Jump to: navigation, search

Journal of Popular Film & Television (1990) - The Notorious Postwar Psyche

Details

Links

Abstract

It is important to understand the film "Notorious," directed by Alfred Hitchcock, as a spontaneous elaborated fantasy out of the joint imaginative effort of its scriptwriters. Interpretation of the film is detailed.

Article

THE NOTORIOUS POST-WAR PSYCHE

There is in the midst of the flow of active imaginative imagery that makes up the cinematic narrative of Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious a frame too fleeting in the actual movie to be experienced as an isolated pictorial event. Yet so many commentators on the film have selected the still of this frame for reproduction that it has become a kind of engram for the impact of the movie, and I follow that tradition by reproducing it here. The image conveys the moment in the action when "Alicia (Ingrid Bergman) begins to realise that her husband (Claude Rains) and his mother (Madame Konstantin) are trying to murder her."1 The frame reveals Alicia, still dressed, but having collapsed from the effects of the arsenic that mother and son have been putting in her coffee. She is lying on the bed in which she can now expect to be held prisoner; as the faces of mother and son lean over her prostrate form start to cast shadows on her body, her own face studies their significant exchange of glances. It is a culminating moment of insight in the sophistication of her consciousness, a process that has been developing since her decision, after the war and her father's conviction as a German agent, to marry Alex in order to spy on his attempts to keep the Nazi cause alive in Brazil. She now knows that he and his mother have not only the desire but the power to extinguish her consciousness and her life. Too weak to take more in, Alicia passes out.

Who is this Alicia, and what has she seen? Why is this moment in Ingrid Bergman's performance as Alicia so remarkable? I do not think we get very far by seeing her as an actual woman experiencing something personally discomfiting; the film then becomes another 1940s Hollywood woman-victim scenario, with the woman a passive and masochistic role model in a patriarchal fantasy that places the ultimate responsibility for her suffering on another (and, of course, older and less beautiful) woman. This idea that the film documents patronizing assumptions about female authority does not explain the satisfaction feminist critics have taken in this film2 and damages the contemporary resonance of its imagery. Neither is the film simply a dreamlike psychosexual romance, as its somewhat formulaic plot might suggest. I think it is important to understand the film neither as conscious social ...

[ to view the rest of the article, please try one of the links above ]

JOHN BEEBE, M.D., is a Jungian analyst in practice in San Francisco. He is the editor of the San Francisco Jung Institute Library Journal, in which a number of his film reviews have been published, and co-editor of the Journal of Analytical Psychology. He appears, discussing film, in the three-part television series The Wisdom of the Dream, which won a gold medal for best educational film at the 1990 New York Film Festival.

Notes & References

  1. ↑ Robin Wood, Hitchcock's Films (New York: Paperback Library, 1970), p. 31.
  2. ↑ See Tania Modleski, The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory (New York: Methuen, 1988), and Robin Wood, Hitchcock's Films Revisited (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989).
  3. ↑ The best account is in Leonard J. Leff's Hitchcock & Selznick (New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1987), pp. 174-223. Hitchcock's own version in François Truffaut's interview book, Hitchcock (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983), is itself an active imagination that is challenged by Donald Spoto's fact-finding in The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock (New York: Ballantine Books, 1984), pp. 297-306.
  4. ↑ The final scenario has been concisely summarized by Leff: After the war, "American government agent T. R. Devlin (Cary Grant) recruits Alicia Huberman (Ingrid Bergman) to infiltrate a Nazi cell in Rio. Though she falls for Devlin, he seems uncertain of his feelings and wary of her reputation as a playgirl. `This is a very strange love affair,' she tells him, because `you don't love me.' Alicia meanwhile pursues her assignment to seduce Alex Sebastian (Claude Rains), the head of the secret German war machine in Brazil. When Sebastian proposes marriage, Devlin allows Alicia to accept. The Nazis openly welcome the new Mrs. Sebastian, but Alicia's spidery mother-inlaw seems jealous and suspicious. Alicia soon learns that her husband has hidden something valuable in the cellar. During a tense search, she and Devlin find uranium in some wine bottles, yet their discovery leads to her exposure. At last expressing his love, Devlin rescues her from the Sebastian home and leaves Alex and his mother behind to face their vengeful Nazi associates," p. 177.
  5. ↑ C. G. Jung, "The Transcendent Function," in The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, Collected Works, Volume 8 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1960), pp. 67-91.
  6. ↑ C. G. Jung, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, Collected Works, Volume 9, ii (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), p. 10.
  7. ↑ Jung, Aion, p. 11.
  8. ↑ James Hillman (personal communication, 1986) offered the term "sophistication of the anima" for the process going on in Notorious; for a thorough discussion of the anima concept in analytical psychology, see his Anima: An Anatomy of a Personified Notion (Dallas: Spring Publications, 1985).
  9. ↑ Jung, Aion, p. 10.
  10. ↑ Jung, Aion, p. 10.
  11. ↑ This connection is made by Sam P. Simone in his Hitchcock as Activist: Politics and the War Films (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1982), p. 144.
  12. ↑ I am indebted to the Jungian analyst Beverley Zabriskie for first making this distinction for me in a discussion of Alicia.
  13. ↑ Michael Renov, "From Identification to Ideology: The Male System of Notorious," Wide Angle 4, No. I (1980). This article is summarized in Robin Wood's Hitchcock's Films Revisited, pp. 304-305.
  14. ↑ C. G. Jung, "Transformation Symbolism in the Mass," in Psychology and Religion: West and East, Collected Works, Volume 11 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), pp. 252-254.
  15. ↑ See especially C. G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Collected Works, Volume 12 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968).
  16. ↑ C. G. Jung, Letters: 1:1906 1950 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), p. 285.
  17. ↑ Richard Abel makes the fairytale structure of the scenario explicit in his "Notorious: Perversion par Excellence," which can be found in Marshall Deutelbaum and Leland Poague, eds., A Hitchcock Reader (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1986), pp. 162-169.
  18. ↑ See William Rothman, "Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious," The Georgia Review 29 (Winter 1975), pp. 884-917, for a careful analysis of this transformation from a formal point of view.

Retrieved from ‘http://the.hitchcock.zone/w/index.php?title=Journal_of_Popular_Film_%26_Television_(1990)_-_The_Notorious_Postwar_Psyche&oldid=186878’