Hitchcock’s Romantic Irony

For over ten years I have regularly taught Alfred Hitchcock’s films in a university setting, and more recently I have edited, with my colleague Sid Gottlieb, the Hitchcock Annual, a journal of “Hitchcock Studies." My thinking about Hitchcock’s work has been shaped, for better or worse, by these experiences, in particular by my attempt to digest the plurality of commentaries his work has supported and spawned since the critics of Cahiers du cinéma first acknowledged his significance as a director in the 1960s. Hitchcock’s work has yielded critical approaches as divergent as the argument of Lesley Brill, who understands Hitchcock as an essentially conventional director of “romances," and “queer theorist" Lee Edelman, who conceives of Hitchcock’s films as an attack on “heteronormativity." The Hitchcock criticism of Robin Wood is actually self-divided between his first book, which views Hitchcock’s films as therapeutic in their effect, confronting us with the dark side of human existence in order to affirm conventional morality, and his later writings, which understand Hitchcock as a critic of conventional morality, particularly as it is embodied in the values of heterosexual romance. Unless these critics are completely misguided rather than simply selectively biased, there are surely properties of Hitchcock’s films that explain this divide, that can explain how it is that Hitchcock’s works yield the divergent interpretations that they do.

Of course, part of the explanation for this contrasting emphasis and “selective bias" in critical writings on Hitchcock stems from the fact that studies of Hitchcock are often driven by a specific theoretical or ideological agenda wherein the critic discovers in the works of Hitchcock what he or she wants to see in them and disregards the potential counterexamples. This problem is compounded by the fact that critics of Hitchcock often discuss at most a dozen or so films—and frequently fewer—out of the fifty-three feature films he made during his long career. I began my research on Hitchcock by setting out to write a book that would be structured around individual films or groups of films, and this research has resulted in a number of published essays that I refer to from time to time in this volume. However, as I conceived the broader contours of the project in response to the wide range of literature in the field, I began to think of this book in terms of a series of thematically organized chapters that encompass a greater span of Hitchcock’s work.

The problem of “selective bias" is not simply one of the scope of critical inquiry, but of the nature of critical inquiry, where film criticism is primarily conceived of as an activity of interpretation. I do not agree with David Bordwell that interpretation is intrinsically an act of “making" (rather than “discovering") meaning;¹ however, I do agree that it is an activity that is prone to the making of meaning, especially when interpretation is conceived as a practice that exists to confirm a theory which the critic applies to the text. In bad interpretation meaning is made; in good interpretation meaning is discovered. One test of a good interpretation is the agreement that a good interpretation commands from informed viewers, while a bad interpretation largely reflects back from a film the assumptions of the critic. While I would not wish to see the activity of interpretation abandoned—indeed, I regularly practice it in the pages of this book—I agree with Bordwell that interpretation must be answerable to the practice of what he calls “poetics" in order to yield critical insights of lasting value.

Poetics is not primarily an interpretative practice, but a practice of descriptive generalization that clarifies the patterns of style (what are the cinematic ways in which Hitchcock’s story is conveyed?); content and theme (what kinds of stories does Hitchcock tell and what are his recurring motifs?); and form (how does Hitchcock structure the spectator’s experience of his stories?). There are many places where description meets interpretation. Even in such a simple case as characterizing what happens in a story, one often needs to interpret what one sees and hears in order to understand it: for example, what exactly happens in the “memory" flashback which concludes Hitchcock’s film Marnie? Nonetheless, much of what takes place in a film can be described—from the canonical story types in Hitchcock’s films and his characteristic stylistic patterns and visual motifs, to the role and function of narrative suspense. Few studies of Hitchcock have placed poetics at center stage in the interpretation of his works. Notable exceptions are Susan Smith’s book on Hitchcock (subtitled Suspense, Humor, and Tone), and Michael Walker’s Hitchcock’s Motifs, which came out just in time for me to at least reference it in these pages.² This book is a poetics-driven study, and that is, I hope, one of the contributions it makes to the literature.

