Installment 9 of the Journal of Manny Face
I write this as I watch the night cover Kyiv in snow. Know what I mean?
I’m home now, here, now, again; my home, a loft overlooking Lev Tolstoy Square. The windows the eyes of a turret that forms a corner of my flat; above me I see the snow dash furious against the skylight, as the clouds pass across the moon. Just a few blocks away, banners sweep the night, waving toward Europe.
For a moment, I think how embarrassing it would be if I sounded like Andrew The Plum, but I quickly banish the thought, recognizing its sheer nonsense.
Back in the Catskills, my cat, Red, who takes care of the place while I’m gone, which is often for years, greeted me with loving indifference, but while I watched the movies that had been laid out on the coffee table for me, she did condescend to honor me with the privilege of hopping into my lap for a spell.
When I called her a stupid bitch, the little whore purred lewdly and curled up into me.
The stack of VHS tapes held a lot of old films recorded years ago off of cable movie channels that have long blitzed out, thanks to the changing fortunes of capitalism, thanks to the Internet, thanks to time – “The Lady Vanishes”, “Imitation of Life”, “A Night to Remember”, “The Three Faces of Eve”, “Jezebel”, “Gaslight”, “Anne of the Thousand Days”…
But there was one tape that particularly caught my attention. On it were “The Philadelphia Story”, “His Girl Friday”, and “Notorious”, all starring Cary Grant, the only actor Manny Face admits is better looking than himself. Hands down, Grant was the best-looking actor on the Silver Screen – during its Golden Age and since – which is to say, ever. He’s one of a kind – the kind they don’t make anymore.
The two other Grant films were lots of laughs, but it was Hitchcock’s “Notorious” that drew me in, though in all three, in the end Grant gets the girl.
As I watched, the emerald studs in my ears throbbed, and then somehow “Notorious” turned into the key that unlocked my understanding of the studs, the reason for their throbbing, and Tango Baby. She, held hostage and brainwashed by The Hunched Cornish, was pregnant – with my kid. I did not know how I suddenly knew that, but I knew. And I knew I had to get her out of there, even if it killed me.
It was my baby. My baby.
And I suddenly knew I couldn’t let The Hunched Cornish see my glowing studs, for that would mean my death.
“But why would The Hunched Cornish know something about me I wouldn’t know myself, until now,” I asked.
“That’s just the way it is. We don’t know why,” they told me, as I held up Red and made her look into my eyes. “It’s not a knowledge he has, but instinctive on his part. Therefore, don’t let him see the emeralds – and you might still live.”
“Or I’ll die trying to make my death beautiful. Know what I mean?”
I threw the cat down and it hissed at me. It was contemptuous, resentful. It didn’t like being used. Fuck the cat. They always come back.
I knew my death by the agency of The Hunched Cornish would mean the death of my baby inside Tango Baby – a miscarriage, if it wasn’t born by the time I died – making The Hunched Cornish suddenly, though briefly, fecund and capable of impregnating her. Since age without end he is damned by the desert waste of his infertility, this is the single greatest pursuit of his existence – to procreate, to reproduce. Chances are extremely slim he would have been able to knock her up first – although he maintains the hope that he has done so. If that were the case, it might spare my life, but the world would be worse off with another Hunched Cornish in it. My ability to get her pregnant after that would not be impaired, although I would then not be able to break the exclusive hold he had on her. But if she gives birth to my kid first, his seed would never bear fruit inside her. His seed would not bear fruit in anyone – for a long, long time to come.
I finally understood why my life in all this meant nothing – because if it was to be sacrificed, it would be for the higher goal: to kill The Hunched Cornish – by killing his future.
Alfred Hitchcock’s 1946 black-and-white spy thriller and love story “Notorious”, starring Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman and Claude Rains, is a masterpiece of cinematographic art and a mesmerizing symphony of dramatic textures – not because of the story Hitchcock tells but because of what he does with his medium to tell it. Substance is given weight, depth, dimension, significance, and meaning, both symbolic on a number of levels and literal, through form.
