1. Edging Our Bets: the Glass Ceiling and the Frozen Sea
Are words on the page more than surface? Is the act of reading something a surface act? Do words on the page hold us on a surface, above depths and shallows like a layer of ice? (A book should be the axe to break the frozen sea inside us, Kafka says.) And what about reading on-screen — the latest, most modern way of communicating, working, writing a letter, writing a book, reading a book, telling a story?
What is a screen? A thing that divides. A thing people undress behind. A thing every computer has, in fact a thing computing has distilled itself increasingly into. A thing we all carry around with us in our pockets, a thing fundamental to western-world human information-gathering and a feature now fundamental — unimaginable this, only ten years ago — to a telephone. A thing that has an appearance of transparency and that divides us from bankers, ticket sellers, post office workers, people with money. A thing people project onto.
Does an image on a screen form the same kind of surface as words on a page? Filmmakers have been trying to conquer the way screens divide audiences from what they see on them since The Big Swallow in 1901, by James Williamson, where a man annoyed by a photographer taking his picture comes up so close to the camera that there’s nothing but his mouth, which then swallows both camera and cameraman.
Straight after the opening credits of Chaplin’s 1928 film The Circus, we see a hoop of paper with a star on it then a circus performer breaking through it. From the first appearance of his Tramp figure, in a 1914 short called Kid Auto Races at Venice, where he acts like what he looks like, a real member of the public who’s trying to get into a film some newsreel men are making, Chaplin was keen to slice through any divisive filter between the audience and the form; and in The Circus especially (he’s at the height of international fame when he makes it, probably still the most famous film symbol in the world) he wants to rip through any notions of stardom that might come between an audience and the everyman quality of his Tramp figure.
Powell and Pressburger start each of their Archers films with a perfect screen circle too, with an archery target printed on it, already bristling with arrows, and into which an arrow flies in a virtuoso bull’s-eye shot — suggesting something is about to pass between watcher and screen that will hit home, hit the target. And Alfred Hitchcock knew very early that cinema screen and dream are related; he understood that the screen has to be permeable, pass-throughable, like Alice with the looking glass — that this permeable nature is what makes the screen a feasible mirror. In one of his British silent films, The Lodger (1927), a mysterious stranger moves into the house of a family whose members, like everybody in the city, are in a panic about a series of local murders. The lodger is strange, jumpy, weirdly energetic; he’s not like anyone else. At one point the family stares up at a ceiling with a chandelier in it, and the ceiling turns to glass, you can see right through it, you can see the soles of the feet of the lodger, pacing up and down above them, because Hitchcock wants us to know what the family is hearing, the nervous pacing of the man on the floor above.
‘I did it,’ Hitchcock said afterwards, ‘by having a floor made of one-inch-thick glass.’ But it wasn’t just a brainwave for showing sound visually in a silent film. Hitchcock, a brilliant early interpreter of film form, knew that to hook a film audience with real suspense you have to let them in on parts of the plot or understandings of narrative atmosphere that the people in the story can’t have or understand. ‘The whodunnit contains no emotion. The audience are wondering, they’re not emoting, they’re not apprehensive for anyone…When the film is finished and the revelation comes, well, you get two or three minutes of saying, ‘ah, I told you so,’ or ‘I thought so,’ or ‘fancy that.’ I prefer to do the suspense film by giving all the information to the audience at the beginning of the picture.” Rarely among Hitchcock films, The Lodger doesn’t do this, works on withheld knowledge — it’s a film that Hitchcock didn’t have full directorial choice over, because of the bankability of its star, Ivor Novello. But in his films that do, Hitchcock creates a psychological gray area where the division isn’t between us and the story on the screen, it’s between those who know and those who don’t. In this way, knowledge becomes more than plot; it becomes a key to understanding action and morality.
In the first chapter of Henry James’s The Golden Bowl (1904) the Prince, out for a walk in London, is a modern man from an ancient culture, an Italian about to marry a rich American, and is wandering Bond Street, window-shopping, looking through the ‘plate glass all about him’ at all the spoils of empire that money can buy, ‘tumbled together’ like ‘loot.’ Meanwhile the ladies pass him ‘in faces shaded,’ hidden by hats ‘or more delicately tinted still under the tense silk of parasols.’ He has his new-world marriage and his prospective father-in-law’s millions to think about so he tells himself he doesn’t need passion or love, that romance is a memory he can simply ‘screen out — much as, just in front of him while he walked, the iron shutter of a shop, closing early to the stale summer day, rattled down at the turn of some crank.’
Poor Prince, foppishly wandering the city paying no attention to the clues in his own narrative; the heft of the novel is about to turn against him like a storm that thickens below the surface of a lake on which he thinks himself safe in his chic little boat. More — the churning storm at the heart of this novel will come in the form of a story about passion, about unmentionable love, and will be one that Henry James himself never once fully unveils, never allows to surface fully. The Golden Bowl is about worth, about money, about seeing the flaw in what looks perfect, yes. But as its first chapter insists, with its repeating imagery of veils and mists and screens and shutters and the shrouding these do, The Golden Bowl will be a narrative about a more deathly flaw, a state of blindness. James uses this resonant imagery to alert readers to something from which we’re being withheld, to suggest to us to read beneath the surface a story whose absence is so pressing that we feel it through the narrative, bone beneath skin.
A hundred years after The Golden Bowl Javier Marías, in Volume 1 of his trilogy about surveillance and history, Your Face Tomorrow (translated by Margaret Jull Costa), has a visionary take on what living with screens is doing to human beings:
That is doubtless why television is such a success, because you can see and watch people as you never can in real life unless you hide … the screen gives you the opportunity to spy at your leisure and to see more and therefore know more, because you’re not worrying about making eye contact or exposed in turn to being judged. … And inevitably you pass judgement, you immediately utter some kind of verdict (or you don’t utter it, but say it to yourself), it only takes a matter of seconds and there’s nothing you can do about it, even if it’s only rudimentary and takes the least elaborate of forms, which is liking or disliking… And you surprise yourself by saying, almost involuntarily, sitting alone before the screen: ‘I really like him,’ ‘I can’t stand the guy,’ ‘I could eat her up,’ ‘He’s such a pain,’ ‘I’d do anything he asked,’ ‘She deserves a good slap around the face,’ ‘Bighead,’ ‘He’s lying,’ ‘She’s just pretending to feel pity,’ ‘He’s going to find life really tough,’ ‘What a wanker,’ ‘She’s an angel,’ ‘He’s so conceited, so proud,’ ‘They’re such phonies, those two,’ ‘Poor thing, poor thing,’ ‘I’d shoot him this minute, without batting an eyelid,’ ‘I feel so sorry for her,’ ‘He drives me bloody mad,’ ‘She’s pretending,’ ‘How can he be so naïve,’ ‘What a cheek,’ ‘She’s such an intelligent woman,’ ‘He disgusts me,’ ‘He really tickles me.’ The register is infinite, there’s room for everything. And that instant verdict is spot-on, or so it feels when it comes (less so a second later). It carries a weight of conviction without having been subjected to a single argument. With not a single reason to sustain it.