Hospitality, like the Lady, Vanishes: a Green Chartreuse and Two (Poisoned) Brandies

De-stabilized rules of hospitality, the symbolism invested in the three drinks, cinematography and the uneven exchange of information betray the bad hosting of Hitchcock and Dr. Hartz. In this scene, the latter intends to poison Iris Henderson and Gilbert Redman while they reveal to him the fruits of their investigation. The suspense rests on Iris and Gilbert’s assumption that the doctor is a good-natured host, and our knowledge that he is not. Hitchcock’s deceptive hospitality towards his viewers problematizes this knowledge as we later discover that we have been victims of the director’s bad hospitality. The Hitchcockian trope of the train, as well as Dr. Hartz’ social status, allow him to assume the role of host to which he has no more claim than any other passenger. The camera’s framing and the close-up shots underline the falsehood of Hartz’ hospitality. This scene demonstrates a recurring anxiety that Hitchcock mobilizes in his films with regards to modernity, namely that it confuses rules of hospitality in potentially deadly ways.

The train, because it is a neutral space that brings different people into close quarters, de-stabilizes rules of hospitality. Hartz is therefore able to assume the role of host in this scene for a myriad of reasons. Firstly, he is considered a local while Iris and Gilbert are foreigners. The latter assume that Hartz will be helpful to their investigation because he can interact with the non-British passengers. Hartz’ status as a local, however, is tenuous at best given that the speeding train problematizes any notions of locality. Secondly, his social position as an educated and sought-after doctor, gives him authority over Iris and Gilbert. Because of this position of power, the young couple share all their information with the doctor and seek his council, rather than suspecting him of being in on the plot to disappear Miss Froy. This allows Hartz to follow the progress of the British couple’s investigation, to stall it, and eventually try to end it. Thirdly, quite simply and yet crucially, it is Hartz who invites Iris and Gilbert to join him in ordering drinks, making them his guests. This typically innocent gesture of hospitality is invested with ill intentions, becoming a prime example of bad hospitality.

The three drinks which are brought to their table become a truthful double to the deceitful hospitality that is being played out. While the conversation that takes place suggests an alliance between Hartz and the young couple, the positions of the glasses tell otherwise. The importance invested in the drinking glasses reformulates the motif of ‘glasses’ which began earlier with Miss Froy’s spectacles. Iris and Gilbert’s drinks remain visible in the shots throughout the conversation, reminding us of the immediate danger they are in. Hartz, meanwhile, quickly moves his glass of Chartreuse away, subtly suggesting that his intentions differ from those of the young couple. The contents of their respective drinks further this distancing. Iris and Gilbert order brandy, a spirit associated with British identity and consumed by several Hitchcockian protagonists, while Hartz orders Chartreuse. The latter is decidedly un-British, evoking the European continent, specifically France. As the conversation progresses, an extreme close-up of the glasses shows Hartz stopping Iris and Gilbert’s drinks from falling over. This brings our attention back to the imminent threat which the couple face, but is also a visual analogy for the way in which Hartz is setting the two up.

The use of close-ups and shot/reverse shots in this scene, like the drinks, betrays the false hospitality taking place. Although Iris and Gilbert believe the doctor to be an ally, their framing in the shots of the conversation suggests that this is not so. They are shown facing the doctor together, with the threatening drinks looming in the foreground. Hartz meanwhile, is never in the frame with them but always isolated on his side of the table, opposite—or opposing—them. The extreme close-ups of the poisoned drinks, five in total, call our attention away from the amicable conversation taking place. No matter how helpful the dialogue suggests Hartz intends to be, we are made painfully aware that he is lying by having the poisoned drinks shoved under our noses repeatedly. Hitchcock’s cinematography rearticulates to us what Iris and Gilbert don’t know: that Hartz is not working with them but against them.

The dishonesty of the doctor’s hospitality can also be inferred from the conversation. While this seems misleading, it becomes clearer when we track the exchange of information in the scene. Spy films invest information with a great deal of portents, and The Lady Vanishes is no exception. Iris and Gilbert, being good guests, openly share all the information they have accumulated during their investigation. Hartz, meanwhile, withholds all his knowledge of the situation, making him a miserly host so far as information is concerned. This clue reveals his ill-natured hospitality, as he is unable to reciprocate the honesty of his guests. This imbalanced exchange underlines the falseness of the alliance the couple forms with Hartz at the scene’s conclusion.

Hartz’ dishonesty towards Iris and Gilbert is exceeded only by that of Hitchcock towards us, his cinematic guests. Much like the doctor’s false poisoned drinks, Hitchcock gives us a false token of hospitality. We are made to believe that we have crucial information which Iris and Gilbert do not, namely that their drinks are poisoned, when we see Hartz tell the nun to do so in the moments preceding this scene. This knowledge creates the tension we feel throughout the scene as the supposedly poisoned drinks loom in front of Iris and Gilbert, and are eventually consumed by the couple. Later it turns out, however, that the nun didn’t go through with the poisoning, that Iris and Gilbert will be able to save Miss Froy. Thus, it is not Iris and Gilbert being misled by Dr. Hartz that we are watching in this scene, but rather our own duping by the master of suspense, Hitchcock.

In what seems an ultimate gesture of false hospitality, Hartz induces Iris and Gilbert to finish their drinks with a toast: “To our health, and may our enemies if they exist, be unconscious of our purpose.” It is us viewers, however, who have been rendered unconscious on purpose by the poisoned information we have and which Iris and Gilbert ignore. When this information turns out to be irrelevant a few scenes later, we discover the bad hospitality which Hitchcock has provided us. Similarly, in this scene Hartz uses the blurry rules of hospitality which govern the train to his advantage, extracting a great deal of information from Iris and Gilbert but providing none of his own. His dishonesty is hinted at by the drinking glasses motif, as well as Hitchcock’s cinematography, which ironically conceals the director’s own dishonesty towards us.

Shadow of a Doubt, a Suspicion of Blackmail

Products of modernity permeate every Alfred Hitchcock film, often as crucial plot devices and important props. Newspapers, for example, are recurring mass-produced items that often extend an undesired reputation’s ability to follow a fugitive character. This, for instance, is the case for both Johnnie Aysgarth’s reckless ways in Suspicion (1941), and Uncle Charlie’s potentially murderous identity in Shadow of a Doubt (1943). The unreliability of these texts destabilizes their claims to objective truth. In both these films and in Blackmail (1929) mass-produced detective fiction, of the sort so many Hitchcock films borrow from, are alluded to in crucial scenes. This self-referentiality, when considered alongside Hitchcock’s equally self-aware cameos in these films, suggests the director’s impression of, and suggestions to, his viewing audience. His manipulations of our readings, his anticipation of the plots we write into his narratives, testify to an attitude of exchange with active viewers. By destabilizing objective truth, Hitchcock suggests a multiplicity of readings and spectator positions.

Newspapers, their reading and their manipulation, become crucial to our understanding of certain characters in all three of these films. The opening silent sequence in Blackmail leads two police officers, one of whom is Frank Webber, to an apartment where a man reclining in bed reads a newspaper. While it is unclear what the man has done, they arrest him on the spot. Robin Wood provides a useful suggestion, based “on the clear evidence the film does offer—that his real crime is to be working-class and perhaps socialist (he is introduced reading the Daily Herald, the newspaper associated with the British Labour Party)” (255). Frank fails to acknowledge the variety of potential reading practices in this scene, assuming that the man is consuming the Daily Herald passively, acquiescing to the opinions it expresses. The assumption is that you are what you read. This failure in interpretation is symptomatic of Frank’s reading in Blackmail, which acknowledges the potential for only one point of view. Hitchcock’s distrust of the police, as it is articulated in so many of his films, often stems from their similar inability to read narratives in more than one way.

