Sexuality In North By Northwest

Sexuality In northerly By northwestWhile the frozen fight conjured diverse anxieties, I will center my presentation on the idea of Domestic Contain handst, specifically the containment of homo g subverter in the States (Cohan). I came crosswise this concept in Elaine Tyler Mays Homeward Bound. It deals with the political and ideological reasons 1950s America insisted on promoting rigid hetero internal activity and capitalist drives, ridding itself of backward men and communistic traitors, something entirely in line with Hitchcocks mission in the delineationMoreover, by invoking the homophobic categories of dust-covered War political discourse, in particular the construction of the homosexual as a issuing area security put on the line, N by NW virtually guaranteed that gender and nationality functioned as mutually reinforcing categories of identity.In this presentation, I will prove sexuality as related to ideas of nation-hood and argue that there is a mini cold war unive rse waged in North by Northwest, one that deals specifically with pass on the Ameri merchantman straight couple over the Soviet homosexual one coded by means ofout the germinate. With the American, heterosexual couples triumph on screen comes an ideological victory for America in 1959. chuteBefore I analyze clips and stills from North By Northwest that deal with currents of sexuality and nationality, I wanted to show this clip from the last mentioned half of the film to show that Hitchcock makes it abundantly clear that we are supposed to tell North by Northwest as a crisp War film pertain with sexuality. CLICKI want you to take away from this clip the obvious language of the cold war as well as how sexuality or bedding down is wrapped up in this international struggle.In this way, North by Northwest presents in biting reverberate America immersed in moth-eaten War ambiguity in which people on two sides were served up as sacrificial lambs.N by NW was made and released dur ing the latter phase of the second term of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a time when the Cold War was in full force, with the US and rival Soviet Union utilizing the most sophisticated spy techniques.This new kind of war required constant vigilance and readiness to fight on a moments notice. The Cold War lasted longer than any other war in our countrys history, starting when the United States introduced nuclear terror to the world by dropping its first atomic bomb on Japan on August 6, 1945, and lasting into our conducttime with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.Although the Cold War shaped and misshapen virtually every aspect of American life, perhaps more than anything else, nuclear weapons changed the world. With them, an element of vulnerability existed unlike anything in history.Nuclear threat escalated during the 1950s, the decade were concerned with today. In August 1949 the Soviets had their first successful nuclear bomb test. Both the US and the Soviet Union held hy drogen bomb tests in 1952 and 53 and in October 1957 the Soviets launched Sputnik.Americas nuclear buildup, global mobilization, and interventionism during the Cold War were justified in the name of stopping Soviet fabianism, a foe policymakers deemed so diabolical that its defeat warranted the risk of destroying civilization itself.The detail that the Soviet Union was not just a military, economic, and geopolitical scarce an ideological foe, posed a unique kind of gainsay to a resolutely capitalistic nation.This ideological antagonism mingled with socialism and capitalism polarized the world along new lines.And it is against this backdrop that Hitchcock gave birth to his suspense thriller North by Northwest. soaringCertain historical trends and demographics are crucial to understand before analyzing the films comments on sexuality.During the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s, an amazing rise in the birth rate, a declining age of marriage, a growth in the marriage rate, and l ow divorce rate all converged in the midst of the most intemperate years of nuclear fear and ideological and surrogate warfare.Since family formation and fertility respond to both positive and negative economic and cultural stimuli, it is not affect that this era of comparatively good times brought increased marriage and fertility.At the same time, however, increased sexual activity at younger and younger ages, particularly for women in the late 1950s and beyond, problematically, included increasing instances of pre-marital sexThus the history of sexuality in postwar America is the story of increasing looseningMen, overly, participated. The rebellion of men against marriage and the increasingly permissive fantasy life associated with the playboy lifestyle of the late 1950s, appears to be the kind of life our protagonist and hero, Cary Grants flake Roger Thornhill, ascribes to.And, in terms of female rebellion, perhaps even more dismantling is the sexual promiscuity of even Ken dall, played by Eva Marie Saint.Thornhill is typed as a womanizer, with two