Rope and Underlying Homoerotic Tensions
"Those things which are included in the following list shall not appear in pictures produced by the members of this Association, irrespective of the manner in which they are treated:
1) Pointed profanity
2) Any licentious or suggestive nudity
4) Any inference of sex perversion
11) Willful offence to any nation, race or creed”
The Hays Code, 29 June 1927
Filmmaking within the restrictions of Hollywood took on a new dimension under the Hays Production Code throughout the four decades of its strict implementation – with many once-explicit depictions curbed by moral-fearing restrictions, wrapped so tightly around any sign of vulgar expression that even the slightest image of morally-wrong material would be subject to the severe slicing practice of the editor’s studio, cinematic contributors were required to get creative in the stories they hoped to tell.
Where a pre-code film such as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931) could comfortably visualise the undressing of a promiscuous young-lady, enticing Dr Jekyll with her clear, alluring state of nudity, a sexually-charged film-noir, whose eroticism is entirely significant to the narrative, such as Double Indemnity (1944), could only hope to imply intimate entanglement through cinematographic tricks, unspoken tension and commonly-used signifiers – hard-pouring rain, drawn-curtains, the lit, phallic and satisfied cigarette drag. Even a romantic expression as banally-erotic as a kiss was timed and celluloid-chopped to prevent any implication of an amplified sense of sexuality. Perhaps, this sustained and specific focus on sex is no surprise – not only were the morally-righteous censors consumed in limiting any sexual expression themselves, the ‘classic noir’ was (enticed by the now-forbidden nature of the topic), ‘almost obsessed with sexual perversity’ (Naremore, p. 98) itself.
Of course, to a 1950s, fundamentally-Christian, American audience, sheltered from the worst fears of the world by their mostly-mediated-media, ‘sexual perversity’ may take on a different meaning to what we can imagine in the 21st century. Within the Hays Code, the refusal of showing any ‘licentious or suggestive nudity’ is clearly suggestive of removing explicit sexual expression, but, if this is the case, what then would the ‘inference of sex perversion’ cover?
Understandably, this wide reaching turn of phrase is put in place to catch any sexual statement outside of the realm of normative, patriarchally-constructed heterosexuality – namely, any expression of sex that is queer or ‘other’ in nature. The enforced prohibition was here, two-fold: whilst heterosexual relationships were restricted to cramped sexual expression, the nature of these relationships was still allowed to be explicitly clear – under the Hays Code, any form of queer expression was entirely prohibited.
Creativity flourished. Directors subsequently were forced to find new ways to imply non-heterosexuality, gravitating towards the fantastical allowance of genre pictures to explore allegorised treatments and metaphoric considerations. As audiences consider ‘anything that opposes or lies outside the ideological status quo intrinsically monstrous and unnatural’ (p. 2), the greatest, widespread and most-allegorised signifiers of queer sexuality could be found within the horror film – the traits and unfounded-fears of queer sexuality displaced onto these creatures. These ‘obvious metaphorical (non-realist) forms and narrative formats’ were able to ‘disrupt the heterosexual status quo’ (Benshoff, p. 6), often by literally placing a heterosexual couple in mortal jeopardy from a queer-sexual “other”, made monstrous by the narrative, practical effects, and, crucially, by its ideological distance from hegemonic society.
Of course, the first ‘widely available images of homosexuality in our time were those provided by American film noir’ (Dyer, p. 50), and with a limited range of other cinematic productions available, it is fair to suggest that the conventions of implying homosexuality (and its immorally-kindred ilk) were solidified and popularly disseminated within this cinematic space. As a mix of the horrific thriller conventions, constructed and explored within the bounds of classic film noir, Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope (1948) is a fitting place to explore the supposed “horrors” of queer sexuality.
Our protagonists, young intellectual males, Brandon and Phillip, taken to espousing philosophical diatribes against the “inferior” human, and the “privilege” of their murder for the “superior few”, undertake the perfect crime – the strangulation of their prep-school-friend, David, by taut-pulled rope – disposing of his body within a central wooden chest in their living quarters. As they host a party, contemplating with their celebratory company on his unexpected absence, their esteemed guest, the prep-school teacher who taught them this very dangerous ideological mindset, begins to suspect the worst – that they have slaughtered David in a (very real) application of his (only theoretical) beliefs.
