I confess it must seem a bit perverse to contribute this essay to Cinephile’s issue on “New Queer Theory in Film.” The text never mentions queerness at all and the film at its centre is far from new. But the essay speaks to my interest in queerness as a disturbance of the order of meaning—a disturbance experienced libidinally as a disorienting enjoyment. Rather than reading queerness, that is, as a sexual orientation, I understand orientations themselves as forms of defence against queerness. By seeming to provide an epistemological ground, orientations, as the word suggests, affirm a capacity to make sense of sexuality through taxonomies of dispositions. As a placeholder for the “nothing,” the illegibility, that narrative logic overcomes, queerness, this essay implicitly suggests, both determines and resists that epistemology. As a figure for the negativity that disfigures every mode of signification, it inhabits cinema in two distinct ways: as the fetishization of the image and as the dissolution of that fetish in the recognition of the minimal difference—the flicker—that the image embodies and denies. Dissolving the substance of reality as it normatively appears, destroying the consensus by which social reality and meaning are assumed, queerness is never far from the criminals to whom Hitchcock keeps returning. Indeed, it is never far from Hitchcock, whose cinematic rhetoric abounds in such acts of radical disfiguration. Against the recuperative deployment of aesthetic
idealizations, Hitchcock confronts queer negativity as the obverse of the fetish, a negativity whose enjoyment threatens the face of cinema itself. That facelessness, I suggest in what follows, is what The Lodger invites us to face.