This anonymous culprit, apparently incriminated by his choice of newspaper, is introduced in a succession of shots that anticipate the opening of Shadow of a Doubt. A series of dissolves eventually brings us into a similar apartment, this time in Philadelphia rather than London, where Uncle Charlie reclines in a similar position. Unlike the man in the opening of Blackmail, he is not reading a newspaper. Later, however, a newspaper reveals his guilt to his niece. After usurping Joe’s position as the head of the household, Uncle Charlie manipulates the daily newspaper into a flimsy house in order to remove the article which suggests his culpability. The family’s two most avid readers, Joe and Ann, are “more-or-less caricatured individuals, each of whom inhabits a private, separate dream world” (Wood 221). Thus, they quickly forget the missing newspaper pages. It is young Charlie, arguably reading Uncle Charlie’s mind through their implied telepathic connection, who discovers the incriminating article. Her reading of the newspaper at the library, and of the inscription on her new ring, allows her to write the murder narrative that fits and is eventually confirmed. In Shadow of a Doubt, our reading of the newspaper is aligned with young Charlie’s and eventually confirmed, though the inhabitants of Santa Rosa are too caught up in their dream world to acknowledge it.

In Suspicion newspapers, the authoritative bearers of truth, prove to be ambiguous. They initially imply the notoriety of Johnnie Aysgarth, and later suggest his culpability. While the extravagant lifestyle depicted in the society section raises our suspicions regarding Johnnie’s marriage to Lina, this also contributes to her romanticizing of him. Later however, the newspaper brought to the Aysgarth home by the two detectives seems to confirm Lina’s reading of Johnnie as a murderer. Lina’s (and the viewer’s) inscription of Johnnie into the murder narrative proves to be mistaken. Johnnie has no control over the reception of this newspaper, whereas Uncle Charlie does in Shadow of a Doubt. However a similar act of concealment increases Lina and our suspicion of Johnnie, namely his pocketing of the insurance company letter. When finally read, its hiding compounds what seems like the incriminating evidence it holds, and the murder narrative Lina has written for Johnnie fits perfectly. Perhaps a large part of viewer dissatisfaction with Suspicion, though this also makes it more ripe for analysis, is the way our reading is disproved so blatantly. The plot we produce from our consumption of the film is completely disavowed, most notably by our counterpart in the text, Lina.

The contrast between production and consumption, between active and passive reading, is illustrated more plainly in Shadow of a Doubt by the characters of Ann and Joe Newton, and Herb Hawkins. Andreas Huyssen provides a relevant insight to this debate by pinpointing “the notion which gained ground during the 19th century that mass culture is somehow associated with women while real, authentic culture remains the prerogative of men” (47). In this sense, Joe and Herb are presented as emasculated characters too absorbed in their murder plots to notice the criminal in their midst. One critic rightly observes “a hint of the father’s inadequacy, sexual and otherwise” (McLaughlin 144), while Herb’s consistent association with his mother insinuates a similar childishness and castration. Ann, meanwhile, represents a less critical and involved kind of reader. Robin Wood writes of the Newton family that “[e]ach is locked in a separate fantasy world: […] Ann in books read, apparently, less for pleasure than as a means of amassing knowledge with which she has little emotional contact (though she also believes everything she reads is ‘true’)” (300). These readers in Shadow of a Doubt illustrate two dangerous extremes of consumption. Ann’s devotion to books is humourless, blind and virtually religious, as she says to Uncle Charlie over dinner: “I’m too old for funnies, I read two books a week, I took a sacred oath I would.” Joe and Herb, meanwhile, are too involved in the “Unsolved Crimes” books they read, failing to acknowledge the very immediate unsolved crimes of Uncle Charlie. In Shadow of a Doubt then, Hitchcock seems to be playing on a similar notion to that which Huyssen’s criticises, namely “the persistent gendering of mass culture as feminine and inferior” (55). That valorization of “low culture” has the coincidental effect of valorizing Hitchcock’s own project.

A more productive, but also dangerous kind of reading is present in Suspicion in the characters of Lina and Johnnie, whose consumption of other texts eventually allows them to produce their own. Lina’s reading is initially restricted to newspapers, magazines and non-fiction books. When we first meet her, she reads a book entitled Child Psychology in the train car Johnnie stumbles into. The suggestion in this instance is that she is what she reads; like Frank in Blackmail, she consumes texts that confirm rather than challenge her identity. The “mannish” outfit she wears in this scene confirms that childishness, which is qualified later by her mother’s comment that “she is rather spinsterish.” Johnnie’s identity is also shaped by the books he reads, particularly those of the writer-in-the-text, Isobel Sedbusk. As Lina puts it to her: “I don’t believe there’s one of your stories he [Johnnie] hasn’t read.” Notwithstanding the unbelievable ending, but rather assuming a false explanation along the lines of Maxim de Winter’s in Rebecca (1940), Johnnie turns into one of the killers he obsessively reads about in Isobel’s novels. Lina’s commitment to non-fiction here becomes crucial, resulting in her inability to read through the ludicrous explanations Johnnie gives her.

By showing readers who become writers, Suspicion advocates a more engaged relationship to texts. Isobel writes the stories that inspire Johnnie’s manipulation of Lina, but she also points out that “he’s worming all my secrets out of me, I suspect him of writing a detective story on the side.” Johnnie’s reading does indeed turn into writing; he creates a murder plot in his life based on those in Isobel’s novels. Lina, gaining interest in this brand of fiction, also becomes a writer. Enthralled by Isobel’s latest novel and their discussion of it, Lina begins to suspect that Johnnie has murdered his friend Beaky Thwaite. A few scenes earlier, her newfound interest in fiction finds her writing at “the moment of crystallization of the suspicions. The couple are playing a word game with the husband’s best friend; as the two men talk, the woman’s hands finger the letters on the table absently arranging them, suddenly they have formed the word ‘murder’” (Wood 71). When she reads the text Johnnie has provided, that he and Beaky must go survey a piece of land although they have already decided not to buy it, she interprets it to be a pretext for murder. Thus, having become a more well-read consumer, Lina is able to produce a constructive and accurate meaning from Johnnie’s fictional plot. This is a more successful writing exercise than Lina’s earlier attempt, in which she tears up a letter to Johnnie that begins “I’m leaving you.” This letter is crucial however, given the production history of the film, and Hitchcock’s cameo.

