Hitchcock’s Cryptonymies.
Volume 1: Secret Agents

Hitchcock’s Cryptonymies.
Volume 2: War Machines

By Tom Cohen

Minnesota, 2005

Reviewed by Joshua D. Gonsalves (English Department, Rice University)

“These are but wild and whirling wor[l]ds, my lord” Hamlet (1.5.139)

A difficult book, maddening, intense, unreadable in the classical sense: “No amount of knowledge can stop this madness,” as Paul de Man wrote, “for it is the madness of words” (“Shelley Disfigured”). The matter of philosophy, literature, film, and—most problematically—the history of the “world,” emerges, in Cohen’s wake, as what Hamlet’s answer to the idiot questioner (“What is that matter […] that you read, my lord?”) held it to be (or not)—“Words, words, words” (2.2.193, 195, 192; The Arden Shakespeare Complete Works, 1998) —or, rather, fragments of words—cryptic letters, anagrammatic numbers, “preletteral,” “prefigural,” “micrological and micrographic” marks, blurs & bars (such as Hitchcock’s signature parallel line motif ////, the slashed/slashing letters of the credit-sequence or générique to Psycho)— a trace-matter Cohen indefatigably tracks across Hitchcock’s entire canon (2. 104, 96; 1. 16). If fatigue is what the reader feels, this is only because Cohen’s basic premise is undeniable: intelligibility is destined to be forever disrupted by the errancy of ever-interpretable letters. This excess of meaning is not, however, the pluralistic liberal dream of an endless fund of significance, but only serves to indicate, once more, an emptiness at the core: the absolute ungroundedness of the human Nietzsche belatedly promised a century after Sade, Hegel, and Keats eviscerated (a favorite Cohen-word) the core of the earth as if in anticipation of Foucault’s reading of the Romantic-era as the uncovering of a finitude without repeal.

I do not mean that this cryptoanalysis, deeply influenced by Nietzsche and those he influenced in turn / Benjamin/Derrida/de Man/ is nihilistic. The reader, on the contrary, finds a version of Yeats’s Romanticism—“I shall find the dark grow luminous, the void fruitful when I understand I have nothing” (Per Amica Silentia Lunae)— an “embalmed darkness” (Keats) where the Romantic fetishization of the image begins—that is, we re-discover the artificially enhanced void of the cinema hall that Friedrich Kittler, central to Cohen’s analysis, has shown the other Friedrich’s experience of Wagner’s soul-assaulting spectacles to prophesize. “According to The Birth of Tragedy, a tragic hero, as inebriated spectators visually hallucinate him, is ‘at bottom no more than a luminous shape projected onto a dark wall, that is to say, appearance through and through.’ It is precisely this dark wall, which allows actors to turn into the imaginary, or film stars, in the first place,” as a result of “Wagner[’s]” “reduc[tion]” of “the bodies of actors (such as the Rhine maidens) to visual hallucinations or afterimages against the background of darkness” (Gramophone, Film, Typewriter [1986] 1999, 121).

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Nietzsche anticipates insight into what Cohen calls the “(a)materiality” of the cinematic image, an imaginary produced by material means—technology, capital, advertising, a directorial/dictatorial organization of skills, bodies, and resources (1. 37)—yet appearing as a shimmer in the darkness, a phantasmagoria of immaterialized bodies, hallucinatory screens ripe for identification on the part of an audience starving for affect due to the disenchanted or desertic world war-zone within which they “exist”. It is this “identification” of spectators with mimetic displays that Cohen critiques under the banner of Benjamin’s suspension of the “auratic habits” (1. 9) that rearticulate the “metaphysics of presence” (Derrida) Nietzsche declared war on.

For Derrida, letters fall to pieces, as in the “bewildering alternation” of “two terms,” “Angemessen(heit) and Unangemessen(heit), to the point where one can no longer tell them apart” (de Man, “Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant”). The fixity of meaning as a fabled substance collapses into a play of signifiers, yet philosophical significance was never visualizable except as metaphor, whereas the cinematic image is idiotically present, and continues to perpetrate ideological effects because we have not paid attention, as Cohen argues, to words on and off the screen, to letters as characterological identifiers, geo-graphical names, background detritus, canonical fetishes (the A. H. of Hitchcock it-self), starry-eyed signifieds (the blonde, for instance, an obsessive target for Cohen’s self-combustible analyses of idiotic masculinity), all adrift in what The Professor (a recurrent figure in the films) in North by Northwest (a Hamlet citation) calls an “alphabet soup” where F.B.I., C.I.A., and other shadowy agencies find themselves afloat in the seas of homeland insecurity (2. 19). In opposition to these agents of governance, discipline, and institutional control that police images of power so as to save meaning (“Meinung, in German,” my own meaning proper to me, or “what is ‘mine’ [mein]”) from the vomitus of language, Cohen poses the secret agency of letters A.K.A. the war-machine of the Hitchcock text in its eternal opposition to the reification of mere letteration—A. H.—as an all-authorizing signature, a sign of nature alleged to trump artifice: the AutHor (auteur) as the disavowed basis of film studies in spite of its consensual pretension to be a cult stud (1. 58).

