North By Northwest Says You Are the Supercool Spy

“Obviously they've mistaken me for a much shorter man,” Cary Grant quips while trying on a too-small suit in Alfred Hitchcock’s North By Northwest, which is 65 this July. The throwaway line’s a neat summary of the film’s brilliant sleight-of-hand, in which viewers get to be Cary Grant while—and because—Cary Grant is mistaken for someone else. The vertiginous shuffling of identity, as viewer, actor, character, and spy slip into each other’s perfectly knotted neckwear defined espionage cinema in its day, and remains a winking standard for empowerment in spy fantasies ever since.

North by Northwest is perhaps Hitchcock’s most famous use of the “wrong man” trope, in which an innocent man is falsely accused. In this case, the man in question is Roger Thornhill (Grant), an advertising executive who sends an inopportune telegram in a New York City hotel and is accidentally mistaken by foreign spies for a government agent named George Kaplan. Kaplan doesn’t actually exist; he’s a fictional decoy created by US intelligence to distract the villainous spy Phillip Vandamm (James Mason) from the real US agent, Vandamm’s girlfriend Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint).

In becoming a man who isn’t real, Thornhill (a movie character who, by definition, is not real either) serves as a perfect metaphor for the viewer. Thornhill, at the beginning of the film, steps from his mundane, boring life (missing an appointment with his mother!) and sets off on a journey of adventure, romance, thrills and sex. He’s shot at by a cropduster at a dusty corn-clogged crossroads in Indiana, chased down Abraham Lincoln’s nose at Mount Rushmore/Six Grandfathers, and along the way violates various production codes with Eve. And all of that is exactly the same journey the (male-coded) viewer goes on as he enters a new film world and becomes someone else—an agent who doesn’t know the plot and needs to find out through trial and error that he’s a bigger, cooler, sexier man like Cary Grant.

In her classic 1975 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Laura Mulvey describes the male gaze—a gaze which we generally now think of as being directed at women. But originally, Mulvey’s male gaze was directed equally, or even mainly, at men. Using Hitchcock’s films as prime examples, Mulvey argued that men, when they watch films, identify with the male main character, who fights villains, performs feats of derring-do, and whisks various leading ladies off their feet. The male gaze is a gaze of mastery, which puts male viewers up on screen with the masterful male heroes.

The visual pleasure of narrative cinema is the pleasure of men looking at (other, better) men and becoming (other, better) men. Men watching are the too-small suit that Cary Grant pulls on. Just as Thornhill becomes Kaplan, so do viewers become Thornhill/Kaplan. The viewer plays Cary Grant who plays Thornhill who plays Kaplan—men crawling into the place of men in an exciting frisson of phallic fantasy which climaxes with the film’s final shot, as the train enters a tunnel just as Thornhill is about to consummate his relationship with Eve.

Thornhill and Kaplan went into that tunnel lustily, but they didn’t just disappear. On the contrary, the innocent spy as a metaphor for the innocent viewer has become a staple of espionage cinema.

Some films, like 1985’s semi-forgotten but still great The Man With One Red Shoe just steal North By Northwest’s some-nobody-mistaken-for-a-spy plot outright. Another very popular variation is the amnesiac spy like Jason Bourne who (per Thornhill and per the viewer) doesn’t know that he’s a cool-ass assassin, and has to spend the film figuring out his own past and learning his own narrative.

Netflix’s Hit Man is another version; it features a boring normal guy who moonlights as an undercover agent with the police. He pretends to be a sexy tough assassin, and ends up turning into the sexy tough assassin he’s playing, just like the actor and the viewer become that sexy tough assassin. At least for two hours or so.

Everyone who watches these films knows that the viewer doesn’t really turn into Cary Grant. That’s why North By Northwest constantly reminds you that the film isn’t real. The bad guys are always criticizing Thornhill’s performance of toughness, sexiness, suaveness, and telling him he doesn’t come across as a real spy—because he’s not a real spy. He’s Cary Grant.

But wouldn’t it be fun if he were that spy, and you were him? The suit doesn’t fit; there isn’t even a real suit. That’s still to this day the brilliance of North By Northwest, which makes you mistake yourself for someone bigger in part by reminding you that you aren’t.