Hitchcock’s Romantic Irony

1. David Bordwell, Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1989), 1–18. For a criticism of Bordwell’s view with which I largely agree, see Berys Gaut, “Making Sense of Films: Neoformalism and Its Limits,” Forum for Modern Language Studies 31:1 (1995): 8–23.

2. Susan Smith, Hitchcock: Suspense, Humour and Tone (London: BFI, 1999); Michael Walker, Hitchcock’s Motifs (Amsterdam: U of Amsterdam P, 2005).

3. Claude Chabrol and Eric Rohmer, Hitchcock: The First Forty-four Films (1957), trans. Stanley Hochman (New York: Ungar, 1979).

4. Richard Allen, “Hitchcock and Cavell,” in Murray Smith and Thomas E. Wartenberg, eds., Thinking Through Cinema: Film as Philosophy (Oxford and Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2006), 43–53.

1. John Belton, “Dexterity in a Void: The Formalist Esthetics of Alfred Hitchcock,” Cineaste 10.3 (Summer 1980): 9–13.

2. Friedrich Schlegel, Atheneum Fragments (A), paragraph 51, in Philosophical Fragments, trans. Peter Firchow (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1991). All subsequent citations are in the text.

3. Friedrich Schlegel, Lyceum (L), paragraph 108, in Philosophical Fragments . All subsequent citations are in the text.

4. See Steven E. Alford, Irony and the Logic of Romantic Imagination (New York: Peter Lang, 1984), 35–46.

5. Friedrich Schlegel, Ideas (I), paragraph 26 in Philosophical Fragments . All subsequent citations are in the text.

6. I draw this example from Jack Forstman, A Romantic Triangle: Schleiermacher and Early German Romanticism (Missoula: U of Montana P, 1977), 6.

7. Hans Eichner, Friedrich Schlegel (New York: Twayne, 1970), 53.

8. Friedrich Schlegel, Dialogue on Poetry, trans. Ernst Behler and Roman Struc, in Dialogue on Poetry and Other Literary Aphorisms (University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1968), 86.

9. Gary Handewerk, Ethics and Irony in Narrative: From Schlegel to Lacan (New Haven: Yale UP, 1985), 44.

10. See Alfred Edwin Lussky, Tieck’s Romantic Irony (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1932), 69.

11. D. C. Muecke, The Compass of Irony (London: Methuen, 1969), 164–77.

12. Lilian Furst, Fictions of Romantic Irony (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1984), 230.

13. Anne Mellor, English Romantic Irony (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1989), 18; Clyde de L. Ryals, A World of Possibilities: Romantic Irony in Victorian Literature (Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1990), 7–8.

14. Raymond Immerwahr, “The Subjectivity or Objectivity of Friedrich Schlegel’s Poetic Irony,” Germanic Review 26 (1951): 190–91.

15. John Francis Fetzer, “Romantic Irony,” in Gerhart Hoffmeister, ed., European Romanticism: Literary Cross-Currents, Modes, and Models (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1990), 22. This typology is close to one developed by Allen Wilde, who makes a three-fold distinction between realist, modern, and postmodern irony using the terms “mediate,” “disjunctive,” and “suspensive irony,” in Horizons of Assent: Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Ironic Imagination (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1981), 9–10.

16. Solger, quoted in Ernst Behler, “The Theory of Irony in German Romanticism,” in Frederick Garber, ed., Romantic Irony (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1988), 71.

17. Gurewitch, quoted in Furst, Fictions of Romantic Irony, 226.

18. For a detailed analysis of kissing in Hitchcock, see Sidney Gottlieb, “Hitchcock and the Art of the Kiss: A Preliminary Survey,” in Sidney Gottlieb and Christopher Brookhouse, eds., Framing Hitchcock: Selected Essays from the Hitchcock Annual (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2002), 132–36.

19. He writes that Hitchcock’s aestheticism “instead of being ‘decadent,’ amoral and idly sham-aristocratic, is moral, robust and ‘democratic.’” Raymond Durgnat, A Long Hard Look at “Psycho” (London: BFI, 2002), 3.

20. François Truffaut (with Helen Scott), Hitchcock, rev. ed. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984), 73.

21. Belton, “Dexterity in a Void,” 10.

22. See V. I. Pudovkin, Film Technique and Film Acting, trans. and ed. by Ivor Montagu (New York: Grove Press, 1970), 168.

23. For further discussion of this issue see Richard Allen, “The Lodger and the Origins of Hitchcock’s Aesthetic,” Hitchcock Annual (2001–2002): 55.

24. Hitchcock makes explicit reference to Pudovkin’s account of the Kuleshov experiment in the course of discussing Rear Window in his interview with François Truffaut (see Truffaut, Hitchcock, 214–16); see also Hitchcock’s discussion of “pure cinema” in “On Style: An Interview with Cinema Magazine,” originally published in Cinema 1.5 (August-September 1963) and reprinted in Sidney Gottlieb, ed., Hitchcock on Hitchcock (Berkeley: U of California P, 1995), 288–89. The unreliability of reminiscences is noted by William Simon apropos of Orson Welles in a review of Irving Singer’s Three Philosophical Filmmakers, Hitchcock Annual (2004–2005): 21.

25. Lesley Brill, The Hitchcock Romance: Love and Irony in Hitchcock’s Films (Princeton: N.J.: Princeton UP, 1988), 56.

26. Robin Wood, Hitchcock’s Films Revisited, 2d ed. (New York: Columbia UP, 2002), 84.

27. James Naremore, “Hitchcock and Humor,” in Richard Allen and Sam Ishii-Gonzales, eds., Hitchcock: Past and Future (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 22–36; Susan Smith, Hitchcock: Suspense, Humour and Tone (London: BFI, 1999), 49–75.