The horror exhibited here is not of monstrous origin – it does not need to hide behind creative practical effects spawning from sensationalist tales of outer-space, attacking from the skies above, or of those folkloric creatures attacking from the grounds below. It is a horror to be found within, from the very apartments that our cinema-going American audiences reside – a desire for murder that comes from their own intellectual elite, whose psychopathic brains lack basic empathy – a blatant disregard for human life taught by their own hypocritical and cowardly teachers. It is a societal horror that is entrenched by failed moral compasses – the teachers who were expected to teach virtuous righteousness into our youth have gone astray, and all that remains is the sickness of what was once thought to be healthy.
By explicitly wedding the psychopathic violence and murderous tendencies of our uncaring, oft-bemused protagonists to their implicit, but ever-clear homosexuality, the film explicitly links the violence and criminality of modern human monstrosity with queer sexuality. Not fearing the censors' sexually-specific scythe, this fatal aggression is made clear from the very first shot of the film: David yelling out in pain and unexpected panic as the final breath leaves his empty lungs through the rope-wrapped and crushed sarcophagus. But what evidence is there for this “ever-clear” homosexuality, shrouded behind the guise of implicit, censoring restrictions, the secret hidden under the thick lid of the wooden chest, devoutly protected from its opening?
Indeed, within the pantheon of implied queer-coded characters, the relationships and performances exhibited by Brandon and Phillip are among the clearest to contain an underlying indication of homosexuality. Hitchcock himself was no stranger to displaying homosexual subtext, this underlying homoerotic tension remaining one of the ‘most persistent and significant features’ (Walker, p. 41) of his body of work – sadly, given societal conditions, it is unlikely that any of these depictions are likely to be positive. Robin Wood (1989) even goes as far to suggest a wholly negative read, surmising that many of Hitchcock’s antagonistic psychopaths are coded as gay characters, linking most of his villainous, unlikable men to the secret antagonists of American society – that of the homosexual man.
With the advent of modern context, it is not a challenging approach to read homosexuality within both Brandon and Phillip, but even within 1948, as Americans attended cinematic screenings of Rope, there would have been telling signs of an off-quality to these central characters, a queerness and remove from the normality of the heterosexual, patriarchal status quo that only worsens as the film progresses: small indications in their ‘finely acculturated, somewhat dandified’ personalities, their love of the arts through the ‘modernist set design’ of their extensive (and shared!) penthouse apartment – even the obsessive piano playing, that is said to be a ‘pun on male masturbation which has circulated for decades’ (Benshoff, p. 46) matches that of Phillip’s own compulsions, a perversion of the talent within his hands that will “bring him great fame”, now twisted from a melodic tinkling of the thin white ivories to a warbling throttling of the thick white throat of David.
Of course, the film begins with their central villainous act, allowing no time to even suggest they were ever positive, upstanding members of society – from before we even meet them, there is, as Stewart’s character (himself a clear representative of the American “everyman”) moralistically intones at the close of the film: “something deep inside you from the very start that let you do this thing” (01:16.48). Brandon and Phillip had no chance to become something else, they were simply born this way – it is innate to their very being.
From the opening sequence, Brandon and Phillip are trapped in their mortal decision, committed to the fatal act and entombed in a winding labyrinth of growing lies, pictured as the film’s characteristic long-takes effortlessly glide from important object to empty room to attention-drawing stare – the style and characters betraying a tension and suspicion that is only worsened as the guilt continues to grow. Their responses are not alike. Brandon remains proud of his involvement throughout, believing fame for their outrageous (and outside-of-the-norm) escapades, his confident, masculine (and subsequently, apathetic) facade only faltering as his mentor, role model and likely-idolised love interest, Stewart, begins to rebuke his dramatic, swooning attempt at impressing him. Phillip is less sure. Performed by noted-bisexual Farley Granger, himself an example of the ‘new version’ of Hollywood masculinity, playing a ‘softer, more vulnerable type of man’ that is ‘internally conflicted, and given to feminising traits such as emotionalism and occasionally even tears’ (Benshoff, p. 137) – he is easily read as a queer character, simply by his deviance from the traditional norm of heterosexual masculinity. This dichotomous relationship and their modes of presentation reflects the ‘inherent sexism in the heterosexual model’ (p. 7), suggesting that there cannot be two ‘equal partners attracted on the basis of sexual object choice’ (p. 48) – even the queer deviance from the hegemonic norm must be constructed around ‘strict gender hierarchies’. Phillip operates much as the femme to Brandon’s masculine butch.
