Robert J. Belton

The Hermeneutic Spiral

“The Hermeneutic Spiral” introduces the notion that interpretive flexibility and originality, while desirable and arguably inevitable, can cross a line beyond which some will put too much of themselves into their interpretations. Years ago, for instance, I had a friend who was utterly convinced that Superman, the 1978 Richard Donner film starring Christopher Reeve, was a sequel to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Should the meditations of such critical “outliers” be discarded, or can they be rescued by showing that in certain contexts they unearth interesting new insights? In other words, how do we decide what is “good” criticism and what is excessive? Or is it all just a series of positions on an ever-changing interpretive trajectory that moves outward from the work into the various contexts around it?

Forcing Insight with Sight and the Availability Heuristic

“Forcing Insight with Sight and the Availability Heuristic” provides an explanation of how and why to force the production of new meanings from old material, followed by a consideration of two psychological phenomena, the availability heuristic and confirmation bias. The latter begins to explain differences of critical opinion in the light of differing individual experiences, which, though they occur outside Vertigo, are as constitutive of its “meaning” as the elements of the film themselves.

Vertigo, The Shining, Spatial Mental Models and the Uncanny

The final chapter explores the possibility that spirals, mazes and the built environment are to be understood not as actual spaces but as internal, psychological structures that are malfunctioning. Scattered within them are objects that signify cognitive distress. They take the form of Uncanny objects teetering between an inanimate world and a threateningly animate one.

Vertigo , Kubrick’s The Shining, Spellbound and Liberty

Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining might seem like an entirely dissimilar film, but it can play a role in reinterpreting Vertigo through confirmation bias. Both films have crucial moments that occur on stairs, which a conventionally Freudian analysis would describe in terms of psychosexual fear. Interpreted in different ways, however, this fear can be flipped on its head to serve as a signifier of psychosexual appetite, which in turn can be seen as a call for sexual liberty. In this way, we return to the contronym and elaborate it in a new direction.

Vertigo , Etrog’s Spiral, The Shining and Traumatic Memory

In preceding sections in this book I have traced the effects of a hermeneutic spiral, which replaces the hermeneutic circle that gives the false impression that it leads to full understanding. Knowing that interpretive acts are created by cognitive processes that are prone to subjectivity, various kinds of attributional errors and bias blind spots, I have begun to illustrate how cognitive processing errors color our understandings of Vertigo. In this section I test the limits of Ross’s “inexhaustibility by contrast” by deliberately playing the role of a critical outlier who sees a correlation between two cultural objects that certainly have no connection. Sorel Etrog was a Romanian-Canadian sculptor whom Hitchcock would not have known. Nevertheless, understanding Etrog’s experimental film Spiral helps us to conclude that Hitchcock was a genuine existentialist.

Vertigo , Man Ray’s L’Etoile de mer , and Flowers

Another early avant-garde film, Robert Desnos and Man Ray’s L’Etoile de mer, provides a different set of signifiers that suggest, through comparison, a different and greater emphasis on symbolic details in Vertigo. A close-up of a hyacinth in the early film seems to symbolize both a threat to sexuality and a reinforcement of it, making it an example of an auto-antonym (or contranym). Words like “dust” or “trim” can mean either “add” or “remove,” as one might dust a cake with powdered sugar or trim a Christmas tree, as opposed to dusting a mantle to remove dirt or trimming toenails. There are, in Vertigo, numerous examples of one signifier that generates opposing signifieds. Through confirmation bias influenced by L’Etoile de mer, we can find that one of them is flowers.

Vertigo, Lynch’s Twin Peaks and the Record Player

A minor motif, the record player, has significance beyond simply being part of Vertigo’s mise en scene. In the works of other filmmakers, mainstream and avant-garde alike, turntables serve as devices that generate anxiety and symbolize sexual activity and violent acts. In Vertigo, however, they cast light on the possibility that there is a rich vein of risque humor in the film, serving to disguise an underlying meditation on masculine virility as a wobbly rhythm of psychosexual loss-replacement-loss-replacement, and so on.

Vertigo, Duchamp’s Anémic Cinéma and a Žižekian Brassiere

A classic experimental film, Marcel Duchamp’s Anemic Cinema, provides a cinematic example of sexual irreverence that one can trace in other cultural objects through the availability heuristic and confirmation bias. Certain details that would have passed unnoticed in early viewings of Vertigo now stand out as more meaningful than first thought. I argue that some of these are examples of “Hitchcockian blots,” after Žižek, that have gone unnoticed. A case in point is the symbolism of a brassiere, which I take further here than do the relatively few scholarly articles that allude to it.

The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics; The Routledge Companion to Music and Visual Culture; Representation in Western Music

the contributions of DJs who worked at the Saint, a predominantly white and gay New York nightclub, between 1980 and 1988, to show how DJ sets were affected by the tastes of the club’s clientele. Noteworthy here is Lawrence’s DJ repertoire list that illustrates the sound of the Saint as it embraced predominantly white styles such as eurodisco and Hi-NRG while ignoring the black sound of Chicago house that would become “the irrefutable successor-genre to disco in New York” (240). Johanna Paulsson examines “synthscenen,” a Swedish club scene and subculture that engages with electronic body music and is characterized by military aesthetics, references to warfare and combat, and totalitarian imagery. Paulsson interviews DJs, considers song lyrics, and surveys crowd fashion styles to explain how synthscenen employs irony and shock tactics to “draw attention to order, discipline and authority” (274) and to invert mainstream social-moral values “in a carnivalesque manner” (282). The book concludes with Simon Morrison’s essay on the representation of the DJ in British literature since 2000. Morrison shows how authors map “musical devices upon the linguistic” (299), make real-worldDJ sets audible through a “verisimilitude of detail” (304), and use the language and syntax of club social life to shape their construction of voice. It’s an apt concluding chapter in that it reveals the degree to which the DJ has entered mainstream consciousness. In sum, DJ Culture is a varied and synergetic collection that captures the reach of DJ practice and its ever-proliferating local scenes. Despite their differences in approach, the chapters en masse offer valuable points of overlap in their tracing of EDM history through their individual accounts of key artists, tracks, styles, theoretical issues, and technologies. For this reason, taken in parts or as a whole, the book is a vital text for understanding DJ-powered musical life.

Please Touch: Dada and Surrealist Objects after the Readymade. By Janine Mileaf

varieties of capitalism that McGowan explores, but also because it is a prime example of cartels and cartel-like formations. It is also an example of U.S. influence on European affairs that has not been as benign as Marshall’s postwar ERP or the initial diplomatic push for Continental integration. Let us ponder upon finance’s secretive syndicates and their regular gatherings; their resilience to regulation by means of tax havens, sometimes located in the very heart of Europe, or by off-shore and shadowy practices; their palpable political clout via the Bank of International Settlements, the International Monetary Fund, and the European Central Bank; and the regular inability of antitrust regulations to break them apart. All these are pertinent themes that the book’s historical and theoretical accounts fail to address—analogously to the European Commission, whose cartel-busting raids and fines have never touched the realm of finance.