Recently I had the opportunity again to watch Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope (1948), this time with a group of students as part of an evening program at the college where I teach. This was only the second time that I saw the movie on a big screen, though I’ve watched it more times than I can recall. It holds an odd fascination for me, though I recognize that it is in many ways a deeply flawed movie–much of the dialogue is rather stilted, and for all of Jimmy Stewart’s skills as an actor, I think that he was very likely miscast in his role as Rupert Cadell.
Much of what I find fascinating, disquietingly so, about the movie is the historical background that gives it some of its complex texture. It’s very loosely based on the case of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, the sons of two very wealthy Chicago families; in 1924 Leopold and Loeb, in part under the sway of Leopold’s rather reductive and simplisitc reading of Nietzsche, decided to prove themselves Nietzschian supermen by committing a perfect murder, an act for which Nathan Leopold, in his autobiography, Life Plus 99 Years (1957), expresses remorse. (Richard Loeb was killed in prison; for his part, Nathan Leopold was paroled after more than thirty years in prison; he moved to Puerto Rico and worked as an X-ray technician.) Their victim was 14-year-old Robert Franks, a distant relative of Richard Loeb.
Leopold and Loeb were quite brilliant young men. At the age of seventeen, Richard Loeb was the youngest graduate in the history of the University of Michigan. He was eighteen at the time of the murder. Nathan Leopold was nineteen and already a student in the School of Law at the University of Chicago. Leopold was also an avid linguist and an expert in ornithology. Both young men seemed to be headed toward brilliant careers in whatever field of endeavor each decided to pursue. Although they demanded a ransom from Robert Franks’s father, this demand–put forward only after the boy was dead–seemed to be merely a part of the experiment. The two brilliant young men surely did not need the money, for both received generous allowances from their wealthy families. By all appearances the crime seems to have been carried out for the mere thrill of getting away with it, of acting outside the law, thus proving the murderers’ supposed superiority.
As I explained to the students at the screening of Rope, I find my ongoing fascination with the movie, as with the Leopold and Loeb case generally, itself to be quite unsettling. I seem to be fascinated with the idea of evil, what it is and where it comes from, a fascination that I encounter in decidedly philosophical, theological, and literary terms. It is a fascination that may account for why I have lost track of how many times I’ve read Paradise Lost, which as it happens I am teaching now in my Milton course. And yet, when the academic questions are accounted for, I think that I still encounter parts of myself left over that continue to be fascinated with the idea of evil for other reasons. Were I Jungian, I would say that I am exploring my dark side. Were I a Freudian, I would call this side my ‘id.’ Were I a Platonist, I might say that what I am concerned with is the lower, the appetitive and/or spirited, part of the soul. In fact, I am a Catholic, and the language that I tend to use is that of my fallen nature, though I find something interesting, compelling, and true in these other (the Jungian, the Freudian, and the Platonic) language constructs also. Whatever one calls it, I suspect that we all have something of this fallen, this dark, appetitive side, and we do well to attend to it to some extent–though frankly I’d prefer not to see all at once all of what is in me–so that it does not begin to make our decisions for us.
When I was in maybe second or third grade, there was a boy–let’s call him Bob– a grade ahead of me. I found Bob to be rather unctious (though I would not have used this term at the time), a real suck-up, a ‘square’ (recall that this was the late sixties or early seventies). One day we were on the playground, and the bell rang. Keeping my cool, I was strolling toward the school building when I saw Bob loping up behind me like he had to get inside as quickly as he could. For some reason, the very sight of him just pissed me off, especially the sight of him eagerly running along to comply with the end-of-recess bell. So as he passed me, on impulse I stuck out my foot and tripped him. He went down hard and came up a bloody mess, crying and holding his arm. The sight of him now scared the living shit out of me, and suddenly I’m all solicitude, putting my arm around him, helping him along, asking if he’s okay. He nods his head and goes along, when a classmate who’s seen the whole thing comes up behind me and mutters, “Way to go, Harp.” So now I’m all innocence. “What do you mean? It was an accident.”
I’m no Leopold or Loeb, and of course I don’t want to be, never did. Nevertheless, I’m disturbed to this day by the fact that I did this when I was a kid. Nor can I really say for sure where this impulse came from. My fear is, though, that there’s plenty more of the same kind of thing wherever it was that the tripping impulse came from. So I watch movies like Rope and read poems like Paradise Lost in part to remind me of the complexities that lie within. I reflect on, discuss, and write about such texts as one small way of making an iota of a contribution that I hope goes somehow toward the good. In the meantime, I hope to do no harm.