Hitchcock's Romantic Irony (Film and Culture Series)
Richard Allen
Language: English
Pages: 328
ISBN: 0231135750
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Is Hitchcock a superficial, though brilliant, entertainer or a moralist? Do his films celebrate the ideal of romantic love or subvert it? In a new interpretation of the director's work, Richard Allen argues that Hitchcock orchestrates the narrative and stylistic idioms of popular cinema to at once celebrate and subvert the ideal of romance and to forge a distinctive worldview-the amoral outlook of the romantic ironist or aesthete. He describes in detail how Hitchcock's characteristic tone is achieved through a titillating combination of suspense and black humor that subverts the moral framework of the romantic thriller, and a meticulous approach to visual style that articulates the lure of human perversity even as the ideal of romance is being deliriously affirmed. Discussing more than thirty films from the director's English and American periods, Allen explores the filmmaker's adoption of the idioms of late romanticism, his orchestration of narrative point of view and suspense, and his distinctive visual strategies of aestheticism and expressionism and surrealism.
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in Hitchcock’s work. It is typically fostered by aligning the audience with the restricted viewpoint of a character who anxiously desires and fears the resolution of a mystery (shared suspenseful mystery). For example, in Rebecca, when the second Mrs. de Winter arrives at Manderley, she has been primed to think of Rebecca, her husband’s first wife, as a figure of awe and fascination, about whom she both desires to know more and fears to know more. By restricting us to the epistemic viewpoint of the
Oakley (Joseph Cotten). The parallelism between the joking friends and Uncle Charlie evokes contrast between them, but it also suggests their affinity. Black humor is a benign outlet for murderous impulses. In a similar way, the fascination with the details of murder expressed by L. B. Jefferies’ nurse, Stella (Thelma Ritter), in Rear Window provides comic relief from the suspense plot. Frenzy, as we saw in chapter 1, is structured by the contrast between the story of an alluring yet psychotic
arm, and “she” looks, to my eyes at least, like a man in drag (plate 4). Since she appears to be a woman who is dressed as a man dressed as a woman, she is represented as a woman whose real identity is that of a man. The equivalent to the male rogue in Hitchcock’s film is the female lead who masquerades or performs her feminine grace and charm to disguise a “promiscuous” core in the manner that the rogue disguises sexual predation and womanizing beneath the veneer of gentlemanly civility. The
his masculine vitality—“I certainly admire people who do things”—Bruno, in Guy’s eyes, has an enviable class status that allows him freedom from personal ties and moral scruples. This is a source of attraction and allure to Guy that he unconsciously articulates by “accidentally” leaving the lighter and love token behind on the train and that is inscribed with “From A to G [Anne to Guy]” with crisscrossed tennis rackets.49 Bruno earlier describes his murder plan as “crisscross.” Guy’s unconscious
factory, I saw a young couple against the wall. The boy was urinating against the wall and the girl never let go of his arm. She’d look down at what he was doing, then look at the scenery around them, then back again at the boy. I felt this was true love at work.56 Truffaut responds that, “Ideally, two lovers should never separate,” as if this is the moral of the story. But his response ignores the fact that when Hitchcock referred to “not breaking up the romantic moment,” he was speaking not