Hitchcock claims that he’s “not too pleased with the way Suspicion ends” (Truffaut 142), though documents regarding the script’s history suggest otherwise. The director explains that in the ending he originally envisioned, Lina dies after drinking the poisoned glass of milk. Before her untimely death, however, Lina writes a letter to her mother and asks Johnnie to post it. The letter reads “Dear Mother, I’m desperately in love with him, but I don’t want to live because he’s a killer. Though I’d rather die I think society should be protected from him” (142). The last shot of the film would have shown “Cary Grant, whistling cheerfully, walks over to the mailbox and pops the letter in” (142). It is worth noting here that the novel Suspicion is based upon, Before the Fact (1932) by Frances Iles, has an unhappy ending (Worland 5). However, “[t]he first complete screenplay for Before the Fact, dated December 28, 1940, and written by Hitchcock’s regular collaborators, his wife, Alma Reville, and assistant Joan Harrison, ends with the husband’s innocence affirmed and the couple reconciled” (7). Therefore, to what extent the ending was actually forced upon Hitchcock is very unclear. The detail of Johnnie sending Lina’s letter in this “original ending” is nonetheless relevant. This is not only what Lina fails to do with her “I’m leaving you” letter, but it is also what we see Hitchcock doing in his cameo. The second time Lina leaves the town bookstore with a stack of Isobel’s novels, Hitchcock is standing on the sidewalk putting a letter into the mailbox. In a sense then, because he is denied the ending he wanted Hitchcock takes matters into his own hands, sending the letter that identifies Johnnie as the murderer himself. This cameo proves Hitchcock, like Lina and to a lesser extent Johnnie, to be both a reader of fiction (he has clearly read Before the Fact), and a creator of fiction, in this case Suspicion.

Alternate endings and authorial interventions aside, both Lina and Hitchcock’s readings of Johnnie prove to be false. Most viewers, however, believe in Johnnie’s guilt until the last scene, hence the widely-held dissatisfaction with the ending. The conclusion mobilized by the script has Johnnie redeemed and, more significantly, Lina framing herself as the culprit. In the final scene, on a dizzying drive in a convertible sports car along a winding road on a steep hill, Lina’s fears are exacerbated only to be proved false. As she breaks down in fear Johnnie demands, rather suspiciously, “how much do you think a man can bear?” This, along with the suggestion that he was going to kill himself (not her) with the poison he’d heard of through Isobel, coaxes Lina into rewriting our understanding of the film. Throughout the film we identify with her as the tormented and suffering victim, but it is her plot that turns out to be the fictional one. If we take the conclusion to be true it is Lina, not Johnnie, who has, in Isobel’s words, been “writing a detective story on the side.” Furthermore it is we, those viewers who identify with Lina rather than Johnnie, who are re-written as gullible readers by the conclusion.

Another important cameo comes in Blackmail, with Hitchcock portraying himself as both reader and creator of fiction, while “Alice and Frank are clearly identified as ‘viewers’” (Poague 87). Hitchcock appears in a streetcar early in the film, “facing us directly, and as one of us, as a reader” (87), suggesting that one ought to both consume and produce texts. Frank meanwhile is an indiscriminate consumer, invested in Fingerprints, “the detective film he looks forward to seeing. He may be confident the filmmakers will get the details wrong, but Frank takes an obviously personal interest in the film nevertheless, as if it were a genuine token of himself” (86). This likens Frank, in many ways, to Joe and Herb in Shadow of a Doubt, whose complete immersion in the world of the texts they consume hinders their ability to act in reality. Frank, like the detective movies he goes to see, gets “all the details [of Alice’s case] wrong.” Frank’s narrow interpretation of detective films, like his earlier assumptions regarding the Daily Herald reader, shows a singular and unwavering approach to texts. Hitchcock’s cameo as fellow reader, on the other hand, provides us with another critical point of view. He disavows directorial authority and opens his texts (and himself) to new kinds of spectatorial interpretation.

By including readers and writers in his films, Hitchcock provides us with surrogates in the text. Taking up their positions, assuming their subjectivity, we gain new and different points of entry into a given text. Furthermore, by critiquing the reading practices of characters within Hitchcock’s films, we are better able to inform and qualify our own readings. The way newspapers, non-fiction books and detective fiction are manipulated in Blackmail, Suspicion and Shadow of a Doubt, suggest ways in which to approach these films as factual, ambiguous or crime fiction, but also the dangers involved in interpretation. Close-minded characters such as Joe and Herb in Shadow or Frank in Blackmail, serve as warnings against claims to a “once-and-for-all meaning” (Poague 88). What Hitchcock advocates by sometimes disproving and sometimes endorsing the readings of his characters, is a constant multiplicity of interpretations.

Note: Written for English 393: Hitchcock course taught by Prof. Ned Schantz at McGill University in the Fall of 2006.

Works Cited

Blackmail. Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. Perf. Anna Ondra (Alice White), Joan Berry (Alice’s voice), John Longden (Frank Webber), Cyril Richard (Crewe), Donald Calthrop (Tracy). British International, 1929.

Huyssen, Andreas. “Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism’s Other.” After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1986. 44-62.

McLaughlin, James. “All in the Family: Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt.” A Hitchcock Reader. Eds. Marshall Deutelbaum and Leland Poague. Ames, IA: Iowa State UP, 1986. 141-152.

Poague, Leland. “Criticism and/as History: Rereading Blackmail.” A Hitchcock Reader. Eds. Marshall Deutelbaum and Leland Poague. Ames, IA: Iowa State UP, 1986. 78-89.

Shadow of a Doubt. Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. Perf. Joseph Cotton (Charles Oakley), Teresa Wright (Charlie Newton), Patricia Collinge (Emma Newton), Henry Travers (Joe Newton), Hume Cronyn (Herb Hawkins). Universal, 1943.

Suspicion. Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. Perf. Joan Fontain (Lina McLaidlaw/Aysgarth), Cary Grant (Johnnie Aysgarth),

Truffault, François. Hitchcock. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983.

Wood, Robin. Hitchcock’s Films Revisited. Revised ed. New York: Columbia UP, 2002.

Worland, Rick. “Before and after the Fact: Writing and Reading Hitchcock’s ‘Suspicion.’” Cinema Journal 41.4 (Summer 2002): 3-26.

Montréal vu par Cosmos: short films, cabs and cameras

Films “about” a specific city will always be faced with the problem of representing an urban space that is too dynamic and multifaceted to be captured in one cinematic installment. In this sense, “Montreal films” stand in much the same relationship to the city as canonical Canadian films do to national identity: the imagined communities both projects seek to depict don’t exist and never have. Christopher E. Gittings refers to this as “a regime of fictive ethnicity… Québec represented as a pur laine Québécois cultural formation” (4). “Montreal films,” then, are involved in a kind of cinematic myth-making that creates a coherent sense of the city, containing its complexity and pluri-ethnic make-up. Two films made in Montreal in the 1990s took a new approach to this dilemma. Rather than rely on one narrative to convey a sense of the city, Montréal vu par… (1991) and Cosmos (1996) use the short film form to help signify the fragmentation of postmodern Montreal. From this common starting point, the two films take different approaches to reconciling their disparate visions of Montreal. The earlier film presents more rigid and conventional portraits of the city while the later features an original approach to addressing tensions in Montreal’s civic identity. Focusing on Cosmos, I will explore how the film gives a sense of unity to its disjointed narrative and cinematic construction of Montreal, and to what extent the title character’s cab facilitates this unifying project.

The depiction of Montreal in both films can be explained, to some extent, by the economics of their productions. Montréal vu par… was financed in part by the National Film Board of Canada (NFB), but also by Montreal’s municipal government for the city’s 350th anniversary (Marshall 212). Attracting six of Canada’s most famous directors – Atom Egoyan, Patricia Rozema, Lea Pool and Denys Arcand among others – the project’s official sanctioning, mix of local and imported filmmakers and mainstream appeal curbed its potential for critical engagement with the Montreal cityscape. Cosmos, meanwhile, was “a showcase for young directors put together by Roger Frappier at Max Films” (214). Financed by a Montreal-based company, Québécois cultural institutions and an NFB fund for independent filmmaking, Cosmos was for several of its young directors a first commercial project after only making student films (Mandolini 46). The film, therefore, benefited from local perspectives informed by the dynamic student and immigrant culture of its filmmakers. Though many of the shorts in Montréal vu par… feature outmoded perspectives onto a city historically construed as white and francophone, Cosmos bares the traces of its production from within the multicultural city.

