THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY
Reflections on Mr. Hardy's camera look¹

Peter Larsen

Pour la première fois, le voyant que je suis m'est vraiment visible; pour
la première fois, je m'apparais retourné jusqu'au fond sous mes propres
yeux.

MAURICE MERLEAU­PONTY

Ten years ago I wrote a short essay on Oliver Hardy's famous camera look in the old Laurel & Hardy comedies.² I tried to describe the impact of the look, the subtle ways in which it affects the relations between film and spectator, and in the course of doing so I referred indirectly to Christian Metz and his discussion of story and discourse in the influential "Note on Two Kinds of Voyeurism".³

In the intervening years I have dealt more directly with Metz' text from time to time, in teaching as well as in writing, and at one point I actually joined the growing group of film scholars who criticized his rather unorthodox application of Émile Benveniste's linguistic categories to the film text.⁴

Then, in 1991, came Metz' own book about the impersonal enunciation, the one which was to be his last.⁵ It is a strange book. He does actually mention a few of his critics and their arguments but the references are rather loose and indirect, there are no real confrontations in the book, no real discussion. On the other hand, the book taken as a whole is a kind of answer: There is an implied acknowledgment, a tacit acceptance of the criticism in the way in which Metz, simply and resolutely, moves the whole discussion of cinematic enunciation into a new field, substituting the totalizing deictic problematic of Benveniste's linguistics with a concern for reflexive, small­scale textual figures.

At the end of the book there is a short paragraph in which he, almost en passant, refers to the older article, excusing it, describing it as "a text with a very personal expression, lyrical at some points, a political critique of the Hollywood Cinema and at the same time a loving prosopopoeia of the same cinema which had nourished me since my youth: a situation typical for a whole generation of French cinéphiles (I am born in 1931) ..." (178).

So, according to the older Metz, there are quite a few reasons why his early "Note on Two Kinds of Voyeurism" should not be taken too seriously: it is a personal, subjective text, but at the same time characteristic of a whole generation; it is a lyrical labor of love, but also a political critique ­ and a type of critique characteristic of, again, a whole generation, etc. An impressive scaffolding of disavowals is being erected in these few sentences. And somewhere, almost hidden among the fleeting, convoluted references to youthful sins, comes the confession: "In that text, then, I went too far ..." (ibid.).

He went too far. And his critics duly spelled it out for him. I read their arguments, I agreed with most of the criticisms ­ and in all these years I never dared to read my own text on Mr. Hardy's camera look. I was afraid of what I might find there, afraid that I too might have gone too far, once, under the influence of Metz.

The conference on "Film and Subjectivity" has provided me with an opportunity (or an excuse) to go back across the tracks. I have done so with caution, but I have actually read my old text again, and while I did, I thought about Metz, the younger Metz of the "Note on Two Kinds of Voyeurism", but also the older Metz of the impersonal enunciation, and I thought about how I would have to rephrase certain sections of my text, if I were to write it today, influenced by ten years of discussions and, perhaps, even a bit influenced by the older Metz and his indirect reply to his critics.

Of course I am not going to write this text, neither today nor tomorrow. But what I can do is to imagine a text, a text which is neither here nor there, a kind of imaginary palimpsest: There is an old text about Mr. Hardy's camera look inspired by an old text by Christian Metz, and across this text another one is being written; at the moment this new text is not complete, it consists mainly of quotations and reflections on quotations, and there are gaps between them, gaps through which the older text with its older, indirect quotations is still visible.

Before I start talking about this palimpsest, I should perhaps clarify one point: The spectator will obviously be a central figure in my imagined text; from time to time I will refer to this figure as "he" ­ which seems reasonable enough to me, since the one I am talking about actually is a male. What is more: it is a male spectator carrying my name, a spectator who is both here and there, both a position in the cinematic text and a person who accepts this position and reflects on it in another text. This duality may also be phrased like this: a series of personal experiences and impressions serve as my point of departure, but I have tried to distanciate myself a bit from them in the hope of making some general points more clear. What I have done is ­ to use Benveniste's terms (this time correctly, in their original sense) ­ to rewrite a "personal" discourse, translating it into an anonymous story. And, as we know from the last ten years of discussion, this is a trick that can only be performed by means of verbal language.

The look

The spectator has, once again, experienced Mr. Hardy's famous camera look. There is something familiar about it: it is simply there in most of the old Laurel & Hardy­movies, a joyful event appearing with a certain regularity, a feature we quickly learned to expect and look forward to back in the cinemas of our childhood. Familiar, and yet strange: to this very day, after all these innumerable repetitions, it still strikes as lightning, just as unexpectedly, just as surprisingly as it did then, at the very first Sunday afternoon matinees. The spectator sits there, expecting it to happen; he is always on guard ­ but apparently he lets himself be carried away by the story, and once again the camera look hits him, off guard as usual, with full strength. He is overpowered, overwhelmed by a strange, indefinite euphoria, but also by a sense of uncertainty, dejection, loss.