failed marriages to boast of, and Eve, as if completely aware of the expectations of her 1950s culture, introduces herself to Thornhill curtly stating that shes 26 and unmarried, and thats all he chooses to know.SLIDEExamining domestic containment in relation to national identity has multiple advantages.It allows us to see that what we have heretofore regarded as a unique Cold War phenomenon was in incident part of the larger, on-going process of defining America.The very meaning of America had become large(p)ly problematized in the 1950s.Perhaps this instability of American identity is why Hitchcock constantly reasserted distinctly American values and American locations throughout North by Northwest, on screen are just a few of the most memorable sites Hitchcock takes us. improviseI will present many facets of North by Northwest that deal specifically with America and American life in order to kick upstairs ground the containment of homosexuality as a Cold War strategy in the film.I first want to discuss the opening credits of the film. judgement Hitchcocks brilliant beginning gives us-the viewers and our class today-a lens through which to understand Hitchcocks understanding of Cold War America, homophobia, heterosexuality and communism.SLIDEDesigned by American graphic designer and Academy award winning filmmaker Saul Bass, the credits provide a kind of map meant to locate or eastward the spectator. A serial of intersecting lines, clearly intended to invoke a map or graph, traverse a blank screen placed at an angle to the camera. They eventually dissolve into a shot of an office building whose glass and steel faade reflects the moving traffic on the busy lane below.The mirror like surface of the faade that emerges from the intersecting lines functions as a screen on which the images of the busy street below are not so much reflected as projected. Consequently, jibe to R obert Corber in his withstand In the Name of National Security Hitchcock, Homophobia, and the Political Construction of Gender the opening titles seem to call forth that, as a semiotic practice, the film has the ability to organize and define naturalism, to construct a map of it that fixes its meaning for the spectator.In this way, they call attention to the artificiality or constructed-ness of the films betation of reality. It provides the spectator with coordinates that enable him/her to locate and define his/her position in the world and thereby make understanding of it-a concept integral to audience receipt that we have discussed at length this semester, and that I will touch on in greater depth shortly.By beginning in this way, according to Corber, the film demonstrates its ability to conjure reality, to construct a representation of the world that the spectator does not question but assumes accurately reflects contemporary society b/c of its perceptual intensity or so-ca lled impression of reality thus, from the beginning, we are meant to assume that Hitchcock s representation of America in 1959 is how it really was.Another authoritative element of the films beginning is that our protagonist Roger Thornhill appears as if plucked from the crowd at random, as he is initially shown emerging from an elevator jammed with office workers. He is completely typical of New Yorks crowded people, lacking direction. Indeed, purely by accident, he is kidnapped shortly after he arrives at the hotel by two of Vandamms men, who slip ones mind him for the fictitious American agent George Kaplan. Thus, Hitchcock makes us hypothecate that anyone of us, too, could have been sucked into this crazy plot.One other interesting thing to glean from the title sequence is that it alludes to the traps in which the protagonists find themselves throughout the film as well as frames the films trajectoryThis grid recurs throughout the film, in railway cars, deserted prairie cross roads, and national monuments.From the very beginning, moreover, I want you to note that the film is an exploration of Cold War AMERICA, as seen in the vertical top shots of the Madison Avenue skyscraper, UN headquarters and Mount Rushmore and the plane shots of the railway car and of the empty Midwestern planeI will now show a hilarious trailer for North by Northwest from 1959, which gives a brief but comprehensive geographical tour of Hitchcocks locations, which I wont have time to flesh out on my own in this presentation, but are extremely important.SHOW TRAILER HERESLIDEHaving recently discussed how the opening credits situate and control the spectators view of the film, and, by extension, personate the Cold War climate according to Hitchcocks construction, I want to specifically link this form of control with the viewers sexual identification.Hitchcocks films contributed in outright to the pathologizing of same-sex eroticism by suggesting that in order for the individual to a chieve a relatively stable heterosexual identity she/he had to successfully negotiate the Oedipus complexBecause Hitchcocks films occupied the subject position, the spectator became complicit with her/his own Oedipalization, which, in