The films’ editing styles add to the sense of simultaneous unity and disjunction in Montréal vu par…, as opposed to the more unified visual code but disjointed narrative style of Cosmos. The former keeps its six segments completely apart, testifying to the auteur status of its feature filmmakers whose work remains clearly separated. This has the contradictory double effect of making the individual segments seem more cohesive, but creating a very disjointed feature-length film. In the latter, however, all the cinematography was handled by André Turpin, creating a cohesive visual style. The film-student directors of Cosmos are well-versed in short film, and thus more comfortable with the vignette format. Furthermore, their narratives present overlapping and interspersed events taking place over the course of the same day, thereby creating a sense of disjointed simultaneity. In an interview with Séquences magazine, the director of the Cosmos & Agriculture segment, Arto Paragamian, explains that their original project was to keep the vignettes separate. When it came time to edit the film, however, the group decided to intertwine their narratives. “That allowed us to freshen up the genre, renew the formula and to propose some unusual constructions” (Castiel 23). By subscribing to a more unified visual code, and placing its different storylines in an overlapping structure, the vision of Montreal communicated in Cosmos is more dynamic, complete and less alienating than that of Montréal vu par…. Put another way, Cosmos “carries the fragmentation of the previous film further, its portmanteau structure reinforcing the idea of the city as an assemblage of distinct and separate subjects” (Marshall 214).

In resolving this tension between the broad identity of the city and the specificity of its districts and subcultures, these two films mediate differently between the image of Montreal as a “walking city,” and one of simultaneous “automobility.” This contributes to the films’ sense of narrative unity or disunity, and to the sense of wholeness they are able to impose onto cinematic Montreal. Several shorts in Montréal vu par… – most notably Egoyan’s En Passant and Rozema’s Desperanto – reproduce the experience of discovering the city’s charms, alienations and exclusions from a pedestrian perspective. This denial of what urban theorists Mimi Sheller and John Urry term “automobilty,” confines Montréal vu par… to portraying only certain parts of the city and denying the fluidity between, and cultural specificity of, different districts. Elaborating on their approach to urban space, Urry and Sheller explain “that civil society should be reconceptualized as a ‘civil society of ‘automobilty’, a civil society of quasi-objects, or ‘car-drivers’ and ‘car-passengers’, along with disenfranchised ‘pedestrians’ and others not-in-cars, those that suffer a Lacanian ‘lack’” (Sheller 739). Through the device of the cab, Cosmos overcomes the barriers between “car-drivers,” “car-passengers” and “pedestrians,” connects disparate areas, and brings cohesion to an otherwise fragmented film. Providing a constant that figures in all the film’s narratives, Cosmos’s cab connects the cinematic city and its citizens.

Experiencing Montreal in Cosmos, therefore, must be understood through the framing device of the cab. Drawing on Anne Friedberg’s analogy between driving a car and sitting in a cinema, we can understand Cosmos’s cab as a camera within the text, leading the narrative from one short film to the next, just as it leads the spectator from one area of the city to the next. As Friedberg explains, “[d]riving transforms the mobilized pedestrian gaze with new kinetics of motored speed and with the privatization of the automobile ‘capsule’ sealed off from the public and the street” (184). Crucially, however, the taxi differs from other cars in that it is a permeable “capsule:” not only does it allow passengers to move through urban space, it allows for movement through its doors and across its seats. The cab, to some extent, combines the private mobility of other cars with the open structure of public transportation.

Aside from the physical and narrative mobility afforded by Cosmos’s cab, it doubles as a meta-cinematic camera within the text, giving a sense of cohesion to Cosmos’s overlapping narratives and Montreal’s multi-nodal landscape. As Bill Marshall puts it, “Cosmos himself is a conduit in the literal and figurative senses, the prime connector of this rhizomatic network of relations” (215). Firstly, we move from one narrative to the next with Cosmos, as he drives and looks out through the windshield. When characters enter his cab we watch him drive from their perspective, but also look out onto the streets from their position in the back seat. The cab becomes a vehicle for narrative but also for camera movement. As Friedberg puts it, “the visuality of driving is the visuality of the windshield, operating as a framing device… one is also sometimes a passenger, and the side windows and vents of an automobile frame the view of the scenery, somewhat differently, en passant” (Friedberg 184). Moreover, it is through the cab that Cosmos makes transitions from one of its micro-narratives into the next. If we conceive of the film’s six shorts as six different districts that make up part of an urban space called Cosmos, the cab becomes our way of moving from one of these areas into the next, the windshield serves as the framing device for the successive districts. The cab, like the camera, is the viewer’s way of navigating through Montreal from one plot to the next, and back again.

The narrative structure of Cosmos creates a sense of temporal continuity that parallels the unity created by Cosmos’s movement between, and appearance in, each vignette. The containment of the vignettes within a twenty-four hour period, the circularity of seeing Cosmos sleeping in his car both at the beginning and near the end of the film, create a sense of coherence that is lacking in the completely free-standing vignettes of Montréal vu par…. As if thinking specifically of Cosmos, Sheller and Urry write that when “people dwell in and socially interact through their cars, they become hyphenated car-drivers: at home in movement, transcending distance to complete series of activities within fragmented moments of time” (Sheller 739). Cosmos’s mobility through city space, but also through the fragmented temporality of postmodern Montreal, allows his cab to move independently of linear story time. Thus, he appears in different narratives simultaneously, defying the spatial and temporal constraints imposed on the other characters. As a meta-cinematic device, Cosmos’s cab is akin to the camera, shaping the diegesis through its movements, manipulating rather than following time.

The polymorphous movements of the Greek-Canadian Cosmos through time and space provide an analogy to the flow of marginalized and immigrant groups throughout Montreal. The invisible movements of Cosmos correspond to the invisibility of marginalized groups in Montreal films. A recurring oversight in Quebec’s national cinema – and to a lesser extent English-Canadian cinema – is the productive engagement with diasporic, marginalized and immigrant communities. The 1996 census, for instance, found that visible minorities make up 12.2 per cent of Montreal’s population, which in turn accounts for 92 per cent of the province’s visible minority population (Marshall 211). However, there remains a remarkable dearth of representations of non-white populations in Quebec cinema. Writing on 1989’s Jésus de Montréal, for instance, one critic ponders whether or not “Arcand is suggesting that it is time Québécois let go of their myth of the unitary, historical subject that is at the basis of their nationalism and also of their xenophobia” (Alemany-Galway 131). Traditionally, Quebec cinema has sought to articulate a popular imaginary that revolved around the Anglophone-Francophone binary. As a result of perceived Anglophone oppression, “there is a much stronger commitment to the need for a national cinema to articulate the values of distinctive cultural traditions” (Leach 159). However, this model of rearticulating pur laine Québécois cultural traditions – what one critic calls “[t]he hegemonic cinema of whiteness that has marked production in Canada historically” (Gittings 233) – has become increasingly divorced from demographic reality.

