Hitchcock and Argo

These two movies were films within films, begging the question whether any film could ever be true fiction or artifice, intersecting as it does with the real lives of real people - the actors who bring characters to life.  Hitchcock tells the story of Alfred Hitchcock's life during the filming of the movie 'Psycho', and is particularly interesting for what it reveals about the lives of  Anthony Perkins, Janet Leigh and Vera Miles, who played the main roles in that 1960 movie. Argo details the successful use of a fake movie production to rescue six American Embassy employees during the Iran hostage crisis.

Both movies were suspenseful - Hitchcock, because the thrill and terror of his movie 'Psycho' was revealed to be a reflection from some dark recess of Hitchcock's own psyche. Argo, because the scenes of Middle Eastern social unrest and Anti-American sentiment are still very much current today, even though the eye-wear, hairstyles and clothing of the movie date these events as belonging solidly in the late seventies.

In both movies, the general outcomes are already known, so these are not stories of what, but stories of how. I wonder, for instance how Hitchcock's wife is able to come to his rescue and help complete 'Psycho' after he falls ill, when he has jealously hounded her and all but accused her of having an affair. It is also not clear whether she is privy to her husband's dark fantasy involving her own murder which seems to have been granted a kind of proxy via the making of the movie. If we are to take these representations as truth, then it does seem that she saves both herself and her husband (not to mention his reputation and career) by taking the helm of this runaway train and bringing it safely into the station.

The tension in Argo was marvelously thick throughout. Therefore, one almost couldn't believe that together, the nimble-fingered Iranian children laboring to piece together the shredded photographs, and the menacing airport security detail were not able to identify the Americans in time to stop the plane from taking off and carrying them to safety. Funny, in life as in art -- suffering is infinitely explorable, whereas happiness resists exploration and is in fact often reduced to a cliche.