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Hitchcock's Romantic Irony
Paper, 328 pages, 64 illus.
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November, 2007
Cloth, 328 pages, 64 illus.
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Excerpt from Chapter 1, “Romantic Irony”
The concept of romantic irony serves both to define and unify Hitchcock’s otherwise diverse body of work, which ranges from a romantic thriller like North by Northwest, a black comedy like The Trouble with Harry (1955), to a horror film like Psycho (1960). The romantic ideal in Hitchcock’s work is articulated through the value placed upon the realization of love between a man and a woman as a narrative goal. Of course, the story of the formation of the couple is a commonplace convention of popular fiction, and it is a fallacy simply to equate romanticism and the romantic quest for the ideal or for transcendence with romantic love. Yet among romantic writers like Byron, Shelley, and Keats, not to mention Schlegel himself in his unfi nished novella Lucinde, the romantic ideal is expressed in terms of romantic love. Heterosexual romantic love provides an image at once of opposites uniting in a third term, the couple, that is greater than the sum of its parts, and of an ecstatic transcendence that is at once spatial (it goes beyond the world of the ordinary and the everyday) and temporal (it cleaves toward a future of romantic enchantment). Hitchcock’s films articulate and emphasize roman-tic love as an ideal in a manner that is emblematized by his staging of the kiss: Dr. Constance Petersen (Ingrid Bergman) kissing John Ballantine (Gregory Peck) in Spellbound (1945) as doorways fly open behind them to infinity, John “Scottie” Ferguson (James Stewart) kissing Judy Barton (Kim Novak) in Vertigo as the camera pans around them 360 degrees, Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) and Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint) in North by Northwest kissing in a moving train while turning in the manner of a waltz, to give but three examples.
Yet what defines Hitchcock’s presentation of heterosexual romance as an ideal is the manner in which it is entwined with its opposite—human perversity. It is as if, in a very Freudian way, sexuality is a source of profound anxiety for Hitchcock. We may speculate about Hitchcock’s personal bio-graphy, but my concern in this book is the way that the form taken by Hitchcock’s work arises from his preoccupation with human perversity. In a literal sense, perversity is associated in Hitchcock’s work with the fact of human sexuality itself, considered as the uninhibited expression of impulse that is free of any moral or social restraint, as in Freud’s phrase “polymorphous perversity.” Human perversity is therefore associated with death—that is, with the potential at once for the annihilation of the other and for self-dissolution. Often in Hitchcock’s films, lurking within the gentleman-hero, lies a sexual predator or a murderer of women, like Cary Grant’s character, John Aysgarth (“Johnnie”), in Suspicion, who seems intent on murdering his wife. And beneath the ostensibly pure or virginal heroine lies the sexually promiscuous woman or the “whore” that is suggested by Ingrid Bergman’s character in Notorious (1946) or by Grace Kelly’s character in To Catch a Thief (1955). Both these heroines are cool Hitchcock blondes who harbor incipient promiscuity beneath their ladylike exterior. The formation of the couple and the portrayal of the kiss are haunted by a sense of perversity and incipient deadliness that is captured in the advertising tagline for Suspicion: “Each time they kissed, there was the thrill of love . . . The threat of murder!” The logic that unites romantic love and human perver-sity or life and death in Hitchcock’s works is the both/and logic of romantic irony in which romantic love and human perversity are at once utterly opposed to one another and yet also, paradoxically, closely identified.
In general, Hitchcock, the narrator, self-consciously draws attention to the force of perversity by suggesting rather than by showing it. Hitchcock is an aesthete in the very precise sense that the extraordinary formal realization of his works functions as a displaced expression of human sexuality. Raymond Durgnat has spoken of Hitchcock as a democratic rather than aristocratic aesthete. In Hitchcock’s cinema, all human sexuality carries the aura of perversity; its secret pleasures are not condemned but are made available to all; and they are not cordoned off for the subtle delectation of a knowing few. Hitchcock’s aestheticism may collude in the articulation of the romantic ideal, as in the frenzied fireworks’ montage of the deliriously romantic To Catch a Thief; it may ambiguously connote romance as an ideal or as an idealization that harbors destruction, as in the romantic/vampiric kiss in The Lodger (1926); or it may evoke the frenzy of annihilation, as in the tour de force shower scene montage in Psycho.
