‘The door flew open, in he ran,
The great, long, red-legged scissorman.
Oh! children, see! the tailor’s come
And caught our little Suck-a-Thumb…’
from Der Struwwelpeter, 1845, Heinrich Hoffmann
For psychologist Carl Jung his patients’ dreams were to be taken as seriously as any waking experience. If a patient described a dream about traveling to India, Jung would get a map and ask him to point out exactly where in India he had been. Taking the dream experience seriously, as an arena of symbolic clues, led him to believe that the psyche contained common archetypes, recurrent images that could be found in cultures all over the world, past or present, primitive or modern. Studying ancient texts and traveling the world, spending time in African villages and American-Indian reservations, he came to believe people saw these images in dreams or visions, that these states were a way for our minds to access a reservoir of shared knowledge, what he called universal consciousness or the collective unconscious.
‘In Greece, if scissors are left gaping on a table, it’s said the Archangel Michael’s mouth is open, ready to take the soul of a member of the family.’
- from The Folk-lore Journal, 1885
One object the archetype could manifest itself in is the humble scissors. No one knows exactly when scissors were invented but an early form of spring scissors were in use in Mesopotamia thousands of years ago. The more familiar pivoted scissors, with blades connected at a point between tips and handles, were probably invented by the Romans. After that they simply evolved from primitive cutting tools to more specific implements for calligraphy or tailoring. Along the way they developed a folkloric power that still persists to this day, a subconscious menace that haunts our sleeping and waking dreams.
BRYSON: I understand that the geology confirms the images. The images are your private images in Dali’s head but painted out they correspond to a reality.
DALI: Exactly…my delirium is injected and sublimate in these rocks and in this geology. There’s many kinds of imagination, [such as] the Romantic imagination, almost never exist in rock. It’s only fog, music, evanescent visions of Nordic countries [where] everything is completely musical. This also is very clear in my moustache because my moustache is the contrary of the moustache of Friedrich Nietzsche. Friedrich Nietzsche is the depressive moustache, plenty of music and fog and romanticism and the Dalí moustache is exactly the same as two erected scissors - completely metallic.
- Salvador Dalí, BBC Third Programme, 1962
In his autobiography Dali tells a story about how he used to go walking with a girl to whom he showed off with copies of L’Esprit Nouveau, a magazine edited by Le Corbusier and Fernand Leger: ‘She would humbly bow her forehead in an attentive attitude over the Cubist paintings. At this period I had a passion for what I called Juan Gris’ ‘Categorical imperative of mysticism’. I remember often speaking to my mistress in enigmatic pronouncements, such as, ‘Glory is a shiny, pointed, cutting thing, like an open pair of scissors’…’ In time Dali would bring this obsession with the glory of cutting things to cinema in his first collaboration with fellow Spanish surrealist Luis Bunuel, Un Chien Andalou.
‘For Hitchcock, murder was aesthetic, erotic, but also appetitive. He rejected a shot from Dial M for Murder because the blades of the scissors did not flash as they arched through the air. ‘A murder without gleaming scissors,’ he reasoned, ‘is like asparagus without the Hollandaise sauce – tasteless.’
- from The Hitchcock Murders by Peter Conrad
In the early years of cinema scissors were the chief implement in the editing process, that destructive act of cutting that gave birth to the language of cinema. Alfred Hitchcock was a passionate believer in the manipulative power of montage, as exemplified by the Kuleshov effect, so it’s no surprise he held scissors in such high regard. In The Hitchcock Murders, Peter Conrad tells of a tribute to Hitchcock during which the great man watched a compilation of clips from his films, an anthology of killings concluding with Grace Kelly stabbing her attacker in Dial M for Murder. ‘The best way to do it,’ Hitchcock commented, ‘is with scissors.’
