The Sopranos: That Last scene

      This marks the 25th anniversary of that brilliant groundbreaking TV drama, The Sopranos. Wow! 25 years. It really did revolutionize TV drama.

    At the time I published three editions of episode-by-episode analyses of the drama, by Continuum Books. The Sopranos on the Couch. Check Abe/Amazon for them. Go for "The Ultimate Edition," which was ultimate at the time, preceding the 7th season, which I covered in an essay anthology on lulu.com. Here is a paper I unloaded at a Sopranos conference in NYC.

Unpredictable But Inevitable: That Last Scene 

I know, I know, David Chase has avowed that Tony Soprano does not get whacked at the end of The Sopranos. And even if we set aside the allure of a Sopranos movie sequel or twelve, Chase might be expected to know because he conceived the whole drama and supervised every instant, every component, across the seven seasons, and in fact both wrote and directed that controversial last episode. But as the reverend D. H. Lawrence has exhorted us -- Trust the art not the artist. As we return to the Art and look very closely at the last scene and the last episode and the last season and indeed at the whole motherjumpin’ series -- Does Tony Soprano get whacked? My conclusion is unequivocal: Yes and No.  

The No is obvious because, as Mr Chase acknowledges, we don’t see Tony get killed. We get that notorious blank screen. Nor do we see either the conception or delivery of Meadow and AJ -- yet we infer those occurred because the context of the drama suggests as much. And as the later action suggests the earlier happened, the earlier action may strongly suggest what happens behind that blank screen. Context counts.

  A plethora of evidence in the drama and around it sets up our expectation he will be killed. This architecture compels the inference that Tony dies in the diner -- and probably not from indigestion. 

For one thing, high art and popular culture have always been obligated to assure us that crime does not pay. The hours and the per diem may make up for the lack of tenure – but crime does not pay. In life and in politics perhaps but in art, nope. So our killers have always been brought to boot heel, even when they are Good Guys like Shane, leave alone the gangsters in David Chase’s primary models – The Public Enemy, The Godfather trilogy and most pertinently the schnook’s mortal boredom at the end of GoodFellas.  

As well Chase has established a tightening noose around Tony. Over the course of the two-season epilogue we see Uncle Junior disintegrate, lovable Bobby killed, Silvio near-fatally wounded, Phil Leotardo squashed, AJ flub his suicide, and even Tony’s beloved Christopher – snuffed by Tony himself. In the lingo of the presidential race and the other Super Bowl, Big Old Moe Mentum has switched from Survival to Death. 

Chase leaves Tony’s fate ambiguous not because Tony escapes death but because Chase – as he has all through the seven seasons -- rejects closure, would rather unsettle than pacify his viewer, and again declares his independence from narrative convention. To the end more like life than like TV, this one last reticence settles nothing – and everything.

Consistent with the drama’s penchant for lifelike paradox, Chase’s ending is both happy and tragic. Tony’s survival would be happy for him -- but is tragic insofar as it extends and validates his moral failure and his damage to others. His death, which would be perhaps not that positive to him, would be the broadly happy ending because it would betoken justice, not just civil but poetic. The ambiguity of that blank screen admits both endings. 

That suggests that whether Tony lives or dies is ultimately insignificant. His human failure leaves him in the state of Death-in-Life. This balances off Tony’s Life-in-Death experience at the beginning of the drama’s epilogue, Season Six, when his near-death leads to a spiritual awakening and a harmony with the universe – that through Season Seven disintegrates. In the last episode at Bobby’s wake Paulie encapsulates this introspective ambiguity: “In the midst of death, we are in life. Huh? Or is it the other way around?... Either way, you’re halfway up the ass.” 

Perhaps Tony has to be left in limbo because he has come to personify the contemporary American pragmatic capitalist – and that just carries on. Indeed The Sopranos could have carried Orson Welles’s working title for Citizen Kane: “The American.” As the last episode title, Made in America, confirms, the general mix of idealistic pretense and corrupt practice, delusions, denial and defeat, covers a considerable stretch of contemporary American culture. More innocent national satires, the current Little Miss Sunshine and the classic Twilight Zone, play respectively on the comatose Silvio’s TV and in Tony’s safe house. 

