Hitchcock's Motifs

Front matter

IN TRANSITION

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Contents

Acknowledgements Introduction Part I Hitchcock, Motifs and Melodrama Introduction Three motifs Home movies Cigarette case/lighter Milk Melodrama and Hitchcock’s motifs An elaborated motif: the Bed Scene in REBECCA and MARNIE A melodramatic motif: hands Diagrammatic representations Overview of the key motifs Part Il The Key Motifs BED SCENE Couples and beds Beds and the police BLONDES AND BRUNETTES Blondes versus brunettes Blond allure/blond iconography

Blondes, brunettes and violence Blondes, brunettes and the police

57 63 67

Introduction

A leitmotif can be understood not as literary technique, but as the expression of an obsession. (Klaus Theweleit: Male Fantasies Volume 2 1989: 383)

This book examines Alfred Hitchcock’s work through his recurring motifs. Motifs in general are a neglected area of Film Studies. Although the decade by decade multi-volume American Film Institute Catalog of Motion Pictures Produced in the United States (see Munden 1997; Krafsur 1997; Hanson 1988, 1993 & 1999) includes a ‘Subject Index’ for each decade, and several film guides have either a ‘Category Index’ or a ‘General Subject Index’ — all of which include motifs — these are no more than listings of the films in which a specific feature occurs. Actual discussions of motifs in the cinema are rare, and there is only one publication in this area which I have found useful to this project and would like to acknowledge at the outset: Michel Cieutat’s two-volume Les grands thèmes du cinéma américain (1988 & 1991). Despite the title, Cieutat includes motifs as well as themes, and he looks at the ways in which recurring elements in Hollywood films reveal (sometimes hidden) aspects of the culture which produced them. Nevertheless — to anticipate one of my arguments — whenever Cieutat’s categories overlap with those in Hitchcock’s films, there is a clash: Hitchcock’s motifs do not fit the general pattern: see, for example, Milk in Part I and STAIR- CASES in Part II.

I have had a substantive interest in motifs in the cinema for many years. This book arose out of my research. Although it is confined to Hitchcock’s films, it is also informed by an awareness of the functioning of motifs in films generally. In cases where one of the Hitchcock motifs has resonances with examples elsewhere, I discuss the similarities and differences. My response to the not unreasonable question: ‘why another book on Hitchcock?’ would be that (a) this aspect of his films has been surprisingly ignored and (b) approaching Hitchcock’s films from the point of view of his recurring motifs offers a different slant on his work, one which I hope will reveal new insights.

My project here is not without precedent: there was an article on Hitchcock’s motifs published in Cahiers du Cinéma as long ago as 1956. Written by Philippe Demonsablon and entitled Lexique mythologique pour l'oeuvre de Hitchcock (Demonsablon 1956: 18-29 & 54-55), this considered twenty recurring motifs in Hitchcock’s films up to THE MAN wHo Knew Too Muci (1955): for details, see

Appendix II. But this was in the days when Sight and Sound — as the key representative of British film criticism of the period — considered the ideas of these French critics to be slightly batty, as is shown by Richard Roud’s survey of their criticism in ‘The French Line’ (Roud 1960: 166-171). After quoting an admittedly rather mystical passage from Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol’s Hitchcock (1957), Roud adds, ‘If this were not enough, Cahiers once devoted fourteen pages to a thematic index of objects in Hitchcock’s films: glasses, throats, clocks, cats, eyes, knives, keys...” (Roud 1960: 169). Although he has invented the throats, clocks and eyes, he has grasped the principle: they would not have been out of place.

Roud was fighting a rearguard action; it was Cahiers du Cinéma’s enthusiasm for Hitchcock as auteur which prevailed, and which spread rapidly throughout the cinéphile world. No other film director has prompted so many books and articles on his work: the annotated bibliography in Jane Sloan’s Alfred Hitchcock: a Filmography and Bibliography (1995) has some 1100 separate entries — up to 1994, and excluding contemporary reviews — and runs to almost two hundred pages. With such a wealth of material, one would have anticipated some reference to further articles on Hitchcock’s motifs. Indeed, this seemed such an obvious area for scholarship that, in a short piece on Hitchcock for Film Dope in 1982, I was moved to speculate:

even now, one has visions of a student somewhere painstakingly working on Hitch’s ‘master-code’, under such headings as false arrest, voyeurism, mother figures, blondes versus brunettes, the law, guilt and confession, pursuit, public disturbances, murder weapons, staircases, falls, birds, keys etc., each with its sub-divisions and variations.

