Walter Raubicheck

Something’s R.O.T.ten in the State of South Dakota: Roger Thornhill’s Matchbook Redemption

I have always been fascinated by the R.O.T matchbook that Roger Thornhill, in North by Northwest, displays to Eve Kendall just before he lights her cigarette in the dining car scene. Thornhill calls the word “ROT” his trademark, and upon being questioned by Kendall, he explains that the “O” stands for “nothing.” Later in the film he uses the same matchbook to help rescue Eve from Vandamm’s lair next to Mount Rushmore. I have always assumed that this transformation of the matchbook from a representation of personal emptiness to a strategic tool for thwarting a planned murder (of Eve by Vandamm) symbolized Thornhill’s change from a successful but extremely self-centered businessman to someone who is now willing to risk his own life to save the life of someone else he loves.

I was surprised to discover that critics of the film did not emphasize this (to me) obvious use of the symbol. When I turned to comments by the director and the screenwriter, I was even more dismayed. In an AFI Roundtable discussion in 1972, Hitchcock stated that he assumed Thornhill totally forgot about his mother and his previous wives when he found himself in his uniquely deadly predicament, that such concerns fit a “psychological story,” not a “chase” story. And Ernest Lehman, in 2000, in the journal Creative Screenwriting, claimed that he had no intention to “remake” or “redeem” Thornhill by the end of the picture. What was going on here?

Lehman went on to say that “it happened unconsciously…I think I have little computers in my head that work unconsciously. And I’m glad they do. Who knows where this stuff comes from?”  We can accept Lehman’s distinction between the conscious and unconscious aspects of the creative process more readily than Hitchcock’s implication that a “chase” story and a “psychological story” are two different kinds of narrative. Wasn’t one of his greatest achievements that he infused the thriller genre with powerful psychological elements? Could Lehman’s explanation apply to Hitchcock as well? I would like to explore these issues while examining the two “matchbook scenes” and relating them to the overall thematic resonance of the film.

About
HitchCon Advisory Board member. Says Walter Raubicheck, “I love to watch, think about, talk about, and write about movies! And I find the greatest satisfaction doing those things about Hitchcock's films.” Walter is professor of English at Pace University in New York. He is the co-author with Walter Srebnick of Scripting Hitchcock (2011) and co-editor, with Srebnick, of Hitchcock’s Re-released Films: From Rope to Vertigo (1991). More recently, he edited Hitchcock and the Cold War: New Essays on the Espionage Films, 1956-1969. A playwright, he debuted The New Norman, a play about the making of Psycho, at HitchCon ‘22. In addition to his work on Hitchcock, he has published essays on twentieth-century authors such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, T. S. Eliot, Dashiell Hammett and G. K. Chesterton.