Short Documentary, How Do You Solve a Problem Like Lolita?, Psychoanalyzes Vladimir Nabokov

in Books, Comedy, Literature | February 27th, 2013

Here’s a flawed but fas­ci­nat­ing lit­tle film about the life of Vladimir Nabokov, exam­ined through the prism of his most famous book.

How Do You Solve a Prob­lem Like Loli­ta? first aired on British tele­vi­sion in 2009. The host is Stephen Smith, a cul­ture cor­re­spon­dent for BBC News­night. We don’t know the rest of Smith’s resume, but in watch­ing the doc­u­men­tary we get the feel­ing he may have picked up a lit­tle of his jour­nal­is­tic sen­si­bil­i­ty from the British tabloids.

The prob­lem referred to in the title is the sense–at least among Smith’s friends–that there is some­thing “per­vy” about Nabokov’s 1955 nov­el, Loli­ta, and that this rais­es cer­tain ques­tions about the author’s own sex­u­al pen­chants. “Was it a moral­i­ty play,” Smith asks at the out­set, “or the fan­ta­sy of a dirty old man?”

It’s a con­temptible point of depar­ture. But How Do You Solve a Prob­lem Like Loli­ta? man­ages to be worth­while in spite of itself. It’s filled with inter­est­ing old footage of Nabokov talk­ing about him­self and his work, as well as con­tem­po­rary footage of the writer’s old haunts in Rus­sia, Amer­i­ca and Switzer­land. The film is a kind of trav­el­ogue. Watch­ing it is like tak­ing a one-hour tour through a fas­ci­nat­ing land­scape with an ami­able but slight­ly annoy­ing guide.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Vladimir Nabokov Mar­vels Over Dif­fer­ent “Loli­ta” Book Cov­ers

Vladimir Nabokov (Chan­nelled by Christo­pher Plum­mer) Teach­es Kaf­ka at Cor­nell

Nabokov Reads Loli­ta, Names the Great Books of the 20th Cen­tu­ry

Hannah Arendt’s Original Articles on “the Banality of Evil” in the New Yorker Archive

in Film, History | January 16th, 2013

We’ve all heard the phrase “the banal­i­ty of evil.” Some of us even know which polit­i­cal the­o­rist to attribute it to, and among those, a few have even read it in con­text. Han­nah Arendt most mem­o­rably employed it in both the sub­ti­tle and clos­ing words of Eich­mann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banal­i­ty of Evil, her book on the tri­al of Nazi lieu­tenant-colonel Adolf Eich­mann. To Arendt’s mind, Eich­mann will­ing­ly did his part to orga­nize the Holo­caust — and an instru­men­tal part it was — out of nei­ther anti-semi­tism nor pure mal­ice, but out of a non-ide­o­log­i­cal, entire­ly more pro­sa­ic com­bi­na­tion of careerism and obe­di­ence. Read­ers have argued ever since its pub­li­ca­tion about this char­ac­ter­i­za­tion, and those with a spe­cial inter­est in how Arendt arrived there can find in the New York­er’s online archives the orig­i­nal series of “Eich­mann in Jerusalem” arti­cles out of which the book grew: part one, part two, part three, part four, and part five. (Click on the images at the bot­tom of each page to see Arendt’s writ­ing up close. Then click on them again and maneu­ver your mouse around to peruse the pages.) Giv­en that Han­nah Arendt, a new biopic star­ring Bar­bara Sukowa, just gained dis­tri­b­u­tion, you may want to read these arti­cles to stay ahead of the next wave of inter­est in the thinker and her writ­ings.