But, although there have been articles on Hitchcock’s themes, and a few on individual motifs, to my knowledge not until 2000 was one published (in German) on Hitchcock’s motifs in general: Hartmut W. Redottée: Leid-Motive: Das Universum des Alfred Hitchcock (Redottée 2000: 19-50). This book takes up the project I outlined in 1982 and looks in detail at the director’s motifs.

In Hitchcock’s Films Revisited, Robin Wood looks at one area of the ‘master-code’: Hitchcock’s “plot formations’ (Wood 1989: 239-248). He discusses five recurring stories in the films: those of the falsely accused man; the guilty woman; the psychopath; the spy intrigue; the marriage. In part, I conceived Hitchcock's Motifs as an albeit somewhat expanded complement to this chapter. Robin Wood looks at Hitchcock’s most significant plots; this book returns to the spirit of the original Cahiers lexicon and focuses on those recurring elements in Hitchcock which, for the most part, one would call motifs. Here I am following Northrop Frye in Anatomy of Criticism (Frye 1957: 73-74) and taking the term

Introduction 17 motif from the more familiar musical term /eitmotif, or ‘leading motif’. But, as well as amending and extending the original Cahiers du Cinéma categories, I have also incorporated a few examples which should more properly be termed themes, e.g. EXHIBITIONISM / VOYEURISM / THE LOOK, GUILT AND CON- FESSION and HOMOSEXUALITY, which I included because I was dissatisfied with the discussions of them elsewhere. In context, I have referred to these as themes, but in the book generally, reversing the usual practice, these few themes are subsumed under the general rubric of motifs, and ‘motifs’ should be read as short for ‘themes and motifs’.

In Hitchcock — The Murderous Gaze, William Rothman refers en passant to several Hitchcock motifs (Rothman 1982). But his examples are for the most part recurring visual motifs, e.g. the parallel vertical lines ‘////’ which he traces throughout Hitchcock’s work: he introduces this motif on page 33. In a more recent article, Rothman has helpfully summarised the Hitchcock motifs which he cites throughout his 1982 book:

‘curtain raisings’; ‘eclipses’; ‘tunnel shots’; white flashes; frames-within-frames; profile shots; symbolically charged objects (e.g., lamps, staircases, birds); symbolically charged colours (red, white, blue-green, brown)

Only the symbolically charged objects overlap with my project. This is not to say that visual motifs are not equally important to Hitchcock’s work, and one could cite others: e.g. circles and spirals, the colour yellow. But, for reasons of space, I have excluded visual motifs: they could indeed form the subject of another book. And so, for example, LIGHT(S) in this book refers to a diegetic light or lights, i.e. light sources within the film’s narrative world, such as light bulbs, candles and the sun, rather than to a film’s lighting scheme (> APPENDIX III for a fuller definition of diegetic).

Since I am also making a distinction between themes and motifs, I should clarify what I mean. Motifs are recurring elements of a certain kind in a narrative or a series of narratives: in Hitchcock’s case they include objects (e.g. keys), types of character (e.g. mothers), settings (e.g. trains), actions (e.g. entrances through a window) and events (e.g. public disturbances). They are usually denoted by concrete nouns, but occasionally by a gerund, e.g. falling.

A theme is more abstract: it incorporates a point of view and implies that the film is saying something about this matter. Themes are denoted by abstract nouns. However, because of the complexity and density of Hitchcock’s work, I would argue that there is in practice little or no functional difference between themes and motifs in his films. A theme in any work is necessarily articulated, inflected in a certain way. Or, from the point of view of the critic: ‘We apprehend the theme by inference — it is the rationale of the images and symbols (i.e. motifs)’ (Sage 1987: 248). But I would say the same of Hitchcock’s motifs: they are not simply recurring elements, but elements which are articulated and recur in patterns of meaning. The significance of these patterns may then be critically inferred: it is my purpose here to investigate and explicate them.

As will be apparent, and as is the common practice in auteur studies, I am attributing the ways in which the individual motifs are inflected in the films to Hitchcock himself. Of course, some of the specific examples will have originated elsewhere, and of course there may be other directors — or, indeed, literary authors — whose work shows similar inflections of a given motif. Collectively, however, they are Hitchcock’s motifs: they provide another facet to his more familiar themes and preoccupations; one whose significance only fully emerges when the examples are considered in toto. In approaching his work from this point of view, my underlying premise is that little (nothing?) in his films is accidental, and so if he chooses, for example, to include a scene in or on a bed in most of his films, there will, consciously or unconsciously, be a purpose and pattern to this. Occasionally, a particular manifestation of a motif might seem to be merely incidental, but I would argue that this is rare. I hope that the examples themselves will provide the evidence to support this argument.

