Hitchcock’s “Misteaks”
The following is an expanded version of a paper I delivered (via Zoom) at Hitchcon ’23, a delightful convention of Hitchcock scholars and fans at Dobbs Ferry, NY.
Here is my modest proposal: Whenever we think Hitchcock has made a grievous error he probably has not. Rather, we have not yet figured out what he’s doing. It’s worth our effort.
Remember the initial complaint about Vertigo? He failed at the whodunit by revealing the solution in the middle. Such a loser! But really. Didn’t that rather mean it’s not a whodunit?
It’s a whydodaydodat? Why are men so susceptible to destructive romanticism? How does even such a hardheaded Scottie so profoundly lose his bearings when he falls in love — with an illusion yet, a known fabrication? To the point that he risks and loses all trying to recreate — that illusion! He is compelled to recreate the fantasy he fell for. Isn’t that what “falling” in love means, a reminder of our solitary instability, encapsulated in the opening montage of alluring lips and spiralling plunge.
Or on a smaller scale: How does Scottie escape from that initial trough-hang? Did Hitchcock goof in his non-reveal?
No. We’re not told how the hero escaped because it doesn’t matter. Not to the plot. Not to the themes. With such compelling dramas we have to remind ourselves that these characters are not real people. They are fabrications composed strictly of the details that serve the director’s purpose. They have no characteristics or experience other than what we are given. They have no life before, beyond or after — except what we grant them on every replay.
That’s not enough? Try this, then: the opening chase scene has a sufficiently oneiric tone to suggest we’re seeing not how the event occurred but how it haunts Scottie’s dreams.
Still not enough? When Scottie ventures up the kitchen step-stool he drops — into Midge’s arms. Maybe that’s implicitly a clarifying replay: Scottie fell and some stronger Fireman Midge caught him.
But really: Does it matter how he came down? If we had to know then Hitch would’ve told us. He didn’t — so we don’t.
Even Psycho fans are irked by the slick psychiatrist’s closing explanation. But the film’s structure clearly detaches Hitchcock from it. The shrink hangs the blame on Norman’s mother: “a clinging, demanding woman.” After killing her and her lover Norman assumed her personality. “He was never only Norman. But he was often all Mother.” And Norman was a mean Mother. Whenever he felt attracted to a woman “Mother killed the girl.” But Mother blames Norman, pleading innocence: “Why, she wouldn’t even hurt a fly.” Ironically, in his mother’s voice Norman confesses to his guilt — but the shrink blames Mom.
The last shot— Marion’s car rising from the swamp — is a parallel resurrection of the dead, as if supporting Mom’s responsibility. But the guilt is all Norman’s, however flawed his mother may have been — or not. Contrary to the shrink, the guilt is solely Norman’s which is confirmed by the film’s narrative frame.
In the opening scenes several characters weakly blame the parent for their own weakness. In the hotel tryst Marion’s dead mother inhibits the lovers’ intimacy. “We can have dinner. At my house,” Marion muses, “with my mother’s picture on the mantle.” “And after the steak?” Sam suggests, “Turn mother’s picture to the wall?” In his cameo Hitchcock — like Mom’s photo — turns his back away from her imminent sin.
For his part, Sam won’t be marryin’ Marion because he’s paying off his dead father’s debts and his own ex-wife’s alimony. The great thing about family here is that it provides excuses for one’s own weaknesses. And even evil.
The real estate office scene shows other characters hiding behind parental domination, like the Patricia Hitchcock character. Her mother’s doctor eased her wedding night — with paralyzing tranquilizers. Now her mother has just phoned to see if husband Teddy has phoned. Parents intrude—as their kids let them.
We infer a future replay when the swaggering Texan Cassidy buys off his sweet little daughter’s unhappiness with a $40,000 (cash) house. (This is a really old movie.) In this narrative frame, the character evades responsibility by claiming parental influence. The weak submit to the domineering — even if they have to invent one.
When the shrink blames Mom he denies Norman’s responsibility for conceiving his mother’s possession of him. Here the Phoenix setting assumes extra meaning. Sure, it’s an aptly torrid desert state. But the phoenix is also one of the film’s bird references — like Norman’s stuffing of birds, Marion the unstuffed Crane, etc. Indeed our opening camera movement is that of a bird approaching and alighting upon an apparently random window sill. The phoenix is a hermaphroditic bird — combining both male and female sexes — that is reborn from its own ashes. That’s a neat emblem of Norman’s excuse: his mother exists anew inside him. But the phoenix is just a myth. A useful excuse, but mythical, unreal. If the psychiatrist’s explanation seems pat and implausible, it’s supposed to be. He adopts Norm’s loony excuse.