the 1950s, was tantamount to accepting the terms of the postwar settlement.By examining N by NW in the context of the postwar settlement, I want show to that Hitchcocks films participated in a regime of pleasure that helped to consolidate the emergence of the national security state.His representational practices were complicit with the dominant construction of social reality during the Cold War era. Hitchcocks tendency to subjectivize the individual spectators experience constitutes one of the principal links b/w his films and the anti-Stalinist project of American Cold War officials.Thus, in N by NW, Hitchcock demonstrated how the discourses of national security produced fantasies that brought the individual spectators desire into alignment with the nations security interests.SLIDENow I will move into the spunk of my presentation the politicization of sexuality.The Cold War persuaded millions of Americans to interpret their world in terms of insidious enemies who threatened them with nuclear and other forms of annihilation.McCarthyism contributed heavily to viewing the world through this dark, distorting lens and setting global and domestic policies to counter these threats.According to the Federal Government, if homosexuals felt alienated from mainstream American society, that was b/c they were maladjusted, their problems were not political but personal and were best remedied in a doctors office.On the other hand, however, the dominant discourse of same sex eroticism tried to show that homosexuality promoted communism and therefore politicized gay identities.The gay community, which had emerged with new cohesion and visibility in the wake of World War II, found itself a prime target for anticommunist crusaders.It was believed that they were curiously vulnerable to blackmail by Soviet agents eager to recruit intelligence sourcesAs a result, the early 1950s witnessed widespread purging of homosexuals from the State Department, the military, and other federal agencies.However, more than just a greater risk of blackmail was involved. Homosexuals were seen as deficient in character, moral integrity, and real masculinity. Unfit as Cold Warriors, they were thus undesirable citizens.This stigmatization, as historian John DEmilio points out in his study of Cold War sexual politics, was carried still further by hidebound politicians who linked homosexuality directly to communism, re-conceptualizing homosexuality as a contagious disease spread by communists to weaken the nation from within.A single homosexual, officials maintained, could easily contaminate an entire government office. The oppression of homosexuals at all levels became yet another act of containment in the fight against communism.Homosexuals, fu rther, were seen as especially dangerous to the close that a gay male character was virtually indistinguishable from straight male ones, thereby demonstrating that homosexuals, like communists, could dangerously escape detection.During its highly publicized hearings in the 1940s and early 1950s, the House UnAmerican Activities Committee did not limit its investigation to the Communists who had supposedly infiltrated the federal Government, but extended it to include homosexuals who passed as heterosexual. On the institution of testimony from psychiatrists and other medical experts who testified that they were unprotected to blackmail by Soviet agents b/c they were emotionally unstable, thus officially pinning homosexuals as national-security risks.The payoff of the Kinsey reports on male and female sexual behavior, in 1948 and 53 respectively, only reinforced the politicization of homosexuality. The reports provided scientific evidence suggesting that sexual identities were flui d and unstable rather than entirely and permanently heterosexual or homosexual. In recognizing the fluidity of sexuality, hindering the attempts of gays to define themselves as members of an oppressed minorityThe pervasive allusions to homosexuality in North by Northwest enables me to stress the centrality of the politicization of same-sex eroticism to post-war American culture and to show that containment of homosexuality was necessary to conditions of the Cold War.Thus, North by Northwest epitomizes this tight bond between sexuality and national security in the Cold War era.SLIDENow I will begin my abridgment of sexuality in the film with what I call a montage of references to homosexuality.When looking at these stills from the movie, keep in mind how Cary Grant, our dashing American protagonist, too, can be wrapped up with homosexuality, speaking to the pervasiveness and dangers of homosexuality infiltrating American lives.SLIDEThe films drama basalally begins with Roger Thorn hill going to an all-mens bar in the Plaza Hotel. Although he has a date for that evening, it is with his mother no less, a problem I will discuss shortlySLIDEThe theme of the kidnapping of the hero, Thornhill, by two sinister men, with the hero often sit in a car, tightly between them, recurs throughout the film in myriad forms. Pictured above are just a few examples