A Film Canon

 

 

Like The 39 Steps, Sabotage brims with entities that are at the threshold of subject and object, producing a taxonomy of catastrophically, provisionally and naively enlivened objects, respectively figured as a proliferation of explosives, animals and toys. These subject-objects are introduced into the narrative in such a way as to de-objectify the 'criminal', conflating him with everything that he ostensibly rejects, and replacing the moral dichotomies of the conventional thriller with an aesthetic of fluidity, once again registered in Hitchcock's taste for framing devices, as well as a nascent version of his celebrated tracking-shot. Hence the central figurative gesture of the film, in which a cinematic screen depicting London is superimposed over an aquarium window. Not only does this anticipate the nuanced, tracked passage of a bomb through the cityscape, but it clarifies Hitchcock's collapse of subject and object as a function of the cinematic experience itself. For this reason, the screen within the film is rarely presented as an isolated entity, instead becoming the pretext for a renewal of the pathetic fallacy, according to which the 'external' world is one, ultra-sensitive, cinematographic medium - as if Hitchcock's desire were, literally, to transform London into a film. That this disruption of subjectivity is classically Oedipal is confirmed by his simultaneous taxonomy of partial father figures - stepfather, ringleader, paternalistic policeman, grandfather - or, alternatively, his presentation of a protagonist incapable of deciding whether to treat his spouse as wife, mother or daughter.