The system

The film historians have been digging on this particular site for decades. Charles Barr, for instance, staked his claim as early as in 1967: "To look collusively at the camera at all implies a certain kind of relationship with the audience that can't be taken for granted; when it is [...] the result can be to alienate us damagingly. Chaplin in his early films uses the camera­look delicately, usually to express mute appeal when thwarted, or apprehension, and so do other comedians including even Stan, but no­one has used the technique with such emphasis (frequent close­ups) or with such a range of expression as Ollie".⁶

And Barr then goes on to describe the typical forms of Ollie's look. There is in fact a small system here, a neat catalogue of facial expressions, and these expressions have a sequence of their own; to put them in chronological order is to trace a historical development: First came the furious look, the one with that special quality of despair and exhaustion which everybody remembers even when the films themselves and all their particular plots and gags are faded memories. Charles Barr tells us that Mr. Laurel, the real mastermind behind the comedies, actually was the one who developed this special quality of expression: He deliberately dragged the shooting out, and then, late in the afternoon, when Mr. Hardy was out of his mind with rage and fatigue, he finally allowed him to do the scene with the furious, exasperated camera look. In later films the quizzical look was added, and little by little Mr. Hardy expanded and perfected his repertoire with the apprehensive look, the conspirational look, and the embarrassed look.

The contract

A small, tight system. However, what is caught and catalogued within this system is only variations, only artful ornamentations of one and the same primeval form: in the beginning was THE LOOK, the raw, unsophisticated camera look. Mr. Hardy's play with all those many, different types of expression, is always based on this original LOOK, the primal look ­ and the primal transgression, the violation of the screen actors' First Commandment, the taboo they have promised to obey since the days of early cinema: THOU SHALT NOT LOOK INTO THE CAMERA.

The taboo has obviously to do with the fact that the film is a narrative which presupposes a special form of contract between the parties involved: What the "sender" is going to "send", and what the "receiver" is going to "receive", is not only a story told by means of moving images, a story about fictional or factual events, it is a story which is to be told as if it weren't told at all, as if it weren't told by someone to someone. The events will simply be there ­ happen. Or as Benveniste put it when he defined written, textual "histoire" in the well­known, influential phrase which later on was to cause so much controversy: "The events are presented as if they were produced while they appear on the horizon of the narrative. Nobody speaks here; the events seem to tell themselves."⁷

As Metz remarked in his last book: The crucial words here are "as if" (176). If the written "histoire" is to function properly, the reader has to read it "as if". This is the prime condition of the realist novel of the 19th century, and this is the core of the contract defining the film/spectator­relationship within narrative mainstream cinema. But in the transition from written text to moving images, a couple of new clauses have been added to the old literary contract, among them the ban put upon the camera look.

The folding

The camera look is taboo because it undermines the basic premisses of this particular kind of cinematic narrative. The very moment the taboo is broken, something becomes visible, something the spectator promised to repress when he accepted the terms of the contract, something the narrative film promised to hide: The camera look points to, and points out, the spectator, revealing that the story is actually told to someone ­ or at least indicating that something in the text is conscious of the fact that there is a narratee, if not a spectator. In fact, the camera look itself is that something­in­the­text, a small figuration, indicating and acknowledging the existence of an hors­texte, of a something­outside­the­text. The look is one of these phenomena which the later Metz called replis, a sudden "folding" within the film which brings something else, something "of another nature", as he put it, to the surface (20), in this case a knowledge of "another nature", a knowledge of the hors­texte revealed by a sudden figuration on the inside of the filmic fabric.

At the same time the camera look also points in the opposite direction, suggesting that the events are not simply there: A work is going on, a narration, the narrative is being enunciated, or at least performed. There may not be a narrator in the traditional sense of the word, there may not be a narrating instance that can be readily identified, but at least the narrative events are "carried out" by someone, they are presented by an agent, a delegate, by someone who can be seen "going through the motions", someone whose look at the camera reveals that he is merely acting, that he is working on behalf of someone else, of an absent one ­ as we perhaps would have phrased it in more innocent times.

Back then we might even have said that the appearance of the camera look is one of these rare moments when the veil is suddenly lifted and the story itself reveals that it is in fact a discourse, a message from someone to someone. But, as we know, this would be a misuse of Benveniste's terms. So today we will prudently follow the older Metz' advice and say that the camera look is one of many reflexive figures, one of these small foldings within the film, a moment in which the film seems to double itself: On top of the narrative, another layer suddenly becomes visible, a thin film as it were (: une fine pellicule), something which is not part of the story but rather a kind of inscription, as Metz puts it, an inscription carrying "some indications of another nature (or of another level) concerning the production and not the product [...] Enunciation is the semiotic act through which certain parts of the text talk to us about the text considered as an act" (20).

