Do we laugh for poor Margot, or with her?

Poor Margot Mary Wendice, how few of us
are ever tempted to think, given her un-
canny incompetence. Having failed to be
strangled the first time, by garotte pro-
cured by her husband, she slithers out of
the knot the Crown's arranged as her pun-
ishment. And yet, to watch Dial M for Mur-
der with the mirth with which it was made,
these days, seems to call for an almost
Presidential scale of denial, of doing any
such thing. Still, how many survivors of
two such accidental acts of justice do we
know, in our unanimously censorious times,
who have the sang froid to accept a con-
gratulatory highball of Scotch from the
loser in these trials, a spouse culpable  
of both of them? Yet who, apart from a
very ugly American, would ever interpret
her acceptance, I suppose I could do with
something, as proof she had asked for it?

Poor Margot's incapacity to satisfy the
pangs of affront she excites, arising
first from her adulteries before a mer-
rily neglectful husband, and next from
the inadequacy of bruising about her
quite elegantly tempered neck, in the
eyes of the law, is suspiciously allied
to certain felicities of genetics, cou-
ture, deportment, carriage and voice
without which the British craft of com-
edy would sink like a stone, if she ev-
er were to bolt the corral for a casino.
It isn't enough to deliver a line per-
suasively, which Margot seems never able
to do; one has to make the line go away,
or rather to sink its hook in disbelief.

For this sleight of hand Hitchcock

floods the set of a West End London

drawing room with eight blue eyes,

and they all belong to Margot. Two

are her husband's, two her beau's,

two for the inspector, and two il-

luminate a face that absorbs them.

Their job is to subject her to in-

fractions. Hers is to play nice.

At last (one can almost hear the

screen call out), in his first of

three pictures with this Margot,

he has finally found his icon.

Everyone allows the director his

boast of taking it easy with this

picture, of simply lifting a hit

play from the stage and celebrat-

ing its own structure with his

inspired camera angles. But when

in doubt, one goes with Truffaut,

who confessed to Hitchcock, in

their famous interview in LA, he

might allow that the film lacked

importance, but he could not re-

sist revisiting it with pleasure.

It will do nobody any good these

days, to publish a kind of approv-

al of this picture or its methods.

Ah, but for those to whom doing

themselves some good makes for a

superfluous conversation, we re-

member Margot's advice to Tony,

before her first strangulation -

Don't make the martinis too watery.

Alfred Hitchcock

  director

Frederick Knott

  and Alfred Hitchcock

  screenplay

Robert Burks

  cinematography

Dial M for Murder

Warner Brothers, 1954©

Some time back

I can not pretend to remember
my brother's birthday; I ar-
rived in the family some four
years later. It quickly became
one of the few calendar dates
I would memorize, and antici-
pate always as one of one's
happiest days. I would ignore
it for months, even though the
sound of it would always touch
a nerve, only to welcome its
proximity with particular in-
tensity, and its arrival with
suspended anxiousness. Even 
now, with abundant practice,
it always comes to me with ex-
traordinary sympathy. I notice,
the American JD McClatchy cap-
tures an ironic aspect in this,
while considering friendship --

          Friends are fables for our loneliness.

          If love would live for hope, friendship thrives

          On memory, the friends we "make" made up

          Of old desires for surprise without danger,

          For support without a parent's smarting ruler,

          For a brother's sweaty hand and a train of crumbs.

We extol the details some-

what differently. I do not

feel the hand as sweaty, 

but sometimes damp, changing

places in the bathtub, ris-

ing from the pool, passing a

condensing cocktail. It is

strong, even clenched from

time to time, but primarily

it is calm, as in closing

gratefully upon a golf club.

I prefer not to pronounce

upon that hand in any way, 

because it does not yield.

Friendship certainly does

thrive on memory, but not 

on this, and is made up of

inconsistent subtractions

from brotherhood, whose ev-

every surprise harbors an 

element of danger. This is

the edge we keep between our-

selves, and is ever present.

It changes nothing, even us;

and it changes for nothing.