that represent this theme of Thornhills encounters with homosexuality. CLICK FOUR TIMES.SLIDENow we arrive at the Villain Phillip Vandamms home who is played by George Mason.I want you to keep this seemingly benign image on screen in mind throughout the remainder of my presentation.While no scholar has mentioned the significance of the cars pulling into Vandamms gate, I think this action is importantly mirrored in the iconic ending of the film that I will show later.For now, however, just keep in mind that a car driven by a man and with our protagonist squished tightly b/w two other men in the backseat, penetrates th e gate to a Soviet home.SLIDEVandamm, the lead villain, unsurp rebellionly is connected with homosexuality. His masculinity should be suspect because of his relationship with his sadistic, overtly homosexual associate, Leonard, played by Martin Landau, who Hitchcock notes in the screenplay should be read as gay.The slide above features Leonard, with the help of two male henchmen, forcing the neck of a liquor bottle between Thornhills lips, making him drink its full contents-an plainly phallic reference of homosexual rapeSLIDEAs I noted a few minutes ago, a central facet of the politicization of sexuality in the 1950s, came with associating homosexuality with communism.While Hitchcock doesnt specifically mention the country of origin of the foreigners in the film, he locates Vandamms home importantly in Glen Cove, New York.This location directly implies that Vandamm and his associates are from the Soviet Union, who at the time had a mission in that town on northern Long Island. This fact sheds particular light on the stills of homosexuality I am showing, as they are directly linked with communism.Further, later in the film, the Professor describes Vandamm as an importer exporter of government secrets, thereby coding him as a Soviet agent involved in the Cold War.SLIDEBefore I move on to show and discuss the famous spraying scene-the scene I regard as the most compelling, and famous, visual representation of the threat of homosexuality to our protagonist-I essential first discuss another aspect of Thornhills inapplicable sexuality his unhealthy relationship with his mother.In order to Contain Thornhill and set him on the proper sexual path, his relationship with his mother needs to severely change.The basic mother-son story line goes as follows the film opens with an ageless male, Thornhill, identifying himself first of all as a son.He speaks of his efforts to keep the smell of liquor on his lead from the watchful nose of his mother, and he comes to the att ention of his enemies because of an unresolved anxiety about getting a message to his mother, whereupon he is taken captive. (Cavell)Hitchcock suggests that Thornhills involvement in the Communist underworld, an underworld marked by sexual as well as political deviance, is not purely coincidental but is indirectly related to his idolatry to his mother. The film tries to show that b/c he has failed to internalize the Law of the Father and remains emotionally dependent on his mother, there is a sense in which his irresponsible behavior is complicit with the Communist infiltration of the American government.The discourses that linked communism and homosexuality actually warned against the potentially pernicious effects of motherhood specifically and point to a reaction against the emergence of the feminine mystique of the 1950s.On the one hand, as we have seen throughout seminar, post-war American culture experienced a proliferation of proclaim representations of motherhood designed to lure women back into the home following the war. On the other hand, many Americans resented the glorification of motherhood b/c it gave women supposedly too much power in the domestic sphere.With the outbreak of the Cold War, Mom-ism too became linked to the spread of communism and led to the creation of a demonology of motherhood. Suddenly, mothers risked making their sons susceptible to Communist propaganda.The discourses of mom-ism limited womens empowerment in the domestic sphere and ensured that their child-rearing practices conformed to the nations security interests. For, if women disregarded the expert advice of psychiatrists and other trained professionals, they risked producing children who were Communists as well as homosexuals.In N by NW this aspect of the demonization of motherhood is obvious in Thornhills relationship with his mother.Thornhills sexual immaturity thus is incompatible with the nations security interest. In the postwar period, the nations political sta bility and economic prosperity were thought to depend upon the production of subjects who had internalized the rules and regulations governing Oedipal desire. Thus Thornhill was not so different from the films Communists and homosexuals.ADLIB-mom younger than Grant, problematic.SLIDETo close this section on homosexuality, I want to look at the famous scene where Thornhill is attacked by a crop-dusting plane. This iconic sequence of events is both the central image of Thornhills victimization and