Hitchcock’s first published writing was “Gas,” written for an in-house magazine put out by the firm he worked for at the time, the Henley Telegraph and Cable Company. It is a lurid, somewhat overheated tale, perhaps rightly described by Spoto as like an “undergraduate’s imitation of a Poe short story” (46)—I prefer to think of it as a vision of Poe as filmed by D. W. Griffith—but in any event it is uncanny how this brief story prefigures so much of Hitchcock’s later work. Spoto points out that “Gas” “shows the young Hitchcock’s instinctive grasp of the mechanics of reader manipulation and the evocation of fear” (46). Maurice Yacowar in Hitchcock’s British Films, notes how it sketches what will later turn out to be Hitchcock’s recurrent fascination with “affrighted purity,” false refuges, bondage, fantasies of horror “tenuously attached to a normal situation,” and the problematic role of the creative artist who, like the dentist in the story, both induces and redeems the experience of terror (15–17). (In this context, the struggle for the dentist’s chair in the 1934 version of The Man Who Knew Too Much perhaps takes on added resonance.) To this we might add that “Gas” also features a dramatic chase, treads the fine line between the horrific and the unacceptably horrible, and ends with at least some kind of release from the surrounding dangers: the protagonist pays a half crown at the end, but neither she nor the reader of the tale pays the price of suffering the full consequences of what is threatened. All these above-mentioned themes not only recur in Hitchcock’s films but also figure prominently in the essays in this section, written by Hitchcock in part to explain the relationship between the psychological dynamics of fear and his particular cinematic method and intentions.
In all these essays he acknowledges his position as a genre artist and energetically analyzes and also somewhat defensively pleads the case for the genre of the thriller, with which he was inevitably, sometimes begrudgingly, associated. In “Let ’Em Play God,” for example, he emphatically announces that he is “not at all” bothered by being “typed as a mystery maker” and goes on to talk proudly and seriously about his trademark style, “the result of growth and patient experimentation with the materials of the trade.” He makes even bolder claims in “Why ‘Thrillers’ Thrive” and “The Enjoyment of Fear,” where he takes the characteristic aspects of his chosen genre and turns them into defining marks of all “good cinema.” (He does this as well in “Core of the Movie—The Chase,” where nearly all kinds of dramatic action turn out to be some sort of chase.) The purpose of film-going in general, he says, is to see things “we don’t experience ourselves,” consisting of “emotional disturbances.” These thrills or “shake-ups” keep us from becoming “sluggish and jellified,” which would otherwise be the result of leading a typically modern “sheltered” life. Wood’s well-known emphasis on the therapeutic function of Hitchcock’s art, on the healing and enlivening dramas that envelop the protagonists and the spectators as well, is thus supported by Hitchcock’s own descriptions of the structure and function of his thrillers.
Hitchcock praises cinema, an artistic experience far more immediate and participatory than the theater, as a powerful way of obtaining these shocks, but he carefully sets limits. The introductory blurb to “Why ‘Thrillers’ Thrive” notes that it is “a valuable contribution to the current discussion on the vexed question of ‘horror’ films.” Whether or not he specifically had in mind the popularity of such recently released films as Dracula (1931), Frankenstein (1931), Freaks (1932), King Kong (1933), and The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), Hitchcock emphatically distinguishes between the therapeutic shocks of well-made “horrific” films and the “unnatural excitement” derived from the “sadism, perversion, bestiality, and deformity” of horror films. Later in his career he continually upped the ante of his thrills, so much so that he was often accused of making the latter kind of horror films. But in the mid-1930s he took great pride in announcing that he did not overstep the “dividing line which is apparent to all thinking people.”
Perhaps the most important limit on the shock effect of his films, though, is established by what he imagines to be the implicit arrangement between filmmaker and audience, described in charming detail in “The Enjoyment of Fear.” Fear is a vital principle of life, but it is enjoyable only if we are simultaneously, although perhaps only subconsciously, aware that the price of the dangers that quicken our sensations “need not be paid.” As in life, so in film: threats must be experienced as real but in one way or another understood as imaginary and inconsequential. An “invisible cloak” covers characters we sympathize with, protecting them from ever being cut in half by the menacing buzz saw or run over by the approaching train and thereby freeing us to be aesthetically and emotionally entertained by dramas that would otherwise overwhelmingly disturb us. And even when sympathetic characters die, “there is no harm, because in our subconscious we are aware that we are safe, sitting in a comfortable armchair, watching a screen.”