One of the main advantages of poetics in the study of film is that it forces the critic to pay attention to style and form. As Bordwell notes, interpretation-based criticism is too often thematic, or pays attention to style only selectively and opportunistically. My assumption in this book, one that is shared with the first important critical work on Hitchcock’s films by Claude Chabrol and Eric Rohmer,³ is that the significance of Hitchcock’s films is indissolubly wedded to the form and style in which they are told. However, at the same time, the study of “poetics" need not, it seems to me, entail a formalism that simply studies patterns of style for their own sake, or construes the themes of a work as merely occasion for indulging in certain rhetorical strategies or experiments in style. The critical debate over Hitchcock’s status as an auteur has been traditionally framed as a question about whether he was merely a director of technically and rhetorically brilliant works of entertainment or whether his works actually express a moral point of view. My answer in this book is that this opposition poses a false dichotomy, for Hitchcock’s depth lies in the visual (and aural) surface of his works, and in this way they express a distinctive viewpoint. This outlook is neither moral nor immoral: it is the amoral point of view of the romantic-ironist or aesthete.

This book is organized into two distinct but interrelated parts, each of which comprises three chapters. Part I, Narrative Form, is framed by the concept of romantic irony that is introduced and anatomized in chapter 1. Chapter 2 develops the argument that Hitchcock’s particular brand of suspense that is imbricated with black humor is the privileged mode of romantic irony in his work. Chapter 3 investigates the way in which romantic irony informs Hitchcock’s plots that are structured around the problems of recognition and misrecognition, knowledge and skepticism, and whose consequences differ according to gender. Part II, Visual Style, is framed in chapter 4 by the concept of aestheticism, which is the way in which romantic irony is expressed through style in Hitchcock’s work. Chapter 5, on expressionism, explores the specific film style in which aestheticism is manifest in Hitchcock’s work. Chapter 6 extends the discussion of chapter 5 into the domain of color, where the influence of surrealism, an heir of aestheticism, is manifest in Hitchcock’s work. All the chapters circle back to romantic irony, which serves as an introduction to the whole, and just as questions of aestheticism and style emerge when introducing the concept of romantic irony and articulating suspense, the forms and content of Hitchcock’s work remain important for part II.

The idea of romantic irony I develop in chapter 1 is a “descriptive generalization" that seeks to encompass the vast majority of works directed by Hitchcock. Romantic irony is a concept that at once accounts for the divergent interpretations of the role of the romantic ideal in Hitchcock’s work but also provides an explanation of the relationship between form and content that defines Hitchcock’s emplotment and subversion of that ideal. The concept of romantic irony describes the both/and rather than the either/or logic that governs the universe of Hitchcock’s films, and it explains how it is that critics could construe Hitchcock’s work both as an affirmation of the ideal of heterosexual romance and as a critique of that ideal. The concept of romantic irony also explains why Hitchcock’s films are not simply elaborate works of self-conscious formal dexterity that incorporate a consistent reflection upon their own conditions of existence, but the manner in which their formal dexterity is a product of and entwined with the content of the work; indeed, it is, in part, the expression of that content. Finally, romantic irony describes what at once unifies and differentiates Hitchcock’s works. I shall describe three main types of romantic irony in Hitchcock’s work according to whether the “dialectical" logic of both/and creates an atmosphere of perpetual transformation and renewal that is characterized by his romantic thrillers such as North by Northwest (1959), whether it creates an environment of pervasive ambiguity, as in Suspicion (1941), or whether it fosters a downward spiraling trajectory of negation and descent, as in Vertigo (1958).

Chapter 2 addresses the role and function of suspense which, together with the black humor that informs it, is Hitchcock’s signature mode of narration and the primary vehicle of romantic irony. I begin by outlining two key forms of suspense in Hitchcock’s work—classical suspense and suspenseful mystery—and I describe the ways that these different forms of suspense are implicated in Hitchcock’s control of the spectator’s access to the narrative world and his orchestration of character point of view. These distinctions are a prelude to showing how suspense is one of the central ways in which Hitchcock complicates the narrative resolution that favors the formation of the couple by manipulating the relationship between narrative point of view and character point of view. Finally, this chapter demonstrates how the goal of Hitchcockian suspense is, as a form of black humor, to subvert the coordinates of conventional morality and to foster audience allegiance with the sources of human perversity.

Chapter 3 continues the concerns of chapter 2 with the role of knowledge from the standpoint of investigating Hitchcock’s signature recognition narratives. Given the way in which Hitchcock’s romantic irony involves orchestrating the deceptiveness of visual appearances and the misattribution of guilt to innocent protagonists in his famous “wrong man" or “wronged man" motif, it is tempting to conclude that Hitchcock is a radical skeptic. However, this conclusion ignores the frequency with which guilt and innocence are resolved in Hitchcock’s works. Knowledge is a problem in Hitchcock’s films not primarily because it is infected by doubt, but because of the way it is keyed to the incipiently coercive force of sexual desire that drives the formation of the couple and binds them in love. Where the couple are both outsiders to power, as in Hitchcock’s romances like The 39Steps (1935), the object of knowledge takes the form of what Hitchcock terms a “MacGuffin," that is, it is essentially a plot pretext for the quest that will unite the couple. However, where the quest for knowledge is to redeem one who is desired or loved, the quest to attain knowledge, while successful, is often coercive, as in Marnie (1964), or disillusioning, as in Shadow of a Doubt (1943), or both, as in Vertigo.