surprisingly, or unsurprisingly as my presentation is attempting to prove, a powerful instance of homosexual attack.The night before this scene takes place Thornhill and Eve violate a taboo. We know that Thornhill spent the night with Eve, boldly and obviously suggesting pre-marital intercourse.I understand the attack Im about to show, which once again occurs the very side by side(p) day, to be a powerful visualization of punishment for intercourseCLICK SHOW CLIPCLICK AFTERThe linkage of thi s scene with sexuality is unmixed in Hitchcocks filming. The association of the prairie with the sexual landscape of the train compartment where Thornhill and Eve had sex the night before is signaled by his camera shots.Right before the clip I just showed, a close-up of Eves face at the train station dissolved into an aerial shot of the road and fields of the plane attack, explicitly linking these scenes.This shot convert begs for an allegorical identification of the woman and this stretch of land, the very land where Thornhill undergoes his attack.To discuss this scene I will rely on the analysis of Theodore Price from his book Hitchcock and Homosexuality. He notes that firstly, we must note the phallic symbolism associated with birds and of flying objects in general.According to Price, aside from the birds shape, and its darting, pecking beak, a bird is, to everyones unconscious, a phallic symbol because it flies. trajectory excessively is a symbol for getting an erection, for potency, and for sexual intercourse in general according to Ernest Jones.Thus, in a way, the crop-dusting plane scene can conjure undertones of homosexual rape from above. There are several meanings that arise when looking at this scene from this angle.1) This scene could represent a fear on the part of Thornhill of homosexual rape-and/or fear in his strange attraction to homosexual rape. This connection is clear especially when considering the homosexual rape still I showed earlier of Leonard forcing liquor down Thornhills mouth. The phallic bird-plane then may be interpreted as Grants fear of his former attraction to homosexuality as he starts out on still another new love affair with a woman.2) The plane could also stand for the avenging phallus of the father figure in the film, here Vandamm, who is understandably angry at the son figure, Thornhill, for making time with the mother figure, Eve.3) Additionally, the sequence could mean that the plane represents the Castrator, Eve, who set him up in the corn field to begin with. For, from the psychoanalytic view, birds can be woman or vagina symbols too.SLIDERegardless of which way we read this scene, a powerful avenging phallus, sent by Communists, launches its bullets-take this fact as an allusion to ejaculation-at our male hero. Luckily for Thornhill, he finds safety in the cornfields of America-which, in my opinion, represents finding protection from this Communist phallus in the heartland of America.SLIDEHaving catalogued countless instances of the front man and associated dangers of homosexuality in the film, I now need to show how these dangers were contained by the insistence on heterosexual couple.To do so, I will use Mays analysis of 1950s Domesticity in Homeward bound.In this work, May linked the exaggerated domesticity that characterized the long fifties-from 1945-1965-that weve discussed at length in seminar to homosexuality and anticommunist imperatives.May readily acknowledge the extraordinary stresses placed upon the American family by the Great Depression and World War II.Postwar Americans, finding additional threats to traditional family life in rising rates of out-of-wedlock pregnancy and sexual promiscuity, as I discussed before, juvenile delinquency, as Willi discussed two weeks ago, and the ultimate threat of nuclear war, Americans understandably sought normalcy in marital sex, pro-natalism, and suburban domesticity during this time.Further, just as anticommunism required the containment of Sino-Soviet expansion abroad, so, too, May argued, gender revolution and deviant expression of sexual desire had to be effectively contained at home, hence domestic containment.Promotion of family values, policymakers believed, would ensure not only a place for men to return to the workforce, but also the stable family life necessary for personal and national security, a kind of Cold War victory on the domestic front.Hitchcock too received the memo, as he promoted the heterose xual couple throughout the film.Hitchcock, by associating homosexuality with the soviets coded as communists, both comments on its pervasiveness of both groups in America at that time and establishes it as the inferior sexual bond that must be checked and contained by the heterosexual couple.Thus, no mere exercise in nostalgia, domestic containment was part of a new Cold War consensus about the meaning of America and deeply embedded in the plot of North by Northwest.Now Im going to show you a series of slides that blatantly show the heterosexual couple of Thornhill and Eve. CLICK AND ADLIBSLIDEWhen contextualized within the domestic politics