Alfred Hitchcock, the Man
Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980), the British-born fim director has received a number of accolades in his lifetime, among them 'the master of suspense.' That it should be so is hardly surprising since the movies he made move outside genre and into a definition of their own. Even today, we describe a movie or plot device as being 'very Hitchcock'. However, I have never seen him ranked among the great modernists of the twentieth century. Yet, his movies portray the indivudual as mentally tortured as the painterly subjects of Francis Bacon, and the protagtonists of the novels of James Joyce and DH Lawrence.
Hitchcock was born and raised in a time when the individual was moving into a new era of psychological awareness. It is no accident that many of his plots have at their center a character seeking a solution to their life, identity, or whatever their 'problem' happens to be. Norman Bates of Psycho (1960), Anthony Edwardes of Spellbound (1945), and the epynonymous heroine of Marnie (1964), spring immediately to mind. The 'suspense' in these movies generates from the minds of the main players, and not from any supernatural, outside force. In short, Hitchcock didn't do ghosts.
New Art, Old Joke
Consider Hitchcock's use of contemporary visual culture in his movies; Saul Bellow created many of Hitchcock's title sequences, and Salvador Dali's famous film sequence in Spellbound. Less apparent is the film Rebecca (1940), based on the novel by Daphne du Maurier. The protagonist is a perfectly 'normal' young woman who marries into aristocracy and becomes Mrs de Winter, her husband's second wife. In her new home, she is slyly led into a maze of perfidy by Mrs Danvers, the housekeeper who cannot get over the death of the first Mrs de Winter, the epynonymous Rebecca.
The new bride is trying to choose a dress for the forthcoming fancy dress ball. Unused to formal dressing, she wonders what to wear until Mrs Danvers points her towards the portrait of an ancestor dressed in an eighteenth-century shepherdess-style frock and hat. She takes the bait. On the night of the party, she appears before her husband and his guests in straw hat, bodice and full-skirted frock.
Here, it amuses me to think that Ralph de Winter's reaction is one of disgust at the hideousness of the outfit, even on the lovely Joan Fontaine. It is, of course, because the frock was one worn by Rebecca, and Ralph's past was not a happy place. The young bride retreats in horror from the party while Mrs Danvers smiles in quiet triumph. For the remainder of the film, the characters work together to unravel the mystery of Rebecca. In a metaphorical incident at the end, Manderly, the ancestral pile of de Winter, burns down and Mrs Danvers perishes along with it. At one level, the intention of the director is transparent, but I often wonder if his message wasn't more subtle, more profound? In much classical literature, e.g. Hamlet, the protagonist derives strength from hearkening to the deeds of an ancestor. But the dysfunctional Mrs Danvers either can't or won't let go of the past. For the purpose of the movie, her state of mind hardly matters; it being her actions that poison the lives of the other characters.
Dizzying Evidence
In Vertigo (1960), psychologically-damaged policeman Scottie becomes obsessed with a beautiful woman, Madeline. She has an obsession all of her own, the portrait of dead woman in a San Franciscan art gallery, whom she resembles greatly. At least, that is what it looks like. From there, Scottie is lured into a labyrinth in which he is both victim and investigating hero. The ending is ambivalent: when he finds out what is going on, is it too late to extricate himself? But the grandfather of all dramas is Psycho. Marion Crane, the protagonist, is hemmed in by life. She holds down a boring office job while conducting an affair with a married man. One day, she seizes an opportunity to steal a considerable sum of money from her employer. She leaves the town for the wilderness, hoping to rendezvous with her lover - but her choice of accommodation is the Bates Motel. Marion's destruction is imminent, and we never see her alive again. The other characters are already looking for her. The motel consists of two buildings; the new-ish motel building and a short distance away, a much older house in which Norman Bates keeps his mother and his past. It is into this old house that we are led in the search for Marion and in it, we see the workings of Bates' mind; the toys and the stuffed animals. By the end of the movie we know Bates to have a personality split irrevocably between the old and the new. Bates is ill because of his inability to reconcile the past with the present.
The Darker Future
However, Hitchcock does question his own approach to modernity and modernism in Rope (1948), a film where two characters who endorse the theories of Nietzsche are later found to have committed murder. This questioning of uber-rationality points back to Hitchcock himself. The Master was ever-reminding us what we all concede to; that mankind is not perfect. He also knew that post-futurism, the world is ever a shifting, changing panoply where we have only our identity as individuals to hold onto. Again, I say that the case for Hitchcock joining the ranks of modernist greats is outstanding.
Influences and Further Reading
All of the movies referred to above
Oxford Companion To The Mind, Edited by Richard L. Gregory, USA, 1987, Oxford University Press
Mary Phelan - I am an art historian, magazine editor, design philosopher and fiction writer. I am also a sometime artist and photographer.