28. Bill Krohn, “Suspicion (Ambivalence),” Hitchcock Annual (2002–2003): 79–83.

29. Most famously Laura Mulvey in her 1975 essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” reprinted in Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989), 14–26.

30. Truffaut, Hitchcock, 261–62.

31. This is part of sixteen sequences from Hitchcock’s home movie collection filed as item number 2990–1 in the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, Los Angeles, California.

32. See Robert Stam and Roberta Pearson, “Rear Window and the Critique of Reflexivity,” in Marshall Deutelbaum and Leland Poague, eds., A Hitchcock Reader (Ames: Iowa State UP, 1986), 193–206. Stam and Pearson provide a fine summary of the self-reflexive aspects of Rear Window, but assuming an identity between the film spectator and the rear window voyeur, they fail to conceptualize how Rear Window affords the spectator a critical distance upon the activity of voyeurism in the very act of invoking it.

33. Michael Walker, Hitchcock’s Motifs (Amsterdam: U of Amsterdam P, 2005), 88.

34. Smith, Hitchcock: Suspense, Humour and Tone, 70, 102.

35. Raymond Bellour, The Analysis of Film (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2001), 228.

36. Walker, Hitchcock’s Motifs, 91.

37. John Fawell, Hitchcock’s “Rear Window”: The Well-Made Film (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2001), 99–101.

38. Smith, Hitchcock: Suspense, Humour and Tone, 3.

39. See William Rothman, Hitchcock: The Murderous Gaze (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1982), 65.

40. Paula Marantz Cohen, Alfred Hitchcock: The Legacy of Victorianism (Lexington: U of Kentucky P, 1995), 67–85.

41. Walker, Hitchcock’s Motifs, 95–96.

42. Tom Cohen, Hitchcock’s Cryptonymies, vol. 1 (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2005), 26. Perhaps, following an assumption made in an editorial remark in the Truffaut interview book, Cohen claims to spot Hitchcock in the crowd that pursues the Avenger at the denouement of the film, though I like others am skeptical, for this figure is too old to match Hitchcock’s profile. It is unfortunately characteristic of Cohen’s chapter, one that is key to the argument of his book, that he builds an interpretation of Hitchcock’s two “cameos” on the basis of one role that is not a cameo, in the sense that his later roles were (and why would Hitchcock lie about this?), and on a later alleged cameo that is arguably not Hitchcock at all.

43. For a detailed analysis of this sequence, see Charles Barr, English Hitchcock (Moffat, U.K.: Cameron and Hollis, 1999), 36–38.

44. Barr, English Hitchcock, 41.

45 . Brill, The Hitchcock Romance, 20. Brill draws attention to the constitutive relationship between romance and artifice in Hitchcock’s work and rightly singles out the concluding sequence of North by Northwest to illustrate this. However, Brill believes that the role of irony in Hitchcock’s work has been overstated, and seeks to privilege the narrative of romantic renewal not as a form of irony in Hitchcock’s work but as an antidote to it. In Brill’s analysis of North by Northwest, irony along with the human perversity that it expresses is largely absent. However, in my analysis, irony with its source in human perversity is not an optional feature of Hitchcock’s narratives of romantic renewal but constitutive of their form.

46. Truffaut, Hitchcock, 47.

47. As Patrick McGilligan reports it: “A naughty girl herself, Kelly juggled two or three affairs during the filming of Dial M for Murder, much to the director’s delight. ‘That’s Gryce!’ [sic] Hitchcock was wont to exclaim privately. ‘She fucked everyone! Why, she even fucked little Freddie, the writer!’” McGilligan, Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), 471.

48. Sarah Berry, “‘She’s Too Everything ’: Marriage and Masquerade in Rear Window and To Catch a Thief,” Hitchcock Annual (2001–2002): 95–96.

49. I thank Bill Paul for pointing this out to me.

50. Cohen, Alfred Hitchcock: The Legacy of Victorianism, 99–113.

51. Brill, The Hitchcock Romance, 219.

1. See Patrick McGilligan, Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light (New York: Harper Collins, 2003), 276.

2. Two significant exceptions are Susan Smith’s Hitchcock: Suspense, Humor and Tone (London: BFI, 1999); and Christopher Morris, The Hanging Figure: On Suspense and the Films of Alfred Hitchcock (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2002).

3. Ian Cameron, “Hitchcock and the Mechanics of Suspense 1,” Movie 3 (October 1962): 6.

4. Noël Carroll, “Toward a Theory of Film Suspense,” in Theorizing the Moving Image (New York: Cambridge UP, 1996), 101. Carroll restates the argument of this essay in more formalized language in “The Paradox of Suspense,” in Peter Vorderer and Hans J. Wulff, eds., Supsense: Conceptualizations, Theoretical Analyses, and Empirical Explanations (Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1996), 71–92.

5. Carroll, Theorizing the Moving Image, 106–107.

6. Alfred Hitchcock, “Lecture at Columbia University (1939),” in Sidney Gottlieb, ed., Hitchcock on Hitchcock (Berkeley: U of California P, 1995), 272.

7. Gottlieb, ed., Hitchcock on Hitchcock, 272–73.

8. I borrow the term “shared suspense” from Susan Smith. See Smith, Hitchcock: Suspense, Humour and Tone, 20–22.

9. François Truffaut (with Helen Scott), Hitchcock, rev. ed. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984), 73 (emphasis in original).

10. Smith, Hitchcock: Suspense, Humour and Tone, 18–20.

11. Truffaut, Hitchcock, 73. Susan Smith’s excellent discussion of suspense in Hitchcock is marred by her failure to reference sources other than the Truffaut interviews.

12. Meir Sternberg, Expositional Modes and Temporal Ordering (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978), 65.