of marriage during the cold war, heterosexuality and Re-Marriage take on great importance.We come to see that Thornhill and Eves adventures throughout the film serve as trials for their suitability to get married.Eve is sexually immature before she becomes an agent for the American government, according to the terms of the postwar settlement. Al though she is partially redeemed by acting as an American agent-showing her willingness to perform her patriotic duty-she nevertheless continues to occupy a position outback(a) the law.This is so because to perform her patriotic duty she must violate the rules that govern female sexuality in the 1950s, making her only partly rehabilitated.She is a treacherous little tramp and uses sex like a fly swatter according to the movie so she remains a marked woman throughout.However, when Thornhill rescues her from Vandamm, he enables her to do something genuinely worthwhile for the nation become a proper wife and motherThe relationship b/w gender and nationality suggests that Thornhills activities as an American agent also need to be reconstructed according to the post-war settlement.His activities as an American agent create a scenario that puts an end to his womanizing.Thornhills mix-up within the CIAs efforts to attack communism actually increases his desire for marriage and domestic ity. To Thornhill, the domestic sphere not only provides a refuge from the government which has recklessly endangered his and eves lives, but also constantly restages his pre-Oedipal attachment to his mother.In this way, his espionage activities ensure that the organization of sexuality and his identity as a citizen are mutually reinforcing.Thus, Hitchcock stresses the ability of the American government to learn and control the construction of the individuals subjectivity-as it is only once he is involved in its activities that he is redeemed. According to the discourses of national security then, Thornhills resistance to his role as a husband is un-American, and his activities as an American reorganize him as a proper citizen.This scene shows how the series of events that have unfolded have transformed both protagonists views of marriage, and suggest that re-marriage in the name of national security is on the horizon. CLICK SHOW CLIPAs you just saw Thornhill uses the loaded word p roposal that explicitly suggests marriage. Also, they discuss his former failed marriages, alerting the viewer that we are dealing with re-marriage here. Also, Cary Grants sly wit about leading too dull a life suggests that as a result of his involvement in matters of state, he has achieved a level of excitement suitable for marriage and can now enter into a proper relationship.SLIDEI want to show you a series of images and a clip from the end of the film that pit homosexuality explicitly against heterosexuality. With their placement at the end of the film they attain great significance, suggesting that the winner of this sexual battle is the victor in a mini cold war.In addition, I show images with men and women, homosexuals and heterosexuals, in these clips, to show both strains of sexuality at odds within a single frame.SLIDEBefore I show these stills and clips, I need to discuss the importance of the Vandamm house itself, where the majority of these clips take place.Situated in a fictitious forested plateau atop the Mount Rushmore, Vandamms house dominates a devotional shrine of American democracy-its positioning alone reveals how even Americas most iconic monuments are endangered by Soviet penetration.Further, the houses Midwestern location-in the Black Hills region, come on Keystone, South Dakota, is also important. The move toward the west, evoked by the films title, brings the protagonists to the American heartland, the spine of the continent.Additionally, the houses placement atop a mountain has wider implications. It expresses visual domination and panoptic control. The fact that blatant homosexuality pervades a site that serves simultaneously as a great threat to an iconic American monument and exerts intense control, suggests how dangerous the threats of homosexuality and communism have at once become at the end of the film.CLICK THROUGH CLIPS and ad-libCLICK, SHOW CLIPIn this clip, we see Leonard employ phrases like his womans intuition aligning himself with homosexuality, or femininity at the least and Vandamm noting that hes touched by jealousy.SLIDENow I would like to move into the net phase of my discussion a comprehensive discussion of Mount Rushmore, and the battle between the US and Soviet Union that occurs atop its democratic faces.First and foremost, we must understand Mount Rushmore to be a place so definitely and undeniably American.Using a carved rock containing the gigantic granite portraits of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham capital of Nebraska as a backdrop, Hitchcock suggests that what happens there is of NATIONAL IMPORTANCE.After a few savvy moves, Thornhill and Eve leave Vandamms house and find themselves atop monument being chased by Vandamm, Leonard and their henchmen.