Projections and Intersections: Paranoid Textuality in Sorry, Wrong Number

Plots originate in knots, and knots are created when the lines circumscribing the worlds of the narrative universe, instead of colliding, intersect each other. In order to disentangle the lines in their domain, characters resort to plotting, with the almost inevitable effect of creating new knots in some other domain.

—Marie-Laure Ryan, Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory

Telephones are funny things.

—Policeman in Sorry, Wrong Number

Initial Connections

While telephones may well be funny things, they are not always a laughing matter. This certainly holds true for the 1943 radio drama, Sorry, Wrong Number, in which this line is first spoken, as well as for the 1948 film adaptation, which repeats it. ¹ In both, the telephone functions as a suspenseful connection to anxiety, hysteria, and paranoia—it is "funny" only in the peculiarly excessive investments made in it. The prologue to the film version—a printed text that crawls up the screen over a shot of switchboard operators—speaks best to how the phone slips from a signifier of comfort (if not actually humor) to a harbinger of doom:"In the tangled networks of a great city, the telephone is the unseen link between a million lives. ... It is the servant of our common needs—the confidante of our inmost secrets ... life and happiness wait upon its ring ... and horror ... and loneliness ... and death!!!"The importance of the telephone extends beyond the brute materiality of an object; its power is projected into a network of connections, a system of meanings that, as presented in these specific film and radio texts, proves fatally tangled. In both (but in different ways), the telephone lets characters plot their schemes, while it also allows for the intersection, interruption, and interpretation of those plots.

Indeed, the phone itself becomes an agent in this diegetic plotting and, more crucially, in the broader narrative plotting that helps constitute these texts, ultimately contributing to what I call their paranoid textuality. Paranoid textuality does not simply depict characters suffering from paranoid (and ultimately "false") delusions. Nor does it merely present a paranoid diegesis in which all is connected to persecute a protagonist. Instead, paranoia becomes a dynamic element in textual and, especially, narrative discourse—in the narrating voice, as Gérard Genette would say. ² Thus what might otherwise seem to be the delusions of a particular character become realized in the textual system itself. In other words, within their fictional (and even nonfictional, though I will not deal with that here) worlds, paranoid texts nearly always demonstrate the "truth" of the conspiracies they depict. ³

Paranoid texts are more than collections of symptomatic tropes. Paranoia is basic to their narrative and textual structures, and in the texts I will focus on here, the telephone is the medium through which their paranoid narrative discourse is intermediated and articulated. The device allows the realization of delusion in the textual system and the mediation of agency within that system. It also serves as a transmediational link between the original radio production and the film adaptation (both scripted by Lucille Fletcher). These two texts plot paranoia somewhat differently, however: the radio play depicts a networked system that threatens its protagonist, while the film seeks a clearer motivating agent within that system. ⁴ The questions concerning narrative agency raised by the telephone in both cases have wider implications as well in that they deal with the relationship between enacted monstration and recounted narration in performative texts. More important, they directly address debates in film studies that pit abstract narrative systems against more personalized narrators. David Bordwell's dismissal of the filmic narrator as an "anthropomorphic fiction" stands out in this context, though, as we shall see, that fiction still strongly animates both popular and academic interpretations of texts. ⁵

In the two versions of Sorry, Wrong Number, the textual and mediational entanglements are also tied to the knot of sexual difference. The female protagonists of...