The interaction of an artist with his or her culture can be a complex and difficult one; this is perhaps especially so with an artist as sophisticated as Hitchcock. Investigating Hitchcock’s films through their motifs — particularly in the cases where the motifs are widespread in other works — thus becomes in part an exploration of Hitchcock’s relationship to his culture. As with motifs in films generally, some of the examples discussed here function in a way which seems quite unconscious. An exploration of their meanings should thus also reveal something of the ‘Hitchcockian unconscious’, the hidden/unconscious patterns underlying his works. I should stress that the concept of the Hitchcockian unconscious is not meant to refer to the psychology of Hitchcock himself, but to a feature of his films: it arises, again, from the complex interaction of Hitchcock the artist with his culture. In many respects, Hitchcock is an elusive figure: critics have noted how guarded he usually sounds in interviews. But the films are a different matter: they offer themselves as subjects for analysis.

A few words about the structure of the book. Part I constitutes a general discussion of the significance and meaning of motifs, with selected examples. The theoretical material here is designed to underpin and contextualise the discussions of the individual motifs. The examples in Part I have been selected to illustrate aspects of the theoretical arguments, but also to probe more deeply into the whole issue of Hitchcock’s motifs by looking at a small number of instances of a given motif in detail. The examples have also been chosen to illustrate two basic points I wish to make about Hitchcock’s use of motifs. First, that his articulation of a given motif tends to be more sophisticated (and/or distinctive)

Introduction 19 than the norm. Second, that there are Hitchcock films in which a motif is woven into the narrative to such an extent that one can use the motif itself as a starting point to investigate the film’s concerns. All this material is in turn designed to explore the issue of why an investigation of the motifs in Hitchcock’s work in particular is so rewarding.

Part II constitutes an alphabetical listing of what I have termed the Key Motifs. These are all elements which occur in a substantial number of films, rather than just a few. Some of the categories will be familiar from the Hitchcock literature; others less so. I have necessarily been selective, but I hope that no significant motifs have been overlooked. Where I have excluded motifs cited by Demonsablon — and indeed a couple on my own 1982 list — this is because I decided that they were ultimately less important to Hitchcock’s work overall than those that I have included. One example, the Police, is covered in a different manner from the rest. There are two motifs - ENDINGS AND THE POLICE and HANDCUFFS AND BONDAGE - in which the police feature throughout the discussions. Otherwise, their special place in Hitchcock’s cinema is recorded in a note at the end of each motif which cites their specific contributions to that particular motif.

I have also sought to be comprehensive with regard to the films. Although, inevitably, some titles crop up frequently, some rarely, and the majority in between, each of Hitchcock’s fifty-two extant feature films as director has a number of entries. In two motifs, PAINTERS and STAIRCASES, I also refer to a film Hitchcock scripted and designed, THE BLACKGUARD (Graham Cutts, 1925). In addition, Appendix I looks at nine TV episodes Hitchcock directed which include a significant example of one of the key motifs. The spread of the motifs across Hitchcock’s whole oeuvre is in fact a strong measure of his consistency as auteur. Whilst there may be a shift in the prominence or inflection of a motif between his British and Hollywood films, none of those discussed in Part II is confined to only one of the periods.

For reference purposes, Appendix II lists the motifs covered in the original article by Philippe Demonsablon and the recent one by Hartmut W. Redottée, together with brief comments. It also lists the themes and motifs included in Thomas Leitch’s The Encyclopedia of Alfred Hitchcock (2002). For published articles on individual motifs, the reader is referred to Jane Sloan’s excellent bibliography index: Sloan 1995: 599-614. Finally, in Appendix III I define two technical terms used throughout the book which could perhaps prove troublesome: diegesis and point-of-view editing.