War is a key trope for the secret agency of letters as they run across the screen in an unstoppable relay that undoes the fixity of any meaning. If Cohen sticks to eminently canonical citations over two dense tomes, he cannot be faulted for this, since only the high canonical-critical-cultural familiarity of Hitchcock enables truly estranging readings of philosophy, literature, film, and the global worlding of words to materialize. Hitchcock’s Cryptonymies focuses on under-read or condemned films, such as Secret Agent or To Catch a Thief, thereby querying the ideological blindness, doxa, or Meinung (opinion) that these films are inferior to Vertigo or The Birds, which is not to say that Cohen does not provide a “close reading” (a problematic term to which I will return) of the latter, or is that letter? Double takes are, in other words, de rigueur for following the winding Hitchcockian by-ways of the “materiality of the signifier” valorized by Lacan and de Man, an (a)materiality infinitely suspended between the all-explaining system of the one, and the endless impossibilities—reading, for example, or writing—relentlessly delineated by the other. There is, in sum, no center for Cohen’s cryptoanalyses, a regulative ideal many adherents of deconstruction mouth yet fail to practice.

Cohen’s books “begin” with an “impasse: ‘cinema’ was supposed to guard representa-tion, assure the eye’s domain and its mimetic transparency, be ‘coded as the real, the locus of truthful representation’ (Rodowick), yet, constituted by etched marks and shadow play on a translucent band, it above all exemplifies the priority of inscription over perception, memory over phenomenalization” (1.1) . If writing signifies in the absence of the writer’s ability to defend the philosophical forms s/he wishes to communicate—to Plato’s trauma and Derrida’s delight—this is even truer in the case of film, where mimetic forms are no more than the reproducible result of light captured on celluloid. If light, the ur-philosophic metaphor for gnosis, is now no more than dead matter, then the appearance of life on the screen (and in the consciousnesses it produces, say you or I) is reduced to what Cohen wittily defines as “the effect of animation” (1. 162), or the mere appearance of life (anima: life, air, breath, soul, mind).

If “Nietzsche’s notion of inscription” precedes the mirage of life, substance, or soul—afterimages all of what has never existed except as a retinal after-image (Kittler [1999] cited in Cohen 1. 19)—the cinematic inscription differs from textual inscription in that the illusion of vitality is more persuasive—as fetishistic responses to the star system testify—and more conducive to catalyzing interventions in the real. Witness John Hinkley’s shooting of an actor President to impress Jodie Foster—the ingénue in Taxi Driver—as if he were Travis Bickle or Robert De Niro in the same film. The possibility of an “epistemo-political” “intervention in history, altering (in retrospect, here [and now])” a simulacra-rich worldscape, is crucial for Cohen and is enabled by Hitchcock’s “archaeology of ‘global’ image culture,” a Foucauldian archeology enacted by his “first cameo in The Lodger (behind a glass partition in the vast telecommunications sequence, the newsroom’s production of print and the relay of public copy)” (1. 6, 2. 18, 1. xii, 1. 241).

“‘Hitchcock’ performs” this archeology, via “exploding cameos,” among other citational strategies, and the result is, according to Cohen, “a prehistory of the afterlife of ‘cinema,’” insofar as the cinema imperially contains all history on the model of the reading room in the British Museum deconstructed by Blackmail (1. 15, 239). Yet the cinema simultaneously deconstructs this epistemic claim by redrawing attention to the pre-historical non-origin of an ever-eviscerating, always already, inscription, since “if all begins with the trace, there is above all no originary trace” (Derrida, Of Grammatology [1967] 1976, 61). A Hitchcockian “[c]ameology” or “cameonom[y]” is formative for this deconstruction in that it blurs the distinction between diegetic and extra-diegetic (1. 241, 2: 261). If Hitchcock is both “real” and in the reel, then so are we. The real goes out the proverbial window (Gilles Deleuze).

