What Alfred Hitchcock tells us about whether Obama should show us the bullet-ridden head of Osama bin Laden.

Here's the fantastic "I think you're evil!" clip from Hitchcock's "The Birds":


I Think You're Evil! by movieclips

I looked that up because Titus invoked it in the thread about whether the bin Laden death photos should be shown: "I want to see them and he better look like Suzanne Pleshette in The Byrds." Titus is a comic commenter who says all manner of outrageous things (and misspells to amuse us). (By the way, did you know that the rock group The Byrds came out around the same time as the Hitchcock movie, and they adapted the movie slogan: "The Byrds is coming"?)

Anyway, if you've seen "The Birds," you have the feeling that you stared straight at a stark depiction of the character Annie (Suzanne Pleshette) with her eyes completely plucked out. With the clip at your control, you may have to go back a few times before you can be sure how much you really saw. I mean, I think I went back about 10 times, and I'm still not sure! But you see almost nothing. Similarly, in "Psycho," you feel you see the knife cut into Janet Leigh multiple times, but, in fact, you never see that.

The vivid, lingering image of the eyeless Pleshette is a product of imagination, and in our imagination we already have the picture of Osama's blasted face. Why should we prefer the opportunity to stare at the destruction? If "The Birds" were made today, we probably would get a long look at gruesome special effects, and it would, undoubtedly be a much worse movie with far less emotional impact. We might even laugh at it. How would we react to the real photo of bin Laden? I don't know. Maybe we'd feel a thrill, followed perhaps by shame at our brutishness. More likely, we'd stare to the point of familiarity and arrive at some clinical distance.

Why would Obama want that? Like a remake of "The Birds," it's beyond unnecessary.

In the new "informational privacy" case — Justice Scalia talks about evaporated, refreshing, Lincolnesque honesty; pontificating in the guise of judicial minimalism; and what I think are McGuffins.

"I agree with the Court, of course, that background checks of employees of government contractors do not offend the Constitution," writes Justice Scalia in a concurring opinion in NASA v. Nelson, a unanimously decided case issued this morning:

But rather than reach this conclusion on the basis of the never-explained assumption that the Constitution requires courts to “balance” the Government’s interests in data collection against its contractor employees’ interest in privacy, I reach it on simpler grounds. Like many other desirable things not included in the Constitution, “informational privacy” seems like a good idea—wherefore the People have enacted laws at the federal level and in the states restricting the government’s collection and use of information. But it is up to the People to enact those laws, to shape them, and, when they think it appropriate, to repeal them. A federal constitutional right to “informational privacy” does not exist.

Scalia notes the "remarkable and telling fact," which he says he has never seen before in the Supreme Court, that the party saying his rights have been violated does not — even once —cite a constitutional text in his brief:

To tell the truth, I found this approach refreshingly honest. One who asks us to invent a constitutional right out of whole cloth should spare himself and us the pretense of tying it to some words of the Constitution.

Regrettably, this Lincolnesque honesty evaporated at oral argument....

Questioned at oral argument, Nelson's lawyer said what you'd expect him to say: the Due Process Clause. And then Scalia goes on to say what you'd expect him to say, disparaging "the infinitely plastic concept of 'substantive' due process."

Scalia also attacks the majority's "judicial minimalism" — manifested in its failure to say whether at some point — though not in this case — there may be a violation of a constitutional right to informational privacy. It's "not actually minimalist" to decide cases this way, Scalia says, because the Court took the opportunity able "to pontificate upon a matter that" — if there is no such right — "is none of its business: the appropriate balance between security and privacy." And if there is such a right...

I fail to see the minimalist virtues in delivering a lengthy opinion analyzing that right while coyly noting that the right is “assumed” rather than “decided.” Thirty-three years have passed since the Court first suggested that the right may, or may not, exist. It is past time for the Court to abandon this Alfred Hitchcock line of our jurisprudence.

Alfred Hitchcock line of jurisprudence...  I think that has something to do with McGuffins.

ADDED: I moved the erstwhile title of this post into the first line so I could write a more exciting headline. I've got to push myself to be more sensationalistic. I hope you appreciate the effort.

"We've always said, you and I, that moral concepts of good and evil and right and wrong don't hold for the intellectually superior."

The teacher is confronted with the acting out of his philosophy in Alfred Hitchcock's "Rope":

"Have you never wanted to do anything that was dangerous?"

That's a montage I happened upon while looking for something else. Make of it what you will, but there's some truly fabulous female (and male) beauty to be gawked at. Tallulah is the most beautiful, is she not? And there she was, in that least glamorous setting, the lifeboat, of Hitchcock's "Lifeboat," which is what I was Googling for, looking for that scene with William Bendix (as "Gus") drinking sea water, a propos of lemondog's comment in the "Irony pursues Barack Obama" post.

"Rape is - or should be - an art... And, as such, the privilege of committing it should be reserved for those few who are really superior individuals."

That's a quote from Hitchcock's movie "Rope" — with one word substitution: "rape" for "murder."