13. Raymond Durgnat, A Long Hard Look at “Psycho” (London: BFI, 2002), 169.

14. See Steven Schneider, “Maufacturing Horror in Hitchcock’s Psycho,” Cine-Action 50 (October 1999): 71.

15. See Deborah Knight and George McKnight, “Suspense and Its Master,” in Richard Allen and Sam Ishii-Gonzales, eds., Alfred Hitchcock: Centenary Essays (London: BFI, 1999), 108. For Hitchcock’s comments on suspense and romance, see Gottlieb, ed., Hitchcock on Hitchcock, 72.

16. One might be reminded of the words of the old English music hall song: “My old man said, ‘Follow the van, don’t dillydally on the way!’”

17. Smith, Hitchcock: Suspense, Humor and Tone, 19.

18. Truffaut, Hitchcock, 109.

19. Cameron writes of the film: “Hitchcock builds up his suspense in sections, which depend on various complications. At times we almost forget the predicament of the little boy.” “Hitchcock and the Mechanics of Suspense 1,” 5.

20. Truffaut, Hitchcock, 272.

21. Truffaut, Hitchcock, 73.

22. Carroll, Theorizing the Moving Image, 122.

23. Carroll, “The Paradox of Suspense,” 79.

24. I thank Sid Gottlieb for this suggestion.

25. Victor Perkins, Film as Film (Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin, 1972), 89–90.

26. Sigmund Freud, “Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious” (1905), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (hereafter, SE), trans. James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud, vol. 8 (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1953–1974), 229.

27. Sigmund Freud, “Humour” (1927), in SE 21:162.

28. For detailed discussion, see Smith, Hitchcock: Suspense, Humour and Tone, 50–54.

29. James Naremore, “Hitchcock and Humour,” in Richard Allen and Sam Ishii-Gonzales, eds., Hitchcock: Past and Future (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 27.

30. Thomas M. Bauso, “Rope: Hitchcock’s Unkindest Cut,” in Walter Raubicheck and Walter Srebnick, eds., Hitchcock’s Rereleased Films: From “Vertigo” to “Rope” (Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State UP, 1991), 233.

31. Smith, Hitchcock: Suspense, Humour and Tone, 57–71.

32. Truffaut, Hitchcock, 127.

33. André Bazin, “Hitchcock vs. Hitchcock,” in Albert J. LaValley, ed., Focus on Hitchcock (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1972), 65.

34. Truffaut, Hitchcock, 72.

35. See Gaylyn Studlar, In the Realm of Pleasure: Von Sternberg, Dietrich, and the Masochistic Aesthetic (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1988). Unfortunately, Studlar’s argument about von Sternberg’s aesthetic takes place in the context of constructing a theory that the film spectator him/herself is a masochist, which is as absurd as the theories of the sadistic spectator that Studlar is arguing against.

36. Michael Walker notes that while women in Hitchcock may eavesdrop, they are not cast as voyeurs. See Walker, Hitchcock’s Motifs (Amsterdam: U of Amsterdam P, 2005), 164–70.

37. The female gaze in Rebecca is noted by John Orr in Hitchcock and Twentieth Century Cinema (London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2005), 84–88. I have also elaborated upon it in detail in “Daphne du Maurier and Alfred Hitchcock,” in Robert Stam and Alessandra Raengo, eds., A Companion to Literature and Film (New York: Blackwell, 2004), 298–325.

1. Herbert Brean, “A Case of Identity,” Life (June 29, 1953), 97–100, 102, 104. The story was first dramatized as “A Case of Mistaken Identity” on Robert Montgomery Presents, broadcast on January 11, 1954. Marshall Deutelbaum notes that there are similarities between the Hitchcock and Montgomery versions that suggest Hitchcock’s familiarity with the earlier adaptation. See “Finding the Right Man in The Wrong Man,” in Marshall Deutelbaum and Leland Poague, eds., The Hitchcock Reader (Ames, Iowa: Iowa State UP, 1986), 209.

2. Brean, “A Case of Identity,” 102.

3. This is noted by David Sterritt in The Films of Alfred Hitchcock (New York: Cambridge UP, 1993), 76–77.

4. See Thomas Leitch, “The Outer Circle: Hitchcock on Television,” in Richard Allen and Sam Ishii-Gonzales, eds., Alfred Hitchcock: Centenary Essays (London: BFI, 1999), 59–71.

5. François Truffaut (with Helen Scott), Hitchcock, rev. ed. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984), 103.

6. The film bears some affinities in this respect to I Confess (1953), in which a celibate priest, played by Montgomery Clift, is wrongfully accused of the crime of murder. He cannot clear his name even though he knows who did the murder, because this knowledge was communicated to him in the secrecy of the confessional. Again, I Confess is a “wrong man” story that is preoccupied with the consequences of wrongful accusation and imprisonment, though here the “coercion” is one that is bred by conscience.

7. Aristotle, Poetics, trans. by S. H. Butcher (New York: Hill and Wang, 1961), 11:2.

8. Terence Cave, Recognitions: A Study in Poetics (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1988), 250.

9. Cave, Recognitions, 251.

10. See Thomas Elsaesser, “The Dandy in Hitchcock,” in Allen and Ishii-Gonzales, eds., Alfred Hitchcock: Centenary Essays, 3–13.

11. See, for example, Donald Spoto, The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock (New York: Da Capo Press, 1999), 16.

12. See Alfred Hitchcock, “Rear Window,” in Albert J. LaValley, ed., Focus on Hitchcock (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1972), 43–44.

13. Christopher Morris, The Hanging Figure: On Suspense and the Films of Alfred Hitchcock (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2002), 40–46.

14. Thornhill’s name is also an in-joke on the name of David O. Selznick, whose “O” also stood for nothing. He added it to his name to give it the right sounding ring.

15. I thank Rahul Hamid for the idea of “secular Catholicism” in Hitchcock in an unpublished paper entitled “Hitchcock as a Catholic Director.”

