“prophet, educator, and Führer of his Volk. ”28
Like Goebbels in his 1937 speech, Marlow insists on a fundamental nexus between the aesthetic and the political. Art, according to his view, has an essentially political function in that it shapes human emotions like clay into homogeneous public forms. For Marlow authentic art, just like politics, expresses the will to power and form. It structures corporeal expressions and recuperates what decisionistic theories of the state considered the existential determination of political life. Liberalism’s valorization of justice, equality, and freedom thwart the political calling of authentic art.
It causes Marlow to launch a double attack on modern life, one against the postaesthetic rule of mass art and diversion and one against liberal democracy and the equalizing rationality of social engineering. Henderson represents what aggravates Marlow most. By attending an entertainment show with an anonymous lady wearing a duplicate of an extravagant designer hat, Henderson, on the one hand, upsets Marlow’s call for the aura of genius art.
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Figure 22. Marlow’s hands: Franchot Tone (right), with Elisha Cook Jr., in Phantom Lady. Courtesy of Filmmuseum Berlin—Deutsche Kinemathek.
On the other hand, renowned—in Kansas’s words—as an engineer for his
“plans to build model cities, sunlight in every room, children’s play yards everywhere for everyone,” Henderson embodies in the eyes of Marlow an egalitarian liberal whose utopian commitments deplete the existential ground of the political: the moment of danger and enmity.
Reminiscent of the Austrian silent film classic Orlacs Hände (1924, Robert Wiene) and its 1935 MGM remake Mad Love (Karl Freund), Marlow’s antimodernism is expressed most graphically in the artist’s obsession with his own hands. Hands signify for Marlow the putative authenticity that preceded the industrial age of machines and masses. Preoccupied with his own hands, Marlow does not spare his victims lectures on the power of his hands (fig. 22). His speeches attest to the extent to which Marlow’s attack on the institutions of social modernity is intimately tied to the desire to kill. Hands organize the chaos and anarchy of existence into stable shapes and meaningful structures for Marlow no matter whether they seek
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to preserve or to annul life: the aesthete’s call for total form and reality control links directly to the killer’s mode of reducing complexity through murder. It is fascinating to see, Marlow reflects before strangling Cliff, how hands can “mold beauty out of clay,” “trick melody out of a piano keyboard,” or bring “life back to a dying child.” But it is even more mesmerizing, he continues, to imagine that “the same pair of hands can do incon-ceivable evil,” how they can torture, whip, “even kill.” As he promotes the act of murder to the most sophisticated artistic practice, Marlow in a perverse fashion joins the efforts of aesthetic modernism and the twentieth-century avant-garde to burst the boundaries of the aesthetic. Similar to the avant-garde, Marlow hopes to restore a more comprehensive notion of culture by means of a one-sided explosion of the aesthetic. Yet in simply replacing one form of putative excess (technology, democracy) with another (monumental art), Marlow drives both art and politics beyond any fact, code, or value. Prioritizing form radically over norm, he elevates death to the ultimate telos of all human action, for it is solely in death that life may adhere to the desired order and simplicity that fuel Marlow’s discontent with modern civilization in the first place.
How modern, then, we must ask, is Marlow’s antimodernism? To what extent does his aesthetic reduction of modern contingency and his search for moments of intensive life outside of the banality of bourgeois everydayness recall certain strains within aesthetic modernism itself that culminated in fascism? It is important to note in this context that Marlow himself appropriates toward the end of the film the split between voice and body that in previous passages of Phantom Lady signified the impact of modernity on everyday experience. As if temporarily slipping into the role of the film’s director, Marlow seems to manipulate for his own purposes what the film at other moments employed in order to unmask Marlow’s jargon of authenticity. After Marlow and Kansas finally discover the phantom lady, Marlow—panicked by the unraveling of the case—pretends to call Inspector Burgess and inform him about Henderson’s innocence. To do so, he positions himself behind the windowpane of a gas station, tinkering with a public telephone without properly dialing. The camera alternates between Kansas’s point of view, who is situated in the car outside and observes Marlow’s gestures as if projected onto a big screen, and shots taken from the inside, allowing the spectator to know what Kansas doesn’t know, namely, that Marlow’s thumb has interrupted the connection. Faking a conversation, then, Marlow not only redresses himself as a director-actor who himself manipulates the terms of representation, but he also makes deliberate use of the peculiarly modern assimilation of the body to technology
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and the concomitant sundering of images and sounds. At the brink of a ruinous breakdown, Marlow selectively embraces technological modernity in order to warrant the future success of his antimodernist stance, his fight against the values of political liberalism and modern mass society.