Tony’s failure appears in his children’s moral decline, like the fast flare and funk of AJ’s idealism. At Bobby’s wake AJ contends that enlisting to “go kill some fuckin terrorists” would be “more noble than watching jerk-off fantasies on TV if I were kicking their asses.” He echoes Tony’s immigrant idealism: “It’s like – America, this is where people came. To make it. It’s a beautiful idea. And what do they get? Blame? And come-ons for what they don’t need and can’t afford.” AJ tells his new therapist that his SUV’s explosion felt like a cleansing. “We have to break our dependence on foreign oil,” he recites. But even as AJ buys Arabic lesson CDs his idealism remains materialistic. When the army’s helicopter training could get him a job with Donald Trump his ambition stays in the TV fantasies (Trump’s “reality” show) that he spurned. 

AJ readily abandons his military sacrifice for a film job – that brings a sporty new BMW. This career puts AJ on the film course that doomed Tony’s adoptive “son,” Christopher. AJ’s film project is about a private eye who’s sucked into the internet to solve the murders of some virtual prostitutes. Chase has consistently teased the relationship between life and fiction, between actor and role. A real character’s need to solve the murder of fictional prostitutes reflects upon the conventions of fiction suspended by Chase’s open ending. 

Like AJ, Meadow’s legal career reverts to her past. She switched from medicine when her father’s arrests proved “The state can crush the individual.” Echoing Carmela’s denial – which she used to reject -- Meadow blames Tony’s arrests on anti-Italian prejudice -- as if his guilt were irrelevant. As well, she moves from her volunteer work defending oppressed minorities, like blacks and Moslems, into her fiance’s big law firm –where she will start at $170k – that defends a politician against corruption charges involving bid rigging, bagmen and whores. In contrast, her bulemic classmate Hunter (played by David Chase’s daughter) has straightened out and is in second-year Medicine. That is, Hunter escapes her dysfunction while the healthier Meadow relapses into her father’s. 

The other supporting characters, trapped in their selves, confirm the Death-in-Life pattern. Janice tries to inveigle Uncle Junior of his missing money and claims improvement: “I had therapy. I’m a good mother. I put Ma and all her warped shit behind me…. Not that I get any thanks for it.” Within a breath her Livia element rebounds. So, too, Uncle Junior doesn’t recognize Janice or Tony but he proudly remembers “This thing of ours”: “I was involved in that?” As patterns persist, AJ’s new therapist is a Wasp Melfi who crosses her long, lovely legs and evokes both Tony’s old claim  -- an unloving mother who “was a borderline personality”--  and Carmela’s denial: “Maybe the army’d be great for [AJ], if there wasn’t a war going on.”

In fact the only major character to change is the once virtuous FBI Agent Harris – as he sinks into Tony. By the old proverb, whoever touches pitch is defiled. After the FBI surveillance protects the Sopranos at Bobby’s funeral, Harris fingers Tony’s nemesis Phil Leotardo. Harris reacts to Phil’s death as if he were on Tony’s team: “Damn, we’re gonna win this thing.” As Big Pussy Bonpensiero came to see himself as an FBI agent, Harris has turned Soprano. As he betrays his wife with his colleague mistress, he betrays his colleagues with his support of Tony. 

The scene where Tony leaves Paulie sunning himself outside Satriale’s replays the II, 11 ending where Agent Harris drops by to introduce his new partner to Tony. Paulie’s antagonism towards the cat that stares at Christopher’s photo coheres with his superstition-based religion. To his claim he saw the Virgin Mary at the Bada Bing (presumably after hours), Tony shows limited support: “Why didn’t you say something? Fuck strippers, we coulda had a shrine. Sold holy water in gallon jugs, we coulda made millions.” Paulie’s reluctant acceptance of his promotion – “I live but to serve you, my liege” – raises the suspicion he could (again) betray Tony. 

Tony’s soft spot for the stray cat – an antithetic reminder of his ducks in I,1 – and his pause to enjoy the air as he rakes round his pool, recall his post-surgery spirituality in Season Six. Season Seven traces his relapse into his selfish brutishness and his consequent isolation. Perhaps Tony’s last emblem is his last supper’s onion ring– unhealthy, flavourful but indigestible, and hollow at the core. Indeed, as the Sopranos swallow the whole ring sans bite or chew, it suggests a profane deep fry communion.

