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    Bio-Politicizing Cary Grant: Pressing Race, Class and Ethnicity into Service in “Amerika”
    Bio-Politicizing Cary Grant: Pressing Race, Class and Ethnicity into Service in “Amerika”
    Bio-Politicizing Cary Grant: Pressing Race, Class and Ethnicity into Service in “Amerika”
    Ebook94 pages54 minutes

    Bio-Politicizing Cary Grant: Pressing Race, Class and Ethnicity into Service in “Amerika”

    By Joshua David Gonsalves

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    Who will Cary Grant have been when the future runs out? In the atrocity-rich wake of Hiroshima, Cold War America is enriched beyond belief. Hollywood radiates, in turn, images of a consumer utopia criss-crossed by segregation, social mobility, racial passing, anxieties about ethnicity and “white panic”. Cary Grant’s class-less classiness seems to denote this (sub)urban leisure class without an effort, yet he signifies more than this: ambivalent, bi-sex’d, inter-sected by the biopolitics of racialization, the policing of sexual agency and stereotypical ethnic identifications (including the invisible Anglo instanced by the high-angle shot). If biopolitics signifies the individuated control of populations, Bio-Politicizing Cary Grant: Pressing Race, Class and Ethnicity into Service in Amerika locates this anxious racialization of service persons, interracial sexuality and social mobility (passing) in an Americanized simulacrum of the Mediterranean world in To Catch a Thief (1955) and in a New York/Northeast-centered USA in North by Northwest (1959). Bio-Politicizing Cary Grant queries the criticism of Alfred J. Hitchcock’s films so as to historically situate one of the first free agents in Hollywood. Yet this semblance of freedom pays a price in meat, murder, massification and the organized homicide of Cold War geopolitics. The book explicates, in sum, the ethnic, racial and sexual ambiguity of Cary Grant’s star persona as both an inculcation of (and resistance to) biopolitical imperatives in fifties-era “America”.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherJohn Hunt Publishing
    Release dateFeb 27, 2015
    ISBN9781782797708
    Bio-Politicizing Cary Grant: Pressing Race, Class and Ethnicity into Service in “Amerika”
    Author

    Joshua David Gonsalves

    Joshua David Gonsalves is an Assistant Professor in the English Department at the American University of Beirut, where he teaches Romanticism, War and Cinema Studies. He has published on Romantic-era Geo/Bio-politics, Speculative Realism and David Lynch’s Inland Empire (2006) in David Lynch in Theory (2010).

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      Book preview

      Bio-Politicizing Cary Grant - Joshua David Gonsalves

      First published by Zero Books, 2015

      Zero Books is an imprint of John Hunt Publishing Ltd., Laurel House, Station Approach,

      Alresford, Hants, SO24 9JH, UK

      office1@jhpbooks.net

      www.johnhuntpublishing.com

      www.zero-books.net

      For distributor details and how to order please visit the ‘Ordering’ section on our website.

      Text copyright: Joshua David Gonsalves 2014

      ISBN: 978 1 78279 771 5

      Library of Congress Control Number: 2014945006

      All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publishers.

      The rights of Joshua David Gonsalves as author have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

      A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

      Design: Lee Nash

      Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

      We operate a distinctive and ethical publishing philosophy in all areas of our business, from our global network of authors to production and worldwide distribution.

      CONTENTS

      Foreword by Tom Cohen: Pre-Carious Grant

      Preface: We’re all living in Amerika

      Acknowledgments

      Bio-Politicizing Cary Grant: Pressing Race, Class and Ethnicity into Service in Amerika

      Chapter 1: The Uncr(edited) Crowd

      Chapter 2: Invisible Workers

      Chapter 3: I’m an advertising executive, not a red herring

      Chapter 4: Racing Results

      Chapter 5: I’ve got you, Mrs. Thornhill

      Chapter 6: Guess Who’s Coming?