16. I shall defer discussion of the less visible but extremely important figure of the female dandy in Hitchcock until chapter 4.

17. Greenmantle was a book that Hitchcock expressed interest in filming, and he began development of a project to adapt Buchan’s The Three Hostages. See Sidney Gottlieb, “Unknown Hitchcock: The Unrealized Projects,” in Richard Allen and Sam Ishii-Gonzales, eds., Hitchcock: Past and Future (London: Routledge, 2004), 85–106.

18. Influential analysis of female subjectivity in Hitchcock from this period are offered by Laura Mulvey in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” reprinted in Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989); by Raymond Bellour in his essays on Hitchcock collected in The Analysis of Film (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2001); and by Tania Modleski in The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory (New York: Routledge, 1989).

19. See Patrice Petro, “Rematerializing the Vanishing ‘Lady’”: Feminism, Hitchcock, and Interpretation,” in Deutelbaum and Poague, eds., A Hitchcock Reader, 122–33.

20. See Michael Walker, “The Stolen Raincoat and the Bloodstained Dress: Young and Innocent and Stage Fright,” in Allen and Ishii-Gonzales, eds., Alfred Hitchcock: Centenary Essays, 187–204.

21. See Phil Hansen, “The Misogynist at Rest: Women in Hitchcock’s Lifeboat,” Hitchcock Annual (1996–1997): 110–16.

22. On the transformation of James Stewart’s persona, see Amy Lawrence, “American Shame: Rope, James Stewart, and the Postwar Crisis in Masculinity,” in Jonathan Freedman and Richard Millington, eds., Hitchcock’s America (New York: Oxford UP, 1999), 55–76.

23. For a discussion of female knowledge and agency in Rear Window, see Elise Lemaire, “Voyeurism and the Postwar Crisis in Masculinity,” in John Belton, ed., Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rear Window” (New York: Cambridge UP, 2000), 57–90.

24. Lesley Brill, The Hitchcock Romance: Love and Irony in Hitchcock’s Films (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1988), 279.

25. William Rothman, Hitchcock: The Murderous Gaze (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1982), 53.

26. It should be noted that while the object of investigation by the women in these films is a brooding, incipiently villainous male character, sometimes the object of investigation by a woman is herself a woman, a “wrong woman,” who is in some way associated with the male villain, as in Rebecca, Stage Fright, and, in a minor way, Vertigo, where the character of Midge Wood plays the role of the female investigator.

27. Mark Crispin Miller, “Hitchcock’s Suspicions and Suspicion,” in Boxed In: The Culture of TV (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1988), 241–78.

28. For the affirmative interpretation, see Maurice Yacower, Hitchcock’s British Films (Hamdon, Conn..: Archon Books, 1977), 126; for an ironic interpretation see Rothman, Hitchcock: The Murderous Gaze, 99. For a detailed critical discussion of this film, see Richard Allen, “Sir John and the Half-Caste: Identity and Representation in Hitchcock’s Murder!,” Hitchcock Annual 13 (2004–2005): 92–126.

29. Allan Lloyd Smith provides a valuable psychoanalytically oriented analysis of the mother’s secret in “Marnie, the Dead Mother, and the Phantom,” Hitchcock Annual (2002–2003): 164–80.

30. Why does Judy put on the necklace? We might surmise that she has finally capitulated entirely to Scottie’s madness or we might, equally, impute to her an intention, perhaps an unacknowledged or unconscious one, that Scottie will recognize who she really is.

31. I thank Dana Polan for drawing my attention to the importance of these shots.

32. This is noted by Peter Swaab, in “Hitchcock’s Homophobia? The Case of Murder!,” Perversions 4 (Spring 1995): 21.

33. Rothman, Hitchcock: The Murderous Gaze, 53.

1. Walter Pater, The Renaissance (Glasgow: Collins, 1961), 210–11.

2. Pater, The Renaissance, 208.

4. Kenneth Clarke, “Introduction” to Walter Pater, Renaissance, 11.

5. Pater, The Renaissance, 128.

6. See Alfred Hitchcock, “On Style: An Interview with Cinema,” in Sidney Gottlieb, ed., Hitchcock on Hitchcock (Berkeley: U of California P, 1995), 285–302.

7. Alan Sinfield, The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde, and the Queer Moment (New York: Columbia UP, 1995), 98.

8. Ellen Moers, The Dandy: Brummell to Beerbohm (New York: Viking, 1960), 174.

9. This distinction between Apollonian and Dionysian form is taken from Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, in Raymond Geuss and Ronald Spiers, eds., The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, trans. by Ronald Spiers (New York: Cambridge UP, 1999), 1–116. Nietzsche’s book is itself a source of aestheticist ideas, and it is a work that mediates romantic irony and aestheticism. Furthermore, Nietzsche’s concept of the Übermensch or superman who ranged beyond the framework of orthodox morality was certainly au courant in the 1920s and permeates the Hannay novels of Buchan, and through Buchan informs Hitchcock’s characterization of the dandy. The relationship between Nietzsche’s ideas, as filtered through their historical context, and Hitchcock’s films, deserves more extended treatment.

10. In Poe’s tale the well-being of the woman whose portrait is being painted is neglected by the painter, who is obsessed with completing his portrait of her. However, Poe’s moral is clearly the triumph of artistic form over life itself. It is the picture itself that kills the thing that it represents.

11. Peter Conrad, The Hitchcock Murders (London: Faber and Faber), 67.

12. For a detailed discussion of Wilde’s influence on Hitchcock, see Ken Mogg, “Alfred Hitchcock: Master of Paradox,” at www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/05/hitchcock.html.

13. Sigmund Freud, “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria” (1905), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (hereafter, SE), trans. James Strachey, vol. 7 (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1953–1974), 50.

