Hail and welcome. In this episode I’ll be delving into film criticism with an analysis of the 1948 film Rope, produced and directed by Alfred Hitchcock and starring John Dall, Farley Granger, and James Stewart. Rope has fascinated me since I first saw it earlier this year; it’s now one of my favorite films and, in my opinion, and although it enjoys considerably less fame than staples like Psycho and Vertigo, Hitchcock’s best. Its central theme, as I’ll be arguing here, is the relation between the life-world of human symbolic reality and the Real itself, and as such makes an excellent example for exploring some of the themes of metaphysical idealism from my recent episodes. At the same time, I thought it would make an excellent warmup for a larger film criticism project I’d like to attempt, a look at the religious themes in the films of Martin Scorsese.
Hitchcock’s film Rope is based on a 1929 play by Patrick Hamilton, inspired by the real-life murder of Bobby Franks by Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb in Chicago in 1924. Leopold and Loeb were brilliant intellectuals, both of whom advanced quickly through school, Loeb graduating from the University of Michigan at 17. They shared an interest in crime and Leopold in particular was fascinated by the work of Friedrich Nietzsche and his concept of der Übermensch, the “overman” or “superman.” The overman is a concept central to Nietzsche’s 1883 book Thus Spoke Zarathustra. In later works—Beyond Good and Evil from 1886 and On the Genealogy of Morals from 1887—Nietzsche criticizes the binary moral distinction between good and evil, stating that it originated in the resentment of slaves for the power of their masters, but his criticisms of traditional morality go back all the way to his first work, The Birth of Tragedy. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche presents the overman as the future human or posthuman being who overcomes these value systems to forge their own values. There’s a lot more to it than that—I’ve just distilled three books down to two sentence—but the important thing for our purposes is that Leopold and Loeb took Nietzsche to mean that they could themselves overcome traditional morality, prove their intellectual superiority, and become overmen by plotting, executing, and escaping consequences for a murder. And they did so, two out of three in any case, kidnapping and killing Bobby Franks, a distant relative of Loeb’s. Nietzsche would have disapproved in the strongest terms: one who merely reverses traditional moral maxims such as “Thou shalt not kill” is still bound by traditional morality, and moreover, such an act was arbitrary, cruel, stupid, and ugly. But this isn’t exactly obvious from a casual reading, especially the kind of piecemeal reading available to Anglophones prior to Walter Kaufmann’s mid-20th century project of Nietzsche’s translation and exegesis. You really don’t get the full scope of Nietzsche’s thought from individual quotes or even individual books—he’s a thinker whose thought must be assessed in total if it is to be understood, and as with all philosophers, his work exists in dialogue with other thinkers whose thought must also be understood (at least to some degree) to properly grasp Nietzsche.
On to the film itself, and it goes without saying that there will be extensive spoilers throughout this episode. I highly recommend watching the film first and then coming back to this episode, perhaps watching the film again afterwards. I maintain that it’s one of the greatest films of the 20th century and well worth two watches.
It begins with the murder itself: friends, former schoolmates, intellectual elitists, and possible gay lovers (more about that later) Brandon Shaw and Phillip Morgan strangle to death their former schoolmate David Kentley, hiding the body in an antique wooden chest. Afterwards, Brandon rises up exaltantly while Phillip remains hunched over, despairing over what he has just done. Opening their apartment’s curtains, Brandon says, “Pity we couldn’t have done it with the curtains open, in the bright sunlight.” For him, the murder was a performance—he makes several allusions to the artistic or aesthetic qualities of the act—but a performance for whom? Not for Phillip, who participated, and certainly not for the deceased, who is no longer in a position to appreciate any sort of performance. We soon learn that Brandon and Phillip have planned to host a party at the murder scene, with David’s body still present, hidden in the wooden chest, but the party guests are supposed to remain ignorant of the murder and so cannot grasp its performative aspect. It is a performance for Brandon precisely in that it is not a performance for the party guests.
But it is a movie, after all, and so there’s another audience to consider—we who are watching the film. Of course, we typically try to forget the fact when watching movies that we’re watching movies, but in Rope this is something of which Hitchcock wishes to remind us. Rope was filmed and edited so as to appear as one continuous 80-minute take, so we watch the movie more as though it were a play, with the audience physically present in the space with the performers. Other clues to this perspective appear throughout the film, and we’ll get to them in due course. It’s also clear that Hitchcock wants us to understand this movie in reference to the psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud. Freudian psychoanalysis had attained a particular popularity in the 1940s (in Leitch & Poague, p. 302) and Hitchcock was widely known to read Freud’s work and implement the ideas in his films. In case we think that we’re reading too much into the text, one of the guests at Brandon and Phillip’s party, Janet, says at one point, “Freud says there’s a reason for everything” (0:33:50).