J.D. McClatchy

The Rest of the Way

  Poems

    dedicated to

    James Merrill

  An Essay on Friendship

    viii  1 - 6

Alfred A. Knopf, 1992©

  

What flu shot Brooks?

A positive flash flood of flu

having crested through these

parts in recent days, I took

myself down the road for an

inoculation, for what good it

might do, taking care at the

time to request a reading of 

blood pressure - a narrative

I never have understood, but

which, like Beowulf, I've

come to respect. Besides, it

makes one feel cared for, to

be compressed in a good cause.

The shooting part did not go

well, however, and purely for

that reason. I was wearing a

recently produced shirt from

my childhood haberdasher, 

Brooks Brothers, and found it

so binding in the sleeve that

it couldn't be rolled up, and

had to be removed. It's hard

to convey a basis for bitter-

ness toward shabbiness, if it

isn't obvious; but I laughed

to myself to recall, how my

elder brother, entering those

vain years ending in the syl-

lable, "teen," complained of

an architecture in the stand-

by button-down of our lives

theretofore, resembling a

"tent." Now, compression did

not make one feel cared for,

nor did it seem to respond to

any neutral necessity in man-

ufacture. It felt, together

with more minute details of

tackiness, as if one were be-

ing taken advantage of. 

It's a pity that, whoever

owns this oft-sold brand to-

day has not been furnished a

guidebook to its lore. The

great shirt has doubled for

generations as a pajama top,

as a copious tail for the ex-

pressive drama of shirtlift-

ing, and, actually, as a sur-

passingly comfortable and vis-

ibly classic passport to a de-

cent table. It wore forever,

it held its texture and its

ratios, and it never did re-

quire the removal of a necktie,

to receive a simple flu shot. 

If their underwear now emulates

this decadence, they'll have a

boxer rebellion on their hands.

Daniel Wolmer

"I shall destroy them. What's the matter with you?"

The infallibly entertaining New American
President has mounted a little drawing
room comedy on the dazzled gaze of the
People's representatives in the Repub-
lic, on the theme of depriving stunning-
ly innocent immigrants of shelter under
Liberty's torch, for lack of permission 
to have lived here for the last several
decades. As if to sustain the suspense,
he has even equated their immaculate as-
pirations with the revolting xenophobia
of his base, as in, "Americans" dream,
by way of typifying humans as rodents
straight out of Jud Süss. Of course, how-
ever, he means well, so that's different.

While swooning in his Pontius Pilate im-
partiality, he laments how his hands are
tied, by his predecessor's evil illegal-
ity, in sustaining Liberty's welcome. And
who remains, to recall his calculated, al-
beit seemingly precipitous, promise to re-
patriate these hundreds of thousands, on
a date certain to give his media thugs e-
nough time to hammer steel to his edge?

But we stray. For now, the New American
President has wrought his ingenious hyp-
nosis of the public, to blame itself for
balking at his seizure of power, black-
mail dripping from every homily of its
chorus, No nation is a nation without
borders. And don't his sectarian lem-
mings writhe with joy on every avowal
of those cleansing, ethnic torments,
the revelatory permissions of a wedge?

Now, therefore, his taunt goes out:
What on earth is the matter with you, 
for not stopping me in my bestiality?
As ever, in democracy's enchanted ba-
zaar, the matter comes down to whether
to do the right thing, or to gain more
seats, to be more comfy with the act.
Yes, it is a dilemma too ancient for
genealogy here, but with a corollary
luminosity to which many are blind:
time after time, whether to win So-
cial Security, to win voting rights
for all, to win health care for all,
the right thing has imposed a cost,
which only one Party has been will-
ing to bear, even if hauled across
the finish line by adamant martyrs. 
What's its claim now, as we speak, 
to call itself by our name?

Connor Hill

Timothée Chalamet

  on a visa in New York

2017

Poisoner, Pusher, Crook

How unbecoming it must seem,
I grant you, to appear on the
very day of the New American
Government's generous reaching
out to the lingering skeptics
of its Crowd Size, with homil-
ies on unity in preserving a
fragile whiteness in the land,
to observe that yet another of
its stalwarts had been compel-
led to relinquish office, not
by peer review, not by intern-
al investigation, not by Con-
gressional oversight, not for
indiscipline of policy, but by
journalistic inquiry into her
staggering commitments of in-
vestment (never mind, of pol-
icy), in poisonous addiction,
pharmaceutical dependency, and
the odd market variation in
price arising from her own de-
partment's actions. Oh, dear. 