 The closing restaurant scene feels ominous. As we get Tony’s perspective on the bystanders we taste the crime boss’s restless fear. They are the “schnooks” to which Harry Hill, the turncoat hero of GoodFellas, was reduced, so even as innocents they embody Tony’s dread. While Bobby’s wake was at Vesuvio’s, the Holsten’s diner suggests cheap comfort not class. It images Tony’s decline from Artie Bucco’s restaurant and self-realization. As Little Italy is “now reduced to one row of shops and cafes,” the diner is another comedown, like Carmela’s refuge here, an old house reeking with the previous owners’ urine. 

Tony takes a booth from which he can watch the door –and not just for his family’s separate arrivals. In a medley of metaphors, from the tabletop jukebox he plays Journey’s Don’t Stop Believin’. Journey sing off the end of Tony’s, and Chase’s. The lyrics point to the ambiguous end: “Some will win, some will lose, Some were born to sing the blues. Oh, the movie never ends. It goes on and on and on and on.” 

As Tony scans the juke, the song’s flip side explicitly assigns the ending to the viewer: Any Way You Want It. Tony also lingers over Heart’s Where Will You Run To? and Magic Man, and over Tony Bennett’s I’ve Gotta Be Me and – for Tony -- the synonymous A Lonely Place.  As the titles summarize Tony’s condition and like his perspective on the other diners, the very last shot, the no-life blackout, signifies his last view. That makes it the reverse of the episode’s opening shot, where Tony wakes up, resumes consciousness, in the safe house. 

Though AJ cites Tony’s valediction from the end of I, 13 -- “Focus on the good times.” -- we project Tony’s educated suspicion onto the truck driver in a USA cap, the strong young man with a date, the black duo who enter last. Even the man with three boy scouts disturbingly recalls the customers at the hobby shop where Bobby is killed (VII, 8). 

Most importantly, the man who walks past the Sopranos to the WC behind Tony recalls Michael Corleone’s Family initiation, when he retrieved a gun from the toilet box. His “Members Only” jacket repeats the title of the opening episode in Chase’s two-season epilogue, VI,1, after the jacket Eugene Pontecorvo wore when he killed a man in a diner like this one. Tall dark and lanky, the man resembles Eugene, who killed himself when Tony wouldn’t release him from the mob. Earlier Eugene’s wife said someone should “put a bullet in [Tony’s] head” – perhaps setting up a contract fulfilled now.

Meadow’s difficulty in parking her car establishes a suspense we assume is life or death. As Hitchcock contended, dramatic power lies not in the explosion but in its expectation. Will she get there in time to die or late enough to be saved? The last words, as Tony sees someone approach -- maybe Meadow, maybe not -- are Steve Perry interrupted at “Don’t stop.” But as art –whether a song or an epic TV drama – can’t control life the show and I suggest Tony’s life both do stop. We’re deprived of Perry’s last “believin’.”

Reading the blank screen as Tony’s death also fulfills Bobby’s remark about assassinations in “Soprano Home Movies” (VII, 1): “You probably don’t hear it when it happens, right?” In “Stage Five” (VII, 2) when Gerry Torciano is killed “He did not hear a thing” and didn’t realize anything “until it was over.” That’s how Bobby himself got it (VII, 8), how Phil gets it here, and by extension Tony now. 

Further, this is one of only three Sopranos episodes without music over the end-credits. Where II, 8 ended on the beep of the wounded Christopher’s life-support system, Tony at the end has no life-support. VI, 1 ends with Tony shot by Junior, unconscious, and no sound over the end credits. The endings of the first and last episodes of Chase’s two-season epilogue take their cue from Hamlet: “The rest is silence.”  

Nevertheless all this remains surmise. We don’t know Tony has been killed because we haven’t seen it. The conclusion spares/deprives us of the sensation, thrill or more cerebral satisfaction of his death, as Chase denied us Melfi’s vengeance against her rapist (III, 4). Because we have suspended our moral rigour to cheer Tony on all these years Chase won’t give us any easy way out. This reticence is a moral imperative. Knowing Tony is dead could give us false confidence that such unfathomable evil has been controlled. However directed his conclusion, Chase leaves Tony in limbo for the same reason Shakespeare leaves Iago alive and silent -- because such massive evil remains a living danger. We may assume he’s dead but assurance lies elsewhere. As John Allemang put it, “For closure, look to M*A*S*H or Friends/ But Tony’s torment never ends.”  And yet… Tony has to be killed.  It can’t be over till the fat Soprano croaks. 