These possibilities encapsulate the way in which the three kinds of romantic irony I have already outlined inform Hitchcock’s work. The first kind of romantic irony, romantic irony as romantic renewal (or romantic irony), is represented by his comic thrillers like The 39 Steps, To Catch a Thief, and North by Northwest. In these works Hitchcock, the godlike narrator, orchestrates a self-evidently fictive universe to yield blessings upon its hero and heroine, come what may, and the anarchic force of human sexuality serves only to fuel rather than to undermine romantic renewal. The second form of romantic irony, romantic irony as ironic ambivalence (or romantic irony simpliciter), comprises the majority of his works ranging from the The Lodger and Murder! (1930), from his British period, to Strangers on a Train (1951) and Rear Window from his American period. In these films, which are ambivalent in tone, Hitchcock, the narrator, hovers in suspended judgment between asserting the romantic ideal and undermining that ideal from within. These competing perspectives are sustained by exploiting the distinc-tion between character point of view and the point of view of the narration. In this mode of romantic irony the lure of human perversity is a competing source of attraction that often seems blunted and contained by the romance rather than serving to inspire it. The third form of romantic irony (romantic irony) I shall call narratives of ironic inversion. These works form a minority of Hitchcock’s fiction and comprise only a handful of films, beginning with his fourth, the aptly entitled Downhill (1927). In these films, the romantic ideal is infected or undermined by the forces of human perversity, and the narrative either borders on the tragic, as in Vertigo, or becomes darkly comic, as in Psycho. Here play-acting and masquerade takes on a demonic and often deadly quality, and often the narrator fundamentally deceives the spectator.
The Style of Hitchcock’s Romantic Irony
Before I outline in more detail the different forms taken by Hitchcock’s romantic irony in the concluding part of this chapter, I will fi rst describe the different rhetorical and stylistic characteristics that serve to unify Hitchcock’s cinema.
Orchestration of Character Identification and Narrative Point of View
Hitchcock manipulates the viewer’s identification with character by aligning us with the point of view of the villain, such as Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) in Psycho, or with a character who experiences the ambiguous allure of perverse desire, such as the second Mrs. de Winter (Joan Fontaine) in Rebecca. Or else Hitchcock will employ dramatic irony, and orchestrate narrative point of view to endow the audience with superior knowledge to the character about the nature of the circumstances they are in. This is the situation of suspense that Hitchcock described to French director Francois Truffaut in the extended interview he conducted with him in the 1960s. In a suspense situation, Hitchcock argues, the audience is placed in a superior position of knowledge to characters, knowing something that they do not—for example, that there is a bomb about to explode under the table where they are sitting. This may create a sense of vicarious identification with character, but it also yields a sense of distance from their fate, with the spectator sharing with the narrator a sense of toying with and controlling the destiny of his characters. Hitchcock will also sometimes align the spectator with the situation of his characters, but because of his overall orchestration of narrative point of view, this alignment itself sustains a sense of authorial presence and control. I shall explore these macro-structures of narration in chapter 2.
Hitchcock’s manipulation of narrative point of view is equally present within micro-structures of editing through the manner in which, as John Belton points out, Hitchcock combines the representation of character per-ception and emotional response through point-of-view editing with a “constructivist” approach to the creation of meaning through editing that many writers, including Belton himself, impute to the influence of Soviet montage. The case for the direct Soviet influence on Hitchcock is mixed. It is unlikely he saw Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925) until the British ban was lifted on the film and it was screened at the London Film Society in 1929. Also, the first English translation of Pudovkin, which tells of filmmaker Lev Kuleshov’s experiments with the creation of meaning through editing, did not occur until 1929. However, Ivor Montagu, a friend of Eisenstein, may well have watched the film before he recut The Lodger, in which traces of Eisenstein’s influence are discernable, and he undoubtedly talked to Hitchcock about the practices of Soviet filmmakers. Furthermore, much later in his career Hitchcock attributed his own practice of what he termed “pure cinema” to the influence of the Russians, although filmmakers’ reminiscences must always be treated with caution when they are in the business of constructing their biographical legend. Regardless, Soviet montage did influence the German expressionists, who were a formative influence on Hitchcock during his stint in Germany in 1924–25, as well as works of the French avant-garde such as Fernand Léger’s Ballet mécanique (1924), which was screened, alongside Weimar films, at the London Film Society, which Hitchcock habitually attended in the mid-twenties. These influences result in what I shall term Hitchcock’s analytical expressionism, a technique of embedding the visual rhetoric of expressionism with the framework of analytical editing that characterizes the classical Hollywood style, in a manner that at once sustains the character-centered causal drive of cinematic storytelling and preserves a self-conscious commentary upon the events in the story world.
