Lacanian psychoanalysis has emphasized in many ways the pathological origins of human language. According to Lacan the symbolic is a realm of lack and loss. To speak means to depart from the undivided pleasures of the imaginary and forsake the original totality of the maternal. Whether they are prosthetic or not, film noir’s voices evidence a curious variation—and inversion— of this apocalyptic figuration of language. For dominant voices in film noir speak over or against the image track to armor the human (and mostly male) body against possible pathologies. Film noir is driven by an existential necessity to speak, a relentless desire for the symbolic. Be they diegetically anchored or not, the various voices of film noir not only reveal what is inaccessible to the image track, but they also speak up against the visible in order to convert drastic circumstances into symbolic orders. The voices of film noir speak, as Kaja Silverman puts it, “in extremis.”31 As disembodied voice-overs they embrace narration as a last straw in the hope of casting the factual disarray of material experience into more manageable spatial and temporal structures. Film noir’s protagonists speak in the performative. Their voices embrace speech as a medium that defines and reorganizes social relationships.
The stylized vocophilia and narrative obsession of film noir , it has often been pointed out, attests to the literary origins of the genre, its indebted-ness to the hard-boiled stories of Cain, Chandler, and Woolrich. Diegetic and nondiegetic speech in film noir , one might add, espouses secondary orality—speech based on the paragon of the written32—as a source of meaning and orientation. More important to our present purposes, however, is the antagonistic and unreconciled character of film noir’s embodied and disembodied voices. Film noir pictures speech as a realm of conflict and struggle, a realm in which neither meaning nor understanding is ever a given. Unlike the Nazi ideologues of biocentric dialogue, film noir presents the symbolic as an arena of discord and radical contingency. Speech is not natural; it is a product of articulation and hence deeply implicated in the individual’s struggle to survive, to overcome fate and hostility. Voice machines in film noir in many respects amplify this view of human language as being articu-
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lated and contested. Telephones, for instance, in allowing communication from a distance, can work both as instruments of individual empowerment as much as of cruel subjection. As Amy Lawrence has argued with regard to women’s use of phones in 1940s cinema, “To some extent the telephone empowers women, enabling them to combine their piecemeal knowledge and find out what is going on in the separate world of men.”33 Phone communications can puncture woman’s confinement in the bourgeois home and thus disrupt the excessive diegeticization of women in dominant Hollywood cinema. At the same time, however, the telephone in film noir—as in Litvak’s Sorry, Wrong Number— can also indicate a fatal lack of physical and intellectual control. Whether situated in the onscreen, the offscreen, or the extradiegetic, film noir’s telephones accentuate the negotiated character of speech and signification. Part of film noir’s inventory of on-the-air sounds, phones help broadcast the unfixity of meaning as the central feature of modern experience.
Feminist critics, with solid arguments and abundant examples, have theorized the use of sound in film noir as merely a split and deeply gendered project of unfixing the dominant codes of classical cinema. Far from rendering male authority problematic, the commanding voices in film noir, according to critics such as Kaja Silverman and Amy Lawrence, fortify the male subject against his own losses—at the cost of the female’s body and articulation. Woman is spoken from the position of the sexual other. In particular the embodied male voice-over in films such as Double Indemnity, Lady from Shanghai (1947, Orson Welles), Out of the Past (1947, Jacques Tourneur), D. O. A. (1950, Rudolf Maté), and Sunset Boulevard (1950, Billy Wilder) functions like “a precarious hook on which to hang the phallus.”34 Film noir’s women either speak too much and therefore need to be silenced by the intervention of the male voice, or they speak too little and must be brought to speech; yet once they open their mouths they are not really allowed to say anything. When women accede to the privilege of language at all, they do so only to become situated as dependent wives in the domestic sphere. Film noir thus projects male lack and paranoia—that which he cannot tolerate in himself— onto the female other as deforma-tion, fragmentation, and impediment. As Silverman summarizes: “[T]he female voice, like the female body, is more frequently obliged to display than to conceal lack—to protect the male subject from knowledge of his own castration.”35 In the dark thrillers of the 1940s, illusions of male integrity and control are in fact reconstituted by going to the extreme—by extracting a scream from the female body. In accord with dominant practices women’s voices are contained and excessively synchronized within the
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diegesis, whereas the male voice is allowed to wander offscreen into exterior positions of narrative authority and self-assertion.
