After Hitchcock: Influence, Imitation, and Intertextuality

Exposing the Lies of Hitchcock’s Truth

Exposing the Lies of Hitchcock’s Truth Walter Metz Introduction A s a helicopter descends into an isolated trailer park, commandos storm into one of its residences. Inside, a man and a woman scream as armed troops surround them. The woman is whisked into a van and driven away. Later, this woman is taken deep within an intelligence agency’s headquarters . She is placed inside a dark, cavernous room where she is interrogated by two men who remain hidden behind a one-way mirror. The men’s voices are grotesque, distorted by computer technology. The woman cries hysterically , desperately trying to convince her abductors that she is not a spy. Is this torture scene from a recent Tom Clancy adaptation, in which evil Soviets have kidnapped a brave American spy as part of a Cold War battle? While its imagery certainly draws from such Cold War films, this scene in fact comes from James Cameron’s True Lies (1994), a generic hybrid of post–Cold War action-adventure film and domestic family melodrama. The torturers are the film’s two Arnolds—Tom (as in Roseanne’s ex-husband) and Schwarzenegger (as in big muscles). They play two Omega Sector (a CIA-like antiterrorism organization) agents: Schwarzenegger is Harry Tasker and Tom Arnold is his sidekick, Gib. The woman being tortured is Harry’s wife, Helen, played by Jamie Lee Curtis. The scene is part of a lengthy subplot early in the film that depicts Harry using the technologies of his agency to cure Helen of her adulterous tendencies. The cruelty of this subplot—as vicious as the film’s main plot about Arab terrorists attempting to detonate nuclear devices on American soil—belies an instability in the narrative structure of the Cold-War spy thriller in the post– 110 the politics of intertextuality Cold War era. With the end of the Cold War, an espionage plot such as the one True Lies attempts to activate needs to be rewritten in a number of ways. One such method is to refocus attention on the spy’s home front. In doing so, True Lies returns to the roots of the Cold War thriller, namely to the geopolitical thrillers of Alfred Hitchcock (such as, for example, 1959’s North by Northwest). Like True Lies, these 1950s films also express their Cold War intrigues within the framework of the domestic melodrama. Toward an Intertextual Hitchcock Criticism At the end of “Ideology, Genre, Auteur,” Robin Wood engages in a defensive critical exercise, attempting to shield his bravura reading of Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943) against appeals to intentionality. Wood argues, My final stress is less on the evaluation of a particular film or director than on the implications for a criticism of the Hollywood cinema of the notions of interaction and multiple determinacy I have been employing. Its roots in the Hollywood genres, and in the very ideological structure it so disturbingly subverts, make Shadow of a Doubt so much more suggestive and significant a work than Hitchcock the bourgeois entertainer could ever have guessed. (72–73) My reading of True Lies as a Hitchcockian thriller rejects the functioning of genre that Wood takes for granted, and replaces this largely formalist concept with the more post-structuralist concept of intertextuality. Whereas Wood uses his formalist reading of Shadow of a Doubt to transcend the intentional claims of the author, this essay uses intertextual criticism to trace how a contemporary Hollywood film engages in a wide variety of discursive reactivations . This historical and political reading of Hitchcock goes far beyond what even Wood in his later Lacanian incarnation could ever have guessed about Hitchcock’s political significance. I use this observation to reconceptualize the “genericity” of True Lies. For even though True Lies is most superficially an Arnold Schwarzenegger action-adventure film, it also reactivates the geopolitical -thriller trajectory of such films as North by Northwest and Notorious; for this reason, True Lies is a film of great interest to film studies; far greater than it would appear at first glance. This replacement of genre by intertextuality is what Jim Collins has in mind in his essay, “Genericity in the Nineties.” Collins argues that Hollywood films in the 1990s follow two discrete paths in activating a generic intertext: exposing the lies of hitchcock’s truth 111 there are those that engage in eclectic irony, and those that activate a...