The pleasures

Be that as it may. The spectator who has been hit by Mr. Hardy's camera look is inclined to think that the younger Metz, the one who, inspired by Freud and Lacan, allowed himself to play rather freely with Benveniste's concepts back in those more innocent days, that this other Metz actually came somewhat closer at describing the impact of the camera look than the older, more prudent Metz, the one with the many learned footnotes. Surely, the younger, playful Metz was irresponsibly imprecise when he wrote about the transparency of the mainstream film; on the other hand he was not really trying to present a systematic description of this type of film and its particular narrative regime, he was actually trying to describe, or at least to talk about, how this kind of film is experienced. This becomes particularly evident at the end of the old Note, at the point where he introduces Sartre's concept of visée de conscience, or "orientation of consciousness", into the final discussion. For what it is that the camera look actually does for the spectator? Does it not, precisely, disorient him, break the spell, change the orientation of his consciousness for a brief moment, thereby making him conscious of that other orientation which he, in that very same moment, has suspended?

Sitting there in the darkness, watching Mr. Hardy's camera look, the spectator has a queasy and quite uncanny feeling: His orientation is being broken by Mr. Hardy's violation of the contract - this Mr. Hardy who obviously is a figment of imagination, an image on the screen, a character in a fictional story about fictional events, but who also is "himself", as the credits inform the audience: an actor by the name of Mr. Hardy playing the role of Mr. Hardy. The very moment this complex figure turns his eyes towards the camera, he not only marks out the spectator as an instance who always precedes and is always taken into account by the text, he transforms the spectator's position in relation to the movie ­ and consequences appear at all levels, in the spectator's experience of himself, of Mr. Hardy, and of the narrative.

Until this very moment, the spectator has simply fulfilled the conditions of the narrative contract. He has experienced that particular pleasure the movie offers to everyone who accepts to play the part of the innocent passer-by who accidentally, in an unguarded moment, steals a glance through a camera which, just as accidentally, has been placed there. And as far as the description of this pleasure is concerned, the younger Freudian Metz still has a few points to offer, points which are absent from the older Metz' more prudent text. The theoretical foundation of the "Note on Two Kinds of Voyeurism" may be somewhat shaky, but nevertheless there is a kind of poetic truth in the way in which he works with the image of the child who watches the primal scene at the doorstep, and the image of the adult voyeur in the darkness in front of the bright window, both of them metaphors used to emphasize that by signing the contract the Spectator has accepted to be placed on the outside, in another place, from which he, fascinated, holding his breath, looks into the light, watches something happen, some events, a story.

The Spectator stipulated in the contract is supposed to be out there, but now, as Mr. Hardy seems to be looking at the spectator in the cinema hall, he feels that this contractual illusion is falling apart. When he bought the ticket he promised to pretend that the people he was going to watch only had eyes for each other, not for him. Now he remembers what he pretended to have forgotten, or, perhaps more precisely, now the sudden folding in the film gives him another "orientation", makes him take off in a new direction, makes him go into another "as if". It is as if he has a partner, a fellow conspirator within the story, someone who knows that there is another person standing behind the window pane, and this someone within the story is now playing with him, counting on his presence, showing off, showing that he is there within the story for him. The Freudian interpretation would be that the spectator is still placed in the voyeurist position, but the loneliness of the primal scene is suspended, the voyeur has found his ideal counterpart: an exhibitionist. And he has found another pleasure as well, a pleasure derived from precisely this coming together of the voyeurist Spectator on the outside and the imaginary, exhibitionist Character on the inside.

The spectacle

Under the rule of the camera look it is as if, for a very short moment, a mutual relation between two subjects were established. The spectator thinks: "I know that he sees me, and he knows that I know" ­ thereby spinning Mr. Hardy and himself into an infinite web of mutually related identifications. And during this process even Mr. Hardy is transformed: He points to himself, making it clear that he is precisely an actor, that the credits were right: the character Mr. Hardy is played by "himself".

With this gesture he pulls down the narrative, and in a flash the spectator sees something he knows very well but keeps forgetting, something which was a main point in Metz' early "Note on Two Kinds of Voyeurism" - that the movies not only grow out of the realist novel, they are also related to the spectacle, to all the old forms of performance: the theater, the opera, the music hall.

