Occupied Territories

Much of the shattering impact of [the shower scene in Psycho] derives from Bernard Herrmann’s score. Hitchcock’s original intention was to release the shower-murder sequence with no musical accompaniment at all, but Herrmann prevailed on him to try it out with music.

—

William Rothman, Hitchcock: The Murderous Gaze

Is this evidence for or against auteurism? I think many people would say “against,” given that this idea to use music in the scene, a now-iconic feature so widely imitated and praised, did not originate with Hitchcock but with Herrmann. But I think we could look at it another way: who, after all, eventually agreed to use the music? This passage from Rothman’s book somewhat elides Hitchcock’s autonomy here, making it sound like there was this debate about the use of music and he lost. Note the phrase “Herrmann prevailed,” a kind of euphemistic phrase that conceals what was likely a robust discussion between the two men.

Not that Rothman is making any kind of explicitly anti-auteurist statement here—he’s just presenting information, not drawing conclusions—but I think that if we were discussing, say, the writing of a novel rather than the production of a film, fewer people would draw the conclusion that the writer is somehow less of the author because someone else gave him an idea (which is often largely what the debate on auteurism comes down to). In fact, writers frequently get ideas from other people, sometimes quite overtly, but there’s never really any dispute about authorship there because literally every word (and, thus, every component of the novel) has been put there by the writer. But actually, that’s not true either, as writers work with their editors, who often make critical suggestions that end up in the final, published version of the novel.

The reason the writer is considered sole author of the novel is, then, really because sometime before publishing, the novel becomes “blessed” by the writer, who accepts that no more edits will be made and agrees that this will be the final version read by the public. (This is partly why unfinished and posthumously published novels often feel quite different to us, not necessarily while reading them but as a whole, the novel as a public artifact: we know that this final blessing has not yet occurred and never will.) There’s not a whole lot about this process that differs substantially from the process of filming, editing, and releasing a movie. We all know about the sometimes pesky role producers play, tampering with the director’s “vision” and releasing something presumably at odds with it. (It’s worth reading Jonathan Rosenbaum’s “Potential Perils of the Director’s Cut” to complicate our understanding of this and related issues.)

But we don’t know and often can’t know everything about this process, just as we can’t always know the path a novel took on its way to publication. As viewers or readers, we treat the film or book, as “blessed” by its author, as an intentional and public work, and we analyze and criticize it based on this assumption. (One can imagine a critic of a film complaining about a particular creative decision and blaming the director when really it was the producer who forced that into the final work, or vice versa might also be true.) In order not to go mad, we assume that the “author” presents the work to the audience, and I think this is a safe, not to mention necessary and unavoidable, assumption. It’s just how art works, in the same way that communication between individuals works: if someone told you to phrase something to me in a particular way and this causes me to get upset because it is so tactless and impolite, I’m going to blame you because it’s the simplest and most rational thing to do. (Think of how maddening it would be to assume everything someone else told you was really “scripted” by a mysterious third person.)

Hitchcock is the director of his films, and what this means—not always literally but in a kind of customary and accepted manner—is that he has, in some way or another, “blessed” the final version of his films before they were presented to us. We know this is the case (again, whether or not it is literally so) because sometimes filmmakers disavow their own films, claiming that their intentions had been distorted to such a degree that they can no longer claim authorship. (This phenomenon, coincidentally, is something like the artistic version of Hitchcock’s own The Wrong Man.) Based on these assumptions, Hitchcock is still partially responsible for the music in Psycho: Herrmann may have had a great idea (not to mention the fact that he composed the music), but Hitchcock listened to him, despite his own initial instinct to have no music playing during the scene, and then considered it a good enough idea to use it. This anecdote may reveal something about Herrmann, but it arguably reveals more about Hitchcock. Even when a director makes a creative decision that turns out to be an artistic mistake, we benefit more by considering why he made this decision than we do by imagining how we would have done it differently (and better).

What’s there on the screen is what the film is, and there’s something in the finality of the film that is, more often than not, deliberate and intentional. After all, films are expensive and time-consuming to produce, more expensive than writing a novel, and so we can assume that at least in some small way, the director who took the time to make the film has bothered to look at the final product and debate with himself whether anything in it should be changed before it is finally screened. (The fact that there have been some producers of films—Val Lewton being the classic case—who have played such an important role in shaping that final product, the “blessing” perhaps even being given by them and not (solely) the director, is why some make the case for the auteurism of such figures, and the same could be true for others involved in the creative process, so long as we recognize the fundamental difference between mere involvement and authorship.)

This notion can be applied to a lot more than just Hitchcock’s use of Herrmann’s score: even when we recognize the unavoidable fact that performances originate in the actor and not somehow (completely) in the director’s vision, the director still wields the power to ask for more takes, each consecutive iteration potentially reshaping the actor’s performance in subtle ways. Even so, some actors’ performances are just so strong that they overpower a director, but in these cases, it is still the director (we assume) who takes a look at the footage they shot together, decides whether any more is needed, and then gives the okay, actively or passively, to what they have. It’s possible that a director could see such footage and think it absolutely horrible, that it will ruin the picture, and just not say anything out of laziness or ineptitude, but unless we have information that points to this, assuming it to be true gets us nowhere.

An actor may play a large role in the finished product we see, but the director often has the ability to influence that—Robert Bresson being a classic case of this—to such an extent that the performances and footage shot become just another building block for the director to work with. (Not to mention all the other ways a director can subvert an actor’s performance.) What people who resist auteurism fail to see, ultimately, is that the director matters precisely because the art of cinema is less about telling a story than about how a story is told, or to put it in terms that are more suitable to the cinema (which is not always about a “story”): what matters is not merely the “what” of the world that is being filmed but the way an arrangement of “whats” creates a vision that is overlaid on top of them, influencing the way we perceive all the “whats.” And the person who is responsible for shaping this vision, the individual (by virtue of the precise position he or she is in) most capable of doing that work, is called the director.