­a­tion in order to pull off, is kind of remark­ably mul­ti­valent. Via the dis­solve, he sculpts in time, demon­strat­ing its passing while also show­ing the life, the live­li­ness, going out of the ostens­ible cel­eb­ra­tion. Jack’s vic­tory is an empty one, because his wife is in fact out on the town with his rival…the man he will, as the scen­ario has it, have to face in the title ring for the final, you know, showdown.

The cham­pagne effect is one of the most strik­ing in a movie that is full of cine­mat­ic storytelling touches that were innov­a­tions at the time and sub­sequently became part of the lin­gua franca. Most of the pleas­ure to be had from The Ring today is see­ing Hitchcock work­ing out his ideas; his cine­mat­ic appar­at­us, while remark­ably assured, isn’t entirely refined. But there’s a raw exuber­ance to the way he throws one effect after anoth­er. For the next thirty-plus years of his career, you nev­er see that enthu­si­asm flag, but you do see it applied more vir­tu­osic­ally. While this movie plays awk­wardly to that bug­a­boo of cinephil­ia, the “con­tem­por­ary sens­ib­il­ity,” it’s also entirely clear that in The Ring,  Hitchcock isn’t just learn­ing the ropes, he’s mak­ing them.