We even have the same signifiers pointing to a (hetero-) sexual union, found within the common film noir, although now, they are displaced onto violent “homosexual” tendencies instead of loving “heterosexual” ones (Walker, p. 110) – where Humphrey Bogart might smoke a calm cigarette after the camera cuts to black and his sexual union is complete, within Rope, Brandon and Phillip pant with climactic exertion at the killing of their friend: Brandon basking in the glow himself with a celebratory cigarette; Phillip’s bottle of champagne, exploding white foam and calming him to approach the party guests; both sharing whispered queries in the aftermath, close to one another, asking “how was it for you?” (00:09.01); Brandon’s hand upon David’s chest, presumably stopping and gripping to feel the non-thump of an absent heartbeat that was there just moments before.
Brandon can lay his hand on David’s chest all he likes, he will now only ever feel the removal of his life, the absence of blood rushing throughout his body. Rope possesses a thematic narrative that makes this absence integral. David, our victim, is never introduced to us – the only image we ever see is his lifeless corpse falling limp between our killer’s hands. He remains a continued spectre within the film. However, explicitly, through his absence, we are reminded constantly of his lacking presence by the characters that await him, those characters that try to hide and disavow his ever-present corpse, and the characters that theorise on his uncharacteristic disappearance and the reasoning therein.
Similarly, the ‘homosexuality of the protagonists, never either visually displayed (with a kiss) or verbally disclosed (by a declaration), is simply not in the story at all’ (Miller, p. 121) – it remains as absent as David. The murder of David has served to ‘repress the desire the two killers implicitly felt’ (Walker, p. 110) for him or for any men – now ‘paranoid to the point of trying to eradicate the unacceptable object of desire’ (Benshoff, p. 45) they must kill David. His murder signifies a few common tropes – like the queer monsters of classic Hollywood science-fiction and horror narratives, David’s death functions to destroy and upend the dominant heterosexual force within the film – the impending straight wedding is left unable to continue forth; David is the only blond character of focus within the film, and, as is common for Hitchcock’s obsessive love interests, subject to many lingering, fetishised close-ups as the active camera waits hauntingly above the wooden chest, sitting as though it is expecting for the lid to spring open and David’s very real, very narratively-dominant body is shown for what it is – an expression of Brandon and Phillip’s true homosexual love.
Certainly, the entirety of Rope’s narrative tension, and indeed, the locus of its central horror, can be found within this central wooden chest, its bindings holding the dead body of David – David, who can “live and love as [Brandon and Phillip] never could – and never will again” (01:17.50), or David who is “inferior”, boring and too normal – his corpse functioning ‘symbolically as their guilty secret, both their murderousness and their homosexuality’ (p. 110). What is unknown, ‘the repressed issues of human sexuality that they keep in darkened closets and secret societies’ (p. 104) that lead to destruction and monstrosity is contained within this closeting box – should this chest be opened, that very secret will be unearthed, and the world will know Brandon and Phillip for what they really are. The ever-growing tangled mess of emotions and lies will be undone, the thread binding it tightly together will fall to the floor, impotent and discarded, and there, the telling male body exposed and its implications bound to their very selves for the rest of their now-shortened lives, their queer personality will remain. Or, was it not their murderous personality that they are now forever tied to? My my, what have they got themselves roped into…
Filmography
Rope, 1948. [Film]. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. US: Warner Bros. Pictures.
Double Indemnity, 1944. [Film]. Directed by Billy Wilder. US: Paramount Pictures.
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 1931. [Film]. Directed by Rouben Mamoulian. US: Paramount Pictures.
Bibliography
Benshoff, H. (1997) Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film (Inside Popular Film). Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Dyer, R. (2002) The Matter of Images: Essays on Representations. Oxfordshire: Routledge.
Miller, D. A. (1990) ‘Anal Rope’, Representations, Vol. 32, pp. 114-133.
Naremore, J. (2008) More Than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts. California: University of California Press.
Walker, M. (2005) Hitchcock's Motifs. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
Wood, R. (1989) Hitchcock’s Films Revisited. New York: Columbia University Press.
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