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5. Packs, Predators, and Love in Hitchcock’s: North by Northwest
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121 North by Northwest, Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 comedy-thriller, has enjoyed enduring favor for more than forty years among both popular and academic audiences. The latter, indeed, have made it one of the more explicated works of the director who is by far the most analyzed and written about auteur in the history of cinema. (Vertigo , the film preceding North by Northwest, seems to be its maker’s Hamlet; everyone has something to say about that picture.) Even though North by Northwest has achieved an elevated place in the consciousness of movie fans and critics, however, some aspects of it have gone unremarked, from single shots through configurations of images and themes. Giving attention to issues of crowds, power, and predation allows us to focus on aspects of Hitchcock’s muchstudied movie that have hitherto been only thinly understood: the significance of the threat to individuals of the predators that pursue them and the potential shelter of the crowds that they seek to rejoin. Hunters and Prey “There is nothing that man fears more,” writes Canetti at the beginning of Crowds and Power, “than the touch of the unknown. He wants to see what is reaching toward him, and to be able to recognize or at least classify it. . . . It is only in a crowd that man can become free of this fear of being touched” (15). But Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant), abducted at the beginning of North by Northwest, cannot flee back into the crowds from which he has been plucked. (Thornhill may have exposed himself to his fate, as I observed in the introduction, by leaving the crowd to grab a taxi not rightfully his.) However much he may wish to attend the Wintergarden The5 Packs, Predators, and Love in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest CHAPTER 5 122 ater as he had planned, the safety of masses of people will not be his again until he regains the freedom that he has lost to “the touch of the unknown.” Human horror at the touch of the unknown derives from our biological heritage of hunting and of suffering predation, whether by other species or our own. “The design of one body on the other becomes concrete from the moment of touching. Even at the lowest levels of life this moment has something decisive about it. It contains the oldest terrors; we dream of it, we imagine it, and civilized life is nothing but a sustained effort to avoid it” (204). Many of Hitchcock’s films vividly illustrate Canetti’s assertion. In particular , North by Northwest—however comic its frights may be—consistently develops actions that suggest flight from a predator. Thornhill is first touched, seized, and stuffed into a waiting car by two thugs of Philip Vandamm (James Mason) when he separates himself from acquaintances to send a telegram. One of the thugs will later stalk him with a knife in the United Nations building and later still will lurk in ambush to pounce on him at the Mount Rushmore monument. Police and park rangers—intermittently benign, but ultimately associated with the violence of both the espionage and counterespionage forces—substantially duplicate Thornhill’s first abduction by jailing him after his drunken The touch of the unknown [34.204.181.19] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 08:06 GMT) Packs, Predators, and Love in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest 123 ride down the coast road, grabbing and forcing him into a patrol car after an auction, loading him into an ambulance as part of a faked cafeteria shooting, and knocking him out and incarcerating him in a hospital afterward. Eve (Eva Marie Saint), the American counterespionage agent, is also seized: at the auction, we see a close-up of Vandamm’s hand holding the back of her neck; later she enters the Mount Rushmore cafeteria in his grip. After the staged shooting, we are indirectly reminded of Vandamm and his control over Eve through the prominence of the pearl choker around her throat—a detail continued from the cafeteria and one which dramatizes that she is still in Vandamm’s grasp. Such seizings lead symbolically toward their primitive continuation , tearing and ingesting. The interiors of automobiles, ambulances , and jails suggest the armored maw of the predator. From a Canettian viewpoint, the knives and guns of the kidnappers and assassins repeat the smoothness and power of a predator’s teeth; the cramped spaces into which they thrust their captives and prey recall mouths: “The teeth are the armed guardians...