Last week, I watched the classic Alfred Hitchcock movie "Notorious" for one of my classes. It's the one that features Cary Grant as a suave federal police officer who persuades Ingrid Bergman, the daughter of a convicted German spy, to infiltrate a Brazilian man's inner circle and uncover his role as a German agent.
Okay, it's a bit of a hokey set-up, but the movie proves marvelous, and for reasons you might not expect. For one, it's unbelievably sexy. The banter between Grant and Bergman is funny, nasty, tense, romantic, charming; they turn us (and each other) on through their words and gestures. The movie's greater virtue is how it all looks -- most everything is set in a grand mansion, everyone seems to be wearing tuxedos and ball gowns, even to breakfast, and chic champagne parties are thrown every night.
I bring all of this up because the movie struck a very raw, very contemporary nerve for me. Of late, I've been thinking a lot (perhaps too much for some of my fellow staff columnists at The Dartmouth) about looking good, acting right, having style and saying the correct things. It's not that a sudden case of superficiality has attacked me. I think it's just a realization that all of these things really do matter.
Perhaps I've been inspired by seeing so many seniors decked out in suits scurrying around the campus on their way to corporate recruiting interviews; each and every one of them, and for good reason, wants to outdo his competitor -- look the best, brightest, smartest and most appealing. The Cary Grant / Ingrid Bergman metaphor may not be far off here.
In interviews, we are nothing but actors, trying to impress the director to give us the lead role. But can we ever hope to live up to the standards set by Cary and Ingrid; are any of us capable, like they are, of conveying -- in every thing we do -- relentless style, intelligence, sophistication and taste?
Without the presence of regular gala balls (Disco Inferno does not count, sorry), I don't think so. Instead, here at Dartmouth, we look to other things -- simple idiosyncratic choices -- to convey our individuality. It comes through in the classes we take, the clothes we wear, the activities in which we take part.
But does it?
Taking a look around my room, I realized that posters are a pretty strong indicator of personality -- what's on your wall reveals interests, obsessions, quirks, and so on. When I looked at my posters, however, I realized they didn't really convey anything that different from the posters on the walls of my neighbors' rooms. While the presence of a pretty cool, rather obscure Matisse print and the poster for a pretty cool, rather obscure German movie called "The Nasty Girl" line two sides of the room, any sense of style or individuality that those posters might reveal are counterbalanced by a "Reservoir Dogs" poster, and even worse, a Winter Carnival poster (though NOT the Dr. Suess one).
In other words, the trouble was that the individual selections I have made in everything -- my clothes, my CD's, the color of my blanket, the font I write my papers in -- didn't seem to present me (pardon the ego flight here) as the creative, intelligent, interesting person that I think I am. They just made me seem ordinary, just like everyone else.
I returned to the other aspect of "Notorious" that I found so appealing -- the talk -- and tried to determine if any of my conversational abilities were what would make people offer me any job I wanted if and when I go through corporate recruiting next year. I quickly realized, however, that when I do speak to people for a sustained period of time, it resembles, at best, a poorly written episode of "Three's Company."
At Dartmouth, even if we're not job hunting, we try to make ourselves stand out; we want to be individual Cary Grant's and Ingrid Bergman's; people who others are invariably drawn to and find interesting. By the same token though, most of things that received attention in high school -- being president of everything, being at the top of the class, etc. -- don't hold much weight here. And so we are left with seemingly everyday choices.
The problem with Dartmouth -- and maybe herein lies my current obsession with all of this -- is that, all too often, individual decisions, designed to make ourselves stand out, merely set us as part of the pack. J. Crew, Gap or L.L. Bean -- they're all the same clothes; co-ed, fraternity or sorority, whatever Greek letter combination you pick, it's pretty much all the same there too.
We've all read the same books, seen the same movies, taken the same cool road trips. We live in a world where the anxiety of influence doesn't extend from the past, but from the present -- and it's the sort of anxiety that makes us strive for individuality but leaves us floundering in conformity.
Try as hard as we will, we can never be in the same league, heck, the same universe, as Cary and Ingrid.