Amy Lawrence, in Echo and Narcissus, has extended this analysis to Robert Siodmak’s Gothic thriller The Spiral Staircase. The muteness of the film’s character Helen (Dorothy McGuire) is for Lawrence “a lack she can overcome, but she can only do so within the narrative by assuming her approved social role as ‘woman’—helpless, grateful, and dependent. The engine driving the narrative and providing the suspense is whether or not Helen will recover her ability to speak in time to save herself from the unseen killer who stalks her.”36 Although Lawrence’s analysis is important and insightful, it underestimates the extent to which The Spiral Staircase itself addresses the role of cinema as a compensatory mechanism of male projection, an audiovisual machine that pits male empowerment against female subjugation. Moreover, Lawrence strangely elides the other ideological and highly contemporaneous subtext that drives The Spiral Staircase.
In contrast to Ethel Lina White’s original novel of 1941, entitled Some Must Watch, Siodmak’s film presents the killer as an obsessed zoologist, Professor Albert Warren (George Brent), whose Darwinist quest for authenticity and social hygiene is fueled by Nazi rhetoric. Engineering words that speak over the killer’s resolute appropriation of the imaginary, The Spiral Staircase allows Helen to speak so as to drive a wedge through Warren’s existential quest for a vigorous and unified body politic. Helen’s final ascent to language may qualify her indeed, as Lawrence suggests, for new domestic tasks, but at closer inspection it also emphasizes the performative aspects of speech and modern identity, as well as the noncoercive power of language to connect people. Helen’s words in the last sequence matter because they posit language and meaning as contested. Speaking into a phone, her recuperated voice opposes Warren’s fascist imaginary. The figuration of speech and muteness in Siodmak’s thriller The Spiral Staircase, which according to one reviewer had the power to elicit from audiences “frequent spasms of nervous giggling and . . . audible, breathless sighs,”37 therefore deserves closer scrutiny.
d i a l i n g t h e r i g h t nu m b e r Produced by Dore Schary for RKO and Selznick Productions, and shot in the summer of 1945, Siodmak’s The Spiral Staircase explores the curious conjunction of existentialism, vitalism, and the aesthetics of horror. Similar to Phantom Lady, the film contains numerous references to the cinematic apparatus, to spectatorship, and to the work of special effects. Drawing on
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the remarkable success of earlier Hollywood gothics such as Wuthering Heights (1939, William Wyler) and Rebecca (1940, Alfred Hitchcock), The Spiral Staircase uses a late-Victorian setting to stage nothing less than a diegetic competition over cinema’s production of sights and sounds—its capacity either to make bodies talk or to condemn them to silence. Set in a small town in New England in 1906, a time ostensibly characterized by many social and technological transformations, The Spiral Staircase tells the story of a zoologist who kills a series of young women because they do not match his standards of physical perfection and natural beauty. Son of a deceased big-game hunter, the socially respected Professor Warren lives together with his bed-ridden stepmother (Ethel Barrymore) and his dandy half brother, Steve (Gordon Oliver), in a mansion at the edge of town. Professor Warren’s project of social hygiene leads him to hunt down Helen, his gullible servant who has become mute after having witnessed the death of her parents in a fire. All characters who populate the house—including Dr. Parry (Kent Smith), who seeks to heal Helen from what he considers her feminine hysteria— emerge at various times as the possible killer.
Reminiscent of Hitchcock and Lang, Siodmak withholds essential information from the spectator’s perception by means of strong narrative interventions. It is only in the film’s final minutes that the camera reveals the true identity of the strangler. In the last sequence Mrs. Warren leaves her bed for the first and only time in the film in order to rescue Helen from her own stepson as she shoots the psychopathic professor on the mansion’s spiral staircase.
Contrary to Victorian ideology, The Spiral Staircase depicts the domestic as a space not of security and refuge but of terror and anxiety. The mansion’s interior resembles “a panopticum, a space of total control over all movements.”38 No one here can ever be by himself or herself. Any bourgeois notion of intimacy is inaccessible. Abundant mirrors seem to expand the spatial configurations, yet they do not yield any sense of physical liberation. Stuffed with remnants of the past, the mansion leaves no real room for residing in the present. Although the many animal trophies attest to the activism of the dead family patriarch, their crammed display casts paralyzing shadows on the present generation. Connecting the three different floors on which the narrative unfolds, the staircase intensifies the manor’s fatalistic materiality. It dictates physical movements, punctures spatial borders, and thus overwhelms protagonists and viewers alike with impressions of inevitability. We see characters moving up and down but failing to escape their fate. No one in the film seems able to take flight from this flight of stairs. Initially, space here does not emerge, in Michel de Certeau’s words,
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as “practiced place.”39 Only in the final sequence do the film’s protagonists really appropriate the house as a space of the living and repossess the staircase as a location of agency and articulation. Poised at the very top of the staircase, the dying Mrs. Warren triggers the emancipation of the present from the grasp of the past. Her intervention ends Professor Warren’s efforts to define history as nature and emplace human bodies in a fixed geography of power. Her gunshot discontinues the mansion’s mythical order and reclaims the possibility of practiced place and historical experience.