Montreal is the playing field on which Quebec national identity meets the polymorphous and multicultural postmodern urban environment. The city, then, is the site of an ongoing negotiation between these two identities, it “is the most common setting for a Québec film and would seem, therefore, to play an authenticating role within this national cinema. And yet it is also the ‘weakest’ point for any kind of pure, homogenous vision of Québec culture to be formed since such a role is immediately contested and contradicted by its insertion within the international flows of both capital and labor” (Marshall 211). This tension is addressed summarily in Montréal vu par…, though none of the shorts actively engage multiculturalism. Cosmos, meanwhile, is more productive in its depiction of Quebec culture as it is destabilized by postmodern urban fragmentation and multiplicity.

The sense of a larger polymorphous city beyond the narrative, outside its frame, is a difficulty that most of the shorts in Montréal vu par… elide. Jacques Leduc’s La Toile du temps segment, for instance, takes a historical documentary approach, addressing Montreal’s history rather than its lived reality. The segment belies nostalgia for Quebec history, and looks back romantically from an unstable present in which traditional white patriarchal Québécois identity is threatened. Michel Brault’s La Dernière partie, meanwhile, takes a pillar of Montreal civic identity as its setting, but contains its scope to the middle-class white hockey fans who populate the Pepsi Forum. Denys Arcand’s short, Vue d’ailleurs, similarly confines itself to an upper-middle class white woman’s subjective experience. Set on a tropical estate, the short features a multicultural cast, but is completely removed from Montreal. Arcand only engages with Montreal’s multiculturalism in order to fetishize it, in the person of the nameless native character portrayed by Raoul Trujillo. It’s hard to tell whether the tone of Arcand’s short is sarcastic, or if it is very blatantly eroticizing the aboriginal other. The views on Montreal expressed at the dinner party do, however, testify to the popular mythologies surrounding the city, and its place in a network of global cities.

The three remaining shorts in Montréal vu par…, the ones not directed by white Québécois men over fifty, address the experience of Montreal’s urban geography as an alienating spectacle. Rispondetemi, Léa Pool’s segment, takes place at dawn and mostly consists of private flashbacks of a young woman’s childhood, and non-narrative shots of the morning sky from the streets. Rushing through the deserted city in an ambulance, Montreal becomes a sublime experience that washes over the body. The other segments, Rozema and Egoyan’s, address the immensity and elusiveness of Montreal from the perspective of a visitor. Both feature clever manipulations of language, through a voiceover audio guide in Egoyan’s En passant, and in the pulling of subtitles into the diegesis of Rozema’s Desperanto. Calling attention to language in these shorts, however, mainly serves to play up the English-French binary rather than address the pluri-lingualism of contemporary Montreal. As one critic puts it, “[a]ll six short films are in fact very oblique, either figuring the city as ‘elsewhere’ or, in their narratives of encounters and combinations, favouring the transversal over the panoptic” (Marshall 212). Indeed, Montréal vu par… trades on the existing popular imaginary of the city rather than contributing to or disrupting it.

Cosmos, however, repeatedly parodies the problem of a city that can never be captured on film, bringing new points to bear on Montreal’s polymorphous identity. Indeed, it is one of “[a] group of films in the 1990s [that] began to take on board and attempted to negotiate the new state of affairs of the Global City, which both unbalances that old tension between place and space, container and flow, and creates new possibilities as well as exclusions” (Marshall 211). A clear articulation of this, for instance, comes in Denis Villeneuve’s segment, Le Technétium. When the director-in-the-film Morille – portrayed by successful Québécois actor David La Haye – walks into a building in typical Plateau architectural style for an interview, he stumbles into a subcultural postmodern microcosm of global communication culture. Passing indoors, Morille emerges into a hyper-sensory internet television studio. Hiding amongst the picturesque rowhouses – the same ones that fuel the romantic imagination of Polly Vandersema (Sheila McCarthy) in Rozema’s short from Montréal vu par… – a jarring subcultural phenomenon is thriving in a timeless and technologically-shaped space. When Morille is forcibly given a haircut that complements his “director” function, the six mirrors that capture his face visit the same postmodern fragmentation on him that the film’s six narratives visit on the urban landscape of Montreal. The cultural underground that the Tekno Show represents is one that operates outside the material boundaries of national Quebec identity, instead engaging in the dematerialized media flow between global cities.

Two of the Cosmos segments take another approach to engaging the changing identity of Quebec and Montreal, using a white male figure to illustrate the pressures that have destabilized traditional categories of Quebec identity. In André Turpin’s Jules & Fanny, the ultra-modern space of the Place Ville Marie skyscraper provides the stage for an encounter between ex-lovers who are about to be rivals in court. Jules, portrayed by Alexis Martin, is isolated in a dreary work routine, debilitatingly immature and perpetuating antiquated gender and sexual norms. If taken as an allegorical figure for the state of white heterosexual Québécois masculinity in general, Jules embodies shock and angst at the fragmentation of the imagined patriarchal francophone community of Quebec. The architectural space of Place Ville Marie, at once a part of Montreal and of that international network that mediates the flow of global capital, helps to infantilize the diminutive Jules. The verticality of Montreal’s tallest office tower furthers the sexual emasculation that the powerful – perhaps phallic – Fanny uses to manipulate Jules. Turpin’s elegant segment, then, acknowledges the antiquated models of Quebec nationalism that revolve around heterosexual white patriarchal power. This articulation of the untenable norms of traditional Quebec culture in Jules & Fanny exemplifies postmodern reality, under which “the incorporation of Montreal within a culturally coherent Québécois identity remains problematic” (Lajoie 39).

Another problematic male figure in Cosmos testifies to a marginalized queer community that has only recently become visible in Montreal. In Manon Briand’s segment Boost two automobile flâneurs, Yannie (Marie-Hélène Montpetit) and Joël (Pascal Contamine), travel around Montreal as procrastination rather than going to get the latter’s HIV test results. Beginning in the Plateau, Boost is located in a section that is fluid in its demographic make-up, being both historically working-class and recently artistic and gentrifying. As opposed to the vertical city space of Jules & Fanny, Boost depicts “the alternative chronotype of the city’s multicultural Plateau district as a potential source of more mobile, less stable… definitions of the Québécois self” (Marshall 211). This segment again plays on lapses in maturity and characters who are adult children, refusing to accept responsibilities and consequences. Like Jules, Joël struggles to come to terms with a crisis in Quebec male identity, though he copes more successfully than the former. Boost not only stages the instability of Quebec masculine identity, but presents a narrative that attempts to acknowledge and work through that instability.

Finally, the narrative Cosmos weaves through Montreal’s landscape is driven by a working-class immigrant. Linking disparate people and places in the city together, Cosmos “is a Greek-Canadian cab driver, who sleeps in his cab and links the different stories in which all the main characters are white and francophone” (Leach 132). The scenes featuring Cosmos and the final segment, Cosmos & Agriculture, are all directed by a filmmaker of Armenian origin, Arto Paragamian. In an interview, Paragamian explains that “my Armenian origins are a determining factor in the construction of the sketch I directed” (Castiel 24). For the final sequence, which combines the chase and buddy-movie genres, Cosmos is joined by a Haitian-Canadian cab driver named Janvier, and the pair chase bank robbing car thieves into an abandoned open-air mine. Rather than being the result of narrative continuity, however, the passage of the cab from urban streets into the mine actualizes the postmodern dematerialization of the city. Montreal turns into a towering and amorphous disembodied space where there are no roads, exits, onramps, sidewalks or people, and where the vertical walls of buildings are grey, indistinguishable and polymorphous. This sequence, furthermore, features the “formal self-consciousness,” “self-ironic eclecticism and knowingness” that characterise postmodern aesthetics (Brooker 203). In this absurd space, logic is displaced by detached sarcasm and cynicism. Or, as Janvier responds to Cosmos’s pitiful “why me?”: “Yeah, it’s ironic. It’s as if everything was meaningless.”