However, the realist narrative and the extrovert performative spectacle do not really match. In the opera a kind of unstable balance is sometimes established. In the theater of, say, Ibsen, the narrative usually gets the upper hand, and here the reciprocity, the actual co­presence of actors and spectators, is only marked ritually at the very end when the actors finally discover the audience and acknowledge the applause by bowing towards the hall. In the mainstream film the narrative wins, always. These films are governed by the special "as if"­contract. And even when one of those small, reflexive, meta­cinematic foldings actually do occur, the regular narrative regime is quickly restored ­ a folding is precisely a configuration, not the material itself; it is something which can be seen briefly in the fabric, a transitory figure, something which is not intended to last.

This is the way it is with Mr. Hardy. His camera look is only a small, impossible revolt ­ sanctioned partly by the fact that comedy is historically rooted in the spectacle, but primarily sanctioned by the very role he plays, by the childish character he "is" within the story ­ and, again, this is why an interpretation based on the Freudian primal phantasies seems so appropriate: When events get out of hand, when everything becomes too absurd, too nerve­racking, too unbearable, it is as if Mr. Hardy "himself", the actor, tries to break out of the story, to leave Mr. Hardy the character ­ and one is reminded of Metz' definition of enunciative, reflexive figures: they are a special kind of utterances which have the capacity to split, to peel a thin film off themselves. At the moment of the camera look Mr. Hardy is transformed, he is suddenly "himself", or at least someone "of another nature", acting at another level than Mr. Hardy the character. And this someone is now appealing to the spectator like an unhappy child who is seeking the support and comfort of an adult. The positions within the scenario of the primal scene are suddenly reversed: Standing on the threshold of the story the spectator understands that Mr. Hardy is longing to get out of the light, to join him in the darkness.

In a short moment an unstable connection is established, the actor almost meet the spectator on neutral ground, in a space which is neither here nor there, neither the cinema hall nor the story space. But it won't work: Mr. Hardy is promptly sucked into the story again, he forgets his fellow conspirator. And the spectator on his part forgets what he actually knows very well, but has promised to forget in order to experience the story in the "correct" way, namely that it is he who is the real arbitrator, the last and highest instance of the narrative, of any narrative. The dizzying abyss of mutual identifications is closed.

The movements

The story moves on, as they say. And a little later Mr.Hardy again directs his look at the camera. Each time he does so, each time this particular folding in the narrative fabric occurs, there is another kind of movement: The camera look moves the spectator ­ in the full, double meaning of the word.

The spectator feels that he is being moved, physically transported, that Mr. Hardy's look is jerking him out of the familiar arrangement, sending him off in another direction, giving him another orientation: For a while he is no longer the lonely child in the darkness, no longer the distant voyeur who watches the others with cold passion. The narrative contract is broken, and at the same time it is as if the window pane is breaking, as if, as Merleau­Ponty once put it, the spectator suddenly "belongs to the visible", as if he "is fully visible [...] through other eyes".⁸ He sees himself as seen, not like Sartre's subject who shamefully looses his subjectivity the moment he discovers that he is a mere object in the eye of the other, on the contrary: in this case the spectator jubilantly sees himself as a full, living subject who is interpellated as such by another subject.

And the spectator is moved, touched by this unexpected, surprising, frank interpellation, but is also sad because he knows that it is only "as if": this moving interpellation is a fiction, a childish dream. He knows that an interpellation of this kind could only exist in a situation where narrative and performance were one. And he knows that Mr. Hardy's look comes from far away, from a naive, childish universe which he, the spectator, may very well look at from without, regard as a fiction, but of which he can never be part: The window pane is there all the same. He is standing at the outside, powerless. He, the spectator, may very well be the highest instance of the narrative, but nevertheless the story moves on.

And, once again, one is reminded of Metz who in his last book discovered that the only term he actually needed for textual phenomena of this type was enunciation ­ "which precisely names a function", as he said ­ and who, as far as reception is concerned, ended up by being content with the term spectator (199), the older Metz who, brutally and bluntly, wrote: "On the side of 'sending' there is nobody, there are no persons, there is only a text [...] At the 'reception', on the contrary, there is necessarily someone, a person ..." (ibid.).

He may have gone a bit too far, once again. But maybe he was only trying to emphasize that these two poles are not symmetrical. In the cinema there is always, constantly, enunciation, but no communication, at least not communication in the sense of direct interaction between human beings, not that kind of interaction we so aptly call face­to­face communication. The spectator agrees with Metz. He knows it very well. In fact, he has known it all a long, even in that short moment when he seemed to be communicating face­to­face with Mr. Hardy, when Mr. Hardy looked at him, suggesting that there were after all a kind of balance. And this is why the spectator's euphoria at these moments is always mixed with a sharp feeling of being rejected. He knows that what he sees on the screen is only yet another méconnaisance, an illusion of communication, of closeness, of human presence. And he knows that Mr. Hardy cannot hear him when he shouts the comforting, redeeming words: "Don't worry, Ollie. It is only a movie."

Bergen, March 1994

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