Mr Peanut - Adam Ross [171]
“Little-known fact about the films of Alfred Hitchcock,” he said, and everyone went silent, the type-A kids holding their pens poised above their notebooks. “There’s a chicken in every one of them.” Several students looked at one another, perplexed. A knowing cluster of grad students to David’s left guffawed. “Yes,” he said, “a chicken. This was my discovery, and I’m not yet famous for it, but I will be once my book is complete.” His soft laugh was almost like a pant. “This I call the Chicken Theory of Cinema. In French, Le Poulet Subtil. There is in every movie—not just the work of Hitchcock but every movie ever made—either a literal chicken or what I’ve come to call the Subtle Chicken. Now, I know what your next question is going to be: What’s the Subtle Chicken? Well, I’ll tell you. It may be a figurative chicken. Or a psychological condition. It might even be an egg. I noticed a close-up of an egg frying in Moonstruck this weekend. Aha, I thought, Subtle Chicken. Not to mention that the characters in the film are all afraid of love or death.” He pointed the remote at the projector and partly dimmed the lights. “Of course, your next question is why? Why, Dr. Otto, is there a chicken in every movie? Well, I’m afraid I can’t tell you that. Why should I give you the punch line of my life’s work?” He dimmed the lights further. “Of course one problem with my theory is that while it covers the entire history of cinema, I’ve yet to see every movie ever made. And they make new ones all the time. I’ll never finish!” He laughed again, a wet laugh, Grover-ish, mixed liberally with saliva. The class laughed too as he wiped his mouth, but David could barely bring himself to breathe. “Let’s start, shall we? Oh, wait,” Otto said, “I have to take roll.”
He called her name, finally: Alice Reese.
Then he killed the lights. But before it was dark, Alice turned in her chair, pen still in her mouth and notebook not yet open, and looked up at David. If she was waiting for him to smile, he couldn’t; he was too shocked even to blink.
Otto aimed the remote at the projector and turned toward the screen. There was an image of Hitchcock himself, standing with a movie clapboard that read Psycho. “To my mind,” he said, “Alfred Hitchcock is the William Shakespeare of modern cinema. The comparison is apt on numerous levels, the least of which being that both are British artists. Really, it’s the sheer breadth of Hitch’s work, the variety of his menagerie, the range of his characters, his pathos, his comfort in genres from tragedy to comedy, slasher to satire, action film to farce, along with his relentless revolution of these forms, his playfulness with spectatorship, for instance, with the audience’s expectations—not to mention his output, his magnificent output! Nearly sixty films, spanning silents to talkies, black-and-white to Technicolor, even one or two in 3-D. And that doesn’t even touch on his work in television.”
A montage of images with no sound followed, clips from his films in black and white and then glorious color.
“Speaking of silents”—he laughed at his joke—“Hitch always said he was trying to achieve what he called pure cinema. He was trying to tell stories that were possible only in the medium of film. Because of his training as both a draftsman and silent filmmaker, he was wary of dialogue—not sound, mind you, he was wildly inventive with the use of sound. But it was the image, the image as a way of telling, that he was most interested in, and he left nothing to chance with the images he used. From the time he directed his first picture—Number 13, which was never completed—he storyboarded every shot before filming. Think about that level of intentionality. Every shot!