In today’s mag­a­zines, one reads rather few­er five-part inter­sec­tions of tri­al reportage and moral inquiry by fig­ures like Arendt. But the New York­er has­n’t entire­ly lost its will­ing­ness to con­front these mat­ters. Short­ly after last year’s mas­sacre in Auro­ra, Col­orado, the mag­a­zine ran on its site a piece by Rol­lo Romig in touch with con­cerns, broad­ly speak­ing, sim­i­lar to Arendt’s. Romig, too, looks at the nature of evil, but in a reflec­tion suit­ed to our time — brief, star­tling­ly time­ly, and specif­i­cal­ly for the web — rather than Eich­mann in Jerusalem’s. “The dan­ger of a word like ‘evil’ is that it is absolute,” he writes. “ ‘Evil’ has become the word we apply to per­pe­tra­tors who we’re both unable and unwill­ing to do any­thing to repair, and for whom all of our mech­a­nisms of jus­tice seem unequal: it describes the lim­its of what malev­o­lence we’re able to bear. In the end, it’s a word that says more about the help­less­ness of the accuser than it does the trans­gres­sor.”

H/T to Chris­t­ian F. for flag­ging the New York­er arti­cles for us.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Tri­al of Adolf Eich­mann at 50

55 Free Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

Down­load Free Cours­es from Famous Philoso­phers: From Bertrand Rus­sell to Michel Fou­cault

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on lit­er­a­ture, film, cities, Asia, and aes­thet­ics. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Jacques Lacan Talks About Psychoanalysis with Panache (1973)

in Philosophy, Psychology | January 9th, 2013

Both psy­cho­analy­sis and psy­chother­a­py act only through words. Yet they are in con­flict. How so? There we have the ques­tion posed to psy­cho­an­a­lyst, psy­chi­a­trist, and world-famous pub­lic intel­lec­tu­al Jacques Lacan in the video above, a clip from a script­ed qua­si-inter­view called Tele­vi­sion whose answers play like his famous lec­tures. Watch it, or watch our pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured video of Lacan giv­ing a talk, and you’ll expe­ri­ence one qual­i­ty that made him world-famous. Few oth­ers could com­bine such high-flown sub­ject mat­ter with such the­atri­cal­ly emphat­ic ora­tor­i­cal abil­i­ty — an abil­i­ty you can sense even if you don’t under­stand French. For­tu­nate­ly, sub­ti­tles have been pro­vid­ed, offer­ing Anglo­phones a chance to under­stand what con­nec­tions the man saw between the uncon­scious, lan­guage, Freud, sex­u­al rela­tions, and com­e­dy.

“There are, inso­far as the uncon­scious is impli­cat­ed, two sides pre­sent­ed by the struc­ture, the struc­ture which is lan­guage,” Lacan begins. “The side of mean­ing, the first side, the side we would iden­ti­fy as that of analy­sis, which pours out a flood of mean­ing to float the sex­u­al boat.” These remarks come pre-writ­ten in the script of Tele­vi­sion, some­thing between a con­ver­sa­tion and a play that grew out of Jacques-Alain Miller’s failed attempt to film a tra­di­tion­al inter­view of the psy­cho­an­a­lyt­ic lumi­nary. “After every cut, when it was time to start up again, Lacan shift­ed a bit in his dis­course,” Miller wrote in Micro­scopia: An Intro­duc­tion to the Read­ing of Tele­vi­sion. “Each time he gave an addi­tion­al twist to his reflec­tions which were unfold­ing there, under the spot­lights, thwart­ing any chance of bridge-build­ing. We stopped after two hours; I gave him in writ­ing a list of ques­tions; and he wrote [Tele­vi­sion] in about two weeks’ time. I saw him every evening and he gave me the day’s man­u­script pages; then he read or act­ed out — with a few impro­vised vari­a­tions — the writ­ten text. He made a spring-board of this false start.”

Relat­ed con­tent:

Jacques Lacan Speaks; Zizek Pro­vides Free Cliffs Notes

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on lit­er­a­ture, film, cities, Asia, and aes­thet­ics. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

The Enduring Analog Underworld of Gramercy Typewriter

in Books, History, Technology | October 22nd, 2012

Are type­writ­ers going the way of vinyl?