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“Hitchcock” does not name, then, a center, but a text (life and oeuvre, history and aesthetic experience, fetish parades and signifier chains) to be read, mis-read, or over-read by the Überleser envisioned by the Romantic or seventies-era Harold Bloom, over-read into infinity, or, given the theological residue of that word, into the “intense inane” (P. B. Shelley). Cohen focuses on “two terms—bar and mark” (2. 257). The first is cinematic, like the extra-diegetic slash marks in the credits to Psycho, a “‘bar series’” (William Rothman) signature that diegetically recurs in the mimetic afterlife mummified on celluloid, in the form, for instance, of a “spiked fence” or “banister” (1. xvi). The second is literary, like the mark “Mar […] Marlow, Marvin, Mary, Marnie, Marion, Margot, Margaret, Murchison, Morton, Mark, and so on […] passing often through proper names to network marring, memory, ‘Mother,’ mer, mère, or materiality, the sea [mer] and,” of course, “sight [seeing]” (1. 58, 258).

The mark mars seeing as cinematic experience (“‘MUR/DER’ […] which elicits the French mur,” or light projected on a dark “‘wall’” [mur] ; 1. 258), re-immersing the “I” in “the era of the book” it thought it had “simply” transcended (2. 162). Yet the mark is also cinematic—i.e., the specially effected blurs standing in for birds in The Birds—and vice versa via the “word-syllable bar (Barbara, George Barbor, Detective Barton or Judy Barton, Barlow Creek, even Bertani and Bernice)” (1. 50). This cinematic blur series—exemplified by “‘the Bar at the top of the Mark’ (the hotel by that name in San Francisco),” a bar/mark that makes Jimmy Stewart vertiginous in Vertigo (2. 257)—s(p)lices the legibility of old-fashioned literacy to shreds, as is seen in the générique to Psycho and consummated in the murder of Marion Crane: Janet Leigh, pre-inscribed as the pin-up star-system girl incarnate (Rita Hayworth) by Welles’s Touch of Evil.

The [Hitch]cock’s violence against women is not read, in short, as misogynistic, but as “the evisceration of a program, the Western blonde as icon of European whiteness veered toward a violence through which a system had constructed and sacrificially fed itself” (2. 75). What is murdered is the obsession with the blonde as an icon of legible meaning, which is not to say that a feminist critique of Cohen might find this murder-critique to partake all too much in what it kills. So too, one wishes he had problematized his repeated invocation of Hitchcock’s violence against the viewer’s nostalgia for meaning as a “rape”. A feminist focus is, however, sharpened by Cohen’s interrogation of Žižek’s auteurist Lacanianism. The psychoanalytic “‘Mother’” is “eviscerate[d] by a mother who cannot be personified or given place […] a chain of marks or M- terms across Hitchcock’s writing” (2. 95). The “bog” where Norman (Normative Man) buries dead blondes in Psycho “does not contain 'Mother,'” instead it is the “site of [the] disarticulation of letters,” a pre-gendered condition for meaning’s possibility (Derrida’s khora for those keeping score), and not the explicatory crux, key, or closure that feminist, auteurist, and masculinist readers enjoy taking it to be (negatively, structurally, or positively, respectively; 2. 95).

Gender is another target. Cohen analyzes Mae West’s haunting of Hitchcock as a “female female impersonator” intent on a deconstruction of heteronormativity or “eunarchy”: an anarchic undoing of gendered signifiers into a sea of pre-meaning we can never see and that does not, therefore, exist in any sense (2. 69, 80). Then again, a “historian has to do not with what actually happened, but only with events supposed to have happened: for only the latter have produced an effect” (Nietzsche, Daybreak, Aphorism # 307, [1881] 1982, 156). Cohen also problematizes the all-too-easily visualizable globe-model of globalization by spinning it toward the planetary, or the earth, which, as in the later Heidegger, recalcitrantly juts into world, undoing pretensions to meaning via the chain George (Kaplan, a non-existent Signifier Zero misidentified as Cary Grant in North by Northwest)-geo-(earth)-“earth […] where that figure that will resolve itself into the bar motif” (1. 272). Some thing bars meaning, in short, no matter what we name it, yet the postcolonial critics Cohen cites vis-à-vis the planetary would undoubtedly desire closer analyses of the association of the bar with other races (“Lorre’s dark-skinned General” in Secret Agent or “the black-faced ‘drummer-man’” in Young and Innocent), as well an exegesis of the politico-economic situation in Mor-occo, site of the second Man Who Knew Too Much, as more than simply an allegory for dead labor (“impoverished sweatshop Fates”), “the destitution of Moroccan poverty,” or the desertification (once more!) of meaning (1. 137, 2. 243, 1: 215, 209).