Chapter 4 opens part II of the book by exploring aestheticism as the stylistic mode of Hitchcock’s romantic irony. In Hitchcock’s work, human sexuality, deemed by definition perverse, is self-consciously displaced into style in the manner of a Freudian joke that at once disguises and reveals its sexual content. Tracing some of the historical antecedents of Hitchcock’s style in British fin de siècle aestheticism, this chapter focuses on the manner in which Hitchcock’s visual style is allied to those forces of human perversity, in particular a homosexuality deemed “perverse,” which disrupts the romance, while acknowledging that Hitchcock’s narratives of romantic renewal (discussed in chapter 1) also bear the hallmarks of aestheticism. This chapter concludes by developing an overarching distinction that is derived, in part, from the distinction between classical suspense and suspenseful mystery. This distinction is one that contrasts Hitchcock’s “masculine aesthetic,” where style registers perverse sexual content and holds it at arm’s length in the manner of a joke, as in Rope (1948), and his “feminine aesthetic,” where visual style registers the sublime allure of human perversity, as in Rebecca (1940).

Chapter 5 complements chapter 4 by exploring the way that Hitchcock’s aestheticism is inflected by the influence of the works of German expressionist filmmakers who rework the idioms of German romanticism in a manner that is in some ways comparable to the way in which fin de siècle aestheticism reworks the idioms of English romanticism. It demonstrates at once how the theme of the double or the shadow world is the central trope of romantic irony in Hitchcock’s work and how that theme is centrally articulated through visual narration: framing, mise-en-scène, and editing. Given the fact that visual expressionism articulates the subversive force of the double or the shadow world, this chapter, like the previous one, focuses on narratives where the formation of the romance is wholly or partly subverted, rather than upon Hitchcock’s narratives of romantic renewal.

Chapter 6 continues the argument of chapter 5 by treating in detail a topic that has been neglected in the study of Hitchcock and of cinema as a whole: namely, color. Far from being a peripheral element of Hitchcock’s visual style, I argue that color design is central to the character of his later works. By affording a more differentiated range of expression than black and white, color expands the vocabulary of black-and-white expressionism beyond the articulation of the double. Hitchcock’s uses of color gestures toward a surrealist aesthetic where the shadow world supervenes completely upon the world of the everyday or the ordinary through the use of color symbolism, such as the reds of Marnie or Vertigo. Yet, at the same time, color gives a remarkable unity to Hitchcock’s thematic concerns by affording the articulation both of patterns of complementarity that define the narratives of romantic renewal and of the logic of opposition that characterizes the double in Hitchcock’s black-and-white expressionism.

A book like this could not have been written without the works of others. The influence of Lesley Brill’s book, The Hitchcock Romance, on chapter 1 is evident, even as my argument departs from it. Chapter 2 is indebted to the writings of Susan Smith and Noel Carroll on suspense. Part of the argument of chapter 3 is indebted to my reading of Stanley Cavell’s writings in a manner that I have made explicit elsewhere,⁴ as well as those critics, such as Tania Modleski and Paula Marantz Cohen, who have drawn attention, in different ways, to the role of female agency in Hitchcock’s work. Chapter 4 is influenced by Thomas Elsaesser’s essay “The Dandy in Hitchcock” and by Raymond Durgnat’s study of the director, as well as the writings of queer theorists such as Lee Edelman and D. A. Miller. Chapter 5 is indebted to William Rothman’s pioneering investigation into Hitchcock’s expressionism. My understanding of the relationship between sexuality and style is influenced by Hitchcock’s psychoanalytic critics, most of all Slavoj Žižek, and by Tom Leitch’s conception of Hitchcock as a ludic director whose mode of address to the audience is a playful one. However, my profoundest, if more diffuse, debt is to the work of Robin Wood, who first applied the idea of the shadow world, or what he calls “the chaos world,” to Hitchcock’s works and, in spite of the moralism which is oddly ill-attuned to his object of admiration, surely remains the most perceptive of all Hitchcock’s critics.