14. Chasseguet-Smirgel’s careful reading of Freud on perversion has been largely ignored by humanities scholars. Most salient, in this context, is Creativity and Perversion (New York: Norton, 1984). See also Chasseguet-Smirgel, The Ego Ideal: A Psychoanalytic Essay on the Malady of the Ideal (New York: Norton, 1985). By invoking Chasseguet-Smirgel as a Freudian, I mean to emphasize the fact that she elaborates a logic implicit in Freud’s views, and therefore one that should be understood and assessed historically, alongside and in relation to Wilde’s elaboration of the same themes.

15. See Sigmund Freud, “On Narcissism” (1914), in SE 14:73–104. Freud, as far as I am aware, does not discuss the figure of the dandy explicitly.

16. Thomas Elsaesser, “The Dandy in Hitchcock,” in Richard Allen and Sam Ishii-Gonzales, eds., Alfred Hitchcock: Centenary Essays (London: BFI, 1999), 10–11. Elsaesser’s essay directly inspired the argument of this section.

17. Martin Green, Children of the Sun (New York: Basic Books, 1976), 14.

18. Green, Children of the Sun, 12.

19. On the Byron legend, see Fiona McCarthy, Byron: Life and Legend (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2002), 525–74

20. François Truffaut (with Helen Scott), Hitchcock, rev. ed. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984), 82.

21. I explore the influence of du Maurier on Hitchcock in full in Richard Allen, “Daphne du Maurier and Alfred Hitchcock,” in Robert Stam and Alessandra Raengo, eds., A Companion to Literature and Film (New York: Blackwell, 2004), 298–325.

22. See Robin Wood, Hitchcock’s Films Revisited, 2d ed. (New York: Columbia UP, 2002), 336–57.

23. This is the profound weakness of Robert Corber’s nonetheless informative book, In the Name of National Security: Hitchcock, Homophobia, and the Political Construction of Gender in Postwar America (Durham, N.C.: Duke UP, 1993). Erroneously, to my mind, Corber casts Hitchcock as a ventriloquist of homophobic Cold War ideology.

24. Examples of such actors include Ivor Novello (The Lodger); Farley Granger (who plays a homosexual in Rope and the ultra-straight Guy in Strangers on a Train); Montgomery Clift (I Confess), who Hitchcock also wanted in Rope; Anthony Perkins (Psycho); and even Cary Grant himself, who was rumored to be homosexual.

25. For a discussion of Dietrich’s role in relation to lesbian desire, see Patricia White, “Hitchcock and Hom(m)osexuality,” in Richard Allen and Sam Ishii-Gonzales, eds., Hitchcock: Past and Future (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 221.

26. Raymond Durgnat, The Strange Case of Alfred Hitchcock (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1978), 61.

27. Elsaesser, “The Dandy in Hitchcock,” 5. However, it is also worth remembering that in the early years in England, Hitchcock would entertain reporters in dressing gown and silk pajamas, rather in the manner of Noël Coward. See Leonard Leff, Hitchcock and Selznick: The Rich and Strange Collaboration of Alfred Hitchcock and David O. Selznick in Hollywood (Berkeley: U of California P, 1987), 13.

28. See James Eli Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Masculinity (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell UP, 1995), 195.

29. See Thomas Leitch, “The Outer Circle: Hitchcock on Television,” in Allen and Ishii-Gonzales, eds., Alfred Hitchcock: Centenary Essays, 65–69.

30. Quoted by John Russell Taylor in the E! Channel documentary True Hollywood Stories: Alfred Hitchcock (1999). I thank Ken Mogg for this reference.

31. David Freeman, who worked with Hitchcock on his last script, reports that one day Hitchcock confessed to him, “You know, David, that Alma and I do not have relations. Haven’t for years” (The Last Days of Alfred Hitchcock [New York: Overlook Press, 1999], 29). Patrick McGilligan states categorically that Hitchcock was impotent, citing among other things a joke by Hitchcock that he had only ever had sex once, to conceive Pat; a comment by Marnie’s writer and close family friend Jay Presson Allen that Hitchcock was “functionally impotent”; and a comment in response to Truffaut’s observation about the intimacy and passion of his sex scenes: “I’m a celibate, you know. I’m not against it, but I just don’t think about it very much” (Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light [New York: HarperCollins, 2003], 177).

32. John Russell Taylor reports that during the shooting of The Blackguard in German, director Graham Cutts, who was accompanied by his wife, was having an affair. This led to absences from the set and de facto directorial decision-making by Hitchcock. Taylor, Hitch: The Life and Times of Alfred Hitchcock (New York: Da Capo, 1996), 57.

33. The shot from Blackmail is an early attempt on Hitchcock’s part to evoke the sense of psychological dislocation later realized more completely in the combined tracking and zoom point-of-view shot that evokes Scottie Ferguson’s vertigo in Vertigo.

34. Tania Modleski, The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory (New York: Routledge, 1989), 24.

35. See Sabrina Barton, “Hitchcock’s Hands,” in Sidney Gottlieb and Christopher Brookhouse, eds., Framing Hitchcock: Selected Essays from the Hitchcock Annual (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2002), 174–75.

36. See Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Lacan to Popular Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), 88–97.

37. I discuss the “Hitchcockian Blot” in general, and this sequence in particular, in more detail, in chapters 5 and 6.

38. Durgnat, The Strange Case of Alfred Hitchcock, 203.

39. Ken Mogg notes the cannibalism motif and suggests a possible source for this in Huysman’s novel Against Nature. See “Alfred Hitchcock: Master of Paradox” (cited in note 12).

40. Arthur Laurents, Original Story by Arthur Laurents (New York: Applause Books, 2000), 127. See also his comments in Walter Srebnick, ed., “Working with Hitchcock: A Screenwriter’s Forum with Evan Hunter, Arthur Laurents, and Joe Stefano,” Hitchcock Annual (2001–2002): 3.