Cosmos, then, completes the postmodern transformation of Montreal’s urban landscape into a place out of time and space. Through the cohesiveness of its visual aesthetic and the linking functions served by its immigrant cab driver, the film overcomes the disjointed assemblage of its narrative. In so doing it also acknowledges the complexities of Montreal’s urban network, and the pressures that are displacing the once hegemonic national Québécois myth of white patriarchal masculinity. Montréal vu par… employs a different strategy by isolating its auteur filmmakers, thereby producing a more uneven and dissatisfying film. By featuring a mix of outsiders (the Swiss immigrant Léa Pool, Egyptian-born Armenian immigrant Atom Egoyan and Ontarian Patricia Rozema) and established white heterosexual Québécois men (Denys Arcand, Jacques Leduc and Michel Brault), Montréal vu par… skirts the constructed nature of the imaginary stability of Quebec national identity. Each of these series of short films acknowledges the contradictions and inherent complexities of urban identity in “the age of globalization, the tension between specific local environments and generic locations, which has always been a part of Canadian cinema, [and] is increasingly becoming a worldwide phenomenon” (Leach 48). Unfortunately, Montréal vu par… shies away from a productive engagement with these themes. Cosmos, meanwhile, embraces the multiplicity of Montreal in a way that “reveals a set of meanings that is constantly in process but which usefully connects the specificity of the Québec situation with global evolutions and transitions” (Marshall 215).

Note: Written for course English 393: Canadian Cinema 1 taught by Mr. Ger Zielinski at McGill University in the Winter of 2007.

Works Cited

Alemany-Galway, Mary. “Jesus of Montreal.” A Postmodern Cinema: The Voice of the Other in Canadian Film. Lanham, MD, London: Scarecrow Press, 2002. 119-139.

Brooker, Peter. A Glossary of Cultural Theory. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford UP, 2003.

Castiel, Élie. “Cosmos: les risques du métier.” Séquences 188 (January/February 1997): 22-24.

Cosmos. Dir. Jennifer Alleyn (Aurore et Crépuscule), Manon Briand (Boost), Marie-Julie Dallaire (L’Individu), Arto Paragamian (Cosmos & Agriculture), André Turpin (Jules & Fanny), Denis Villeneuve (Le Technétium). Perf. Igor Ovadis, Stéphane Demers, Sarah-Jeanne Salvy, Gabriel Gascon, David La Haye, Marie-France Lambert, Alexis Martin, Marie-Hélène Monpetit. Max Films Productions Inc., 1996.

Friedberg, Anne. “Urban Mobility and Cinematic Visuality: the Screens of Los Angeles – Endless Cinema or Private Telematics.” Journal of Visual Studies 1.2 (2002): 183-204.

Gittings, Christopher E. Canadian National Cinema: ideology, difference and representation. New York: Routledge, 2002.

Lajoie, Mark. “Imagining the City in Québécois Cinema.” Cahiers du Gerse 3 (2001): 34-54.

Leach, Jim. Film in Canada. Oxford, New York: Oxford UP, 2006.

Mandolini, Carlo. “Cosmos: Vingt-quatre heures sur la planète Solitude.” Séquences 187 (November/December 1996): 46-47.

Marshall, Bill. “Montréal Between Strangeness, Home and Flow.” In Cinema and the City: Film and Urban Societies in a Global Context. Eds. Mark Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice. Oxford, Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2001. 206-216.

Montréal vu par… . Dir. Denys Arcand (Vue d’ailleurs), Michel Brault (La Dernière partie), Atom Egoyan (En passant), Jacques Leduc (La Toile du temps), Léa Pool (Rispondetemi), Patricia Rozema (Desperanto). Perf. Rémy Girard, Arsinée Khanjian, Robert Lepage, Hélène Loiselle, Jean Mathieu, Anne Dorval. Atlantis Films Limited, Cinémaginaire Inc., National Film Board of Canada, 1991.

Sheller, Mimi and John Urry. “The City and the Car.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 24.4 (December 2000): 737-757).

Subverting the Suburbs in Mildred Pierce

In Mildred Pierce, the title character transforms the patriarchal space of the suburb into one which suits her ambitions. This takes place in the historical context of economic depression, of women’s rising social power and independence, and of the resultant male anxiety. The suburbs, originally passed off as female-coded spaces, are seen as detached, and alienating at the beginning of Mildred’s story. However her actions are not destructive or dismissive; she does not build a new home or move to the city. Instead she adapts the isolating space of the suburb to the needs and demands of her personal and entrepreneurial agendas. She creates a network of supportive women who help her (temporarily) overcome the isolating fabric of the suburb. She changes the physical space of the suburban home into a successful restaurant. Finally, she turns her skills as a homemaker into assets which become money-makers. I will argue that Mildred Pierce successfully transforms the suburbs into a space which works for her rather than against her, though she is ultimately punished for doing so and reinscribed into a patriarchal power structure.

In an article on the evolving roles and activities of suburban women, Kim V. L. England illustrates the adaptive skills of women in the suburbs. Using a study of thirty women in suburban Columbus, Ohio conducted in the late 1980s, she identifies some of the tactics women have used to incorporate their professional ambitions into the suburban lifestyle. She begins by summarizing previous and contemporaneous writings on the positions of women in the suburbs. From this she concludes that “because societal expectations about gender identities are literally fossilized into bricks and mortar they will continue to partially constrain the possibilities open to women” (England 40). She argues for “the suburbs as contextualizing how women define and reconstruct their identities and their neighbourhoods to better facilitate the integration of their various roles” (30). Her conclusions are based on observations made some five decades after the events in Mildred Pierce are set. Mildred’s proto-feminist timing only amplifies the transgressive nature of her actions. In the context of the 1930s her financial ascent is scandalous, and it is necessary to reincorporate her into a patriarchal structure before the novel’s end.

From the beginning, the Pierce household is characterized as one in which monetary concerns prevail. Shortly after Mildred is introduced it is made known that her baking is for commercial purposes as she tells Bert: “I’m making this cake for Mrs. Whitley, and she’s going to pay me three dollars for it” (Cain 6). Mildred qualifies this statement with the implications of the following: “I don’t see anybody working around here but me” (6). Thus it is already clear that in light of Bert’s ineffectuality, Mildred has converted the female space of the kitchen into a place of economic production. Later in this scene, as Mildred indicts him for his affair with Maggie Biederhof, the narrator is quick to point out that Bert’s infidelity is translated into economic terms. “She had little to say about love, fidelity, or morals. She talked about money, and his failure to find work” (7). This concern for money is partly a symptom of the early 1930s having been a time of economic depression in the United States. However, this also reflects a larger social movement of women who became more aware of money and their own possibilities as wage-earners. As the novel opens Mildred has already reversed the typical power structure within her home, becoming the bread-winner while Bert is passive and dependant.

