The Subject/Object of Cinema

Abstract

Consider two roughly contemporary modernist works: Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, which premiered in 1953, and Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train (1951). Both are, for what it’s worth, canonical, and though they differ in their media, how they have been taken up into various economies of culture—the elite and the popular—and many more ways that would be exhausting to detail, what prompts my comparison and what even might be said to permit their alignment under the rubric of modernism has to do with their relation to the object, which then comes to inform their status as aesthetic objects themselves. Godot, as is well known, structures itself around a central absence that can never be redeemed or made good, and Strangers follows the adventures of a lighter. In the former the object’s absence is felt by characters and audience alike as a bewildering loss that undoes the very possibility of meaning itself, and along with that the assumed integrity of character, the possibility of agency, and even the passage of time. In the latter the object’s trajectory, its circulation and exchange, promotes a remarkably similar anxiety; and even if ultimately this object’s presence is less traumatic than Godot’s absence, its status as a McGuffin, as mere pretext, is belied by its elevation to a similarly structural role, in which it determines the network of relations among characters by virtue not just of its ambivalent presence or absence but of this uncanny elevation to a very nearly metaphysical principle.