The few who are privileged to commit [rape] ... are those men of such intellectual and cultural superiority that they're above the traditional "moral" concepts. Good and evil, right and wrong, were invented for the ordinary, average man — the inferior man, because he needs them.

The scene, 9 minutes long, is embedded at Jac's blog, with commentary on Roman Polanski.

Beauty... love... kisses...

"I’m frightened of eggs, worse than frightened, they revolt me."

"That white round thing without any holes … have you ever seen anything more revolting than an egg yolk breaking and spilling its yellow liquid? Blood is jolly, red. But egg yolk is yellow, revolting. I’ve never tasted it." --Alfred Hitchcock

"The doddering American Film Institute has finally updated its list of the best 100 films..."

"... (i.e., best big-studio fiction blockbusters made with white marquee stars and male directors in the good ol' days of Kabuki pomposity like Ben Hur)," writes New York magazine:

For New Yorkers, the Los Angeles–based list is predictably awful, but still worse than the last: Do The Right Thing's token inclusion at pitiful No. 94 stings worse than its omission in 1997 and many of the city's great filmmakers are still missing (Cassavetes, for starters). We never expected to see some of our personal faves (David Edelstein respects no list without Larry Cohen's Q, for instance), but we began fuming when we noticed that mainstream picks like Sweet Smell of Success and Scarlett Street didn't even make the 400-film ballot. Then we noticed Mean Streets was off the list and grew angrier. Our pique peaked when we noticed that Toy Story had been added — and Woody Allen's Manhattan had not.

I love the New York perspective that it's all a big struggle between the two giant coastal cities. It's so Woody Allenish. And the Woody Allen film they put on the list -- "Annie Hall" -- is itself about the struggle between the two cities. One character is deeply, neurotically bonded to New York (and a basket case on his trip to L.A. ) and the other blooms in L.A. By contrast, "Manhattan" fixates on Manhattan. Nowhere else matters.

The AFI's list is obviously not the 100 best films, but a collection of best films fiitting various categories that seem significant enough to include. Although a few directors -- Hitchcock, Scorsese, Chaplin -- are given more than one slot, it's pretty obvious that there is a second level category that the AFI deemed worthy of one slot. Thus, we have one, but only one D.W. Griffith film on the list (and it's not "Birth of a Nation"), and one but only one Woody Allen film. It's not a question, then, of whether "Manhattan" is better than "Ben-Hur," but only which Woody Allen film should get the Woody Allen slot.

***

This is my second post on the AFI list, and in the first, I said I'd tell you the films on the list I haven't seen, so let me do that now:

30. "Apocalypse Now," 1979.
45. "Shane," 1953.
59. "Nashville," 1975.
66. "Raiders of the Lost Ark," 1981.
72. "The Shawshank Redemption," 1994.
73. "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," 1969.
81. "Spartacus," 1960.
82. "Sunrise," 1927.
90. "Swing Time," 1936.
95. "The Last Picture Show," 1971.
100. "Ben-Hur," 1959.

Four of those movies I've had in my DVD collection for years and keep meaning to watch. I'm not able to admit that I never want to watch them. Three of them have made it into the DVD player. Two of those I tried to watch, maybe for an hour, then paused. I still half think -- months or years later -- that I'm going to finish. The third is the DVD I chose to test out my HDTV when I first set it up. I watched 5 minutes and thought -- brilliant! -- why have I gone all these years without seeing this movie?

One of those movies -- "Sunrise" -- is something I would have seen long ago if it were around and playing in the revival houses back in the 1970s when I did most of my catching up with movies that were made before my time. It's not on DVD either. So my failure to see that says nothing about my preferences.

The rest of them... it just doesn't matter. I've had enough Fred and Ginger in various clips of their dancing and don't need to sit through "Swing Time." And a few of those movies I actively snubbed when they first ran, and I don't feel any more warmly toward them because they made this list.

As for "Shane," well, I used to love the old TV show "Shane," with David Carradine. That's the original for me personally.

"Turn off your mind, relax, float downstream."

Luc Sante reviews Robert Greenfield's new biography of Timothy Leary:

He was initially known as an expert on personality assessment, but, while on a sojourn in Mexico the following year, he was introduced to psilocybin mushrooms, and the experience was so transformative that psychedelics promptly became the central force in his life, his research and his teaching....

It wasn't long before any pretense to scientific detachment fell away and controlled experiments were chucked in favor of missionary zeal and contempt for all mundane exigencies. Chaotic tripping parties ensued, involving students, under "spiritual" or "philosophical" pretexts.

Teachers involving their students in spiritual exercises? Now, that is outrageous. But he lost his position as a Harvard professor soon enough.

[T]he psychedelic caravan picked up the Hitchcock siblings, Peggy, Billy and Tommy, heirs to the Mellon fortune, and through them acquired the use of a fabulous rambling house and huge estate in Millbrook, N.Y. This became the headquarters of Leary and gang for the better part of five years, a period filled with endless parties, epiphanies and breakdowns, emotional dramas of all sizes.... It was also at Millbrook that Leary, [Richard] Alpert and Ralph Metzner wrote "The Psychedelic Experience" (1964), which contained the injunction to "turn off your mind, relax, float downstream," appropriated two years later by John Lennon for "Tomorrow Never Knows," the last song on "Revolver."...

