North by Northwest

Can the scene where Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) and Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint) descend Mount Rushmore in North by Northwest, which was recently revived as part of the current Hitchcock retrospective at Film Forum, be compared to the Odessa Steps sequence of Potemkin? It’s just one of a number of historical landmarks turned into imaginative constructs in the film. The U.N. was still a fresh contribution to the Manhattan’s skyline when Hitchcock cast it and the cantilevered shots are prescient of both the majesty and tragedy of the enterprise the structure represents. “War is hell, even if it’s a cold one,” says The Professor (Leo Carroll), the film’s intelligence operative, but that still doesn’t do justice to either the pseudo-politics of the setting or to the multivalent levels of Hitchcock’s canvas. The answer may be found in the title, which derives from Hamlet who says “I am but mad, North by Northwest.” The movie starts out with another piece of New York architecture, a classic modernist skyscraper of the Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building variety in which reality is reflected, a reality of bustling cabs one of which reads “Kind Taxi.” Is it kind or one of a kind? Little by little we are given coordinates. George Kaplan occupies suite 796 at the Plaza, but he doesn’t exist, and is only identifiable by a valet and a maid who identify him respectively with a room key and suit. When Thornhill fills a void left in time and space, he becomes Kaplan and that sets the plot in motion. Then there is berth 3901, Suite E on the Chicago Limited and Prairie Road 41 which is the site of the famous crop duster sequence. The doomed diplomat Leonard Townsend (Philip Ober) is mistakenly identified by the house he no longer occupies and the wife who is no longer alive. In neurology you have Capgras Syndrome in which a familiar person seems like an imposter (in one of the film’s comic asides, even,Thornhill’s mother doesn’t really seem to know the person who inhabits her son’s body) and the countervailing prosopagnosia in which the familiar is no longer recognizable. Here we come closer to the heart of Hitchcock’s visions, a nightmare world in which appearances whether they be awe inspiring landmarks or merely individual identities (the redcaps sequence in which the police futilely try to locate Thornhill amidst a sea  of baggage handlers is another example) are obscured by the presence of more unsettling realities.  Eva Marie Saint is just another setting which Hitchcock’s camera explores. Her ethereal beauty can lure a man into bed or death.  She is Janus-faced like Hamlet who also says “When the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw.” One of the many triumphs of this masterpiece occurs when Hitchcock peels away the layers of darkness, transforming madness into romantic comedy.

Confronting Your Walking Alter Ego

Meet the walking alter egos talking earnestly to their proclivities. “I know that I don’t need to eat sugar and that sugar is as lethal to me as meat or caffeine or women. I realize that I don’t have to live the kind of life where I crave the delights of the flesh. When I'm lured up against the shoals of pastry eating, the Scylla and Charybdis of chocolate, I know it’s my disease talking to me. It’s not the real me.” Some people exhibit their alter egos like Popeye his muscles. But walking alter egos, are not harmless. With their determination and glazed eyes, these alter egos often resemble the doppelgängers in The Invasion of the Body Snatchers  and with with their robotic talk, The Stepford Wives. Walking alter egos can make you feel like you're suffering from Capgras Syndrome, a neurological disorder in which people seem like impostors. Indeed, these alter egos may cause viscosity in pedestrian situations that can result in traffic snarls. What to do when confronted with an insistent sounding alter ego in heated conversation with its other half? The answer is that it's hopeless to separate them. A walking alter ego is on a mission. Getting in its way is not as bad as surprising a bear raiding your garbage. You do not have to shoot it, but it's also important not to try to talk it out of its self-justifiying behavior. Above all don’t interrupt--especially with permissive sounding liberal pieties like "that's not so bad," "I’ve done that to myself too,” or “I can ID that." Walking alter egos will not be reasoned with, nor will they be convinced that the programs they propose are overly extreme or harsh. Moderation is not what alter egos want to hear. Nod knowingly when confronted by a walking alter ego and remember not to take it personally. It’s not you it's talking so prescriptively to. It’s just another part of itself.

