William Katz: Alfred Hitchcock and the 2008 election, take two
Bill Katz began his consideration of Alfred Hitchcock and the 2008 elections here. Today he continues:
Last week in this space I wrote about Alfred Hitchcock, a director with an uncanny understanding of people, and how his film ideas apply directly to a political race. I gave five of Hitch's "lessons." Today we cover six through ten:To comment on this post, go here.LESSON SIX – It's all in the planning. Hitchcock often stressed how dull it was to make a movie. Anyone who's been on a movie set would agree. It's tedious and slow. There are hours of waiting while things get set up, and makeup applied. The exciting part, Hitchcock said, was in the planning, where every detail was laid out, and he could see the movie before him. Nothing was overlooked. Directing the film was mechanical.
POLITICAL APPLICATION - It's true in a political campaign as well. The campaign events are boring and repetitive, but candidates' staffs get caught up in them, when they should be planning. And don't accept this stuff about candidates making "spontaneous" statements. A candidate, like any good speaker, doesn't make spontaneous statements. He has a whole catalogue in his head, just as an actor memorizes lines. Reagan, a natural speaker, rehearsed intensively. Douglas MacArthur's farewell to West Point, one of the great speeches of the last century, was said to be spontaneous. In fact, it had been practiced for weeks. Everything in a Hitchcock movie was planned in detail. It's the only way to do it in politics. We may hate to admit it, but it's a show.
LESSON SEVEN – Fill the frame. Do you recall the classic scene in "North by Northwest," where Cary Grant, in a cornfield, runs away from a airplane spraying lethal chemicals? An average director would have just shot the plane chasing Grant, and left it at that. But Hitchcock, in many of the shots, fills the frame with Cary Grant. He's practically in our lap. Hitch makes the character an overwhelming presence.
POLITICAL APPLICATION – We now wage TV campaigns. The candidate must be larger than life, but TV screens are small. Therefore, fill the frame. Make the candidate large and imposing, not a dot in front of a crowd. The size of the image has a psychological effect. Make the candidate commander-in-chief size. We want the commander-in-chief to be at least a bit intimidating. The aforementioned MacArthur often insisted that he be photographed from a low angle, to make him look larger.
LESSON EIGHT – Experience is not enough. Hitch could have been speaking directly to Hillary Clinton when he talked about this. No matter how much experience the director of a film has, no matter how much he knows about something, it only counts if the audience buys it. Just saying you have experience is not enough. Hitchcock used the example of his failed film, "I Confess," to make the point. In it, a priest takes confession from a man who admits to a murder. Later, the priest himself gets into trouble, but can get out of it if he reveals what that man told him. As a priest, though, he can not expose what was in a confession, and he does not. Hitchcock explained that to a Catholic – and he was Catholic – the film was entirely logical. But the non-Catholic audience just wouldn't buy it, even from Alfred Hitchcock, even though he explained everything.
POLITICAL APPLICATION – Well, Hillary, you can tell them you were there, you can tell them you saw everything, but if the public doesn't think that's real experience, they are not going to buy it. The actual experience isn't enough, your knowledge isn't enough. You've got to convince the public to accept it. No man had more experience than did President George H.W. Bush, as he ran for a second term in 1992. He received 37.4 percent of the vote.
LESSON NINE – You must control the emotions of the audience. This was Hitchcock's great gift. He used us. He worked us. He knew what we were feeling, and made us feel that way. He had insights into emotion that few had. He knew, for instance, that we sometimes like to root for the bad guy, depending on the moment. He used this example: We see a burglar at work. We then see that he's about to be discovered. We want to scream, "Watch out!" Even though he's the bad guy, we want him to get away. It's human nature, Hitchcock said. In a chase film, we often root for the bad guy to elude the cops, at least for a time. We love the chase.
POLITICAL APPLICATION – Oh, the applications! Think of the presidents who've been the great political stars – Roosevelt and Reagan. They both knew how to appeal to our hearts as well as our minds. They also knew how to control that appeal. They sensed how people would react, and they fit that reaction into a political plan. Roosevelt knew he had to build passions without allowing the left-wing fringe any real control. Reagan knew he had to lead a conservative revolt without seeming ideologically rigid. Both had to build and control feelings.
Barack Obama learned a bitter lesson when he let racial passions get out of control for a few critical days. It wasn't smart to allow surrogates to hint that Hillary Clinton was "insensitive" to blacks. It may have stirred some understandable feelings among African-Americans, but it led to an immediate backlash that diminished Obama as a "transformational" candidate. He wasn't controlling his supporters' emotions, and I suspect he's paid a price. The last thing he wanted was to be seen as a "minority" candidate, which is increasingly the case.
Hitchcock's insights also caution those who think they'll be home free if they can paint their opponent as "the bad guy." The bad guy can suddenly be the object of sympathy if attacks on him are over the top, or if he's unfairly cornered. He can become that burglar we root for. He can be Bill Clinton, for whom sympathy increased once he was impeached, even though he'd disgraced his office. Be careful how you handle "the bad guy."
LESSON TEN – The twinkle in the eye. Hitchcock, despite tense plots soaked with murder, was very funny. He was, in "real life," a renowned practical joker. Suspense and comedy are closely related, each depending on a careful release of information. People need some escape from the tension of suspense. They like the lighter moment. Hitchcock made sure to include light touches in his films, the twinkle in the eye, as if saying to the audience, "Look here, it's only a movie."
POLITICAL APPLICATION - "Well, there you go again," Reagan famously said, lightening up a debate. Roosevelt had that smile, that lightness. Jimmy Carter didn't. John Kerry didn't. Nixon didn't either. He got elected, but, in the end, nobody loved him. You have to have that little twinkle that says, "It's not all that grim." Hillary, take note.
ADDENDUM: A reader alerted me to an error in part one of this Hitchcock series. In describing the plot of "Strangers on a Train," I wrote, "The agreement is sealed, and the plot gets going." I meant to write, "The agreement is debated, and the plot gets going," but absent-mindedly used the idiom. There was never a sealed agreement between the two main characters.