As I mentioned earlier, I believe the central theme of this movie is the relation between the symbolic order and the Real, to borrow terms from the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. We can begin to approach these concepts by reference to the film itself. The Symbolic is the story that unfolds as we watch the film: two murderers host a party at the scene of the crime in order to prove their intellectual superiority. The Real, by contrast, is the play of colors on a screen, the sound coming from our speakers, the recorded event of actors on a soundstage saying lines and performing movements that they have memorized, lines and movements that we interpret as a story. Even that is not quite the way to properly represent the Real, and in fact there is no such way, because the Real is precisely that which remains outside the Symbolic. The Symbolic breaks from the Real and the Real cannot be integrated into the Symbolic, which is generated by this very break, constituted by its own failure. Perversely, Brandon’s performance is an attempt to integrate the reality of his act of murder into the symbolic context of the party, even as the partygoers’ lack of knowledge about the murder is precisely what makes Brandon, in his own opinion, intellectually superior.
The title of the movie refers to the rope that Brandon and Phillip used to strangle David. The event of the murder does nothing to change the rope, at least nothing that would be visible to casual partygoers who have no reason to suspect a murder has taken place. The material reality of the rope has no narrative arc in the film: it remains at the end exactly what it was at the beginning, and even before the beginning, before it was used to strangle David. Brandon says to Phillip as they’re cleaning up before their guests arrive, “It’s only a piece of rope, an ordinary household article, why hide it?” (0:15:30). But we read the rope as being something which is not at all material but rather conceptual: it is a murder weapon, a fact which excites Brandon, who displays it casually throughout the party, and terrifies Phillip. The rope is symbolic of the murder itself, which was an attempt on the part of the murderers to bring the abstract ideas of Nietzsche (such as they understood him) into reality. Similarly the chest in which they store the body is just a chest. Closed, it betrays no outward signs of serving as a coffin, and so Brandon elects to use it as the dinner table for the party, reveling in the knowledge of its hidden truth which he possesses but denies to the guests. Shortly after the murder itself, Brandon comments on a glass that David had used, calling it a “museum piece,” saying “Out of this, David Kentley had his last drink” (0:05:40). It’s an ordinary glass and hasn’t materially changed in any way; its significance exists purely within the realm of the Symbolic.
So it appears that Brandon’s performance is also for the benefit of what Lacan called the big Other, which is the authoritative presence of the social life-world of the Symbolic for us. As Slavoj Žižek explains in his book How to Read Lacan,
The symbolic order, society’s unwritten constitution, is the second nature of every speaking being: it is here, directing and controlling my acts; it is the sea I swim in, yet it remains ultimately impenetrable—I can never put it in front of me and grasp it. It is as if we, subjects of language, talk and interact like puppets, our speech and gestures dictated by some nameless all-pervasive agency.
(2006, ch. 1)
Brandon and Phillip are physically unchanged by their having committed a murder, but the big Other knows that they are murderers: the big Other is precisely the reality—immaterial but objective—of their being murderers in the first place, a reality which they cannot now deny and know that no one else could deny if they knew the facts of what Brandon and Phillip had done. After the act itself is concluded, there is no material reality that makes one a murderer. One could even be holding the smoking gun, but the gun is not itself what makes them a murderer but rather the abstraction of having-done in which the gun is involved only as a sign. The immaterial reality of having-done is nevertheless objectively real: if the signs present in the material reality of the present moment confirm for us, by reference to the big Other, the abstraction of having-murdered, no feelings or thoughts or opinions of mine or of anyone can make it otherwise, even as our collective use of language structures the big Other itself.