 

In the Cut (2003)

As befits such a  courageous woman director as Jane Campion, In The Cut moves star Meg Ryan out of the Rom Com fuzzies splat into the arena of toxic masculinity. That’s as drastic a persona remake as one can imagine. Unfortunately it sidelined rather than justly advanced Ryan’s persona.

Franny Avery (Ryan) is a college Creative Writing prof who moves through a world of poetry. Even beyond her classroom, her trips in the NYC subway provide snatches of poetry to beguile her. Her name suggests an ancestry in Salinger, with no Zooey here in sight to share her precocity and innocence. 

Her snatches of poety veer into the sensual and sensational. Thus one: “The still waters of the water under a frond of stars. The still waters of your mouth under a thicket of kisses.” That last phrase anticipates her cunnilinguistic seduction by the aggressively sensitive cop Molloy (Mark Rufalo), a dab hand at articulating sexual techniques himself. Molloy persists in interviewing her about the first woman’s murder, the questioning segueing into courtship.

Instead of Zooey this Franny has a sadly hypersexual half-sister Pauline, whose aggressive luring of her doctor leads to her banishment and criminal charges. Pauline’s sadistic murder is the second one Franny confronts. The first victim's partial body was found in Franny’s garden. Eden this NYC tenement ain’t. This is underlined by the names of the working girls’ job sites: The Red Turtle, The Baby Doll. 

Franny and Pauline pretend to a sexual agency that proves an illusion. Both remain trapped in the oppression of male authority. The fat pimp outside Franny’s apartment may appear to be a caring guardian but he too sells women. 

In particular Franny’s poeticizing transparently fails to gloss over Pauline’s sexual helplessness: “You're a poet of love. The lovelorn man who Sick in soul and of this Busy human heart aweary Worships the spirit Of unconscious life In tree or wildflower Gentle lunatic.” That’s BS. Lorca but in this sad case a fatal BS.

Franny equally deceives herself in her intimate warming towards one of her students, the large seemingly sensitive black man Cornelius. He won’t carry her bag because that would be “an insult” to her Amazon bearing. She leaves it for him anyway. He obliges. Cornelius skips class, writes in defence of mass murderers and sadists like John Wayne Gacey and submits his assignments in blood-like red ink — or blood. When Franny admits a moment of intimate submission Cornelius shucks his professed gentleness altogether and proves as sexually violent as the literary subjects he professes to rewrite.   

    Franny at first denies any connection to the first woman’s murder. But she accidentally witnessed the victim’s earlier blowing a man with a telltale tattoo. Molloy’s reflections on that sexual act — plus having that telltale tattoo — eventually convince her that her lover is the killer. The ultimate revelation may clear him but it only confirms the official empowering of the rampant male at the expense and exploitation of women. That dooms women from the brilliant prof down to the most helpless and least tenurable.    

War Dogs

  The title refers to the low-scale scavengers who sell arms to the US military. It also evokes Marc Antony’s line in Shakespeare’s Julius Caeser: “Cry ‘Havoc!’ and let slip the dogs of war.” That is, declare a state of chaos then go brutal. (That’s the possibly unwitting mantra of Hamas.) Your declared chaos will excuse your savagery.

The film opens on hero David Packouz being beaten up by Armenia thugs — then goes back to trace how an ordinary, appealing young American massage therapist got into that predicament.

Skilled director Todd Phillips explains this true story on two levels. Psychologically, the young innocent was seduced into collaboration with a high school buddy, Efraim.  

Jonah Hill plays him with Falstaffian vaunt and void. He has a raging lust for wealth, admiration, food — concentrated in his needing a cocaine high. His sense of love is someone to exploit. His sex shrinks to hand- and blow-jobs. This in contrast to David’s disciplined and respectable profession of massage. Efraim can care for no-one else. He will eventually rub everyone the wrong way. His response to a crooked drug deal is not to recover his money but to show a violent face.

David is like Prince Hall charmed by that unyielding larger-than-life spirit. Their partnership provides David’s new marriage with a flashy Porsche and apartment — but both only parallel Efraim’s. David is no longer his own self. His new career compels him to lie to his wife — and to keep lying, until all trust is gone. 

The story’s psychological lesson is the destructiveness of Efraim’s unbridled greed. Our lads are set up for a $30million profit. Efraim blows it by irrationally wanting more. He’s angered by the revelation their bid low-balled the rivals by $53 million. Suddenly their windfall isn’t enough. He ruins the deal by trying to cut out his two key collaborators and by failing to pay the Albanian box-merchant who had saved their deal and even increased their profit. Piddling savings both, that doom the operation. And inexcusable — a reminder of the self-destruction and madness in unharnessed greed.