Note to those cave dwellers who’ve yet to suc­cumb to Mad Men mania, it’s not that same route so trav­eled by the dodo. For a while it looked like the world’s sup­ply of Under­woods and Olivet­tis was being req­ui­si­tioned for hip­ster jew­el­ry, but their recent come­back is root­ed in their intend­ed pur­pose. These days, they’re near fetish objects for roman­tic young writ­ers con­ceived in the shad­ow of the Mac Clas­sic.

Mean­while, the likes of Cor­mac McCarthy and David McCul­lough, author of 1776, have yet to turn their backs on their beloved, quite like­ly lucky ana­log imple­ments.

All due respect to the young Turks seek­ing to dig­i­tize the dinosaur, but the real hero of the type­writer’s post mil­len­ni­al sur­vival is Paul Schweitzer, the ink fin­gered med­i­cine man at the helm of Gramer­cy Type­writer. His once-robust com­pe­ti­tion con­signed to the ash heap, Schweitzer has both the stub­born­ness and exper­tise to tough it out, in an ana­log lair that’s the antithe­sis of sleek.

No one will fault you if your heart lies with your var­i­ous screens. But let’s not for­get where you came from.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Mak­ing Paper in L.A., Pianos in Paris: Old Crafts­men Hang­ing on in a Chang­ing World

- Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the author of a half dozen some books includ­ing the decid­ed­ly ana­log Zinester’s Guide to NYC.

Leonard Bernstein Explains Modern Music, From Stravinsky to Cage, with Baseball Analogies (1957)

in Music | August 20th, 2012

We’ve blogged before about Leonard Bernstein’s appear­ances on a 1950s tele­vi­sion pro­gram called Omnibus, “the most suc­cess­ful cul­tur­al mag­a­zine series in the his­to­ry of U.S. com­mer­cial tele­vi­sion,” which fea­tured sci­en­tists and artists pre­sent­ing orig­i­nal ideas and com­po­si­tions. In this doc­u­men­tary, Bern­stein intro­duces his audi­ence to “mod­ern music,” includ­ing such a more or less clas­si­cal com­pos­er as Stravin­sky to the avant-garde instru­men­ta­tion of John Cage’s pre­pared piano and ear­ly elec­tron­ics of Pierre Hen­ry’s musique con­crete. After watch­ing a sex­tet of “musi­cians” “play­ing” tran­sis­tor radios, Bern­stein admits, “Now com­pared with all these wildest out­posts of exper­i­men­ta­tion… Stravin­sky prob­a­bly sounds tame or more like, well… music.” Bern­stein then goes on to make a case for mod­ern, exper­i­men­tal music, hop­ing to per­suade his audi­ence to “hate it less, or hate it more intel­li­gent­ly, or even grow to like it.” He’s a very patient teacher, and he antic­i­pates his stu­dents’ first objec­tion to the mod­ernism of his time: “What has hap­pened to beau­ty?” The beau­ty of Mozart, say, or Tchaikovsky?

In order to answer this ques­tion, Bern­stein uses eas­i­ly visu­al­ized analo­gies to base­ball and numer­ous more or less famil­iar sym­phon­ic pas­sages to explain basic music theory—tonality, har­mon­ics, chord struc­ture, scale pat­terns, melody, dis­so­nance. By the time he comes to describe the con­flict, post-Wag­n­er, between aton­al com­posers and more con­ser­v­a­tive “tonal­ists” around the twen­ty minute mark, you’ve got a pret­ty good idea of what he’s talk­ing about, even if this debate is entire­ly new to you. It’s a cap­ti­vat­ing lec­ture trac­ing the his­to­ry and log­ic of musi­cal com­po­si­tion, and despite Bernstein’s range of ref­er­ences, he’s nev­er eso­teric. He had the patience of a Fred Rogers and media per­son­al­i­ty of a musi­cal Carl Sagan (and, odd­ly, some of the man­ner­isms of Rod Ser­ling). Like Rogers and Sagan, he was part of an age when tele­vi­sion pre­sen­ters could be edu­ca­tors first, enter­tain­ers sec­ond, and solip­sists not at all. Luck­i­ly for us, we’ve got him on Youtube.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Leonard Bernstein’s Mas­ter­ful Lec­tures on Music (11+ Hours of Video Record­ed in 1973)

Glenn Gould and Leonard Bern­stein Play Bach

Josh Jones is a doc­tor­al can­di­date in Eng­lish at Ford­ham Uni­ver­si­ty and a co-founder and for­mer man­ag­ing edi­tor of Guer­ni­ca / A Mag­a­zine of Arts and Pol­i­tics.