Despite his confident assertion of the duties of a responsible artist, perhaps Hitchcock was as aware as we are that if he had followed those principles rigidly he would never have achieved very much as a filmmaker. He goes on in this essay, as in many other essays and interviews, compulsively to chastise himself for breaking what he has set out as a fundamental rule of filmmaking by actually letting the bomb go off in Sabotage, killing innocent little Stevie. But regardless of his apologies—which are in any event qualified by a barely concealed delight in his capacity to “shake up” and outrage critics and audiences—this type of episode is common, not only in his later films, such as Psycho, The Birds, and Frenzy, where sympathetic characters pay a fearful price, but even in early works such as The 39 Steps, where the innocent crofter’s wife is physically abused and presumably doomed to a lifetime of further mistreatment, and Secret Agent, where a likable little man is mistakenly assassinated.
What is characteristic about such essays as “The Enjoyment of Fear,” then, is that they set out principles and formulas that Hitchcock’s films both elaborate and challenge. This dynamic aspect of his art is immediately apparent in “Master of Suspense,” a telling bit of “self-analysis,” as the subtitle suggests, that reviews some of the key techniques he is identified with in order to suggest how they can—and must—be modified. The major metaphor he adopts here is that of “turning the tables,” and he acknowledges that his intention in doing so is “sinister” and unsettling. For example, he speaks about his famous cameo appearances in his films as a kind of humbling of himself, a momentary opportunity for him to be subjected to—in fact, “shot” and “hit” by—the cinematic weapons he usually wields, and this is a comic but also startling reminder of the hostility and aggression that are intimately bound up with filmmaking (indeed, with all acts of photography, as Susan Sontag suggests in On Photography). A certain amount of free-flowing aggression is also evident in his fantasy about “try[ing] the same trick” with press people by torturing them with interviews and disturbing the security of his audience by making them suspicious of everyone.
Throughout “Master of Suspense,” the erstwhile fixed points of Hitchcock’s method become, to use the modern term, interrogated. Instead of simply trotting out once again his familiar definitions of “suspense,” contrasting the bomb that suddenly goes off with the one we anxiously know is ticking away, and the “MacGuffin,” telling us of the lions that are not in the Scottish highlands, Hitchcock stresses that these devices have to change with the times. His desire is to “smoke” the suspense drama “out of its old haunts,” to turn it away from the trappings of espionage, secret papers, and codes and toward “more personal sorts of menace” and “the big problem of the glamorous villain.” In obvious ways, this brief essay prefigures such films as North by Northwest, which salvages some of the “old tradition” of the thriller but also moves it into “frontier territory.” In less obvious ways, it looks forward to innovative works such as Rear Window and Psycho, two of his most detailed representations of, as he says here, “a brave new world in which we are becoming conditioned to suspect our neighbors and expecting the worst.” The effort to describe but also to rethink and revise his characteristic artistic techniques and relationship with his chosen genre, evident in this essay and others, is an important prelude to the achievement of the next ten to fifteen years of Hitchcock’s career, which can legitimately be called his major phase.
The final articles in the section perhaps tend to portray a recognizable rather than revisionary Hitchcock, but this makes them no less interesting. “Core of the Movie” contains Hitchcock’s most focused and extended discussion of the chase, obviously a central element in many of his films. While it is useful to overhear Hitchcock’s broad technical definition of the chase, which comes to include basically all goal-oriented action, and his distinction between suspense and the chase, he is more subtle and interesting when discussing the rhythm of various chase sequences in his films, the dynamics of identification, tension, and release created by a chase, and the various landscapes of the chase, some external and others internal. Hitchcock’s chases are indebted, as he acknowledges, to Griffith’s, but they are far more complex, and his wonderful description of allowing his audience to “run with the hares and hunt with the hounds” applies not only to the double chase structure he frequently uses but also to the whole range of mixed pleasures, equivocal attachments, and moral complications that characterize his films.
“Murder—With English on It” was published at a time when Hitchcock’s persona and voice were becoming increasingly familiar via his appearances as the host of his weekly television program. This polished, belletristic essay effectively captures much of Hitchcock’s carefully crafted manner and “philosophy,” especially his droll treatment of gruesome events, use of polite and literate euphemisms for the unspeakable, and confident knowledge that his audience shares with him a deep attraction to violence that exists side by side with our everyday, presumably high moral character. The major distinction he draws between English and American attitudes toward murder is explored in the form of a kind of witty academic or rhetorical exercise, complete with references to some of his favorite murder cases and some sociological ruminations about how taste is at least in part a product of geography, social habits, and legal customs. Perhaps somewhere behind the argument lies his disappointment over The Trouble with Harry, his most “British” comedy and one of his few acknowledged failures in America. And there is at least a hint of resentment that film audiences are not as astute as British aficionados of criminal trials, whose fascination for murderers does not depend on a “rooting interest” in a sympathetic character, a cinematic convention that Hitchcock challenged throughout his entire career. But beyond these fine critical comments and distinctions, Hitchcock celebrates, in his typically wry manner, the shared taste for what he calls the “juice” of murder cases, exported by the English (he no doubt has one particular transplanted Englishman in mind) and avidly imported and consumed by the Americans.