Orchestration of Internal and External Artifice
Hitchcock scholar Lesley Brill uses the terms “internal and external artifice” to describe the self-conscious theatricality and sense of fiction that is attached to the presentation and performance of character and star persona in Hitchcock’s films (internal artifice), and to Hitchcock’s orchestration of the stylistic elements of film such as editing, lighting, mise-en-scène, and camera movement to create a self-consciously theatricalized, aestheticized, or fictive aura (external artifice). Furthermore, Brill points to a key distinction in Hitchcock’s works between those films in which internal and external artifice function to create a world of playful fictiveness and those films in which the pervasive sense of theatricality and fictiveness is an index of a demonic or fallen world.
In this book I argue that Hitchcock’s artifice is invariably associated with the presence of a human sexuality that is deemed to be incipiently perverse. But in those works where artifice is playful and benign, like The 39 Steps and North by Northwest, the lure of human “perversity” is one that spices up the romance and fuels the movement of the narrative toward romantic-ironic redemption. In his ambivalent works like The Lodger, Suspicion, or Shadow of a Doubt, the status of artifice and the lure of “perversity” it harbors are ambiguous, at best offering the promise of romantic renewal, and at worst potentially life-threatening. In his darker works, like Vertigo and Psycho, artifice and theatricality render the world a profoundly untrustworthy place. In both of these films the central protagonist is lured toward destruction by a character that plays someone else. In Vertigo, Judy Barton masquerades as the possessed wife of another man and, under his tutelage, lures the protagonist Scottie Ferguson to witness an apparent suicide. In Psycho, Norman Bates appears to be innocent of a crime that we believe his mother has committed, when all along he is the criminal whose personality is demonically fused with that of his mother whose clothes he wears. Hitchcock, the narrator, in temporary league with these incipiently demonic characters, disguises the truth of who these characters are.
Visual and Aural Expressionism: The Rhetoric of the Double
Hitchcock employs the rhetoric of the double articulated through theaesthetics of visual expressionism in order to evoke the presence of what Robin Wood calls “the chaos world,” a world of human perversity that exists beneath the veneer of the everyday. This shadow world appearsas a psychological projection of a character’s state of mind. For exam-ple, when Lina McLaidlaw (Joan Fontaine) fears that her husband Johnnie Aysgarth is going to murder her in Suspicion, her fears are registered by the spider webs’ shadows on the walls of her house. But the shadow worldis also, equally, in accordance with the logic of romantic irony, something that is wholly external to the character—a threatening and alien other. Johnnie in Suspicion may indeed be trying to murder his wife, and the analogy between his character and a spider suggests his predatory, murderous nature. The protagonist of Hitchcock’s films is typically doubled in a pattern that begins with the earliest films such as The Pleasure Garden (1925), The Lodger, and The Ring (1927). The straight, ostensibly moral hero is paral-leled and contrasted to the figure of the incipiently perverse criminal, as in the contrast between Devlin (Cary Grant) and Alexander Sebastian (Claude Rains) in Notorious, or between Roger Thornhill and Phillip Vandamm (James Mason) in North by Northwest. In most cases, as in these films, the opposed protagonists are in love with the same woman, creating a triangular relationship that emphasizes the affinities between the two male leads. Furthermore, often the criminal is an alluring dandified figure like the flamboyant Bruno Anthony (Robert Walker) in Strangers on a Train, or even someone who elicits our sympathy, like the unfortunate Alex Sebastian in Notorious. Alex finds himself married to an American agent who exploits his evident feelings for her (though she, too, is in part a victim of circum-stances). Occasionally, it is the female character who is doubled in this way, as in Hitchcock’s first English film, The Pleasure Garden, where the showgirl protagonists are divided between the morally wholesome Patsy Brand (Virginia Valli) and the gold-digger Jill Cheyne (Carmelita Geraghty), and his first American film Rebecca, where the second wife of Maxim de Winter (Laurence Olivier) is the double of his first wife, Rebecca herself.
Tonal Ambiguity and Black Comedy
As James Naremore and Susan Smith have pointed out, Hitchcock’s films are characterized by a seriocomic tonal ambiguity. Hitchcock’s romances, like The 39 Steps and North by Northwest, often treat the depredations undergone by their protagonists with humor. For example, when Roger Thornhill, abducted by the henchmen of the villain Vandamm, is set up for a murder that will look like a suicide, the circumstances of his “poisoning” with alcohol and perilous drive along the cliff and subsequent pursuit by the police are played for laughs and include a final comic collision with the police car that is reminiscent of the sight gags of silent comedy. In making light of something ostensibly bleak, black comedy epitomizes the both/and logic of romantic irony.