David Rees and His One-Man Artisanal Pencil Sharpening Service

in Comedy | May 25th, 2012

This is for any­one with a love of old school wood­work­ing — luthiers, ébénistes and the rest. In 2009, the humorist David Rees gave up car­toon­ing and opened up his one-man arti­sanal pen­cil sharp­en­ing ser­vice in Bea­con, New York, an old fac­to­ry town along the Hud­son Riv­er. Just a man, some high qual­i­ty cedar, a knife, and an occa­sion­al pen­cil sharp­er revive a bygone era and a dis­ap­pear­ing instru­ment of com­mu­ni­ca­tion. 400 pen­cils lat­er, at $15 a pop, Rees has some­thing good going. You can learn more about Rees and his crafts­man­ship by read­ing (seri­ous­ly) his new book, How to Sharp­en Pen­cils, with a for­ward by John Hodg­man.

Note: Rees uses some NSFW lan­guage dur­ing the video.

How Venice Works: 124 Islands, 183 Canals & 438 Bridges

in Current Affairs, History | April 5th, 2011

3,000,000 tourists move through Venice each year. But when the tourists leave the city, 60,000 year-round res­i­dents stay behind, con­tin­u­ing their dai­ly lives, which requires nav­i­gat­ing an arch­i­pel­ago made up of 124 islands, 183 canals and 438 bridges. How this com­pli­cat­ed city works – how the build­ings are defend­ed from water, how the build­ings stand on unsteady ground, how the Vene­tians nav­i­gate this maze of a city – is a pret­ty fas­ci­nat­ing sto­ry. These tech­niques have been worked out over Venice’s 1500 year his­to­ry, and now they’re explored in a cap­ti­vat­ing 17 minute video pro­duced by a Venet­ian gov­ern­ment agency. You can learn more about the inner life of this great city at Venice Back­stage.

via Metafil­ter

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Charismatic Psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan Gives Public Lecture (1972)

in Philosophy, Psychology | March 21st, 2011

The footage above is from an extreme­ly rare – and unex­pect­ed­ly enter­tain­ing – video of the philoso­pher and psy­cho­an­a­lyst Jacques Lacan (1901–1981), giv­ing a lec­ture at The Catholic Uni­ver­si­ty of Lou­vain in 1972. The film is notable for a cou­ple of rea­sons:

1. In France, Lacan’s rock star sta­tus owed much to his pop­u­lar pub­lic sem­i­nars. The charis­mat­ic icon­o­clast had been giv­ing free pub­lic lec­tures for decades, and those lec­tures were usu­al­ly packed with stu­dents, col­leagues, skep­tics, young rad­i­cals … and fans. The video gives you an idea of what the fuss was all about. Even at 70, Lacan still owns the room, and he has the pres­ence of a stage actor, com­plete with dra­mat­ic paus­es, iron­ic self-reflec­tion, and pitch-per­fect storms of emo­tion (see minute 15:07).

2. At minute 21:37, a polit­i­cal­ly inspired heck­ler tries to ambush him. It’s a moment right out of a com­e­dy show, if the com­e­dy show were chic and grainy and edit­ed by Jean-Luc God­dard. Note the grace with which Lacan neu­tral­izes the poor guy, lights his cig­ar and then con­cludes the lec­ture, even though the fall­out from their encounter is still stuck in his hair.