True to what Mary Ann Doane has analyzed in her study of the woman’s film of the 1940s, The Spiral Staircase introduces Helen as enthralled by specular pleasure, an excessive desire for desire for which the film’s subsequent narrative will provide ample punishment.40 The narrative opens in the town’s improvised movie theater—lodged in the lobby of a hotel—with the showing of the silent film The Kiss, a gripping melodrama accompanied by a pianist playing dramatic Beethoven pieces. Unlike White’s novel, which presented Helen as a by-no-means-mute simpleton who “could rarely afford a seat at the Pictures,”41 The Spiral Staircase introduces its female protagonist as a cinephile intensely engrossed in scopic pleasure. Siodmak’s editing, however, leaves little doubt that Helen’s innocent act of viewing is more ambivalent than it may seem, as the film parallels the action on the screen with the film’s first murder scene, which takes place right above the lobby on the hotel’s second floor. The camera awkwardly tilts from the audience up to the ceiling, fades out and then in again in order to carry the viewer into the interior of a hotel room. At this point it is only the continuous, although now muffled, accompanist’s music that warrants a sense of spatial continuity between the two locales, the site of melodramatic entertainment and the scene of psychopathic murder. Interestingly enough, the image of Helen’s scopic bliss vis-à-vis The Kiss is replicated by a macro shot focusing on the eye of the murderer, who hides in a closet waiting to strangle the room’s disabled tenant. Increasingly blurring the boundaries between diegetic fiction and diegetic reality, the subsequent shots suture both lines of action, the one on the screen in the hotel lobby and the murder in the hotel room, into one totality, authorized as it were by Helen’s desire for distraction. What we see through her eyes on the screen of the makeshift theater in fact substitutes for what Siodmak at this point still wants to withhold from the spectator: the heroine’s dramatic suicide in The Kiss coincides with the death of the strangler’s victim upstairs, an act of murder relegated to offscreen space in order to prolong the tension.
The setting of this opening sequence brings to mind historical descriptions of female spectatorship in early cinema:
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The high percentage of women in early film audiences was in fact perceived as an alarming social phenomenon, one which confirmed the breakdown of traditional values elsewhere evidenced by the declining birthrate, the rising marriage age, and the influx of women into the industrial labor force. The presence of a female audience, in other words, not only represented a threat to traditional divisions between public and private, cultural and domestic spheres; it represented a threat to the maintenance of social legitimacy, to the distinctions preserving tradi-tionally defined male and female gender roles and responsibilities.42
Emotionally captivated by the death onscreen, Helen, in the opening sequence, seems to pose a threat to traditional definitions of social spheres.
Her presence in a newly emerging public sphere qualifies her as a perfect future victim. Helen’s excessive spectatorship, on the one hand, magnifies her muteness, which in the eye of the murderer justifies her elimination.
On the other hand, perverse though it may seem, Helen’s fascination with the cinematic apparatus strangely aligns her with the killer himself, whose sadistic act of looking seems to constitute nothing other than the flipside of Helen’s own impassioned voyeurism. Invading the traditional lifeworld of the town, the cinema of the opening sequence thus not only signifies the controversial and hardly controllable proliferation of urban modernity and mass entertainment, but it is also shown as implicated in a dramatic struggle over the terms of perception, over scopic pleasure, control and mastery. Far from implying that cinematic spectatorship per se exhibits a natural tendency toward a delight in the art of murder, the opening shots instead expose the way Warren’s politics of social hygiene rely on a manipulation of the cinematic apparatus and its peculiar pleasures. These shots draw attention to the way Warren—temporarily in control over the imaginary and its effects on the spectator—blends filmic and nonfilmic reality and, hence, appropriates the special effect that is cinema in order to pursue his antimodernist vitalism. Helen, it becomes clear in this opening sequence, will need to overcome her speechlessness, and, by implication, her voyeuristic desire for silent images, to survive Warren’s aesthetics of horror.
Immoderate voyeurism and narcissistic pleasure, according to the narrative logic of The Spiral Staircase, feed into Professor Warren’s sadistic mode of perception, the imaging of terror in the iris of the killer’s eye. In the view of the vitalist who claims that “[t]here is no room in the world for imperfection,” pleasurable looks signify a state of degeneracy: those who simply look and even derive pleasure from it, those, moreover, who hope to fulfill their desire amid the feminized institutions of twentieth-century mass distraction, demonstrate a form of weakness that fails to meet the demands of
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