‘The essential tools of the trade consisted of a rewind bench, a magnifying glass, and an ordinary pair of scissors. The only way you could see the film in motion was to screen it, so editors took to pulling the film through their fingers to simulate movement. The work must have been exceedingly tiresome, yet it evokes a wonderful image, like some kind of strange tailor’s shop, with reams of footage dangling from the walls and the editors, strands of film clenched in their teeth, unspooling bolts of celluloid before their eyes…’
- from Cutters’ Way: The Mysterious Art of Film Editing by Graham Daseler
When Hitchcock and Dali came together to collaborate on the dream sequence for Spellbound it was no surprise to see scissors playing such a prominent role, a giant pair slicing through a roomful of surrealist eyes, not only in homage to the eyeball-slicing scene in Dali and Bunuel’s Un Chien Andalou, but also in symbolic allusion to the editing process itself, its power to do violence to our minds via our eyes. (The editor’s eye, of course, would’ve been enlarged by that magnifying glass) Cinema, this implied, is the unconscious incarnate, a shining implement to access the archetypal images buried deep in our dreams.
‘We believe in nothing, Lebowski! Nothing! And tomorrow we come back and we cut off your johnson!’
- The Big Lebowski, 1998, Joel & Ethan Coen
Fifty years after Spellbound, those giant scissors made another appearance in a dream sequence. Everyone remembers the feelgood gutter-ball sequence in The Big Lebowski, but less so how it ends, the Dude being chased by three nihilists in orange body-suits brandishing enormous scissors. Is this an example of Jung’s archetypal unconscious at work? Did one or both of the Coens dream those scissors? Or were they found in a studio cupboard, left there ever since Spellbound finished? Or is it simply that they wanted to pay homage to Hitchcock in much the same way he did to Bunuel all those years before? Either way, the scene works both as a knowing cinematic reference and a comic-nightmare allusion to the kind of castrative fears scissors have always inspired.
‘There are dreams which belong only partly in the unconscious; these are the dreams we remember on waking so vividly that we deliberately continue them, and so fall asleep again and wake and sleep and the dream goes on without interruption, with a thread of logic the pure dream doesn’t possess…’
- from The Ministry of Fear, Graham Greene
Of course, Hitchcock wasn’t the only director with a fascination for scissors. Fritz Lang had Dan Duryea brandishing a particularly menacing pair in his adaptation of Graham Greene’s Ministry of Fear (a year before Spellbound) in a film all about the saturation of violent irrationality into the everyday, about a war-time sense of life as a crazy and threatening dream. Duryea uses his absurdly large scissors to dial a phone number, a surreal and sexual image worthy of Dali. In fact, Lang had been first to work with the surrealist painter, commissioning a ‘nightmare montage’ for Moontide as far back as 1941, before both were dropped from the film.
Dali’s delayed nightmare would eventually turn up in Hitchcock’s Spellbound, a film about the Freudian unconscious and one doctor’s attempt to reach it through psychoanalysis. In Hitchcock’s film, set in an asylum, the unconscious is hidden inside Gregory Peck’s head, a mystery to be unlocked like so many doors. Lang’s Ministry of Fear shows that unconscious out in the open, objects brimming with wordless significance, sinister meanings everywhere. Its protagonist, Stephen Neale (Ray Milland), just released from an asylum, seems conversely sane by comparison to the world, unless we’re seeing it from his perspective, in which case it could all be a manifestation of his craziness. This is the pleasure of cinema, of course, where the crazy and rational can exist at once, hinged together like the annihilating blades of those ever recurring scissors.
Later in life, Lang would appear in Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Mepris, as a version of himself, making a film of Homer’s Odyssey. ‘The eye of the gods has been replaced by cinema,’ he observes in it. Three years later, in Pierrot le Fou, Godard both alludes to the role of scissors as a key weapon of montage and his intention to use them to destroy narrative, to turn them against the dominant ideology, attacking the God-like eye of cinema as Hitchcock and Dali before him. He shoots Anna Karina brandishing a pair right into the camera, slowly and menacingly cutting away across the screen. It’s both homage and an act of terror. It’s also, lest we forget, a not very subtle reference to the real-life broken marriage of Godard and Karina. It’s female empowerment and castration fears all at once. Note also the cubist paintings behind Karina. We’re back to Dali and Picasso and the great modernist project of cutting up reality, representing the multiple viewpoints of actual vision. If truth is twenty-four frames per second, as Godard once famously declared, then that truth is made up of a multitude of tiny cuts, each one it’s own slice of uncaptureable truth.