Lacan’s ideas have fall­en a bit out of fash­ion in the past two decades, par­tic­u­lar­ly in the U.S., where psy­cho­analy­sis has been nudged out of the spot­light by neu­ro­science and post-struc­tural­ism has lost ground to post-colo­nial stud­ies. But Lacan still has his fans, notably the “Elvis of Phi­los­o­phy,” Slavoj Zizek, who dom­i­nates YouTube the way his pre­de­ces­sor once did salons.

Sheer­ly Avni is a San Fran­cis­co-based arts and cul­ture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Week­ly, Vari­ety, Moth­er Jones, and many oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low her on twit­ter at @sheerly.

Hear Hours of Lectures by Michel Foucault: Recorded in English & French Between 1961 and 1983

in Philosophy | July 16th, 2026

Tucked in the after­ward of the sec­ond, 1982 edi­tion of Hubert Drey­fus and Paul Rabinow’s Michel Fou­cault: Beyond Struc­tural­ism and Hermeneu­tics, we find an impor­tant, but lit­tle-known essay by Fou­cault him­self titled “The Sub­ject and Pow­er.” Here, the French the­o­rist offers what he con­strues as a sum­ma­ry of his life’s work: span­ning 1961’s Mad­ness and Civ­i­liza­tion up to his three-vol­ume, unfin­ished His­to­ry of Sex­u­al­i­ty, still in progress at the time of his death in 1984. He begins by telling us that he has not been, pri­mar­i­ly, con­cerned with pow­er, despite the word’s appear­ance in his essay’s title, its argu­ments, and in near­ly every­thing else he has writ­ten. Instead, he has sought to dis­cov­er the “modes of objec­ti­fi­ca­tion which trans­form human beings into sub­jects.”

This dis­tinc­tion may seem abstruse, a need­less­ly wordy mat­ter of seman­tics. It is not so for Fou­cault. In this key crit­i­cal dif­fer­ence lies the orig­i­nal­i­ty of his project, in all its var­i­ous stages of devel­op­ment. “Pow­er,” as an abstrac­tion, an objec­tive rela­tion of dom­i­nance, is sta­t­ic and con­cep­tu­al, the image of a tyrant on a coin, of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan seat­ed on his throne.

Sub­jec­tion, sub­jec­ti­fi­ca­tion, objec­tiviz­ing, indi­vid­u­al­iz­ing, on the oth­er hand—critical terms in Foucault’s vocabulary—are active process­es, dis­ci­plines, and prac­tices, rela­tion­ships between indi­vid­u­als and insti­tu­tions that deter­mine the char­ac­ter of both. These rela­tion­ships can be locat­ed in his­to­ry, as Fou­cault does in exam­ple after exam­ple, and they can also be crit­i­cal­ly stud­ied in the present, and thus, per­haps, resist­ed and changed in what he terms “anar­chis­tic strug­gles.”

Fou­cault calls for a “new econ­o­my of pow­er rela­tions,” and a crit­i­cal the­o­ry that takes “forms of resis­tance against dif­fer­ent forms of pow­er as a start­ing point.” For exam­ple, in approach­ing the carcer­al state, we must exam­ine the process­es that divide “the crim­i­nals and the ‘good boys,’” process­es that func­tion inde­pen­dent­ly of rea­son. How is it that a sys­tem can cre­ate class­es of peo­ple who belong in cages and peo­ple who don’t, when the stan­dard ratio­nal justification—the pro­tec­tion of soci­ety from violence—fails spec­tac­u­lar­ly to apply in mil­lions of cas­es? From such excess­es, Fou­cault writes, come two “‘dis­eases of power’—fascism and Stal­in­ism.” Despite the “inner mad­ness” of these “patho­log­i­cal forms” of state pow­er, “they used to a large extent the ideas and the devices of our polit­i­cal ratio­nal­i­ty.”

Peo­ple come to accept that mass incar­cer­a­tion, or inva­sive med­ical tech­nolo­gies, or eco­nom­ic depri­va­tion, or mass sur­veil­lance and over-polic­ing, is nec­es­sary and ratio­nal. They do so through the agency of what Fou­cault calls “pas­toral pow­er,” the sec­u­lar­iza­tion of reli­gious author­i­ty as inte­gral to the West­ern state.