Of course, Hitchcock has confessed to at least one mistake, to Truffaut. On Stage Fright he apologizes for having presented the villain’s lie as a flashback. As it was played it seemed as real as the plot. As if it really happened. Reviewers objected to having been thus misled. Was that Hitchcock’s mistake? Or his audience’s, for not yet having twigged to a narrative that exercises the conditional tense.
In fact, that twist in narrative propels the film’s central point — the fluid interweaving of theatre and life. That is, we constantly shift between modes of being and modes of performing. This film’s brilliance lies in how a simple whodunit so richly explores that theme.
Again the life-theatre confusion provides the narrative frame. The film opens on a theatre’s “Safety Curtain.” But when it rises it reveals not a theatre stage but a bustling London street scene. That’s an irrational fluid movement between film, theatre and the “real” life that all art pretends to portray.
That safety curtain closes the plot when it falls down — mercifully off-camera —to slice killer Jonathan (Richard Todd) in half. That frisson the Hitchcock of Frenzy might not have spared us. So much for the “safety” of that curtain — and by extension the stage’s ostensible detachment from our reality, the separation of performance from being. Furthering the illusion of safety, the cops can’t penetrate the “safety glass” on Jonathan’s car window — but bullets do.
In the first scene Eve (Jane Wyman) is driving Jonathan in urgent getaway. This conventional noir image is the film’s “real life” — the basic film level of performance. But the scene’s falseness registers partly in the car’s briefly blank back window but mainly in Eve seeming to drive out at us. This film rhetoric undermines the supposedly “real” drive.
So is what then “happens” here. Jonathan tells Eve — and shows us — that Charlotte killed her husband and has come to him for aid. That’s the lie played as event. As if the whole “event” were not already a string of fictions
In the parallel scene at the end, Eve and Jonathan are hiding in another vehicle — a classic prop carriage — when he is exposed and decides to kill her. These framing scenes are precisely reversed parallels. Jonathan produces his false tale as Eve drives them through the putative street reality in a car. The truth emerges when they cower backstage in a theatre carriage. Truth arrives through artifice.
In sum, we find our life truths through our stories, whether on the page, stage or celluloid. Conversely, to get through life we consistently draw on our fictional, composed lives. This film portrays the complete interweaving of Performance and Being. We act what we are; we are what we act. Living is a layering of performances. The romance between Wyman’s Eve and Ordinary Smith (Michael Wilding) grows entirely through a variety of scenes of false pretences.
In his cameo appearance Hitchcock does a double take on Jane Wyman just as her character has shucked her extreme but ineffective maid disguise and returned to her initial character’s, selecting among roles within her role. He catches her between discordant images of her assumed “self.” Hitch’s appearance reminds us that the film — like life — is all performance, a layering of being. The creator briefly steps into his fiction, just as his heroine has changed her image back to her —fictional —self. And of course — the various plain Janes that wouldbe actress Eve plays evaporate beside the sizzling white marble persona of Marlene Dietrich.
But my primary focus here is on Hitchcock’s scenes of brazen falseness, which tempt us to assume The Master has grown careless, sloppy, in admitting an obviously fake shot. For example, The Lady Vanishes opens on an obviously miniature setting. This isn’t just to save money. Rather, it’s a play with form, a register of pretending. It’s a visual equivalent to “Once upon a time…,” the traditional start of a folk tale like this. Of course, what “Once upon a time” really means is “Never” but also “Always.” It’s how Fiction trumps History.
The film shifts from this initial pastoral romance into hard political reality in the climactic gunfight with the Nazis. That movement of the film as a whole is also reflected in the two comic Brits byplay The foppish cricket-nerds turn into warriors — and prove a crack shot to boot.
So, too, in Torn Curtain, where a shallow self-obsessed couple risk many East German lives to advance the hero’s personal ambition—however noble the MacGuffin. Their opening and closing shots define the couple as isolated, insulated, indulging their own warmth and seclusion amidst the Cold War. The palpably plastic garden where Paul Newman confesses to and recruits Julie Andrews by its unreality admits the actors’ reigning personae: Hud is leading Mary Poppins up the garden path. Given his earliest roots in German Expressionism, it’s hardly surprising that Hitchcock indulges in such calibrated artifice that we may by reflex misread as carelessness.