41. I have not been able to find written corroboration of this, but more than one respondent from rural areas in the United States has confirmed this practice.

42. D. A. Miller, “Anal Rope,” Representations 32 (Fall 1990): 130.

43. One character in Jamaica Inn, a bawdy smuggler, remarks that his public hanging “with the women watching” will “make ’em sit up.” See Conrad, The Hitchcock Murders, 261.

44. See Amy Lawrence, “American Shame: Rope, James Stewart, and the Crisis in Postwar Masculinity,” in Jonathan Freedman and Richard Millington, eds., Hitchcock’s America (New York: Oxford UP, 1999), 67.

45. Laurents, Original Story, 131.

46. Stewart, quoted in Charlotte Chandler, It’s Only a Movie: Alfred Hitchcock, A Personal Biography (New York: Applause Books, 2005), 169.

47. There are three instances of romantic encounters on a train in Hitchcock’s work in addition to Strangers on a Train: The 39 Steps, Suspicion, and North by Northwest. In The Lady Vanishes, the couple is formed on the train although they meet before boarding.

48. Granger, quoted in Chandler, It’s Only a Movie, 196.

49. I thank Bill Paul for drawing my attention to the importance of class envy and for his other comments on this film.

50. Federico Windhausen provides a shot-by-shot breakdown of this sequence in “Hitchcock and the Found Footage Installation: Müller and Girardet’s The Phoenix Tapes,” Hitchcock Annual (2003–2004): 210–12. I thank him for introducing me to this work.

51. Theodore Price, Hitchcock and Homosexuality (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1992), 367–80. Price reads homosexuality everywhere in Hitchcock’s work, including Torn Curtain, even in places where it is not to be found. However, he does not discuss these three suspense sequences.

52. Truffaut, Hitchcock, 309.

53. Donald Spoto, The Dark Side of Genius (New York: Da Capo Press, 1999), 488.

54. See Robert Samuels, Hitchcock’s Bi-textuality: Lacan, Feminisms, and Queer Theory (Albany: State UP of New York, 1998), 109–21, for an interpretation of Rear Window along “bi-textual” lines. For an earlier, baroque elaboration on the same theme, see Lee Edelman, “Rear Window’s Glasshole,” in Ellis Hanson, ed., Out Takes: Essays on Queer Theory and Film (Durham, N.C.: Duke UP, 1999), 72–96. I earlier noted the range of homosexual actors that Hitchcock worked with. Fittingly, perhaps the least obvious of these is Raymond Burr himself.

55. See Lee Edelman, “Piss Elegant: Freud, Hitchcock, and the Micturating Penis,” GLQ 2.1–2 (1995): 149–77.

56. Truffaut, Hitchcock, 262.

57. This structure of displaced looking is in fact invoked near the beginning of Rear Window. L. B. Jefferies looks across the courtyard at a helicopter buzzing the rooftops where two women are bathing topless, but they are concealed from Jefferies’ gaze.

58. Truffaut, Hitchcock, 195.

59. Schiller, quoted in Leff, Hitchcock and Selznick, 63.

60. Rhona Berenstein, “‘I’m Not the Sort of Person Men Marry’: Monsters, Queers, and Hitchcock’s Rebecca,” in Cory K. Creekmur and Alexander Doty, eds., Out in Culture: Gay, Lesbian, and Queer Essays on Popular Culture (Durham, N.C.: Duke UP, 1995), 254.

61. Thanks to Ira Bhaskar for drawing my attention to this spiral pattern.

62. For a full analysis of the shower scene, see Philip Skerry, The Shower Scene in Hitchcock’s “Psycho”: Creating Cinematic Suspense and Terror (New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 2005), 281–332.

63. See Lee Edelman, “Hitchcock’s Future,” in Allen and Ishii-Gonzales, eds., Alfred Hitchcock: Centenary Essays, 239–62.

64. See Žižek, Looking Awry, 105–106. As Evan Hunter put it to me, somewhat ruefully, from a writer’s point of view: “Hitchcock threw birds at my script!

1. Lotte Eisner, The Haunted Screen (Berkeley: U of California P, 1969), 113

2. Donald Spoto, The Dark Side of Genius (New York: Da Capo Press, 1999), 68.

3. Thomas Elsaesser, Weimar Cinema and After: Germany’s Historical Imaginary (New York: Routledge, 2000), 77.

4. Bettina Rosenblatt, “Doubts and Doubles: The German Connection,” in Richard Allen and Sam Ishii-Gonzales, eds., Hitchcock: Past and Future (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 44.

5. Rosenblatt, “Doubts and Doubles,” 38

6. William Rothman, Hitchcock: The Murderous Gaze (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1982), 84.

7. Evan Hunter’s script of Marnie contains a scene in a cinema taken from the novel that focuses on a theft, but although much of his script seemed to make it into Jay Presson Allen’s final screenplay for the film, this scene was left out.

8. Susan Smith provides a detailed analysis of this sequence in Hitchcock: Suspense, Humor and Tone (London: BFI, 1999), 11–15.

9. John D. Barlow, German Expressionist Film (Boston: Twayne. 1982), 136–37.

10. Descartes writes, “When looking from a window and saying I see men who pass in the street, I really do not see them, but infer that what I see is men … and yet what do I see from the window but hats and coats which may cover automatic machines.” The Philosophical Works of Descartes, trans. Elizabeth Haldane and G. R. T. Ross (New York: Cambridge UP, 1931), 155.

11. Frances Guerin, A Culture of Light: Cinema and Technology in 1920sGermany (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2005), 163.