Tiresias or the DSM

In therapeutic sessions, patients often express their fears. If a patient is extremely disturbed, he might believe that there are little men lurking outside his window. He might think these men are talking and that they are telling him to do something, even something rather trite. If the condition is not too severe, the therapist might attempt to help the patient to understand that he is displacing or projecting his own feelings and thoughts onto another person. Hypochondriacs feel they are sick when they are perfectly fine, and parents who suffer from the esoteric syndrome called Münchausen’s syndrome by proxy have very real but illusory feelings about their children being sick. Amongst the neurological symptoms that indicate distorted cognitions is Capgras syndrome, in which the sufferer believes a friend or relative is an imposter, a stranger occupying a familiar-seeming face and body. This last is dramatized by Richard Powers in his novel The Echo Maker. The horror classic The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) is particularly terrifying in that it creates a funhouse view of this very real phenomenon. The reverse neurological symptom is prosopagnosia, in which the afflicted person is no longer able to recognize the faces of those he would otherwise know. Capgras might create paranoia, but prosopagnosia is an adult form of stranger anxiety in which the comfort of familiarity is lost. The DSM, the manual that psychologists and psychiatrists use to categorize and identify illnesses, lists conditions ranging from eating disorders, compulsivity about the search for pleasure (a form of hedonism), and anhedonia (the inability to tolerate pleasure at all), to more far-ranging disorders like psychosis and schizophrenia. Joanne Woodward starred in a movie about multiple personality called The Three Faces of Eve (1957). David and Lisa (1962) elaborated on the theme of schizophrenia and Olivia de Havilland starred in The Snake Pit (1948), a classic about abusive treatment of the mentally ill that foreshadowed the deinstitutionalization of the many severely disturbed patients who would go on to constitute our vast homeless population. But more disturbing than symptoms that are rooted in paranoia and delusion are those that turn out to be rooted in a grim reality. Let’s say a patient had walked into a therapist’s office in Tokyo six months ago and said that he had the feeling that the Northern coast of Japan would be hit by a huge wave that in turn caused a nuclear meltdown? What would we tell to sufferers from pre-9/11 nightmares about terrorists taking over jetliners and flying them into World Trade Center? What would we say to the patient who is obsessed with the idea that it was a genetically engineered double and not Osama bin Laden who was murdered last week?

Awakenings

Starting with an early book on Parkinsonism, Awakenings (which was later made into a movie starring Robert De Niro and Robin Williams), Oliver Sacks has written about neurological conditions with the drama of a fiction writer. Recently, he wrote a piece in The New Yorker about his own battle with prosopagnosia. Prosopagnosia is the inability to recognize faces. Another condition, agnosia, is the inability to recognize objects—the syndrome that the subject of Dr. Sacks’s 1985 tome, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, suffered from. A complementary disorder is Capgras syndrome, in which the subject recognizes a face, but sees it as a mask occupied by an imposter. Richard Powers, a novelist and MacArthur fellow who has devoted his career to writing fiction about ailments of the mind, documents this condition in The Echo Maker. So we have novelists like Powers and Larry Shainberg (who wrote Memories of Amnesia, about a brain surgeon suffering from the aforementioned disorder) writing fiction about neurology and neuroscience, and neurologists and neuroscientists like Sacks and V.S. Ramachandran writing novelistically about the conditions they encounter in their work. Since the early ‘70s, when Sacks started to write poetically about neurological anomalies, the vocabulary of neurology and neuroscience has been coming into common parlance, much the way Freud’s discoveries of neurosis and hysteria did in early part of the last century. Today, parietal lobes, the amygdala, the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex are talked about the way the libido, the id and the superego were discussed when psychoanalysis first came under the scrutiny of the educated reader. This evolution in the way the functions and dysfunctions of the mind are described is significant in and of itself as a cultural phenomenon—whether looked at from the left or right side of the brain.