This form of pow­er can­not be exer­cised with­out know­ing the inside of people’s minds, with­out explor­ing their souls, with­out mak­ing them reveal their inner­most secrets. It implies a knowl­edge of the con­science and an abil­i­ty to direct it.

In the last years of Foucault’s life, he shift­ed his focus from insti­tu­tion­al dis­cours­es and mechanisms—psychiatric, carcer­al, medical—to dis­ci­pli­nary prac­tices of self-con­trol and the gov­ern­ing of oth­ers by “pas­toral” means. Rather than ignor­ing indi­vid­u­al­i­ty, the mod­ern state, he writes, devel­oped “as a very sophis­ti­cat­ed struc­ture, in which indi­vid­u­als can be inte­grat­ed, under one con­di­tion: that this indi­vid­u­al­i­ty would be shaped in a new form and sub­mit­ted to a set of very spe­cif­ic pat­terns.” While writ­ing his mon­u­men­tal His­to­ry of Sex­u­al­i­ty, he gave a series of lec­tures at Berke­ley that explore the mod­ern polic­ing of the self.

In his lec­tures on “Truth and Sub­jec­tiv­i­ty” (1980), Fou­cault looks at forms of inter­ro­ga­tion and var­i­ous “truth ther­a­pies” that func­tion as sub­tle forms of coer­cion. Fou­cault returned to Berke­ley in 1983 and deliv­ered the lec­ture “Dis­course and Truth,” which explores the con­cept of par­rhe­sia, the Greek term mean­ing “free speech,” or as he calls it, “truth-telling as an activ­i­ty.” Through analy­sis of the tragedies of Euripi­des and con­tem­po­rary demo­c­ra­t­ic crises, he reveals the prac­tice of speak­ing truth to pow­er as a kind of tight­ly con­trolled per­for­mance. Final­ly, in his lec­ture series “The Cul­ture of the Self,” Fou­cault dis­cuss­es ancient and mod­ern prac­tices of “self care” or “the care of the self” as tech­nolo­gies designed to pro­duce cer­tain kinds of tight­ly bound­ed sub­jec­tiv­i­ties.

• Four Lec­tures on Truth and Sub­jec­tiv­i­ty (1980)
• Six Lec­tures on Dis­course and Truth (1983)
• Three Lec­tures on “The Cul­ture of the Self” (1983)

You can hear parts of these lec­tures or vis­it our posts with full audio above. Also, over at Ubuweb, down­load the lec­tures as mp3s, and hear sev­er­al ear­li­er talks from Fou­cault in French, dat­ing all the way back to 1961.

When he began his final series of talks in 1980, the philoso­pher was asked in an inter­view with the Dai­ly Cal­i­forn­ian about the moti­va­tions for his crit­i­cal exam­i­na­tions of pow­er and sub­jec­tiv­i­ty. His reply speaks to both his prac­ti­cal con­cern for resis­tance and his almost utopi­an belief in the lim­it­less poten­tial for human free­dom. “No aspect of real­i­ty should be allowed to become a defin­i­tive and inhu­man law for us,” Fou­cault says.

We have to rise up against all forms of power—but not just pow­er in the nar­row sense of the word, refer­ring to the pow­er of a gov­ern­ment or of one social group over anoth­er: these are only a few par­tic­u­lar instances of pow­er.

Pow­er is any­thing that tends to ren­der immo­bile and untouch­able those things that are offered to us as real, as true, as good.

Read Foucault’s state­ment of intent, his essay “The Sub­ject and Pow­er,” and learn more about his life and work in the 1993 doc­u­men­tary below.

Fou­cault’s lec­ture series will be added to our col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2018.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch a “Lost Inter­view” With Michel Fou­cault: Miss­ing for 30 Years But Now Recov­ered

Michel Fou­cault and Alain Badiou Dis­cuss “Phi­los­o­phy and Psy­chol­o­gy” on French TV (1965)

Clash of the Titans: Noam Chom­sky & Michel Fou­cault Debate Human Nature & Pow­er on Dutch TV, 1971

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC.