But let me not pretend to occupy the position of someone who knows too much, especially since I have said all-too-little about Cohen’s solar redeployment of Nietzsche (“Zarathustran Hitchcock,” 1. 184-192), his virtuosic attention to the signifier, or his radical re-readings of the films. There is much to confound the ages in these volumes. “It is safe to say,” as William Rothman blurbs, “that no one who reads this book will ever look at any Hitchcock film in quite the same way again”. Cohen has transcoded literature and film, philosophy and theory, history and (post)-semiotics in an unimaginable manner. His recoding of the Hitchcockian critical tradition is refreshingly devoid of the polite meandering that often masquerades as collegiality. The reader is left with no idea what close reading Hitchcock might mean. Reading Hitchcock has become, once again, a challenge, rather than the reading-for-the-ideological-plot tactic that often limits cultural studies to non-readings of the director, or to a reiteration of “identity politics” as yet another auratic fetish concocted alongside “the home,” “the state,” and “the nonhuman other” to convince me that I exist, which is to say, that I consume (2. 265).

If it is counter-intuitive to read portly old Hitchcock—who once all but scolded Paul Newman for declining wine, a bourgeois fetish of which Hitch was much too fond, in favor of beer out of a can—as a secret agent in a war machined against the homeland, Cohen’s readings of the director’s war-themed and wartime propaganda films insist on this Hitchcockian agency’s ability to deconstruct the difference between the enemy and the homeland. Cohen “rewrite[s] the political as the semiotic,” even associating the cinema with “bombing,” deadly planes, “Benjaminian terrorists,” and a self-consuming suicide “time bomb” as transparent figures for interventionist modes of reading-negotiating the Jetztzeit or Now-Time (Viz. Sabotage; 1. 236, 145, 109, 149). How else to undo stubborn identifications with “telemediatized” machinations of meaning (1. xi)? Incipit “wartime itself as an arena of disincription or reinsciption” (2: 128).

I wish I could say that this is a readable book, since, given the current re(ag)gression contra Theory and the hunger for the fiction of a plain-speaking style, it is certain that Hitchcock’s Cryptonymies will elicit a negative reaction to what remains its strength: the pursuit of fragmentary letters—or, rather, the preletteral power of fragmentation as an anti-mimetic cutting and citational re-marking that we must mis-see in order to make meaning mean (or “mean,” i.e., violent, politically charged inventions). Yet Cohen is doing no more than taking “close reading” to its self-consuming conclusion as an alibi for a nimble subjectivity, an unsurpassable methodological horizon, and a pluralistic academic carnival (cultural studies), while simultaneously suspending the reliance of film studies on the auteur figure as a literary strategy for re-centering meaning’s drift.

Close reading, however, was never as close as it promised to be, for it restricted itself to what I like to call closure reading, or the reassertion of an end to the madness of words, for example, the saving grace of irony that rescues the reader from being caught in an unmasterable whirl of worlds. To be caught in this whorl (see Cohen’s excursus on “fingerprints” as an anonymous inscription of identity in Blackmail; 1. 82) is to be eviscerated by the worlding whipped into a frenzy of the visible by the screens that surround us without any recourse to an exit strategy. Irony, be it Romantic, Modernist, Post-Modern, or what you will, emerges as irrelevant to this brave new century. Cohen’s texts remind readers that critics are readers, that everything must be proven on the level of the letter, or, cinematically speaking, on this level insofar as it is traversed by preletteral marks/bars (…diegetic…extra-diegetic…distinctions blur…), as well as by the post-identificatory figures (human, animal, technological, tele-technical) projected by the cinema’s interminable interaction with the zombie life of word, words, wor-lds: war, mar/nie-tzsche X

Tom Cohen participated in the Nietzsche Circle’s first film screening for their film and discussion series, Nietzsche & Cinema. Along with Richard Allen of NYU’s Dept. of Cinema, Mr. Cohen chose for this screening Alfred Hitchcock’s seminal film, Rope.

Mr. Cohen’s other works include Anti-Mimesis from Plato to Hitchcock (Cambridge UP, 1994), Ideology and Inscription: "Cultural Studies" after Benjamin, de Man, and Bakhtin (Cambridge UP, 1998), Material Events: Paul de Man and the Afterlife of Theory, Contributing Editor (University of Minnesota Press, 2000), and Jacques Derrida and the Humanities: a Transdisciplinary Reader, Contributing Editor (Cambridge UP, 2002). A recent related article is “Zarathustran Birds: Hitchcock's 'Nietzsche,'” in Nietzsche and the Genealogy of Media, ed. Laurence Rickels (forthcoming).

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