Siodmak’s Phantom Lady recognizes lack and fragmentation— corporeal absence and mechanical duplication, the separation of voice and body—as the modern hallmark of subjectivity and human reciprocity. Instead of signifying an ominous intrusion of the uncanny, the splitting of sounds and sights can offer antidotes to Marlow’s deadly aesthetics of closure, uniqueness, and total presence. The gas station sequence, in this sense, testifies to the contradictory ways in which Marlow—like his fascist predecessors in 1930s and 1940s Europe—seeks to incorporate modern tools and experiences into a vitalistic rejection of civil society and modern liberalism. Switching back and forth between Kansas’s space of viewership and Marlow’s cinema of simulated speech, camera and editing expose Marlow as a skillful operator of the modern decentering of corporeal identity and sense perception but also as a dexterous forger of authenticity and existential resolution. Marlow’s mise-en-scène, as seen by Kansas, is a counterfeit in multiple ways. What in Kansas’s perspective appears to be a silent cinema generating powerful sounds of redemption is revealed by the film’s alternating shots as a sound cinema producing vicious silence. What Kansas perceives as a homogeneous scene of incorporation and interiority is exposed as an actual site of heterogeneity and exteriority. Marlow may aspire to restore the aura of artistic genius and political authority, but what Marlow considers authentic expressions of the unified self are nothing other than the products of special effects and technologies of mediation.
Marlow—like fascist modernism—makes use of modern machines to protect himself from recognition and self-recognition. He embraces technology and mechanical reproduction not in order to expand experience and connect nonidentical particulars but to project his own lack as trauma, scar, silence, and death onto the other.
s p e a k o r d i e !
Victorious in its very failure, Henderson’s Dictaphone in Phantom Lady is no stranger to film noir . Whether they transmit, record, or amplify linguistic expressions, voice machines abound in Hollywood’s dark cinema.
They stitch narratives together, perforate the visible space, collapse different temporal registers, and often draw protagonists as much as viewers into a compelling dialectic of presence and absence. Film noir’s voice machines—
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telephones, Dictaphones, answering machines—feature speech as a narrative agent. They may communicate expressions of both individual self-assertion and human frailty, the desire to control narrative and diegesis as much as the failure to attain a space of one’s own. In Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944), Walter Neff’s (Fred MacMurray) voice recorder emerges as a conduit of cinematic storytelling, an imaginary father figure authoritatively capturing a dying man’s confession. Anatole Litvak’s Sorry, Wrong Number (1948), by contrast, presents telephones as media administering death and thus ending all stories. “In the tangled network of a great city,”
titles at the film’s opening explain, “the telephone is the unseen link between a million lives. . . . It is the servant of our common needs, the con-fidant of our inmost secrets . . . life and happiness wait upon its ring . . . and horror . . . and loneliness . . . and death.” Voice machines in film noir make human speech transcend given boundaries between public and private, past and present, here and there. In so many cases the recorded voice in film noir wants to realign the borders of subjectivity. It employs speech as a tool to encroach on the other but also to articulate an existential need for recognition and self-preservation. In the paranoid universe of film noir, prosthetic speech is often marked and marred by strategic reason. You either speak or die, even if speaking may often result in death itself.
The telephones, Dictaphones, and prosthetic voices of film noir are part of the genre’s exploration of what Chion calls “on-the-air” sound, of sonic possibilities that are not subjected to the “natural” principles of sound production: “Sometimes we hear them in sound close-up— clear and sharp, as if the film’s loudspeaker were directly plugged into the radio, telephone, or phonograph depicted on the screen. At the other extreme they can be identified in the setting by acoustical traits to produce an effect of distanc-ing, reverb, and the particular tone color of the speakers or whatever their onscreen source is. Between these two cases lie infinite degrees of variation.”29 On-the-air sounds such as the ones generated by Henderson’s voice recorder fold different spatial and temporal layers into one textual representation. Although normally situated in a scene’s real time, on-the-air sounds cross the boundaries of cinematic space and blur the zones of the onscreen, offscreen, and nondiegetic. Many noir thrillers surely exploit this mechanical unfastening of speech and corporeal source primarily to extend impressions of terror and anxiety; the splitting of body and voice encodes an uncanny return of something that should have remained hidden.30 More generally speaking, however, film noir’s on-the-air sounds can be seen as metonymies for the ways in which Hollywood cinema of the 1940s explored the narrative power of embodied voice-offs or even disembodied
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voice-overs. In stark contrast to Nazi cinema’s phobic containment of sound and source within the visible, film noir is driven by an often-unresolved dialectic between sonic incorporation and disembodiment. As it depicts a world of murderous conflicts and never-ending trials, film noir presents the sounds and sights of cinematic representation in a situation of ceaseless struggle as well. Material experiences thus reappear as formal challenges, as antagonisms that potentially reveal the heterogeneous nature of the film medium.