12. Sidney Gottlieb, “Early Hitchcock: The German Influence,” in Sidney Gottlieb and Christopher Brookhouse, eds., Framing Hitchcock (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2002), 44.

13. Elizabeth Weis, The Silent Scream (Rutherford, N.J.: Farleigh Dickinson UP, 1982), 45

14. See Charles Barr, English Hitchcock (Moffat, U.K.: Cameron and Hollis, 1999), 78–81.

15. Thomas Elsaesser notes the role of nature in Murnau’s work, which he traces to the influence of what he calls the “naturalist” cinema of Scandinavian directors in Weimar Cinema and After, 228. Bettina Rosenblatt discusses the influence of Tieck on Murnau in “Doubts and Doubles: The German Connection,” 47.

16. Ken Mogg suggests a wider salience of Schopenhauer’s romantic philosophy for Hitchcock’s work. See his MacGuffin webpage at www.labyrinth.net.au/~muffin.

17. See James McLaughlin, “All in the Family: Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt,” in Marshall Deutelbaum and Leland Poague, eds., A Hitchcock Reader (Ames: Iowa State UP, 1986), 143.

18. My understanding of the film draws on Lesley Brill, The Hitchcock Romance (Princeton, N.J: Princeton UP, 1988), 283–91.

19. John Orr, Hitchcock and Twentieth Century Cinema (London: Wallflower Press, 2005), 58.

20. One explanation of the strangeness of this shot is that it is one of the many places where Hitchcock invokes film history. In this case it is Edwin Porter’s film The Great Train Robbery (1903), in which an extradiegetic gun shot toward the audience by one of the characters was used as a framing device in the exhibition of the film.

21. Rothman, Hitchcock: The Murderous Gaze, 75.

22. For a detailed study of patterns and alternation in Hitchcock’s work, see Raymond Bellour’s The Analysis of Film (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2001). For a critical discussion of Bellour’s work on Hitchcock, see Richard Allen, “Hitchcock After Bellour,” Hitchcock Annual (2002–2003): 117–48.

23. Rothman, Hitchcock: The Murderous Gaze, 279.

24. Sam Ishii-Gonzales, “An Analysis of the Parlor Scene in Psycho x2,” Hitchcock Annual (2001–2002): 149–54.

25. Sabrina Barton “‘Criss Cross’: Paranoia and Projection in Strangers on a Train,” in Cory K. Creekmur and Alexander Doty, eds., Out in Culture (Durham, N.C.: Duke UP, 1995), 221.

26. Barton “‘Criss Cross,’” 222.

27. Lotte Eisner describes this film in Murnau (Berkeley: U of California P, 1973), 28–33; Theodore Price speculates on its influence upon Hitchcock in Hitchcock and Homosexuality (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1992), 322. For further discussion of the Janus face in Hitchcock, see Brigitte Peucker, “The Cut of Representation: Painting and Sculpture in Hitchcock,” in Richard Allen and Sam Ishii-Gonzales, eds., Alfred Hitchcock: Centenary Essays (London: BFI, 1999), 146–48.

28. See Slavoj Žižek, “Vertigo: The Drama of a Deceived Platonist,” Hitchcock Annual 12 (2003–2004): 69–70.

29. Dennis Zirnite, “Hitchcock on the Level: The Heights of Spatial Tension,” Film Criticism 10.3 (Spring 1986): 4. For further discussion of Hitchcock’s staircases, see Michael Walker, Hitchcock’s Motifs (Amsterdam: U of Amsterdam P, 2005), 350–72.

30. Rothman, Hitchcock: The Murderous Gaze, 33.

31. See Robert Kolker, “The Man Who Knew More Than Too Much,” in The “Psycho” Casebook (New York: Oxford UP, 2004), 205–255.

32. See, for example, Robin Wood, Hitchcock’s Films Revisited, 2d ed. (New York: Columbia UP, 2002), 128; and Brill, The Hitchcock Romance, 205–206.

33. Thanks to Sid Gottlieb for drawing my attention to this example.

34. Ever since Lotte Eisner’s The Haunted Screen, Spring-Heeled Jack has been identified with Jack the Ripper. The mistake is repeated by John Barlow in German Expressionist Film and Thomas Elsaesser in Weimar Cinema and After. Hitchcock scholar Theodore Price sees it as a direct source for Hitchcock’s interest in the Jack the Ripper myth in Hitchcock and Homosexuality, and I repeat the mistake in my article “The Lodger and the Origins of Hitchcock’s Aesthetic,” in Hitchcock Annual (2001–2002): 53. For the record, Spring-Heeled Jack is not Jack the Ripper although he may have been an inspiration for Jack the Ripper’s name. Spring-Heeled Jack, who first appeared in 1837, leaped out from hedgerows or from behind walls on unsuspecting victims, usually young women. Spring-Heeled Jack dressed up in a tight-fitting costume (which, according to one victim, “felt like oilskin”), a large helmet, and a black clock with a W inscribed on the back. He “breathed” a blue flame on his victims and scratched with his clawlike fingers at their faces and clothes. It is thought that the original Spring-Heeled Jack was an Irish nobleman, the Marquis of Watford, who was renowned for his sadistic practical jokes and scorn for women. “Sightings” of Jack continued as late as 1904 and the costume of the Batman was probably inspired by him. See Peter Haining, The Legend and Bizarre Crimes of Spring-Heeled Jack (London: Muller, 1977).

35. For further discussion of the carnivalesque in The Ring and Strangers on a Train, see Thomas Hennelly, Jr., “Alfred Hitchcock’s Carnival,” Hitchcock Annual 13 (2004–2005): 154–78.

36. The lyrics for “The Band Played On” are: “Casey would waltz with the strawberry blonde, and the band played on/He’d glide ’cross the floor with the girl he adored, and the band played on/His brain was so loaded he nearly exploded, the poor girl would shake with alarm/He’d ne’er leave the girl with the strawberry curls, and the band played on.” (Thank you, Ken Mogg.)

