The 39 Steps

There is an old Soviet anecdote about a man who runs through the streets shouting, " The system is broken! The system is broken!" The KGB arrests him, and he pleads, "But I didn’t say which system!" The officer replies, "Shut up! We all know which system is broken!"

Is this not precisely the situation of Richard Hannay in Hitchcock’s masterpiece The 39 Steps? Here we have the "wrong man"—the quintessential Hitchcockian subject—who is guilty not because he committed a crime, but because he exists within a Symbolic Order that requires his guilt to function. I claim that if you watch this film today, in our era of algorithmic feeds and the digital Panopticon, it is not a dusty artifact of 1935. No! It is more contemporary, more terrifyingly real, than any episode of Black Mirror.

Look at the MacGuffin. Hitchcock famously defined the MacGuffin as the thing the spies are after but the audience doesn't care about. In this film, it is the specifications for a silent aircraft engine. Who cares? Nobody! But—and here is the Hegelian twist—precisely because the content is empty, it structures the entire desire of the narrative. Is this not the perfect metaphor for our obsession with "The Algorithm"? We do not know what the algorithm wants, we do not know how it works, but we run across the Scottish moors of the internet, chased by the agents of the Big Other (cancel culture, targeted ads, NSA surveillance), terrified of a secret that does not technically exist.

And then, we have the romance. My God, the handcuffs! Hannay and Pamela are handcuffed together. The liberal humanist will tell you this is a "cute plot device." I spit on this interpretation! It is a profound Lacanian truth: there is no sexual relationship without the intervention of a traumatic, mechanical obstacle. In our modern age of Tinder and Hinge, where we think we have "pure choice," we are miserable. Hitchcock shows us the truth: two people can only fall in love when they are forcibly chained together by the State, dragging each other through the mud, hating one another. This friction is love! The handcuffs are the externalization of the deadlock of desire. We should all be so lucky to be handcuffed!

But the true stroke of genius—the moment that makes this film absolutely essential, a total masterpiece of the highest order—is the figure of Mr. Memory.

Here is a man who memorizes facts. He is the human USB stick, the biological Cloud. The spies use him to smuggle the secret out of the country because he has no physical evidence on him. He is the evidence. When Hannay confronts him in the music hall, asking "What are the 39 Steps?", Mr. Memory crashes. He is like a Chat-GPT bot caught in a logical loop. He cannot help but answer because it is his nature to know.

Mr. Memory is the ultimate tragic figure of the 21st century. He is the victim of the "knowledge economy." He dies because he cannot forget. In a world where nothing is deleted, where every tweet is archived, where the Big Data remembers our sins better than we do, we are all Mr. Memory. We are dying from a surplus of information.

So, do not look at The 39 Steps as a charming thriller. It is a brutal, sublime documentary of our present condition. It shows us that to escape the police, we must become the police; to find love, we must be chained; and to know the truth, we must be prepared to die on a stage while the audience applauds, unaware that the show is over. It is pure ideology, and it is perfect.