Double Take

Double Take - A sort of video essay, penned by the novelist and conceptual artist Tom McCarthy and based upon a Jose Luis Borges short story about the author meeting his doppleganger one morning in the mid eighties.  McCarthy has instead taken this notion and placed Hitchcock in the central role, with the conversation between two the Alfreds, one from the sixties, one from the eighties, being visualised with clips from The Master of Suspense's own films and television efforts, news reels from the cold war and newly shot footage.

The new content accompanying the dialogue between the doubles is mainly close ups, of a raven perched here and a coffee cup there.  Furthermore, interviews are carried out with Hitchcock lookalikes, and their ruminations about the connection they have with the director.  These are a good way to begin to understand the film.  One speaks about how there was a very real chance that he may have rubbed shoulders with Hitchcock during his stint working at a hotel frequented by the director.  This is the sort of associative speculation which allows the film to imply a connection with Hitchcock to former Soviet premier Nikita Khruschev, presumably because the pair were both bald and somewhat overweight.

I'm writing this blog whilst watching old Adam Curtis documentaries, and the comparison between his It Felt Like a Kiss, shown at The Manchester International Festival in 2009 and Double Take is an obvious but justified one (I think).  Double Take lacks the clarity of expression enjoyed by the works of Curtis, yet makes the same sort of critical connection between art and political events.  Double Take will at time invite the occasional rolling of eyes with the connection between fifties and sixties film and the sense of doom inherent in Cold War new coverage now seeming to be old hat after the successes of Mad Men, Blue Velvet and the endless revisionist books and documentaries of events like the Bay of Pigs or Kennedy's assassination.

((((I am revising the grammar on this post six months after I posted it))))

The film manages to keep interest through its presentation which, for the most part, is cryptic and obscure.  The way it flits between the lookalike interviews, old news reels and its presentation of the Cuban Missile Crisis is disconcerting at times, and I spent most of my time trying to understand what it exactly this film was presenting, than engaging with what I could glean from this to-ing and fro-ing.  Some of the footage I had never seen before, like the first televised trans-atlantic satellite image, and the film seems to be a great way to present this sort of material in a manner which does not bore those tired of the formulaic presentation of history which has sadly become the norm for documentary making.  This sort of presentation, which effectively employs music and footage from a variety of sources in order to create an argument by association, seems to be an appropriate, and powerful use of the medium of film to communicate ideas about politics, aesthetics, history and art.  However, Double Take falls flat, sadly, and I think it's because of the obfuscatory manner in which it is presented.  I suspect that this only serves to camouflage the linear parallel drawn between the horror of Hitchcock's films and the horror experienced by millions of people during this period, glued to developments in world politics, worried about the very real danger of nuclear apocalypse.

The film doesn't seem to explore idea concerning anything other than a linear parallel between the factual and the imaginary, the real and the fictive.  There are vague allusions to notions like the manufacturing of fear within films of the fifties and sixties, but again this seems terrain covered by many facets of popular culture like The Simpson and South Park, who each have devoted episodes sending up the absurdity of The Red Scare.  The recounting of history is again fairly mundane, and while brief, due to the probable assumption that the audience is already familiar with the Cuban Missile Crisis, The Space Race, et al, again it sparks no revelations or attempts to give another take on it.  Seeing as this is the only way to judge the film clearly, it makes me suspect that there is nothing more to this film than an unsophisticated cultural theory, which alludes to ideas like the construction of desires and need through advertising (seen explicitly when sixties Alfred questions why eighties Alfred is drinking coffee instead of the customary Hitchcock beverage of choice, tea, and gets the response that choices change, this juxtaposed with coffee commercials which spattered his American television show Alfred Hitchcock Presents...), and the increase in communication and aerospace technology, allowing television and the space race respectively, having a political content to them.

But again the film fails to give an interesting slant on these ideas, and they seem under-developed whilst hiding behind a veneer of cryptic presentation.  They become almost commonsensical when compared to the work being produced by film-makers like Adam Curtis and Chris Petit.  Double Take's excellent concept seems wasted on an argument which simply seems to express mild disapproval of advertising, foreign policy by the East and West in the Cold War and parallels between the political zeitgeist and the films being released in this era.  Clearly the film is trying to do more than this, with the studio lighting and cameras being made visable on screen clearly attempting to place film technics at the forefront of the viewers mind.  The advertising footage being juxtaposed with film and news stocks then nudges the viewer towards the sort of ideas expressed by a thinker like Walter Benjamin in his essay 'Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction', and the idea that films are shaped by all sorts of economic and political factors which are pushed to the back of an audience's mind when experiencing the film.  The use of Hitchcock, the Master of Suspense, as subject matter, along with footage showing the kaleidoscopic series of guises he assumed during his television show seems telling: that the economic and political interests behind any good film are disguised by good film making.  It what makes bad B-movies like The Day the Earth Stood Still and Vincent Price villains all the more ridiculous to modern viewers - the thinly veiled fear or hatred of the cultural and sexual other using bad special effects or mincing WASPs with pencil moustaches.

To end I will go to the end of the film and the beginning.  The film ends with, once again, an allusion, albiet a very explicit one, to Hitchcock's last film, the terrible Soviet set farce Topaz.  This, and the various connections drawn between the fear of nuclear winter due to international tensions and the apocalyptic vision of The Birds, could be interpreted in this way: that we should see Hitchcock not simply as the auteur, making developments within film technique, but as expressing a certain fin de siecle, and by extension a series of private and political interests.  This might not be correct, because the film still remains, in tone at least, a warm hearted homage to the director.

However, you never really know, and this is what is so frustrating about this film, and, in my opinion, is what takes the teeth from the film's argument.  Perhaps this is a stylistic homage to Hitchcock, and this could be backed up with a quick jump to the beginning.  A clip is played from a chat show, in which Hitchcock makes a joke about a Lion and the word MacGuffin.  The MacGuffin, a narrative technique typically used by Hitchcock in order to divert the viewers attention in order to set the narrative up for the classic Hitchcockian twist.  Perhaps this film is making a comment on itself, and trying to avoid the lazy documentary technique of presenting an objective argument, of which it is the equally objective and impartial conduit, and this implicitly exercising a set of economic, political and whole other series of interests.  This notion is admirable, however the arguments of the film are nebulous and difficult even for a diligent viewer to hold onto.  This has the danger of rendering the content of the film impenetrable, inert and ineffectual.