37. See Barr, English Hitchcock, 129.

38. I thank Bill Paul for reminding me of this film.

39. There is further complex avian imagery in the film less immediately salient to Hitchcock. When the Professor is cuckolded, he is equated with a chicken and characterized as “birdbrained.”

1. See the quote from Bazin’s reflections upon interviewing Hitchcock that opens this book, from “Hitchcock Versus Hitchcock,” in Albert J. LaValley, ed.. Focus on Hitchcock (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1972), 69. There is no doubt, in this context, that Hitchcock would have fully embraced digital technology and digital effects, for they would have allowed him to fully construct the narrative world of a film from his desk, not only in terms of the visual orchestration of the surface of the film but also in terms of the kind of navigation and penetration of space that he explores in Vertigo.

2. This was first pointed out by Ian Cameron in “Hitchcock 2: Suspense and Meaning,” Movie 6 (January 1963): 9.

3. Natalie Kalmus, “Color Consciousness,” in Angela Dalle Vacche and Brian Price, eds., Color: The Film Reader (New York: Routledge, 2006), 24. This article is reprinted from the Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers 25.1 (1935): 139–47.

4. Kalmus, “Color Consciousness,” 26.

5. Alfred Hitchcock, “Direction,” in Sidney Gottlieb, ed., Hitchcock on Hitchcock (Berkeley: U of California P, 1995), 258. Originally published in Charles Davy, ed., Footnotes to the Film (New York: Oxford UP, 1937), 3–15.

6. Alfred Hitchcock, “Interview with Charles Thomas Samuels” (1972), in Sidney Gottlieb, ed., Alfred Hitchcock: Interviews (Jackson: U of Mississippi P, 2003), 136.

7. Kalmus, “Color Consciousness,” 28.

8. Edith Head and Jane Kesner Ardmore, The Dress Doctor (Boston: Little, Brown, 1959), 153–54. This is quoted in Gorhem Kindem, “Toward a Semiotic Theory of Visual Communication in the Cinema: A Reappraisal of Semiotic Theories from a Cinematic Perspective and a Semiotic Analysis of Color Signs and Communication in the Color Films of Alfred Hitchcock” (Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 1977), 75. This dissertation is a valuable resource for thinking about color in Hitchcock’s work.

9. Alfred Hitchcock, “Alfred Hitchcock Talking,” in the journal Films and Filming (1959), quoted in Patrick McGilligan, Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), 567.

10. Kalmus, “Color Consciousness,” 28.

11. Edward Branigan, “The Articulation of Color in a Filmic System: Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle,” in Dalle Vacche and Price, eds., Color: The Film Reader, 170–82.

12. The shot seems to echo images from Antonioni’s Red Desert (1964), where the dull industrial landscape articulates the desiccated emotional life of the protagonist.

13. “Hitchcock talks about Lights, Camera, Action: An Interview with Herb A Lightman,” in Gottlieb, ed., Hitchcock on Hitchcock, 306.

14. Kindem, “Toward a Semiotic Theory of Visual Communication in the Cinema,” 212.

15. Hitchcock, quoted in Donald Spoto, The Dark Side of Genius (New York: Da Capo Press, 1999), 22. According to Spoto, this memory dates from as early as 1905, when Hitchcock was six years old. This jade color is also strikingly rendered in at least two pre-Raphealite paintings. In William Holman Hunt’s “Isabella and the Pot of Basil” (1867–68), Isabella inclines over a golden pot of basil containing the severed head of her lover while a jade light from frame left bathes her diaphanous gown in a deathly hue. In Dane Gabriel Rossetti’s unfinished painting “Found” (1869?), a Hardy-esque country man in a smock tries to lift a fallen women of the city from the ground who is dressed in a violet shawl, her face a pasty jade green.

16. For further analysis of color in Topaz, see Lesley Brill, The Hitchcock Romance (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1988), 188–90.

17. Donald Spoto, The Art of Alfred Hitchcock (New York: Doubleday, 1976), 364.

18. I explore the color scheme of The Birds in detail in Richard Allen, “Avian Metaphor in The Birds,” in Sidney Gottlieb and Christopher Brookhouse, eds., Framing Hitchcock (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2002), 281–309.

1. For an explicit discussion and defense of historical poetics against rival research paradigms, see David Bordwell, On the History of Film Style (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1997), 116–57.

2. On “The Eve of St. Agnes,” see Richard Allen, “Hitchcock, or the Pleasures of Metaskepticism,” in Richard Allen and Sam Ishii-Gonzales, eds., Alfred Hitchcock: Centenary Essays (London: BFI, 1999), 229–31. On “Lamia,” see Robin Wood, Hitchcock’s Films Revisited, 2d ed. (New York: Columbia UP, 2002), 66. On the “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” see John P. McCombe, “Oh, I see …” : The Birds and the Culmination of Hitchcock’s Hyper-Romantic Vision,” Cinema Journal 44.3 (Spring 2005): 70–71.

3. In Hitchcock and Twentieth Century Cinema (London and New York: Wall-flower Press, 2005), John Orr proposes, after Gilles Deleuze, that David Hume’s philosophy is the key influence on Hitchcock. Aside from the fact that this argument is based on scattered quotations, I find the argument unconvincing on at least three counts. First, Hume was a classical empiricist and hence a skeptic. Hitchcock, as I have argued, is not. He may be a skeptic about appearances but “knowledge by intuition” plays a central role in his work. Second, how is the historical connection to Hitchcock forged? If it is to be through the Scottish literary tradition from Robert Louis Stevenson to John Buchan, this has to be demonstrated. Third, like many discussions of film as philosophy, Orr’s fails to account for Hitchcock’s style.