Alicia (Bergman) is the post-War American daughter of a convicted and deceased Nazi spy. Devlin (Grant) is a U.S. government agent who recruits her to infiltrate a Nazi spy ring still at work after World War 2 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and find out what they’re doing.
There she meets Alexander Sebastian (Rains), whom she knows from her past and who had been in love with her, and, as it turns out, still is. He is an older, short, unattractive aristocratic Nazi loser still dominated by his mother and surrounded by his Nazi buddies.
Devlin and Alicia fall in love, but she marries Sebastian as a cover for her mission.
Naïve and seemingly good-natured, yet smugly and cagily resourceful, Sebastian is happy. He’s got the dream woman and the big Nazi secret all locked up under his roof, and, he thinks, under his control.
Their passion for each other blocked, Alicia and Devlin remain stoic and steely nerved in furtherance of their mission. Alicia’s psychological resources, which she just manages to keep in check under a feigned veneer of calm, are strained to breaking under the dual pressures of her duty to country, and love for Devlin, who pushed her into Sebastian’s bed, and keeping Sebastian happy as her husband and sexually fulfilled so he never suspects she is betraying his confidence all along. Devlin is melancholy, jealous, seething, bitter.
Alicia and Devlin discover black sand, which turns out to be uranium, in wine bottles in the wine cellar of Sebastian’s mansion. Clearly, the uranium was to be used to produce nuclear weapons, in furtherance of the lost Nazi cause.
Piecing together what’s happened, Sebastian needs to eliminate Alicia while leaving his own blunder in marrying her and becoming her dupe and pawn undetected by his buddies, who would undoubtedly kill him for the blunder. For if the consequences of the blunder were to get out, it would put an end to the great secret Nazi plot.
Sebastian discusses the situation with his mother, who advises him to slowly poison Alicia through her coffee.
Alicia realizes she is being poisoned just as she collapses and is then isolated in her room, where she lies on the bed unable to move – awaiting her death.
Devlin comes by and rescues her, walking her out of the mansion and in front of Sebastian and his buddies. For Sebastian, the jig is up. The buddies don’t know that something has gone terribly wrong, but after this, it’s obvious it has, and what’s Sebastian going to say: ‘Hey guys, everything’s okay…’?
I don’t think so.
Hitchcock’s jarring camera angles intensify not what the viewer sees, but what the viewer understands a character – usually Alicia – is seeing.
Sometimes we are allowed to become omniscient, as with the famous tracking shot from the top of the mansion’s stairs as the angle slowly narrows and we go from a top view of the guests at the grand party moving like chess pieces across the checkered floor to a tight shot of the wine cellar key stolen by Alicia from her husband’s key ring in her hand.
Hitchcock’s slow panning across scenes builds suspense and tension, but he uses his still shots to reveal strong emotions and states of mind, particularly the passion smoldering under the taut nerve-strained veneers of Devlin and Alicia when they are together and their faces caress and they kiss – and kiss… and kiss. The screen pulses with restrained and forbidden desire as the lighting and photography capitalize on Grant’s and Bergman’s beautiful, sensual looks and accentuate their superb acting. In each of their scenes, it is as if they play and willingly fall into the image being created of them by the filming, allowing not their capture, as Alicia and Devlin, or as Bergman and Grant playing these characters, but rather the capture of their desire and passion – like in a Greek myth, frozen in time forever. In each of the scenes, because the passion is so intensely isolated, we are practically drawn into intimate contact with it, and we believe it is real.
They suffer. We suffer. Know what I mean?
As I finish this review for The Checkout, Brian Eno’s “Here Come the Warm Jets” is just fading out on the player and his “Another Green World” is coming in. I stop typing just in time to look up at the skylight and see two pairs of cloven hooves crash through it.
I wonder how many times I will have to replace the glass simply to enjoy the serene peace and awesome beauty of the black night with its inexplicable stars.
Manny Face, December 29, 2013