“Would You Like to Know Your Future?” is particularly intriguing because it discusses fear and suspense in a metaphysical rather than psychological and fictional context. It is one of Hitchcock’s rare direct commentaries on a theme that has fascinated many critics: his conception of the role of God in human life. He uses a story about the early fate of his film The Lodger, first shelved and nearly abandoned, then serendipitously released to great popular success, to underscore the point that even a director who occasionally seems to have godlike qualities is by no means in control of fate. We know from other sources, especially Ivor Montagu, that the history of The Lodger is somewhat more complicated: it was indeed considered to be unreleasable and shelved, but then it was radically reedited, with many of the intertitles cut out, and steered to its eventual successful release by Michael Balcon, who effectively countered the resistance of the distributor, C. M. Woolf (Spoto, 97–99, summarizes these events nicely). Hitchcock’s version of the story, written for the inspirational magazine edited by Norman Vincent Peale, emphasizes the inscrutable divine control of human affairs rather than the efficacy of human labor and thus credits the power of prayer and God rather than Montagu and Balcon. God is the director extraordinaire and, interestingly enough, works in Hitchcock’s genre. After years of strenuous debate about the role of suspense in films, Hitchcock caps his argument by noting that God too says “that things would be very dull without suspense.”
The penultimate essay in this section circles back on the first: the effect of Poe on Hitchcock, so palpable in “Gas,” is acknowledged in “Why I Am Afraid of the Dark.” Hitchcock is usually reticent about influences on him, but he states directly, “It’s because I liked Edgar Allan Poe’s stories so much that I began to make suspense films.” He is particularly attracted to Poe’s “hallucinatory logic,” fantastic and precisely realistic adventures, and personal sense of loneliness and unhappiness and deeply impressed not only by Poe’s stories but also by his cinematic legacy, the films of Buñuel, Clair, Epstein, and Cocteau. Hitchcock carefully distinguishes himself from Poe in some respects, but his surprising general statement “I don’t think that there exists a real resemblance between Edgar Allan Poe and myself” is, if not disingenuous, then at least not entirely persuasive. Hitchcock and Poe are both profound realists and surrealists, adventurers in the linked realms of imagination and terror, and, as Hitchcock ruefully admits, prisoners of as well as experts in their genre. Hitchcock labels himself a “commercial filmmaker” and Poe a “poéte maudit,” but they join arms as, in Dali’s knowing phrase, “chevaliers de la mort.”
The “Redbook Dialogue” that concludes this section not only summarizes many of the themes of the earlier articles but also shows Hitchcock’s mastery of the art of the interview. If there were no such real figure as Dr. Fredric Wertham, Hitchcock might have invented him—and perhaps he did in fact invent him, in the character of the psychiatrist at the end of Psycho, whose glib and pompous analysis only confirms our sense of the impenetrability of Norman Bates. I do not want to be unfair to Dr. Wertham, who was a responsible spokesperson for institutional psychiatry and, as the introductory note to this dialogue explains, “an outspoken critic of violence in comic books, films, and television programs,” a vigorous participant in the ongoing debate in the early 1960s about the apparently pernicious effects of mass media on children. His book The Seduction of the Innocent was widely read and often used as an authoritative study by those denouncing popular culture. But he is a perfect philistine foil for Hitchcock here, unable to fathom cinematic stylization, irony, and the subtleties of audience manipulation that Hitchcock patiently explains. It is Hitchcock who comes across as the master psychologist. Wertham’s literal and simplistic model of human behavior and relationship to representation on film and television—for example, “a child’s mind is like a bank—whatever you put in, you get back in ten years, with interest”—is in striking contrast to Hitchcock’s subtle awareness of the complexity of our enjoyment of fear, even a child’s ability to distinguish between fiction and reality while still being shocked by fiction, and the rhythm of fear and laughter that is integral to many experiences of the horrific. Wertham is rightly concerned about the possibility of becoming desensitized by media violence, but much like Bruno Bettelheim in The Uses of Enchantment, Hitchcock talks knowledgeably and wisely about how we may be educated to “awfulness” by fairy tales and other frightening fictions, presumably like his own.