Larger than the psychological reading, though, the social translates that character flaw to the wider culture: the destructiveness of unbridled capitalism. Our “heroes” personify the self-destruction and irrationality of a social system that allows such dramatic excess in the society’s disproportionate distribution of wealth. The film’s truth applies to the economic structure as much as to our heroes’ character — and its loss. Aye, there’s the rub. A happy medium would be the better massage.

 

Eileen

  Aptly, this film about the stifling repression by the patriarchy focuses on two women working in a boys’ detention centre. The boys live in a state of fragile repression, which can erupt even in a Christmas show. The female staff snap at their juniors, complicit in the principle of hegemony.  

The drama centers on the power shift between two women who work there, The beautiful new Harvard Psych PhD Rebecca meets, liberates and is eventually overtaken by the mousey submissive functionary Eileen.

When Rebecca breezes into her new job she’s introduced by Old School sexist jokes and dismissal. She initially introduces a new sensitivity in her dealing with the inmates. Also, her interest in Eileen draws the girl out of her repression. But by film’s end, Eileen has grabbed the power and initiative, leaving Rebecca in full retreat. 

Rebecca initially warms Eileen by identifying as a fellow orphan. She has learned aggression as a way to survive in the male world. Thus she cold-cocks a brute in the bar. Eileen is still smothered by her violent drunken father. Denying herself any identity, she restricts her wardrobe to her mother’s old clothes. For sexual release she indulges in masturbatory fantasies at work. 

Eileen’s father is the nightmare patriarch. The former police chief, retired in humiliation, survives as a violent, obsessive, helpless drunk. He disdains of Eileen for lacking the gumption to escape him as his other (unseen) daughter did. That’s the no-win ethos of the patriarchy. You lose if you serve.

The other central male is another cop’s son, jailed for having murdered his father in bed. Enigmatically, he has since refused to speak. Rebecca draws out his secret: His mother condoned his father’s sexual abuse of him. Rebecca dumps her discipline of psychology and invades the mother’s house, intent upon forcing her confession. In taking the woman prisoner Rebecca in effect ruins her own career. 

During that woman’s captivity Eileen shifts from unwitting accomplice to impulsive commandant. On impulse she raises the stakes from kidnapping the mother to killing her. At this unintended extremity the psychologist disappears. We watch Eileen’s escape, as she hitches a ride with a trucker and joins a series of trucks — possibly tricks — hitting the highway. That’s an ironic reassertion of the male power, on the road as in stasis.     

The central women’s relationship begins in kindred spirit, warmth and sensual attraction. It’s shivered by Rebecca’s inappropriately forceful initiative, then broken by Eileen’s impulsive extremity. The patriarch is a prison that defeats anyone who submits to its strategy and hegemony.  

Poor Things

  In Poor Things the titles are wraiths of letters, floating, emaciated, fading away, like the beings that preceded and are then drawn out of the corpses under the doctor Godwin Baxter’s knife and training. The letters suggest an ever-fading life and substance, the tension between man’s skeleton through arrogant aspiration back to its reversion into bone. This theme recurs in the film’s intermittent black-and-white evocations of Victoriana which cast the film both in our current times of colour and our stripped past. 

The end-credits are too small to read. In context, they are the sign of the maker, the creator, at once stretching the limit of his art but falling short of fully realizing it. We aspire to spirit but lapse back into being things. The skeleton persists. The bone outlasts the spirit, however remade/reborn. Whatever richness of being we intend we revert to poor things. Thus Dr Baxter is both the practitioner and the victim of patriarchal perversion. 

Hence to the mutants that derive from Dr Baxter’s craft and genius. Weird animals, like a four-footed goose and a pig-headed chicken, scuttle through the scenes, as if too normal to warrant a close-up. His steam-engine carriage pretends to be drawn by a fake horse-head, as if the industrial revolution were but an inflection of the idea that man stays beast.

Similarly hybrid is the genre-basis of the plot. A female Candide strides through the story of Frankenstein’s bride against the urban landscape of a retrospective futurist Verne (the air balloons, that vehicle, etc). 