Nor can one note her departure
with any expectation of remedy,
in the odd coincidence of con-
flict of interest, by which we
know our betters in the dark.
But now a poisoner, invested in
tobacco; a pusher, invested in
wondrous pharmaceutials; an in-
sider privateer, trading on the
currents of official conduct?
Just possibly a purse too far.

The office being vacated, is
the pinnacle of the nation's
Centers for Disease Control.
Just the tiniest little bit of
noble affinity for money seemed
incongruously wagered, even in
the face of this conflagration
of raping America to greatness,
for all that is left, and loved.

Possibly we have only begun to
discover the uses of desire a-
gainst us, even in our ballot.
But what can be told, from our
dull borough of dependency on
fact, but that this is not over.

Saturday commute cl: Cinema calls

Weeknights of Hitchcock are won-
derful escapes from news of Dav-
os, although St Moritz is peril-
ously close in his first Man Who
Knew Too Much. Not the heaviest
burden for our Davos spokesman,
this particular week, of course,
but lamentations from gymnastics
have also weighed upon the mind.

A cinema such as Hitchcock's, so
compelling from someone else's
point of view, is just the thing
to drive a fellow down the road,
to pick up an entertainment, in
Graham Greene's term of art, for
another dive into the vortex of,
may one say, credible blondness.

Detestable as a genetically hide-
bound aesthetic must be, there's
only so much escape one can ask,
from the molestations of a pair
of living headlines. On the fair
assumption, that an evening of
self-defensive homicide with a
blonde might square that circle,
I see no reason not to Dial M
for Murder, a remedy to pull 
focus for any Saturday commute.

Lately, however, I notice a

persistence of a leading la-

dy's image at this page, for

which I would not wish her to

be held responsible, although

it would be Presidentially ne-

farious, to deny that she is.

Still, to mitigate damages to

her fame, I expect to pick up

a copy, too, of Vertigo, for

which she was not accountable,

for all the likelihood that

one might have looked for her

at Ernie's, or living at the

Brocklebank off Mason Street.

But one can't be shopping so

swell as San Francisco, for 

anything less than impeachment.

iii  William Gedney

      untitled photograph

      undated

Suppose it were Friday cxlviii: As we were looking

                     Or che in fondo un miraggio

                     di vapori vacilla e si disperde,

                     altro annunzia, tra gli alberi, la squilla

                     del picchio verde ..

There is a way of appreciating
Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window,
which sees it as a classic ex-
ercise in his telling a story
about the world from a hero's
subjective "point of view."

It is. It happens, in a way
he unravelled completely -
some years later in Vertigo -
equally to tell a story to
him about himself, that the
director unveils to us only
slightly in advance: that he
is looking for someone he can
trust. Who knew, it would be
someone who could dissolve
his point of view and redeem
its narrative of voyeurism?

Who doesn't think of Montale,
writing poems at the same
time, who could just as eas-
ily have been imagining the
entrance of Omar Sharif in
David Lean's Lawrence of A-
rabia, every time there is
Grace Kelly, coming to see
the captive Jimmy Stewart?

With his imagery Hitchcock
showed change and prepared
its renewal, so much more
volatile than a gunshot by
a distant rider in Arabia,
that it keeps pace with a
revolution in the subject
of trust, continuing today.
I don't accuse him of not
wishing to go so far. It's
the reach of his eloquence.

                  Now that in the distance a mirage

                  of vapors shifts, dispels,

                  the green woodpecker's shrilling in the trees

                  announces something else.

Eugenio Montale
Collected Poems
  1920 - 1954
    Corrispondenze
    [fragment]
Jonathan Galassi
  translator and editor
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998©


Alfred Hitchcock
  director
John Michael Hayes
  screenplay
Robert Burks
  cinematography
Rear Window
Paramount, 1954©