North By Northwest

After the first time I watched North By Northwest, probably about this time last year, I wasn’t thrilled by it and at times I found the pacing too slow and the plot too convoluted. However, in my second viewing I learnt to let the plot slowly reveal itself and accept the fact that Hitchcock, in the case of this film, intends to hide as much from the audience as possible. He shows and tells when he wants, it took 40 minutes for the audience to know more than its bumbling, ignorant protagonist William Thornhill. Initially this slow release of information didn’t match up with my expectations as a modern day film viewer who is well acquainted with films that rarely, if ever, leave you in the lurch.

North by Northwest subverts the Spy/Thriller genre it loosely falls into in several different ways.

• Humour: The script of NBNW is filled with puns, sexual innuendos (the famous last shot) and even flat out jokes ‘war is hell, even when its a cold one’. This dry humour gives the film an extra point of focus for an ‘in the know’ viewer and emphasises the farcical nature of the film and the absurdity of the story line.  The story line sends up 1950’s ‘Cold War’ fear, with an everyman being trapped and caught up in War. There is also the irony of an ad-man has falling into a world of deceit.
• Cary Grants ‘Roger Thornhill’: Instead of being reminiscent of Humphrey Bogart in say, The Maltese Falcon, Thornhill seems like a distant relation of George Clooney’s Ulysses Everitt McGill in ‘O Brother Where Art Thou’. Grant, instead of matching  the audiences expectations of him as a witty, hard-bitten hero, he instead plays an inarticulate, dopey leading man, who hysterically and accidently assumes the role of a person who doesn’t even exist. On top of his ability to make things worst he also doesn’t redeem himself as heroic, he steals an innocent mans car after the plane/bus crash and doesn’t save his love Eve on top of Mount Rushmore (a random policeman snipes the villain). Thornhill is also submissive to his passive aggressive Mother.
• The Plot is slowly dispersed to the viewer throughout the film, Hitchcock is brilliant at withholding information and delivers it in dribs and drabs. In many contemporary spy/thriller films information is delivered to the audience in big hits and twists-or alternatively pieces of the plot are never withheld.
• Eve Kendall: Hitchcock sets us up to believe that Eve Kendall played by Eve Marie Saint is a Femme Fatale leading Thornhill into dangerous, potentially deadly situations. However he subverts this cleverly-later on in the film it turns out she’s a good guy, just infiltrating the bad guys.

Observations I had whilst watching the film.

• Historically speaking Japan has had a history full of beauty as well as great violence. The idea of dying honourably is a significant one in Japan, with many pieces of Literature depicting characters whom see death as simply the next part of life, a place they aren’t afraid to enter for the sake of doing what’s right for society (or the emperor)-what is important is that they die honourably. This courage (and willingness to sacrifice) is often embedded in Westerns where the hero confronts death and continually lays down his life for the sake of greater good (in order to restore balance) in the town in which he is protecting. For me, this is the natural link that ties ‘Sukiyaki Western Django’ to standard Westerns.
• In Westerns we often see the hero operate outside ‘what is right’ or the towns ‘code of honour’ in order to achieve there goals. At the end of High Noon we see Gary Cooper (as Will Kane) throw his badge on the floor after he kills the invaders. One of the things that makes Sukiyaki Western Django such an aesthetic pleasing yet ‘bad’ film is that every character operates outside ‘what is right’ meaning that the film is essentially a moral-less free for all. Which is highly entertaining, but awfully shallow.
• After watching the film in class we established that the it is essentially one great big melting pot of genre tropes. One that I picked up on during the screening is the theme of Isolation. The film was shot away from civilisation in a male dominated town far away from anywhere. This loneliness and sense of decay helped give the film a consistently eerie tone that contrasted with the broad/dark comedy in many of the scenes. I’d imagine this contrast would potentially distant some viewers who would be expecting something quite different. Personally when watching the film I wasn’t sure whether too laugh (because it was a comedy) or be dead silent (due to the subject matter being so dark). This process of defamiliarization (presenting common tropes in an unfamiliar way) was the backbone of the film.
• Western Tropes that Sukiyaki Western Django Followed: A Final Showdown, Fighting in a Saloon, Whistling in the soundtrack, bleedingly obvious symbolism (I hope you can pardon the pun but the blood on the gold nuggets at the end was an example of this, e.g. the blood shed in order to attain the ultimate profit, heaps of gunslinging, hardness being deemed an honourable trait (a quote I wrote down during the screening was ‘tenderness wont get you far in life’-especially not in the hard bitten west), Gunslinger having quite literally no name and finally Tarantino’s appearance in the film- it seemed, to me, a reference to American Westerns with Tarantino being a symbol of America, as a symbol he is ‘teaching’ his ways to the Japanese Lady with whom he has a few scenes with-as if the American tradition is being past down and then followed by the Japanese.

• NOTES FROM THE READING
• In Class we spoke about genre as being ‘our myths’. Could this be the reason they are so popular, because they are so familiar. If you loved Westerns as a child you will still watch them when your 40 for nostalgia, the process of simply entering that world, whether its a good or bad film, in and of itself is an enriching process.
• These days Westerns aren’t bound by national cinema frameworks, they don’t aim for verisimilitude; rather they are parodies and pastiches of American Westerns back in the day.
• Genre is still one of the most important components of audience reception for a film.
• No one viewed Sukiyaki Western Django as an ‘auteur driven’ film. It wasn’t really regarded as a work of art. I think something it had going for it was escapism. Often in films made by auteurs you’re able to think about and see the character of the director within the film, for e.g. Wes Anderson, however in Western Django you
  take what is given to you purely on face value, you don’t think too hard and you just go along for the ride-ultimately its fantastic escapism. As the reading stated, by bringing in Tarantino, the film has two auteurs not one, making it very hard to see the individual behind the text. This links into what the reading said about the director Mike Takashi-he is the arranger of films, not the author.
• Western marks the ‘rejection of language’.
• The film was deliberately un-authentic. The actors all spoke a language completely foreign too them.
• No emphasis on language.
• The accents made the characters seem to the audience as being ‘displaced’. Because they are difficult too understand the audience struggles to pinpoint who the protagonist may be. This is unlike the quintessential American John Wayne Westerns where the protagonist is obvious. This choice once again blurs the boundaries of national cinema, making it a true mix of east and west.