My concept of the ecumenicon serves as a materialization of the big Other, an ontology of the abstract reality in which Brandon and Phillip are murderers—really so, despite the absence of change in their own material reality. If you recall from my recent episodes, the ecumenicon is human neural structure writ large, the networks of our brains interconnected by the network of language. The understandings of what a murder is and what murderers are are inscribed across this network, repeated with variations from brain to brain but also networked together so that these understandings synchronize and function in a unitary way, even as they remain complex, dynamic, even self-contradictory. Calling it “unitary” might be a bit deceptive: my understandings of murder, or beauty, or justice, or whatever, are not going to be the same as your understandings, and those concepts may be experienced differently for each of us, but my concepts and your concepts are in perpetual dialogue and that dialogue is itself constitutive of the singular thing to which we are referring, a structure that is capable of that kind of dynamic and individuated response while still functioning in a multivariate but unitary way. It’s a bit like music in that way. Your experience of a song and my experience of a song might be very different, but when we talk about it, we’re talking about the same thing, which is the objective reality of a song not just as a sequence of sounds but as an idea.
Back to the movie. The guests begin to arrive. The first, Kenneth, a friend of Brandon and Phillip, asks why he always finds himself early to parties. “Probably because you’re always on time,” Brandon says (0:18:20). It’s common social practice in the States to arrive “fashionably late” to parties, to arrive at least a short time after the given start time. In the film, this is another allusion to the break between the Real (the given start time of the party) and the Symbolic (the socially-understood start time). Of course, the whole numerization of time is unavoidably symbolic in the first place, but nevertheless serves to signify this break in the context of the film.
One of the guests is Mrs. Atwater, who comes as a guest of the murdered David’s father, also present. Atwater is an astrology enthusiast and immediately sets to work reading the other guests’ horoscopes. Curiously, the star signs she describes are those of the actors. For example, she says that James Stewart’s character is a Taurus. Stewart is himself a Taurus, and this relation remains true for each character whose sign she identifes. The topic turns to that of film and Atwater mentions a recent favorite starring Carry Grant and Ingrid Bergman, a film with a single-word title whose name she can’t remember. Given the timing of the film we’re watching, she can only be referencing Notorious from 1946, which is also a Hitchcock production. This subtle fourth-wall-breaking further signals Hitchcock’s intended reading of the film as relating to the relation between the Real and the Symbolic.
I mentioned earlier that one of the guests at the party is Rupert Cadell, the former schoolmaster of Brandon and Phillip. It is from Rupert that Brandon and Phillip learned of the Nietzschean concept of the overman and the idea that murder can be a kind of art, reserved for the intellectual elite and transcending traditional morality. Brandon had invited him for a few reasons: one, as he says, “He’s the one man who might appreciate this from our angle, the artistic one” (0:16:50). Two, for the added thrill of having someone there smart enough to figure the whole thing out. And three, for the actually possibility that he might figure out the murder and serve as a real witness to their performance, a witness whom they believe will affirm their high opinion of themselves.
The three lead characters, Brandon, Phillip, and Rupert, form a classic Freudian triangle. Brandon, who remains throughout the party exalted by his own intellectual superiority, is the id, acting according to the pleasure principle and seeking immediate gratification. Leopold and Loeb had believed that the ultimate moral weight of an act was the pleasure it provided (Baatz, 2011), and Brandon describes the power to kill as “satisfying” (0:07:50). Phillip is the ego, haunted throughout the party by the reality that he is now a murderer who might be caught and prosecuted. And Rupert is a warped version of the superego, the conscious which normally moderates our actions but, in the sociopathic case of Brandon and Phillip, has given them free reign to persue their desire for superiority… or at least Brandon’s. Phillip is never portrayed as having enthusiastically gone along with the scheme, and he intimates that he’s more than a little scared of Brandon. But Rupert does play the role of a sort of father figure to Brandon and Phillip, and guides their moral choices, which is precisely the role of the superego.
A few things clue Rupert in to what’s happened. During a conversation about supposed Nietzschean ideas of intellectual elitism and the overcoming of traditional morality—a conversation in which Rupert repeatedly and emphatically affirms Brandon’s philosophical positions—Brandon becomes unsettlingly enthusiastic about the prospect of murder as the free recourse of the intellectual elite. In another scene, Rupert catches Phillip in a lie about his childhood, a lie Phillip tells to distance himself from the idea of any sort of violence. One of the big clues is the rope, which Brandon had used to tie up some old books to lend to a party guest. Brandon was apparently so excited about this further demonstration of his intellectual superiority that he botched the job. Rupert noticed and knew something was amiss because he knew Brandon to never be clumsy about anything. I think the rope and the books also symbolize Brandon’s relation to philosophy: he has bound it to his will, but clumsily, without really understanding what’s going on. And when Rupert finally lifts the lid of the chest to discover David’s body, he knocks stacks of books off the lid onto the floor. Abstract ideas are no longer at stake and so the books representing them are banished. David’s body ruptures into the Symbolic, present as the material reality of the event of his murder.
