The Wrong Man (1956) review
Manny Balastrero (Henry Fonda) and his double in Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man
What do people see when they look at you? Henry Fonda's character, based on one real and unlucky fellow named Manny Balastrero, is often subjected to this question, a most brutal question, in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man (1956).
Everything surrounding the mysterious dynamics of identity and subjecthood is scary and nightmarish, something which Hitchcock very aptly conveys in camera. We cinematically experience the ritualized undoing of a man as Manny Balastrero, an innocent man, is wrongly accused of armed robbery.
"You have nothing to fear if you haven't done anything wrong." Or, even: "It's nothing for an innocent man to worry; it's the fella who has done something wrong that has to worry". They keep saying things like that to Balastrero as they carry him, like sheep to the slaughter, to his imminent framing and incarceration: step up, step down, walk there, come along, sign this, stand there. Eventually, a cop strips Balastrero of his belongings and casually asks, "What else have you got?" ––– Nothing. Completely minced and grinded by the machinery of justice. As Kafka’s Josef K. would put it, “Like a dog”....
In short, all that is said to Balastrero means: "You're nobody", except the fellow that answers and responds to these interpellations, as Althusser would put it, he who listens to these callings and suddenly realizes "They're speaking to me". Except "me" is, now, the wrong man, and the right one does not even seem to exist at first, showing up only at the very end, as an eerie double.
We are what they see in us, what they say to us, what they tell us (once they speak to us they are already naming us, and we recognize ourselves in this calling). It's just a matter of luck, there's no personal agency, and you don’t get to decide who you are. One must pray not be seen as a criminal, talked to as a criminal, booked as a criminal: for in such case one will be as a criminal.
Again and again people identify Balastrero as the robber, which he is not. Why do these people want to see a robber? Why are people so quick in ascribing guilt? They demand of him, in quite authoritarian fashion at times, a walk of complete exposure: as Balastrero parades in front of these people, up and down the thin corridors of neighborhood stores, he is submitted to all their prejudices and projections, their own ideas of him. And, given he is sent there by the police and is constrained to do it, he is absolutely defenseless against such ideas, which are never neutral, but always twisted and biased. Always dangerous.
As a suspect thus subjected to whatever others see on him, and make of him, he becomes a nobody, and a nobody is neither innocent nor guilty, for there are no facts regarding a nobody. A nobody will be just a formality among other formalities in a procedure which will establish then, after its completion, who he is. He does not have a say in it. Much like Balzac's Colonel Chabert, Balastrero in Hitchcock's paranoid noir has to work his way out of the procedural labyrinth in order to prove, formally, that he is himself. Merely being himself, concretely and factually, is not enough: only the formality of a juridical and criminal procedure can grant him himself.
In order to do this, poor man Balastrero is helpless: he keeps appealing to common sense, he keeps saying he is himself, and yet people look at him and see a robber. He's a son and a husband and a father and a musician, and he also gambles sometimes— but this does not prove that he is not a criminal. He could be all these things and still be a criminal. In fact, the policemen seem to imply at times that these things he is make even a stronger point of him being a criminal. In the logic of accusation, the slimmest possibility weighs more than the highest probability.
In The Wrong Man Hitchcock challenges his own conventions: instead of building up the suspense into a climax, the film slows down, ever more somber and indefinite, even dull, as it happens in some of Kafka’s novels. Once we get to the law, the grinding seems eternal, lost in apparently irrelevant details and rituals–– there’s even the risk of a mistrial, which Balastrero fears the most: going through everything again and again.
Being reduced to a nobody except what others make of him, in the end, Balastrero, in search of “a break”, coherently appeals to that other nothing which finally receives every single representation and becomes it, that is, God. He prays, talking to another no-one, and a miracle occurs: from two nothings something comes up— the right man.
And only through seeing the right man, the real criminal, can the witnesses and the policemen, retrospectively, distinguish Manny Balastrero from him and realize who Manny really was not. They had to see who he was not in order to be able to see who he was, namely, the wrong man. This is one of Hitchcock's most refined cases of pure cinematic thinking, rendered in noir form, as the documentary of a nightmare. And it can be summarized as this: pray to get a break or else be grinded.
