Over the weekend, I immersed myself in Hitchcock, as one might in a swimming pool — a dark pool at night, with inexplicable splashes at the far end. It was an uneasy rest.

Alfred Hitchcock’s ultimate counsel to anxious colleagues and actors was, “It’s only a movie” — variant: “We’ll make another movie” — and his films do flirt with routine. There is an almost mechanical slickness, for example, manifest in the formulaic way in which subsidiary characters deliver their lines. Policemen and shopkeepers and maîtres d’ all sound like polished stereotypes with no individual quirks whatsoever. Hitchcock deploys the flat predictability of these minor figures as expressions of the unthinking normal world from which the principal characters have been momentarily expelled. They are more functions of the incisive narrative than real people. As such, they trail a certain staleness. This may explain why it took foreigners — the French — to perceive Hitchcock’s greatness; they couldn’t be put off by what to an American ear might sound tediously familiar.

Although my latest plunge into Hitchcock’s movies began somewhat randomly, moving from Psycho to Frenzy and then to Strangers on a Train, from that point I stuck to the order in which films were made: I Confess, Dial M for Murder, Rear Window, To Catch a Thief, The Trouble with Harry, and the remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much. Four on Saturday, and two on Sunday; before angling my chair in front of the screen for The Trouble with Harry yesterday afternoon, I went through magazines. I wish I hadn’t, in a way, because I’d have liked to move on to The Wrong Man, but it was too late. I ought to mention that I watched all the featurettes on the DVDs, each of produced by Laurent Bouzereau. These began to be monotonous and, at times, vaguely irritating — if John Forsythe could be persuaded to reminisce, why not Shirley MacLaine and Jerry Mathers? But the featurettes buffered the features.

Seeing the films in order gave them a surprising freshness, and emphasized their somewhat surprising variety. We’re so accustomed to thinking of Hitchcock as an auteur, and to seeing his films as the work of an extraordinarily methodical producer, that it’s easy to forget that he drew his material from very different sources and maintained a remarkable heterogeneity of tone. I Confess is so transfigured by the miraculous fit between its abundant Catholic imagery and Montgomery Clift’s brooding saintliness that it doesn’t seem like an American, or even Anglophone movie. The next two films on the list have nothing in common except Grace Kelly, and that only nominally, considering the transformation wrought by opportunites fro acting development presented by John Michael Hayes’s screenplay. For the first time ever, the fireworks in To Catch a Thief did not annoy me; they seemed quite suavely done. And Francie Stevens was a real girl, not Grace Kelly pretending to be one. The Trouble with Harry is a “minor” picture that refuses to feel minor while it is actually running; the four principals are engaged in an ensemble that has a glittering commedia dell’arte quality, an effect heightened by Mildred Dunnock’s occasional contributions. If I was shaken by The Man Who Knew Too Much, that owed in part to personal circumstances; the story seemed less about international intrigue and more about kidnapping. But it had me in tears at several points, and the scene in which Doris Day’s Jo McKenna lashes out at her husband, played with magnificent uncertainty by James Stewart, for having sedated her before telling her the awful news about their son made me forget that I was watching a movie. “Only a movie,” my foot.

***

I continue to wrestle with the problem of loyal opposition, more convinced than ever that it is not just a crucial element of democracy but something like the good fairy that wasn’t invited to the birthday of our modern republics, for whose exclusion we have been paying dearly ever since. The modern faith in democracy was engendered in the optimism of Enlightenment, molded by an untried conviction that, given the chance — freed from the shackles of monarchical despotism, that is — reasonable men would come to see things the same way. What we call political parties, the Lumières called factions, and they were regarded as dangerous. George Washington’s second administration was riven by internal dissension between Jefferson and Hamilton that seemed impossible to account for without marking one man or the other as a traitor, and this confusion has never been altogether resolved. There was no conception of loyal opposition in the 1790s, and none was developed in the course of the following century. Indeed, the Civil War was brought about by a professedly disloyal opposition.

The lack of a concept — of a belief in the importance — of loyal opposition underlies many of today’s political crises, if not all of them. From Putin’s Russia to al-Assad’s Syria to Chávez’s Venezuela, we see what happens when the opposition is demonized instead of being respected. “Winner Take All” is not a political motto but an anti-political one.

The lack of constitutional provisions governing the behavior of loyal political parties made it possible for Hitler’s Nazis to take control of Germany via democratic process; the same thing happened in Morsi’s Egypt. Upon assuming power, both regimes set about disemboweling political life and, in the process, making a mockery of democracy. The free election of leaders is not the climax of democracy, but its opening move. Because elected leaders cannot represent everybody — a sad truth about human nature of which the Enlightenment was blithely unaware — it is only when they assume power and engage in compromise with their opponents that we can tell whether the polity is a true democracy or merely a majoritarian tyranny. Such tyranny is the “mob rule” that the thinkers of classical antiquity identified with democracy, and that inspired them to prefer almost any other kind of government.

The wrestling, then, is a matter of nuts and bolts. How would a provision for loyal opposition read, constitutionally? What are the criteria? I would argue, for example, that the loyalty of an opposition not be determined by religious factors, and, by extension, that the constitution ought to provide more robustly than it does for the separation of church and state. And yet there must be agreement between administration and opposition about substantive fundamentals, such as the recognition of human dignity (which comprises privacy) as a personal possession that must be protected by law. And certainly the behavior of political parties, independently of office-holding, out to be prescribed by the constitution. All this, without stifling evolution. I’m glad that it’s not my job to work all of this out.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Monday, July 8th, 2013 at 10:39 am.