The MacGuffin: News and Comment (20/Oct/2012)
(c) Ken Mogg (2012)
October 20
The following may serve as a follow-up to the matter of Hitchcock's sexual harassment of Tippi Hedren (see previous two items). Actually, though, it comes from a discussion I had this week with Bill K about a different matter. Knowing that I see G.K. Chesterton as a major shaping influence on 'the Hitchcock paradox' (Hitchcock's films, when analysed, are typically both pessimistic and anti-pessimistic), Bill suggested that at one point in Donald Spoto's 'The Dark Side of Genius' its author 'uses Chesterton to beat Hitchcock the Puritan Witchfinder General over the head with'. Well, I said, let's analyse that. The passage, in the section on Shadow of a Doubt, is in fact comparing Hitchcock with R.L. Stevenson - about whom Chesterton wrote a biography in 1927. Both Hitchcock and Stevenson were alike, suggests Spoto, in distinguishing Good from Evil but as 'exchangeable: the disclosure of human failings taints the cherished sense of propriety'. Chesterton wrote that Stevenson 'knew the worst too young; not necessarily in his own act or by his own fault ...' And Spoto comments: 'Both Stevenson and Hitchcock endured puritanical repressions: both conjured up images of the late puritan-Victorian wasteland that was inhospitable to maintaining an honourable public life and a happy private one at the same time.' In other words, we're talking about a classic tension between public morality and repression. In just two or three paragraphs, Spoto brilliantly describes the split in Hitchcock between his belief that all social life is a giant hypocrisy and his own rich imaginative life - which in turn, via his filmmmaking, might be used to shock audiences. 'The paradox of Alfred Hitchcock was that his delight in his craft could never be liberated from a terrible and terrifying ... guilt.' Spoto then refers to how Shadow of a Doubt is a dramatic illustration of what Carl Jung called 'the shadow' in all of us and which artists and writers had long drawn attention to. Both the film's two Charlies and Hitchcock himself were 'a walking illustration of Montaigne's observation, "We [...] cannot rid ourselves of what we condemn."' Hmm. For my part, I once referred to how young Charlie's adolescent fascination - until the film's mid-point - with her glamorous uncle exactly reproduces what religious philosopher and proto-psychologist, Sören Kierkegaard (1813-55), called the 'dread' (or vague awe) that arises in an individual when his/her sexuality is first posited - a state Kierkegaard described as innocent dreaming that awakens a thirst for the prodigious and the mysterious. Such 'dread' is a psychological form of suspense, and is, I suggest, what both Stevenson and Hitchcock drew on for some of their effects. For example, in Shadow of a Doubt, it is very evidently behind young Charlie's rush to the local library where she removes the ring her uncle had given her (one passage in Kierkegaard even anticipates this precise moment, I believe!), and Hitchcock films the scene as a metaphor of The Fall (see frame-capture below). Or again, Spoto's phrase 'the late puritan-Victorian wasteland' to describe the psychological legacy that is implicitly targeted in many of Hitchcock's films is surely accurate. I think of Arthur Machen's celebrated horror tale 'The Great God Pan' (1890; 1894) hinting at precisely the 'unmentionable' things - and people's reactions to them - as Spoto's phrase implies: I have suggested that the character Helen Vaughan in Machen's tale is the prototype of Daphne du Maurier's character Rebecca (see June 23, above). There's an excellent and succinct account of the tale here. Each of the tale's paragraphs, we're told, carries a 'cumulative suspense' leading to 'ultimate horror'. The tale's 'misogynistic' content is also noted. But let's return to Hitchcock himself. You could say that he was indeed sexually repressed from boyhood both by his Victorian and Edwardian environment in general and by his Catholic upbringing in particular, not to mention the effect of his endomorphic body-type, which would at least have restricted his opportunities (and invitations)! Even so, 'Hitch' seems to have quickly become something of a 'gregarious loner', supporting team sports and social activities literally and metaphorically from the sidelines but also able to amuse himself by going off to read a book or attend a film or play. In turn, already showing signs of genius, he was cultivating a degree of (non-puritanical!) free-thinking, including various kinds of self-formation (call it dandyism) and the use of humour - sometimes at his own expense, sometimes at the expense of others! I see here the influence of both Nietzsche and Chesterton (vide 'Manalive', 1912). To Bill K I mentioned something I found in Spoto's 'Dark Side'. Once, at the time of The 39 Steps (1935), Hitchcock summoned to his office his attractive blonde secretary, Joan Harrison, and, in front of screenwriter Charles Bennett, embarrassed both of them, no doubt, as he coolly read aloud one of the dirtiest passages from James Joyce's 'Ulysses'. Hmm. Tippi Hedren, you came late to the Hitchcock party! And, reader, if you want a broader perspective on all of this, you might like to consider what is being called the 'good writer, bad man' genre of author biography (or 'pathography'). I recommend this brief piece.
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