Alfred Hitchcock Wanted Frank Lloyd Wright to Design the North by Northwest House: An Architect Just Built It for $45 Million

in Architecture, Film, History | July 6th, 2026

Vil­lains who live in opu­lent, remote mod­ernist hous­es may have been a cliché since the last cen­tu­ry, but giv­en Hol­ly­wood’s addic­tion to the tried and true, they do still turn up now and again. Unsur­pris­ing­ly, few film­mak­ers have man­aged to use them any­where near as mem­o­rably as Alfred Hitch­cock did. Think back to North by North­west, that show­case of both late-fifties high style and unadul­ter­at­ed Hitch­cock­ery, and any num­ber of images come right to mind: the dead­ly crop duster bear­ing down on Cary Grant, the hang off the edge of Mount Rush­more, the cheeky cut to the train enter­ing the tun­nel. But on the archi­tec­tural­ly inclined, the deep­est impres­sion is made by not a shot but a set: the house — mod­ernist, opu­lent, remote — occu­pied by James Mason’s vil­lain Phillip Van­damm.

“The pio­neer­ing deci­sion to fea­ture a mod­ern house as the villain’s lair in North by North­west arose from both the prac­ti­cal needs of the script and the desire to explore inno­va­tion in archi­tec­tur­al rep­re­sen­ta­tion,” writes Chris­tine Madrid French, author of The Archi­tec­ture of Sus­pense: The Built World in the Films of Alfred Hitch­cock.

The look of the Van­damm House betrays con­sid­er­able inspi­ra­tion from the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, espe­cial­ly his “icon­ic Falling­wa­ter, best known for its aston­ish­ing pro­ject­ed porch­es can­tilevered over a run­ning stream.” As the Hol­ly­wood sto­ry goes, Hitch­cock asked Wright him­self about the pos­si­bil­i­ty of design­ing the house, but when the archi­tect asked for ten per­cent of the film’s entire bud­get, the job went to pro­duc­tion design­er Robert F. Boyle.

Despite the high­ly un-Wright­ian steel beams sup­port­ing the can­tilevered liv­ing room (insert­ed because Grant need­ed a way to climb in), movie­go­ers left the the­ater assum­ing that they’d wit­nessed a show­down in one of his hous­es. In fact, like so many of Hitch­cock­’s famous built envi­ron­ments, the struc­ture did­n’t actu­al­ly exist: Boyle and his col­lab­o­ra­tors con­struct­ed pieces on sets, com­plet­ing the rest with mat­te paint­ings. Yet their work did, in a sense, bring the Van­damm House into the world. A North by North­west fan since child­hood, archi­tect John Boc­car­do just this year achieved his $45 mil­lion dream of build­ing it for real. Apart from faith­ful­ly repli­cat­ing onscreen details, he also put in an eigh­teen-seat home the­ater, pos­si­bly on the safe assump­tion that the buy­er will be a fel­low cinephile — who, giv­en that the house over­looks Park City, Utah rather than sits atop Mount Rush­more, will sure­ly rue the day Sun­dance decid­ed to move to Boul­der. See pho­tos here.

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Relat­ed con­tent:

16 Free Hitch­cock Movies Online

Alfred Hitch­cock Explains the Plot Device He Called the ‘MacGuf­fin’

Take a Tour of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Ennis House, the Man­sion That Has Appeared in Blade Run­ner, Twin Peaks & Count­less Hol­ly­wood Films

1,300 Pho­tos of Famous Mod­ern Amer­i­can Homes Now Online, Cour­tesy of USC

A Med­i­ta­tive Tour of Falling­wa­ter, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Archi­tec­tur­al Mas­ter­piece

Sal­vador Dalí Cre­ates a Dream Sequence for Spell­bound, Hitchcock’s Psy­cho­an­a­lyt­ic Thriller

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.