North by Northwest (1959)

At the start of this film, Roger Thornhill tells himself "think thin," hoping to lose weight. He works in advertising.  He intends to change the world by thinking about it.  But the film properly starts when the tables are turned on him.  He stumbles into fictions that everyone but him finds more believable than reality, and his only way out is to deal with hard, uncompromising matter.

 

Suits, mansions, "libations," amber waves of grain, high art, and finally Mount Rushmore lose any social or symbolic weight they might have had.  In the cornfields, he gets down among the dry leaves and dirt.  On Mount Rushmore, he grasps the contours of the cliff face.  He finds himself trapped in an auction house, surrounded by the people of high society, dignifying themselves with art and money.  Faced with a threat to his life, his escape is to mock these people until they toss him out.  He cracks wise about everything, however serious the situation.  He doesn't even care about the United States—he saves it in the end, but not because he wants to. 

 

The camera turns from an elevated view of a train station down toward Thornhill hunched over in a phone booth.  It looms over him, a tiny speck, from above the United Nations headquarters.  The world of fictions forming around him isn't a friendly one, and it isn't until 45 minutes into the film that he has a friendly encounter.  This is the first time we can relax, and what motivates it is nothing more than the romantic and sexual attraction between Thornhill and Eve Kendall, the film's leading woman.  It would seem too simple, but with the way the film has broken things down by this point, why question what Thornhill chooses to take seriously?  

 

North by Northwest pushes some of the same Freudian buttons as films like Psycho and Marnie, like Thornhill bribing his own mother, the scene where he shaves in the train station bathroom, and the infamous final shot.  But indignities of masculinity are gags in this movie, not deep mysteries of the human condition.  They're another route by which fictions assail Thornhill, but only in the same way people assail Charlie Chaplin in his films.  It's not Kendall and Thornhill's desires that get them in trouble. 

Though Hitchcock was the master of suspense, and this film has some very suspenseful scenes, it doesn't turn into dread or hopelessness the way it does in Shadow of a Doubt or Vertigo.  On the contrary, in the end the film is an escapist fantasy.  But it becomes fantasy only after it breaks down the world it's trying to escape.  Watching the first steps of the breakdown is disorienting.  But we regain our footing in the assertion of simple drives for survival and sex and through improvisational navigation.  Even if some mastermind is constructing illusive new worlds every way you turn, you can still find your way around by shedding symbolism and etiquette in favor of texture and desire.  

 

Maybe this is why the only example of "queer representation" in a film that I ever found compelling was the interaction between the villains, Vandamm and Leonard.  Martin Landau purposely played up the homoeroticism of their relationship, but it's still subtler than that in Rope or Strangers on a Train, let alone any of the many other films that are explicitly about queer sexuality.  In their last scene together, we see Leonard and Vandamm standing apart.  The film cuts from this to alternating shots of each of them.  When Leonard exposes a deception to Vandamm, Vandamm punches Leonard in shock.  It's a move that does not make spatial sense, which introduces a sudden change in our perception of distance.  It jolts you.  It's an odd outburst of emotion in a film that treats most things with irreverence.  They are a pair of not-very developed, propagandistic villains, but their charged relationship is treated as one of the few islands of reality in the sea of fictions the film presents to us.