Rupert makes a speech disavowing the philosophical ideas for which he had advocated earlier, but in a struggle over a gun with which Brandon had armed himself, the gun is accidentally discharged and Rupert’s hand is wounded. Rupert secures the gun, and with literal blood on his hands, says that Brandon and Phillip will die for this, and fires three shots out the window to summon the police. So two of the shots are figuratively directed at Brandon and Phillip, and the third at Rupert himself. It is his acknowledgement of his own complicity in the murder.
Quick aside, I could actually do an entire second episode on this film focusing on its queer subtext. Lead actor John Dall was gay, as was screenwriter Arthur Laurents, who was, at the time of filming, having an affair with the other male lead, Farley Granger. Their characters, Brandon Shaw and Phillip Morgan, were explicitly depicted as a gay couple in the original play, and there is some evidence that the real killers Leopold and Loeb were gay lovers as well. At one point in the movie, Phillip plays a piano composition by the French composer Francis Poulenc, who was also gay. On this reading, the theme of the film is the suspense and danger of being gay in 1940s America. This reading isn’t separate from the one I’ve given here: what is relevant is not the bare material reality of two men, which is completely innocuous in any era, but the symbolic reality of their being a gay couple, which was quite dangerous at the time (and unfortunately, for many, still is).
Remember the historical context of the era in which the film was made, immediately after the end of the Second World War. During the philosophical discussion at the party, Mr. Kentley, David’s father, mentions that Hitler was similarly enamored with Nietzsche’s idea of the overman. And that’s entirely true, though Hitler’s reading of Nietzsche was as clumsy as Brandon’s and was likely hampered by Nietzsche’s sister’s editing of her brother’s work to bring it more in line with the Germanic anti-Semitism to which Nietzsche himself was viscerally opposed. Brandon denounces Hitler and the fascists, saying that he’d hang the whole lot of them. “But then, you see,” he says, “I’d hang them first for being stupid” (0:38:40). But Brandon never makes the case for why his interpretation is more valid than Hitler’s; indeed, if Brandon’s philosophy is correct, then it becomes impossible to say that Hitler did anything wrong, except perhaps by recourse to the lack of intellectual superiority evident in his having lost the war.
But Hitchcock isn’t pointing the finger at Nietzsche here; whether or not Brandon and Rupert, or Leopold and Loeb, have correctly interpreted Nietzsche’s work is simply not something Hitchcock is the least bit concerned with in the film. The last scene makes it clear that it is Brandon, Phillip, and Rupert who share responsibility for David’s death, the first two for obvious reasons, and Rupert because he taught dangerous ideas uncritically to his students, people for whose moral welfare he was responsible. Hitchcock has made it clear that the ideas themselves are not the matter of concern in the film, but rather what people do with ideas. Under my own reading of the film, within the context of my own philosophy, ideas need to be taken seriously as objects of significant and dynamic material power. We affect them and they in turn have real, material effects on reality. So there are feedback loops, and those feedback loops can be reinforcing or balancing, but there’s a delay between discourse that shapes ideas and those ideas’ material effects on reality. We don’t get immediate feedback about how our discourse is affecting the reality of our world, and our language is prone to rupturing into material reality the way that David’s body ruptured from material reality into symbolic reality. The key message I take from the film is that philosophy isn’t a game but rather something with real and potentially dangerous power.
Works Cited
- Baatz, S. (2011). For the thrill of it: Leopold, Loeb, and the murder that shocked jazz age Chicago. HarperCollins.
- Hitchcock, A. (Producer and Director). (1948). Rope [film]. Transatlantic Pictures.
- Leitch, T., and Poague, L. (Eds.). (2011). A companion to Alfred Hitchcock. Wiley-Blackwell.
- Nietzsche, F. (1883/1982). Thus spoke Zarathustra (W. Kaufmann, trans.). In The Portable Nietzsche. Penguin Books.
- Nietzsche, F. (1886/2000). Beyond good and evil (W. Kaufmann, trans.). In Basic writings of Nietzsche (W. Kaufmann, ed.). The Modern Library.
- Nietzsche, F. (1887/2000). On the genealogy of morals (W. Kaufmann, trans.). In Basic writings of Nietzsche (W. Kaufmann, ed.). The Modern Library.
- Žižek, S. (2006). How to read Lacan. W.W. Norton and Company.