After Bert’s passage out of the house and Mildred’s usurping of his car (71-3), she sets out to reconstruct the male space outside their home into one which can be profitable for her. The reapropriation of the car in this suburban novel is doubly important. Firstly, it is a symbol of social mobility, and a necessary tool for financial independence and ascension in the suburbs. Without it, Mildred could not accomplish her “various daily activities usually being associated with widely dispersed locations” (England 28). Secondly, it furthers Bert’s symbolic castration. Not only can he not provide for his family financially, but he can no longer move around independently. The car becomes a tool of empowerment for Mildred, allowing her to commute to her job at Mr. Chris’ diner, and to widen her network of pie distribution. Just as suburban expansion was first promoted by car manufacturers, so the development of Mildred’s suburban enterprise is made possible by her having a car.

The network of supportive women which Mildred creates around her is also a crucial asset in the business’ expansion. As England writes, for the suburban women she interviewed “localized social relations were an important part of their coping strategies. For instance, relationships with other women (…) were important for finding paid work and making child care arrangements” (England 39). Mildred’s support network consists of Ida and Mrs. Gessler primarily. Their support is never made more explicit, nor cast in such heroic light, as when they come to Mildred’s rescue on the opening night of her restaurant. Mildred “saw her opening turning into a fiasco (…) Then beside her was Ida, whipping off her hat, tucking it with her handbag beside the tin box that held the cash, slipping into an apron” (Cain 144). Moments later, “Mrs. Gessler laid her hat beside Ida’s and went out” (145). The community of women evolves into a company of women under the ‘Mildred Pierce’ neon sign.

Similarly, what was once the model suburban home becomes the headquarters of a model suburban business. When Mildred’s production needs surpass her kitchen’s capacity, she maximizes the female-coded space of the Pierce Homes model home by making its ground floor half-kitchen, half-dining room. The ‘reconstruction’ England refers to in her article is made literal in Mildred Pierce. As Cain puts it, Mildred’s changes were ‘transforming’ the model home (103). Thus, her antiquated oven becomes the “gigantic range that made her heart pump when she looked at it” (103), and the small driveway becomes “the gravel that had been dumped for the free parking” (112). Finally, the defunct Pierce Homes Inc. becomes the more profitable Mildred Pierce Inc.. This parallel is reinforced by the detail that the initial advertising for the opening of Mildred’s restaurant relied on “the Pierce Home lists, so that every person who had bought a home, or had even thought of buying a home, had been covered” (137). What was built as a place for selling suburban homes is rebuilt into a place for selling suburban homeliness.

Similarly, Mildred’s support network is incorporated into Mildred Pierce Inc. when Ida and Mrs. Gessler become managers of their own branches. Cain never specifies whether Ida’s branch opens in a suburban or residential area of Beverly (203-204). However Mrs. Gessler’s branch epitomizes the theme of converting stultifying suburban homes into bustling suburban dining establishments, which began with the Pierce Homes model home. Firstly it is in Laguna Beach, perched on a cliff “halfway between L.A. and San Diego” (205), putting it as far West as one can go in a nation long characterized by its Westward expansion. Secondly, the home’s spectacular setting and the upscale restaurant which Mrs. Gessler turns it into (206-7), evoke the economic hierarchy of suburbs which prompt Mildred’s move from Glendale to Pasadena (262). The dramatic changes which are made to the Laguna Beach house echo and amplify the modifications made to the Pierce Homes model home.

In the novel’s denouement, Mildred is multiply punished for the transgressive activities she has undertaken. Her manipulation of the physical space of the suburbs is compensated for by other peoples’ manipulations of her. Thus, Mildred ends the novel with much less than she had to begin with, having gained and lost everything she ever wanted in the process. “She had mortgaged the house on Pierce Drive, into which she had now moved” (295). Not only has she moved back into the coded-male space of the Pierce Homes development, but she has assumed the mortgage payments that were Berts’ at the novel’s beginning. She also “could no longer do business under her own name. That, it turned out, was still owned by the corporation” (293-4). Her name having become something profitable, and for having subverted the Pierce from Pierce Homes Inc., Mildred is robbed of her identity. The retribution for her throwing off of patriarchal power structures is made complete when her role as mother is also taken from her. She had ignored the portents of Ray’s death, a symbolic warning coming a few days before the opening of Mildred’s first restaurant. Finally she must “draw the knife across an umbilical cord” (298), severing her maternal ties to Veda, giving up her role as a mother.

The multiple roles which Mildred had assumed are thus taken and re-appropriated by patriarchy, as well as her name and voice. The suburban homes she had transformed to fit her commercial needs become reinscribed into the patriarchal space of the suburbs. This is made light of when Mr. Chris voices his distaste for the pies being sold to him (296). Run by Wally rather than Mildred Pierce, the pies coming from the Mildred Pierce Inc. kitchens simply aren’t as good. The return of Bert at the end of the novel completes a re-establishment of patriarchal law, as impotent and ineffectual as it has proved to be in Mildred Pierce. Though the last line of the novel is spoken by Mildred, it is in Bert’s words. Even her means of self-expression are usurped as she echoes: “Yes—let’s get stinko” (298).

Note: Written for the course English 492: Divergent representations of the suburbs in postwar American fiction and film taught at McGill University by Dr. Jason Polley in the Fall of 2006.

Works Cited

Cain, James A.. Mildred Pierce. New York: Random House, 1941.

England, Kim V.L.. “Changing Suburbs, Changing Women: Geographic Perspectives on Suburban Women and Suburbanization.” Frontiers: A Journal of Womens Studies 14.1 (1993): 24-43.

Déjà vu: Representation and Re-Presentation in White Noise

In Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel White Noise, the narrative trope of repetition is purposefully overused to detract from its effect. This technique mirrors the endless repetitions of disaster which the Gladney family watches on their television Friday nights (DeLillo 64). Repetitions in a novel demand the reader discover the significance of a recurring detail or passage. White Noise problematizes this literary convention. The entire novel becomes a series of repetitions or déjà vu, every moment being an adaptation of one already shown on film or television. According to John Frow, what unifies the fragmented episodes in DeLillo’s narrative, “is their source in a chain of prior representations” (Frow 421). White Noise brings together a conscious repetition of television news scenarios, narrative conventions from popular genres of fiction and everyday tropes of the suburban life experience, all of which are common to most Americans. Re-presentation of recognizable scenes, however, does not indicate a passage of particular significance in White Noise. The frequency of uncannily familiar scenes is the significant point; every narrative event is a déjà vu.

The entire novel becomes a series of reiterated scenes, much like the suburban landscape that repeats a formula of houses, strip malls and fabricated main streets. The déjà vu in White Noise do not duplicate lived experiences of the characters, but instead re-enact events represented in popular texts and newscasts. These texts and tropes form the American collective conscience, one of the few things aside from suburban landscapes that are universal in the United States. Describing one such landscape Jack Gladney observes

The two-story world of an ordinary main street. Modest, sensible, commercial in an unhurried way, a prewar way, with prewar traces of architectural detail surviving in the upper stories, in copper cornices and leaded windows, in the amphora frieze above the dime-store window. (DeLillo 257)

This scene draws on suburban conventions, DeLillo’s Blacksmith becoming a re-presentation of any number of preceding and subsequent fictional Anytowns. Watching Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life suddenly provokes a sense of déjà vu as James Stewart’s George Bailey runs down the main street of Bedford Falls. DeLillo, consciously or not, begins retelling this trope with the word ‘story’ rather than ‘storey.’ This spelling suggests just how storied this two-storey main street is in American fiction.