[H]e had no interest in politics. He called student activists "young men with menopausal minds" and suggested that LSD could stand for "Let the State Disintegrate." But by 1968, his slogans were so poised between derangement and Madison Avenue that they could pass for visionary; "Everyone should start their own nation," he uttered, just days after Martin Luther King's assassination. It was awfully hard to tell charlatans from prophets at the time, and besides, the denatured, anti-intellectual language that dominated discourse then (and is still with us, in a New Age guise) had been rolling off Leary's tongue since before he had ingested a single microgram of lysergic acid: people engaged in emotional "games"; all the world's bad stuff was a "system"; the state of being clued-in was "consciousness," and so on.

Oh, that's painful to read! We Baby Boomers were steeped in this stuff -- whether we took LSD or not. I think it had much more impact than the SDS material that also soddened my generation.

Read the whole review. The plot of Leary's life is convoluted. At one point, he's in Algiers, in the care of Eldridge Cleaver. ("It was a new experience for me to be dependent on a strong, variable, sexually restless, charismatic leader who was insanely erratic. I usually played that role myself.") But it's this that makes me want to read the book:

[T]he book provides a crash course in several aspects of 60's culture: its often gaseous rhetoric, its reliance on mahatmas and soothsayers, its endless bail-fund benefits and sometimes dubious appeals to conscience, its thriving population of informers, its contribution to the well-being of lawyers, its candyland expectations and obstinate denials of reality, its fatal avoidance of critical thinking, its squalid death by its own hand. That still leaves many meritorious elements largely outside Leary's sphere: civil rights, the antiwar movement, music and art, the impulse toward communitarianism, to name a few. In part because of Leary, however, ideals and delusions were encouraged to interbreed, their living progeny being avid consumerism and toothless dissent.

Turn off your mind, relax, float downstream....

The color of movies.

Martin Scorsese just came out with two lists of ten films that have the best use of light and color.

English Language Films

1. Barry Lyndon (1975, Dir. Stanley Kubrick; Cin. John Alcott)

2. Duel in the Sun (1946, Dir. King Vidor; Cin. Lee Garmes, Ray Rennahan, Hal Rosson)

3. Invaders From Mars (1953, Dir. William Cameron Menzies; Cin. John F. Seitz)

4. Leave Her to Heaven (1946, Dir. John M. Stahl; Cin. Leon Shamroy)

5. Moby Dick (1956, Dir. John Huston; Cin. Oswald Morris)

6. Phantom of the Opera (1943, Dir. Arthur Lubin; Cin. W. Howard Greene, Hal Mohr)

7. The Red Shoes (1948, Dir. Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger; Cin. Jack Cardiff)

8. The Searchers (1956, Dir. John Ford; Cin. Winton C. Hoch)

9. Singin’ in the Rain (1952, Dir. Stanley Donen, Gene Kelly; Cin. Harold Rosson)

10. Vertigo (1958, Dir. Alfred Hitchcock; Cin. Robert Burks)


International Films

1. Contempt (1963, Dir. Jean-Luc Godard; Cin. Raoul Coutard; France/Italy)

2. Cries and Whispers (1972, Dir. Ingmar Bergman; Cin. Sven Nykvist; Sweden)

3. Gate of Hell (1953, Dir. Teinosuke Kinugasa; Cin. Kohei Sugiyama; Japan)

4. In the Mood For Love (2000, Dir. Wong Kar-Wai; Cin. Christopher Doyle, Mark Lee Ping-bin; Hong Kong)

5. The Last Emperor (1987, Dir. Bernardo Bertolucci; Cin. Vittorio Storaro; Italy/United Kingdom/China/Hong Kong)

6. Red Desert (1964, Dir. Michelangelo Antonioni; Cin. Carlo Di Palma; France/Italy)

7. The River (1951, Dir. Jean Renoir; Cin. Claude Renoir; India/France/United States)

8. Satyricon (1969, Dir. Federico Fellini; Cin. Giuseppe Rotunno; Italy/France)

9. Senso (1954, Dir. Luchino Visconti; Cin. G.R. Aldo, Robert Krasker, Giuseppe Rotunno; Italy)

10. Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1964, Dir. Sergei Paradjanov; Cin. Viktor Bestayev, Yuri Ilyenko; Russia/Ukraine)

This is clearly a very idiosyncratic list. Just look at the dates: Scorsese is pointing to the films that influenced him in his impressionable years. We already knew how gaga he is for "Duel in the Sun" (a cheesy Western sometimes referred to as "Lust in the Dust").

Maybe in the comments you can come up with some alternatives. Is there a movie that springs my mind for its color? Not really. Those extra-vivid Technicolor movies like "Vertigo" and "The Birds" crowd out more subtly colored recent movies that I find more appealing. Any ideas?