Notorious · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A camera floats high above a crowded party in Rio, looking down on the whole bright social world of the Sebastian mansion — the guests, the champagne, the staircase — and then it begins to descend. It does not cut. It travels down and in, past everything, until the entire frame is one small object: a cellar key clenched in Alicia's gloved hand. The most famous shot in the film tells you, in a single gesture, where its meaning actually lives. Not in the crowd. In the thing the crowd cannot see.

That shot is the key to watching Hitchcock at all, and it is why the philosopher Gilles Deleuze made him the hinge of an entire argument about what film can do. Deleuze sorted cinema into images. Most movies run on the action-image: a character sees a situation and acts to change it, and the cutting just carries us along the chain. Hitchcock does something stranger. He builds what Deleuze calls the relation-image — a film whose real subject is not the actions but the relations between people and things, relations that only exist because a third party holds them in mind. That third party is us. The audience. Hitchcock, Deleuze says, was the first to deliberately weave the spectator into the film as a character — the one who knows. (Adrian's own name for this presence, across his film writing, is the invisible third: the watcher whose knowledge completes the scene.)

Watch how Notorious withholds and discloses, and you feel it. We learn that Sebastian's coffee is poisoned before Alicia does. The camera frames the cup huge in the foreground, from her drugged vantage, and the agony is entirely ours, because we hold a relation she has not yet assembled. Hitchcock builds dread not by showing us more violence but by giving us more knowledge than the people on screen. The screw turns in the wine cellar: upstairs the champagne is running out, each emptied bottle a tick of a clock that will send Sebastian down to the cellar where Devlin and Alicia are searching. Hitchcock cuts between the two. Nothing is happening that the characters would call danger. Everything is happening, because we can count the bottles.

Deleuze gives the small parts of this machine precise names, and Notorious supplies his textbook case. A mark is an object sitting quietly in its ordinary chain of associations — a key opens doors, a cup holds coffee, a bottle holds wine. These domestic things fill the film. Tetzlaff's camera isolates them in big foreground close-ups until cups and bottles carry the weight of weapons. Then comes the demark: the object torn out of its series, out of place, forcing us to read it. Sebastian's wine cellar holds a bottle that is wrong. It is heavy with uranium ore, not wine, and when it shatters the whole espionage plot pours out of a thing that was pretending to be ordinary. The wrongness is the meaning. And above both sits what Deleuze calls the symbol — the single object that condenses the film's organizing relation. He names it himself: the key in Notorious. That cellar key is trust and betrayal and marriage and the mission, all at once, which is why the crane travels the length of a ballroom to land on it. The whole film is in Alicia's fist.

Notice, too, how often we are made to perceive a character perceiving. The morning after, hungover, Alicia sees Devlin appear upside-down in her doorway, and the camera rotates to right him as he advances. Deleuze would call this a dicisign — a perception folded inside the frame, so that we feel the camera's presence and inhabit her disorientation rather than simply observing it. And Bergman's face does the rest. Deleuze prized the affection-image, the close-up where a feeling is registered but not yet discharged into action, and Bergman's is a potisign at full power: a face crossing thresholds, charting Alicia from self-loathing through tenderness to near-fatal exhaustion, the intensity building in micro-movements we read like weather.

None of this fell from the sky. Hitchcock had been assembling it for a decade. The MacGuffin-driven plot subordinated to a bickering romance is the structure of The 39 Steps; the queasy cost of spying for one's country came out of Secret Agent; the mansion-as-trap, with its gliding subjective camera through menacing rooms, was worked out in Rebecca; the urbane, pitiable villain nested in a family is Uncle Charlie from Shadow of a Doubt, softened into Claude Rains. Most directly, the single luminous charged object — the glowing glass of milk a wife dares not drink in Suspicion — becomes the poisoned coffee cup here. Even the bravura crane has a parent: Gregg Toland's descent through the El Rancho skylight in Citizen Kane. Hitchcock took each debt and tightened it.

What he finally made was a cinema in which relations themselves are the drama, and the viewer's knowledge is the suspense. That invention seeded everything downstream that trusts the audience to hold a secret. Watch Notorious again and watch yourself watching. The key is in your hand too.