Other moments of contemporary suburban déjà vu mark the landscape of White Noise. The road out of Blacksmith that the family takes to get to the first evacuation center draws on a universally familiar cliché. The Gladney station wagon takes “the main route out of town, a sordid gantlet of used cars, fast food, discount drugs and quad cinemas” (119). The ‘airborne toxic event’ and its abnormality make the contrasting unremarkable familiarity of this suburban construction ‘sordid.’ Later Jack describes the hypothetical Gray Research headquarters as another instance of déjà vu in the repetitive suburban landscape. The company’s name, real or not, contributes to the universal nature of the building Jack imagines. Its greyness mirrors the indeterminacy of all suburban constructions. It is, not surprisingly, a building that anyone who has driven through a suburban office park can imagine: “One of those long low brick buildings with electrified fencing and low-profile shrubbery” (193). Jack’s use of the phrase ‘one of those’ in the description immediately signifies his reference to a frequently recurring structure in the landscape.

Déjà vu of this sort become invested with sudden meaning at the time of the chemical spill. Authorities cite and then disregard déjà vu as one of the symptoms of exposure to the ‘airborne toxic event,’ itself a familiar trope from disaster films and special television bulletins. The phenomenon of déjà vu, after its association with exposure to Nyodene D., is explicitly and self-consciously addressed in the novel. Seeing a roadside accident as the family proceeds to the evacuation center, Steffie proclaims “I saw this all before” (125). The car crash scene ‘this’ refers to is a familiar image from television traffic reports, Steffie’s déjà vu resembles any other in the novel, including our own. Similarly, the toxic spill which punctuates the center of the narrative is deflated by its own familiarity in the collective conscience. The minor media attention devoted to the ‘airborne toxic event’ testifies to its frequent representation both in television newscasts and narrative fiction. As the ‘man carrying a tiny TV set’ demands: “Does this kind of thing happen so often that nobody cares anymore” (161-2)? He implicitly answers his own question moments later when he turns to Jack after his speech: “I saw this before” (162). That his complaint is a déjà vu dooms the subject of his complaint to being one as well.

The lingo and recurring terms of surveillance and television news infiltrate the vocabulary of White Noise’s characters. Knowledge and clichés associated with the world portrayed by reporters become déjà vu when incorporated into Jack’s narrative. He re-presents the terminology of political scandal, made common parlance by television news associated with Watergate and more recently ‘Monicagate.’ Asking Babette for the Dylar Jack pleads, “I only want them for the sake of historical accuracy. Like White House tapes. They go into the archives” (209). His interpellation of disinterested and archival intentions holds no sway with his wife. Jack can’t hide his selfish motives from Babette or us, the objectivity once implied by journalistic phrases being long forgotten due to their endless repetition.

Television news terminology reappears frequently in White Noise, and always fails to have the desired impact. When easily integrated into familiar newspeak, the name of the drug whose mystery motivates the novel’s second half tellingly proves to be a pliable signifier. Interrogated about the drug, Jack’s doctor “said he thought Dylar was an island in the Persian Gulf, one of those oil terminals crucial to the survival of the West” (180). A double-edged familiarity and ignorance of the world political situation, a widespread result of American news reporting, makes this exchange unremarkable and familiar. A similarly familiar mood of everyday paranoia, reinforced by reports of abductions and murders, is casually referred to as Jack waits for Denise outside her school. As he puts it, “I sat in the driver’s seat scanning the mass of faces, feeling like a dope dealer or pervert” (210). These paranoid conventions of the surveillance genre are emptied of their shocking implications because they are so relentlessly repeated to American consumers of news.

Many of the other déjà vu that appear in White Noise stem from the characters’ awareness of genre conventions. The concept of conventions emerges from one of the foundational texts of genre theory, Thomas Schatz’ book Hollywood Genres. Conventions are tropes which reappear and come to characterize a specific genre, like the femme fatale character of so many film noir. White Noise employs many conventions of the family, melodrama, suburban and disaster genres. Jack and Babette , after a fast-food meal taken in the car, anticipate a convention of the family narrative. The parents are aware that “[a] sulky menace brewed back there. They would attack us, using the classic strategy of fighting among themselves” (235). The term ‘classic’ in this sentence does not imply actions previously taken by Jack and Babette’s children. It refers instead to a frequent scene of tired children in back seats on long drives, the repeated demand “Are we there yet?”

To avoid repeating this narrative déjà vu from so many family movies and sitcoms, Babette begins a debate about the conventions of another genre, alien films and UFO sightings.

Why is it these UFOs are mostly seen upstate? The best sightings are upstate. People get abducted and taken aboard. Farmers see burn marks where saucers landed. A woman gives birth to a UFO baby, so she says. Always upstate. (235)

This observation sparks a comically distracting debate which eventually leads Jack to ponder the existence of conventions in geography: “There had to be large cities in the northern part of some states. Or were they just north of the border in the southern part of states just to the north” (235)? Babette mobilizes genre conventions again when telling Jack about her encounters with Mr. Gray. She invokes tropes of the melodrama and suburban fiction genre, wherein affairs must always be conducted in motels. She describes the one where she meets Mr. Gray as “a grubby little motel room. Never mind where or when. It had the TV up near the ceiling” (194). Jack and readers immediately recognize this image, a re-presentation of a motel room represented in countless other narratives. Babette’s suggestion to ‘never mind where or when’ underlines that this image of a motel room is completely divorced from space and time. The motel, like the toxic spill or quaint main street, becomes a set removed from its original narrative location and integrated into DeLillo’s collage of re-presented familiarities.

The medium of White Noise is, therefore, not a novel of fiction but a quilting of scenes and moments from previous fictions. Thus, when authorities first set up the déjà vu hotline, Jack explains that “[t]here were counsellors on duty around the clock to talk to people who were troubled by recurring episodes” (176). That Jack uses the phrase ‘recurring episodes’ not only evokes the recurring conventions mentioned earlier. This also points to the episodic nature of the novel, the way in which scenes change like television channels with the press of a button. As John N. Duvall points out, the Gladneys occupy “an imagistic space of consumption that one accesses by playing dial-a-rama, turning the dial/dyl to the channel of one’s choice” (Duvall 449). DeLillo’s characters and readers are made aware, if they weren’t already, that the postmodern text is a self-conscious pillaging and re-presentation of previous representations. With a turn of phrase pillaged from Marshall McLuhan, the novel’s re-presentation of countless widely-diffused narrative conventions becomes its message.

Note: Written for the course English 492: Divergent representations of the suburbs in postwar American fiction and film taught at McGill University by Dr. Jason Polley in the Fall of 2006.

Works Cited

DeLillo, Don. White Noise. 1985. White Noise: Text and Criticism. Ed. Mark Osteen. New York: Viking Penguin, 1998. 1-326.

Duvall, John N.. “The (Super)Marketplace of Images: Television as Unmediated Mediation in DeLillo’s White Noise.” 1994. White Noise: Text and Criticism. Ed. Mark Osteen. New York: Viking Penguin, 1998. 432-455.

Frow, John. “The Last Things Before the Last: Notes on White Noise.” 1990. White Noise: Text and Criticism. Ed. Mark Osteen. New York: Viking Penguin, 1998: 417-31.

It’s A Wonderful Life. Dir. Frank Capra. Perf. James Stewart, Dona Reed, Lionel Barrymore, Thomas Mitchell, Henry Travers. Liberty Films, 1946.

Schatz, Thomas. Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking, and the Studio System. New York: Random House, 1981.