The innocent afoot is Bella. Baxter created her when he took the body of a maritally oppressed suicide and implanted the brain of rhe baby from her womb. She bears his surname because he made her, in a non-sexual paternity. That's an echo of Mary Shelley's scientist, bent  upon -- and bent -- creating life without woman, creating life "by this hand." That phrase echoes through his lab, in masturbatory hubris. We watch the current Bella creature blossom syllable by syllable from impulsive inarticulate into the new, independent feminist. Given physical being by the mad scientist, she on her own discovers and asserts her humanity and rights.

Her “I must go punch that baby” anticipates her turning from instinctual impulsiveness to effective social order.

The doctor’s seamed and resewed face evokes Dr Frankenstein’s monster, whom Shelley imagined ("conceived"?) and Hollywood multiplied. The Victorian context is reaffirmed by the latent William in Dr. Godwin’s name. Like this Baxter, William Godwin was himself apparently not comfortable with conventional heterosexuality, as Kara Hagedorn has demonstrated. 

The legitimate freedom of nonbinary sex is also exemplified by Bella’s lesbian affair. That begins in the brothel that also introduced her to the conflict and exchange of power in human sexuality. Those mutant animals and machines universalize this liberty of the nonbinary. 

Director Yorgos Lanthimos’s new feature is so rich, complex, probing and untrammelled that one reluctantly hazards any reading upon a single viewing. So I’ll wait, this current venture my wraith, a presence but not fully bodied. 

Fallen Leaves

  In Aki Kaurismaki’s new film, men coming out of a rep cinema say the Jim Jarmush film  The Dead Don't Die reminds them of Diary of a Country Priest and Bande a Part, respectively. Fair enough. Our film has its own apparently lifeless heroes in staggering tsearch of rebirth. Their heartening tale is conveyed through Bresson’s skeletal aesthetic and Godard’s  (albeit way lower key) outsiders. 

Anyway, Fallen Leaves reminds me of Ozu — a subdued minimalist almost static anatomy of a season as an emblem of the current human condition. As the title— and the closing song, with Autumn in for Fallen — suggests, we’re in a chilly, bleak, tired world, sapped of colour and energy. But the heart beats on, especially those of our dulled central couple whose solitudes ache for their intuited connection.

The course of their true love is hobbled by Holappa’s weakness — drink — and his accidents, whether losing her number or walking into a train. Meanwhile Anya  patiently survives on her own. When she loses her shelf-stacking job for pinching a past-date pastry, she takes a drudge job in a pub. That ends when her boss is busted for drug dealing. Thence to a sheetmetal factory — the industry in which Holappa has his union card. He struggles on his own, with neither union support — until she recovers him at the hospital, retrieving him from a coma.

Anya’s second job is dramatically masculine, sweaty factory work. It involves her in some heavy digging and some heavier carting. This balances — and saves from cliche — her larger woman’s project, saving her man from his destructive weaknesses. 

When she adopts a dog she demonstrates her generous impulse to care for the desperate, to add a relationship to her solitude. Having inherited her small flat from her godmother, Anya is a step up the social ladder from her working friends — and a ladder above her lover.

Amid the cold barren settings the backgrounds bristle with film posters. Cinema provides a rich escape denied these characters’ real lives. Holappa waits outside the cinema in futile hope of meeting Anya again. A ring of cigarette butts tells her he had been there.  

The last shot echoes Chaplin (the auteur not Anya’s dog). The lovers walk into the sunset of a cold, heartless world. The factory scenes recall the dehumanizing sterility of Modern Times. And in the spirit of The Great Dictator the outside news world boils down to Russia's horrible barbaric  attack upon innocent Ukraine. Not a saving barber in sight.

Six months later the soundtrack would have added the October 7 attack on Israel and Israel’s response. No resurgent spring there either. We're into the winter of discontent. 

        But Kaurismaki's small, touching lives go on, in a carefully controlled simplicity. Elegance can also be stark.

Cary's Introduction in Notorious

I’m fascinated by Cary Grant’s introduction in Notorious, which delays our view of his face far longer than we expect in such a romantic star vehicle.

Like Psycho, the film opens on a particular date and time. An April afternoon in Miami in 1946. The very specific implies a very universal. America is at war but this time and place are in domestic, balmy America. 

The first shot is a closeup of a reporter’s flash camera, panning along a line of reporters to one peering in on a courtroom. The journalists make the film about the reporting of the war, the civilian response to it, more than the war itself. There’s also a self-referentiality to Hitchcock’s camera starting on a newsman’s. So, too, his cameo, walking away from a bar with a drink — a replay of the playgirl Alicia’s (Ingrid Bergman) reform and her lover’s dangerous skepticism about it.

