North by Northwest · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

The bus pulls away and leaves Roger Thornhill standing at a crossroads in the Indiana flatland, in a gray suit, in noon light, the whole horizon visible and nothing on it. A car passes. A stranger waits across the road for a bus of his own and mentions, just before his ride arrives, that the crop-duster circling over there is dusting crops where there are no crops. Then he's gone, and Thornhill is alone with the plane.

Everyone remembers the plane. What's worth noticing is how much you already know that Thornhill doesn't, and how that knowledge is the real engine of the scene — and of the whole film.

Gilles Deleuze put Hitchcock at the very end of one era of cinema and in the doorway of another. He argued that Hitchcock completed the movement-image — the cinema of characters who perceive a situation and act to change it — by adding a new kind he called the mental-image, or the image of relations. In an ordinary thriller we watch people do things. In Hitchcock we watch a web of relations that the audience holds in its head, usually more completely than anyone on screen. The film hands you the relations and lets you sweat over them. That's the relation-image, and Deleuze thought Hitchcock invented its cinematic form.

Start with the man who isn't there. The entire plot detonates from George Kaplan, a CIA decoy: a name, a set of hotel reservations, pressed suits hanging in closets, and no body inside them. Thornhill is mistaken for him and can never stop being him, because there's no him to correct the record. Deleuze has a useful pair of terms here. An object is a mark when it sits quietly in its customary chain of relations — a matchbook means what matchbooks mean. It becomes a demark when it jumps the chain, an anomaly that forces everyone, us included, to interpret. Kaplan is a pure demark, a signifier with the referent surgically removed. And the thing everyone chases, the microfilm hidden inside a pre-Columbian statuette, is what Hitchcock called the MacGuffin and what Deleuze would call the symbol: the object that means nothing in itself yet condenses the whole network, the pretext that keeps the relations spinning. Herrmann's fandango drives it. Saul Bass's title grid diagrams it in advance — straight lines caught and bent to oblique angles, geometry as a trap.

None of this makes North by Northwest slow or brainy. It is the movement-image at full throttle, the sensory-motor circuit humming: Thornhill perceives a threat and acts, the act changes the situation, the new situation throws a fresh threat. Deleuze calls the big version of this the large-form action-image — an encompassing situation (Cold War espionage, a whole continent of pursuers) that presses on a man until decisive acts transform it. Force meets force, Thornhill against Vandamm, the binomial the genre runs on. Mason plays villainy as connoisseurship. Grant keeps Thornhill both humiliated and undefeated, the screwball timing of His Girl Friday now carrying real dread instead of relieving it.

Which brings us back to the prairie. For most of the film space is an encompasser — the UN lobby, the auction room, the hotel — architecture that pins a body in relation to doorways and sight lines and manufactures pressure. The crop-duster field does the opposite. Deleuze has a name for a space that stops serving action and becomes pure exposed feeling: the any-space-whatever, and its emptiest variety is exactly this, a deserted flat field in pitiless light with nowhere to hide. Received wisdom in 1959 said menace needed enclosure, darkness, restricted sight lines. Burks and Hitchcock did the reverse: wide VistaVision frame, noon sun, no cover in any direction, the threat arriving as a distant speck. Suspense here comes not from being trapped but from having nowhere to disappear. For a few minutes the machinery of the action-image opens onto a void, and you feel the genre touch its own limit — before Herrmann's silence breaks and the diesel engine and the wheeling crows take over.

Hitchcock built this out of his own earlier films with a craftsman's memory. The wrong man handcuffed to a woman of uncertain loyalty, fleeing across open country, is The 39 Steps expanded to continental scale. The secret hidden inside a mundane art object, and Grant's charm masking culpability, come straight from Notorious. The climax on a vertical civic surface, men clinging to a national monument, is Saboteur's Statue of Liberty restaged on the faces of Mount Rushmore. Downstream, every spy-adventure that followed — the whole Bond architecture of glamour, gadgetry, and continental chase — is drawing on the template set here.

What Hitchcock did to film as an art, on Deleuze's reading, was to make the spectator a character: the third term who holds the relations, who knows the crops shouldn't need dusting. Suspense is the relation-image turned into an emotion. Watch it again and watch yourself. The film keeps handing you knowledge and daring you to do something with it, exactly as Thornhill can't. The dread you feel at that empty crossroads is the pleasure of knowing too much and being unable to act on it. That is Deleuze's mental-image, and for two hours it feels like the best fun in the world.