Now, for an apparent example of emotional incongruity, let’s pause over the stunning shot in Topaz, where the revolutionary’s murder of his beloved is presented as a high angle shot down upon a billowing blossom. Why such beauty for a murder? In this sordid espionage drama the operatic intensity of this shot sticks out like — a healthy thumb. The beauty seems inappropriate. However — the murder itself assumes a beauty when we consider the context. In killing his beloved the revolutionary leader is saving her from the unimaginable atrocities the beautiful “traitor” would suffer if tossed to their troops. From her servants’ fate we have had an idea of what she might endure had her lover not delivered her so … beautifully. His apparent callousness is amplified when the European political traitors get away with their treachery nonplussed.
And so finally — Marnie! Its blatant expressionism begins with the whole-screen red suffusion when the colour reminds Marnie of her suppressed bloody childhood trauma. Despite this clear license, reviewers proudly saw through Hitchcock’s “clumsy” use of back projection. “He didn’t fool me,” is the tacit gloat. As if he couldn’t had he wanted to.
Two versions are especially blatant. In one Marnie rides her Forio in ecstatic escape from her constricted reality. She loses that refuge when she rides into a stone wall — like the stone reality that arrests most fancy —and most attempts to forget past guilt. The other is the obviously false painted backdrop of the shipyard behind Marnie’s mother’s house. That falseness clearly expresses the ghostly past that haunts Marnie until — forced by her wild game hunter hubby — she confronts it and escapes its hold.
Again, the ostensible mistake points to the core of the film. Marnie has lived a rootless, ruthless life because she has buried her memory of killing the sailor who had been fighting off her mother. The mother’s repression of that memory leaves her with one crippled leg to stand on — and evermore to repel Marnie’s affection.
Marnie’s corrupt compulsions derive from her dissociation from her past. The obviously false backdrops emblematize a present life (foreground) detached from its past (background). In the image as in the psychology the past is a ghostly removal from the present — that nonetheless grips. Indeed it paralyzes, Marnie as much as her mother. Hitch’s apparent mistake is a rhetorical strategy. Remember — he cut his teeth on Caligari.
Indeed Hitchcock introduces this theme in the opening credits. They are presented as if a book, with changing pages. Normally in this trope a page is turned to reveal the new page beneath. Here credits are revealed when new pages are piled onto the old. Each new layer buries the last one. It sets up Marnie’s futile burial of her past.
The antithesis, preserving the past, appears in Mark’s first wife’s pre-Colombian art collection— doubly resonant as it is all that Mark still has of hers. It is destroyed by the storm that also shatters Marnie’s cool front. In that primitive spirit, too, Mark applies the jungle hunter’s determination to train the wild creature to trust him. Here — and in the rape scene — Connery’s Mark draws on his association with the expedient license of his James Bond.
The characters’ need to move back into the past is also imaged in their frequent movement toward the back of the scene. Hence Hitchcock’s frequent images of dramatic depth. At Strutt’s dangerous arrival at the party the camera slowly descends through the vast front hall before stopping on his close-up. This plunge fits Strutt as he threatens to expose Marnie’s recent criminality.
The film’s opening shot — a closeup of Marnie’s yellow/gold/guilty purse — pulls back to reveal a railway station in dull browns and greys. Marnie walks away along a thin dull red line into the rear of the shot. In scenes of her momentary successes her fore- and her back-grounds cohere. But only temporarily. She remains fragile — fractured by the split between her past and her present, which is so dramatically figured in the fake backdrops.
Walking into the background is a visual correlative to returning to the past. The characters go back spatially as well as temporally. Marnie and Mark walk down a long corridor at the Rutland stable. After her suicide attempt Mark rushes up and out of several shipboard corridors. Perhaps the film’s most famous scene is the long-shot that frames Marnie’s Strutt theft on the right side of the screen and the (mercifully deaf) cleaning woman on the left. This one scene is presented as two separate depths. And of course Hitchcock knows we’re now siding with the thief.
As usual Hitchcock’s cameo also serves his theme — here the depth-background conundrum. Hitchcock enters a hotel hallway on the left side, sees Marnie walking away behind — with her new, ill-gotten baggage from shopping— then he turns to look at us. As if to say: “Did you get this?” He appears as the pivot between her walking back/away and our presence. The entire film pivots on the depth of the psyche and how its shaping events can only with danger be buried. The obviously fake backdrops embody that split.
Hitchcock knew what he was doing. Especially when we think he didn’t. His “misteaks” are really ours. He’s still ahead of us. QED.
