The MacGuffin: News and Comment (16/Jun/2012)
(c) Ken Mogg (2012)
June 16
My thanks to JG who on our 'advanced' discussion group this week suggested how apparent contradictions in Hitchcock's films are evidence of their director's objectivity and of Hitchcock's 'dualistic approach to character and story, his ability to explore and blend numerous viewpoints'. JG added: 'Once you get past the technical & creative mastery of the man, I think this more than any other single element is the reason people are still pulling apart this body of work after all this time.' Yes! Now, in describing John Patrick Shanley's film Doubt (2008) here last week, I was seeking to move the focus to what Hitchcock's objectivity may owe to his Catholic sensibility. At every turn of Shanley's story, we are subtly shown evidence for and against the viewpoints of the characters; equally, we are inculcated with the idea that 'doubt' can be healthy, forming a bond of right-minded people who know that certainty is elusive. (Not coincidentally, a central scene of the film is a denunciation of 'gossip' - admittedly preached by Father Flynn who stands to lose his reputation if certain gossip starts up, or maybe he is thinking of the boy Donald.) Arguably, this is a more sophisticated version of the paradigm of Hitchcock's Suspicion, where we can never be certain that Johnnie's crimes aren't mainly in Lina's head. Yes, Johnnie admits to being insensitive and to having a gambling weakness, even to a little embezzlement along the way, but he surely isn't a murderer, is he? And he does love Lina, doesn't he? Part of us is relieved when she finally accepts his explanations and they return home. On the other hand, Hitchcock 'playfully' leaves an ambiguity: who, if not Johnnie, did give Beaky the brandy that killed him, and in any case what if Beaky were absolutely right when he once said, 'Johnnie can lie his way out of any situation'? The ending of Suspicion is ambiguous, and it thus points the way to the aptly-named Shadow of a Doubt of two years later. (Note, however, that at a surreal level, Suspicion isn't about crime at all but rather about marriage and the strains that a marriage must endure.) As for the latter, here's something I find interesting. Hitchcock finally does make a 'joke' of the local Santa Rosa pastor and his laudatory sermon about the late Uncle Charlie: 'The beauty of [such people and] their souls lives on for ever', we hear the pastor say. Little does he know that Uncle Charlie was a serial killer! On the other hand - and maybe only a Catholic would have handled the matter like this - the film never actually condemns Uncle Charlie. It even hints that he was mentally unbalanced after his bicycle accident at age ten (based on a real-life killer, Earle Nelson). And the mysterious 'flashbacks' that show waltzing couples, and are associated with Uncle Charlie's psychopathology, are just that: mysterious, hypnotic, ultimately inexplicable (whatever Freudian significance may attach to them). They represent a 'lost paradise' of nostalgia and unregainable happiness. And we, the audience, have experienced them with Uncle Charlie during the film - just as, later, watching Psycho, we will identify with Norman's 'problems' without knowing that he, too, is a serial killer. Shanley's Doubt is rather more cerebral - it ends with a brief scene (see frame-capture below) in which Sister Aloysius finally acknowledges that she has doubts of her own (whereas she had concealed them previously); thus there's a sense in which all is not lost, despite Father Flynn's expulsion to go elsewhere. But now here's a final thought for this week. Doubt is never finally explicit about anything, in keeping with its title. It does have 'issues' at the centre, such as whether Father Flynn may be a paedophile. But nothing about those issues is resolved. What occurs to me is that Hitchcock would never have made a film about such 'controversial' matters (Doubt even 'defends' paedophilia up to a point - see last week). In Hitchcock's films, murder is always incontrovertibly wrong. Sure, Bruno in Strangers on a Train is allowed to ask, 'What's a life or two, Guy?', but individual murders in Hitchcock always remain morally wrong. In Hitchcock, life is essentially good, death is essentially bad, and grey areas aren't considered. No one in Hitchcock is ever suffering from painful cancer, for example. (Well, Rebecca had cancer but that's not relevant here.) Death must figure as the ultimate touchstone to condemn anyone who inflicts it on others. Hitchcock, looking around, said that he agreed with Robert Burns, 'Man's inhumanity to man makes countless thousands mourn.' Shanley's Doubt just reaches a similar conclusion from a slightly different direction, I think.
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