I was searching for the exact quote
of something along the lines of “you don’t know until you try.” I typed those words into Google and much to
my dismay, it gave me all sorts of inspirational/proactive “you’re actually really
intelligent so you should rediscover yourself” types of websites. Good stuff and all, but that was not exactly the
direction I wanted to begin my review of Rope
with. I thought all hope was lost until
Bruno Mars saved my day. (I will never say that again.) Towards the bottom of the search was a page
of lyrics to his song “The Other Side” as it aptly contains the phrase “It's better
if you don't understand 'cause you won't know what it's like until you try.” Perfect!
Now I was back, all thanks to Bruno Mars.
As he tells us, sometimes it is
better if you don’t understand some things, like the feeling of killing another
man as this is what occurs within the first few seconds of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1948
suspense-thriller Rope. Brandon and Phillip, the two men who strangle
their friend, David in their apartment with a piece of rope (hence the title)
hardly fit the profile of two murderers.
They come from wealthy New York families, the type that sends their
children through years of expensive boarding school before entering college as the
boys did. And unlike most murderers,
their willingness to take a man’s life comes not from any amounts torment or
revenge. No, Brandon and Phillip kill
this man simply out of sheer curiosity of knowing what it feels like to kill. Fascinated by the superhuman philosophy of Nietzsche
as taught to them in school by their former boarding school professor and
friend Rupert Cadell (James Stewart), the boys decide to take his nihilistic words
into action. But personally, murder as
an experiment just makes it even more disturbing.