I should like to acknowledge a general indebtedness to the writings of Robin Wood. One manifestation of this is my adoption of his notion of the ‘chaos world’ to specify the world of threat and disorder into which Hitchcock’s characters are almost invariably plunged. Underlying the mundane, everyday world inhabited by most of the characters at the beginnings of the films, the chaos world emphasises how precarious the surface veneer of ‘civilisation’ can be. Extending from the experience of injustice of the falsely accused figures (both men and women), through the world of espionage in the spy movies, to specific locations such as the Bates Motel (PsycHo), or Bodega Bay (THE Bros), the chaos world is, perhaps, the master metaphor for Hitchcock’s films. Robin Wood’s own comments on the concept recur throughout the original 1965 edition of Hitchcock's Films: see, for example, Wood, 1989: 84, 94, 107, 117, 134, 145.

Overall, I have sought, as far as possible, to avoid repetition; instead, I have used cross-referencing. The essay under each motif is intended to be self-contained, but where there is further relevant material elsewhere, this is indicated. Obviously, some scenes or elements in a Hitchcock film could be included under more than one motif. For example, what happens in the bell tower in VERTIco has material relevant to no less than six motifs. I have discussed the events from the different points of view quite fully in four of these (THE CORPSE, GUILT AND CONFESSION, HEIGHTS AND FALLING and STAIRCASES) and in the others (CONFINED SPACES and DOUBLES) included briefer comments. But under each of these six discussions, cross-references to one or more of the other five motifs indicates that there is material there which provides further details. Such cross-referencing serves two additional functions. It highlights the inter-connectedness of the motifs and, by extension, the density of Hitchcock’s work — in Freudian terms, the ‘overdetermination’ of the elements in his films. And it serves to guide the reader from motif to motif for further comments about a given scene.

Identification of the characters. The filmography includes a full listing of the actors who play the various characters, but during the discussions I refer to the characters purely by their names. In most cases, what to call someone is selfevident, but there are exceptions. Joan Fontaine in REBECCA plays a woman who is nameless; in Robert E. Sherwood and Joan Harrison’s screenplay (1940/ 1959), she is designated as ‘I’. I usually refer to her simply as ‘the heroine of Resecca’, but occasionally as ‘Maxim’s young wife’ or ‘Maxim’s bride’. The hero in SPELLBOUND is amnesiac, and he does not learn his name, John Ballyntine, until close to the end. Ben Hecht’s screenplay (1946) calls him Edwardes, the name of the man he is unconsciously impersonating, in the early scenes, and then — when he realises that he is not Edwardes - J.B., from the initials on his cigarette case. I call him J.B. throughout.

For other impersonations, where there are in effect two characters called by the same name, and confusions can arise, I have adopted a convention: Madeleine (VERTIGO) refers to the real Madeleine Elster, unseen alive, ‘Madeleine’ to Judy’s impersonation of her; Mrs Bates (PsycHo) to the real Mrs Bates, now a

Introduction 21 corpse, ‘Mrs Bates’ to Norman’s psychotic version of her and Van Meer (For- EIGN CORRESPONDENT) to the real diplomat, ‘Van Meer’ to his impersonator.

The stills. The still at the beginning of each of the key motifs is intended, where possible, to be ‘emblematic’: to condense that motif into an image which dramatises the motif in a particularly vivid or relevant way. Other stills within a given motif are included to illustrate different sorts of example. But sometimes a still could have been placed under more than one motif: in such cases, both relevant motifs are mentioned in the captions.

In general, stills are better than frames from the films to illustrate the motifs. Taken on set during filming, a still does not show exactly what we see in the film, but it almost always includes more of a given scene, and thus sets the elements, including any motifs, in context. This is particularly true of Hitchcock, where in the films themselves the individual elements tend to be broken down into separate shots. In some stills, the characters are also repositioned from the way they are in the film, but this may well convey the essence of the scene more effectively than a single frame. For example, the JEWELLERY still from Notor- Ious (Fig. 35). In the film, when Prescott fastens the necklace on Alicia, Devlin is on the right and his back is to the camera: a frame of that moment might not suggest his feelings. In the still, where he is repositioned behind the other two characters and we can see his face, his sense of exclusion and jealousy — established throughout the scene as a whole — are readily visible.

Finally, a note on Family Pror. I was surprised how often Hitchcock’s last film served to round off a particular motif and provide a satisfying sense of closure to the discussion. FAMILY ProT is not generally considered to be one of the major works, but in terms of motifs it is crucial. It also contains a Hitchcock couple I find particularly endearing: Blanche and George. My inclusion of Barbara Harris and Bruce Dern in a still (Fig. 5) is a little tribute: it’s not a particularly exciting still, but I wanted them to be there.