Inside the courtroom, a German American is sentenced to 20 years for treason. As his daughter Alicia cuts through those reporters’ intrusive questions she’s beautiful, firm, inexpressive. 

But she cuts loose in the next scene, cavorting at a party. She seems untouched by her father’s verdict. Exhilarated, she is sensual in her bare arms, her blouse a rebuttal to prisoner stripes. In her drunken hilarity the Nazi’s daughter seems to be the film’s central protagonist and mystery. The titular notorious?

But the party scene is commanded by the central rear view of a still, dark haired man. He clearly catches the heroine’s eye, as he denies ours. Alicia flirts with him, offers him a drink, but he is implacable. Of course, he turns out to be Cary Grant. Hitchcock introduced his male lead from behind, anonymous, the still center of the party, of the heroine’s flippant attention and of our questioning engagement. 

And of the film. This character, invitingly named Devlin, becomes its central mystery. He proves to be the true “notorious” for his precarious hovering between the devoted and the devilish. This romantic/political drama is an anatomy of Devlin, not Alicia. Having initially seemed the titular “notorious” of the party life, she is cleared by a conversation recording of any suspicion that she might share her father’s Nazi party life. 

The film exposes Devlin’s questionable pragmatism. He embodies the notorious inhumanity that can shadow even the right side in the eternal battle between good and evil. The good guys can do bad things. Especially when they can claim they have to. 

This Devlin is in the details. His apparent stability proves deceptive. His image does a 360-degree spin from Alicia’s perspective on her hungover morning after. We continue to get rear-view headshots of him, leaving his character and mood in question.

The lovers in various settings are set in a hard-edged clear foreground against soft-focus social backdrops. They are clear in a foggy world. When she is drugged by her Nazi husband Sebastian, Alicia turns foggy, provoking Devlin’s doubts of her reform and character.

The continuing rear-head shots of Devlin leave him enigmatic and ambivalent. To wrest control of the steering wheel he knocks her out with a punch we don’t see but disturbingly hear. As their love affair proceeds she is the aggressor, open, expressive. He receives her ardor coolly, impassive. His cold mien confirms the rear-head concealing of his emotion.  Indeed, the film's famous 360-degree camera spin around the lovers' passionate kiss is the antithetic rebuttal to the first flat shot of his back.

Devlin’s first suggestion of love for Alicia is his silence when his secret service bosses reveal their plan. Alicia is to seduce Sebastian, the Nazi collaborator who already loves her, win his trust and intimacy, then report on him. 

Disdainful of their human weapon, the American government is prostituting Alicia and expecting Devlin to arrange it. Devlin appears as inexpressive with the schemers as he was with her — though he does firmly bristle at one derogation of her character. He then coldly engages her in the ambivalent scheme. Because she loves him she will submit to — even marry —the Nazi she spurned

At heart this is the classic Love vs Duty story. Hitchcock’s twist is that both his heroes dramatically put their duty ahead of their love. Antony and Cleopatra would never do that. Our lovers’ choice neaBon Voyage and Adventure Malgache.rly proves fatal. What saves the day — both for Alicia and for the allies — is Devlin reversing the cliche. He puts his love for Alicia ahead of his duty to the program. Not only does he save Alicia but he gets her dirt on the Nazis’ Macguffin source.  

        Hitchcock was long concerned with the intrusion of world politics into personal or domestic relationships, from his 1930s thrillers --  TMWKTM, 39 Steps, Secret Agent, Sabotage, Lady Vanishes -- into his wartime Foreign Correspondent, Saboteur, Lifeboat, and the centrally focused Bon Voyage and Aventure Malgache. The theme dominated his Torn Curtain and Topaz.

As Hitchcock prefers the human over the political, Devlin’s devotion provides the happy ending for everyone — except Sebastian. As the drama opened on the back of Devlin’s head — the enigmatic positive — it closes on the back of the pathetic Sebastian’s. Devlin has whipped Sebastian’s wife off to her life-saving hospital, leaving him to face his mortally suspicious comrades. Sebastian mounts the stairs to the cabal’s plot. As with Devlin earlier, we can’t see Sebastian’s face but we can infer his feelings. To his notorious comradesl he is now the notorious traitor, his face lost to us as his trust is to them.