      Chapter 7: Post-Racial Ornamentalism

      Chapter 8: Cruising Crusoe’s (Internal) Colonialism: His Girl Friday

      Notes

      References

      Foreword by Tom Cohen:

      Pre-Carious Grant

      …decaying, never to be decayed…

      It has been a matter of time: that is, until the curious construct that is Cary Grant drew the semiotic imagination to cut deeper, or perhaps glide the surfaces that Hitchcock associated with him (since to a degree Cary Grant was, if not Hitchcock’s invention, then Hitchcock’s Semiotik, as Nietzsche says of Plato’s Socrates). If we are drawn back to read Cary Grant differently today, it is because of this primarily: Hitchcock took Grant up, first, as a knowing citation of himself in Suspicion, then cited and turned that again and again in three further works. Then he was through. So we start with Joshua David Gonsalves at the end of that production line, at the point at which the hole that is Cary Grant is complete. He has become a star’s star whose face is familiar and seductive, making women fall in love with it like an advertisement; yet his is also a face which, if you pass into it, is unreadable.

      This unreadability is not the fulcrum of Suspicion; the undecidability of that too familiar and loveable face is socio-pathic, lie-generative (like Marnie later), murderous. Yet the film doesn’t have to go there, for good reasons it holds back, hung in between, generating more folds at the end, but placating stupid viewers about Grant’s brand (definitely not a murderer, please, and then, not of women, and then, not of a gullible, naïve, generous, mousy, irritating Joan Fontaine with reading glasses). He cannot stop calling her monkey face, always when his plastic face looks like a monkey itself, his ears propped. Grant is, for Hitchcock, a figure of defacement. This is not only because Hitchcock camera-claws him into becoming nothing but face: for instance, in North by Northwest’s quibbles about big faces and finally Mount Rushmore’s slippery ones. That, in the end, echoes too in George Kaplan, the non-existent hole in identity, a name which translates into Head of the Earth. If one pursues the enigma of Cary Grant as industrial product, it leads through the entire era of cinema (which for Bernard Stiegler begins with cave paintings and ends today). It passes through the organization of how we identify with faces, grant them credit, credence or identification. Hitchcock knew heads and faces—enough not to give them credit for being what they seem or where they claim to be. Face, Hitchcock said to Truffaut, doesn’t exist, it never emerges from the shadings of light that suggest its possibility. Prosopopeia never arrives and Mount Rushmore stares it down, looking across the American continent.

      One has to return to the opening of North by Northwest, since the fact that Thornhill-Grant is an advertising executive links him to the media product marketed and sold as Cary Grant. Like his dictation to his amanuensis in the cab (make a note, remind me to think thin—which the film then proceeds to do), and like cinema, the idea of Cary Grant is circular; the product that precedes the original that copies it. Grant spoke of Cary Grant in the third person, as an artifact he inhabited. His private life never quite meshed with the artifact’s, but the LSD was a nice touch (to fight homosexual tendencies)—and, given his legitimate options for narcissism, that wasn’t an issue for Hitchcock’s cipher. Like Grace Kelly—and unlike many actors and actresses who would simply be run through the mill, tormented as needed, let go without knowing what was up—Grant seemed in on it. Not intellectually or knowingly, but because he was that good. He was the acrobat first, the protégé of Mae West and, for Hitchcock, a dead-zone cipher; he was the perfect zero or Ø, much better than James Stewart who seemed to like being defaced and emasculated. That is why North by Northwest opens with Grant stepping out of the elevator on the ground floor (on which Gonsalves comments). Cary Grant has left, in other words, Jimmy Stewart’s Scottie on the roof at the end of Vertigo, the preceding film. None of that psycho formalism here, nor anything like faux Wagnerism for the too worldly and too ambiguous Grant. Besides, he serves different algorithms: horizontal ones in lieu of vertical ones; ones running off the map (literally).

      It is not accidental that George Kaplan’s hotel room is in the Plaza, where Grant kept an apartment. Hitchcock has Thornhill go to Cary Grant’s apartment, where there are nothing but fake traces. But this goes on, since where Grant leads Hitchcock, and vice versa, is to a defacement—not only of the actor Grant, whose skills are mocked by the Shakespearean James Mason, but of the earth through him. Grant is the last superstar product to hold Hitchcock’s screen. Later the stars will be birds.

      This practice will recur. In Notorious, Grant is taken down—yet, surprise, it is the closest thing to a happy ending in Hitchcock’s films. Yet in To Catch a Thief, Hitchcock cites and dismantles Grant as jewel thief, his face stealing trust and identification, a

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