This use of black comedy as a relief from suspense can structure a whole work. Thus Hitchcock’s late dark film, Frenzy (1972), is organized around a contrast between the story of an impotent and psychotic sexual murderer of women, Bob Rusk (Barry Foster), and the domestic melodrama of a hen-pecked detective, Chief Inspector Oxford (Alec McCowen) and his wife Mrs. Oxford (Vivien Merchant). Oxford resiliently survives his wife’s sadis-tic, though comic, imposition of obscene gourmet food (undoubtedly substituting for sex in their marriage), while she solves the crime and blames him for imprisoning the wrong man.
However, in other contexts, black comedy can contribute to suspense, providing an excuse for allegiance with the villain in Hitchcock’s film. Hitchcock not only invites our sympathy with the devil by endowing villains such as Bruno Anthony in Strangers on a Train or Bob Rusk in Frenzy with engaging character traits and aligning us with their point of view; in these contexts (as I shall explore in chapter 2), suspense itself becomes a species of black comedy.
Hitchcock’s tonal ambiguity not only relieves us in moments of suspense or solicits identification with the villain, it often drives a wedge between the emotions that a scene ought to solicit and the way in which we are actually invited to respond, in a way that leaves the spectator anxious or uneasy. Often Hitchcock creates this effect by portraying and creating laughter where it is radically inappropriate to the dramatic context. For example, toward the conclusion of Saboteur (1942), the criminal Fry (Norman Lloyd), pursued by police, enters a “music hall” that evokes Radio City in New York, where a melodramatic love triangle plays out on a giant screen. A woman protests that her lover must leave before another man, presumably her husband, shoots him to death. But the audience responds in fi ts of laughter, apparently finding the idea that a man might get shot to be a joke. This inflects with comedy the deadly pursuit being played out with Fry and the police. Then Hitchcock himself compounds the tonal ambiguity by joking upon the idea of being shot in a film with a visual and aural pun. A man on the film screen, who claims he has a real gun, shoots. Then, apparently in response, a man in the auditorium appears to fall from a wound but is actually only laughing. Thus, we the audience is encouraged to laugh. Then Fry shoots his gun in silhouette in front of the large screen, looking as if he is a man in the movie, his shot disguised as a film shot. A policemen shoots back from the auditorium, and the man who previously only appeared to be shot is actually shot. Are we supposed to laugh or scream?
Multiple and Ambiguous Endings
Hitchcock’s films often, even typically, end on a note of ambiguity or irresolution that reflects Hitchcock’s commitment to the both/and logic of romantic irony. Different endings, often of profoundly different tone, exist for a number of Hitchcock films. Both the existence of these multiple endings, and the fact that Hitchcock often opts for the more unresolved or open-ended one, suggest the structuring ambiguity of Hitchcock’s narratives. The ending of The Pleasure Garden exists in two different versions (along with a number of other significant scene differences). In the longer version of the film the conclusion is downbeat. The heroine Patsy Brand joins the delirious hero, Hugh Fielding (John Stuart), who has fallen victim to fever in the Far East: “We both suffered … what have either of us got to live for now?” declares Patsy. Hugh responds, “We have one of the greatest things of life … youth.” Given the fact that Hugh has just risen like Lazarus from a stretcher, this declaration is decidedly unconvincing. In the shorter so-called Rohauer version of the film released in 1971 (named after the collector who saved and reconstructed it), the ending is much more conventional and upbeat as the hero returns with the heroine to her home to be greeted by the parental figures of her landlord and landlady, and by Patsy’s beloved dog, who yaps at his heels with delight.
Vertigo also has two endings. The official-release ending leaves the hero of the film, Scottie, poised helplessly over the edge of a bell tower that the woman he loves, Judy, has plunged from moments before. This is a repetition of an earlier fall in the film, a staged event which Scottie witnessed but was helpless to prevent. The ending leaves the audience with an acute sense of loss and fails to tie up the loose ends. The second version of the ending returns us to the beginning as Scottie, in a state of shock, enters the apartment of his old friend Midge (Barbara Bel Geddes). We hear on a radio that the villain, Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore), is being sought by the police, and we also hear a strange tale about a cow being led up the steps of a college. This story at once evokes the college days of Midge and Scottie and also makes a darkly comic joke about Judy’s prior ascent of the bell tower, dragged by Scottie, before her fall. Like the cow, Judy cannot get back down the steps. The scene ends with Scottie standing in silence overlooking the dark panorama of San Francisco. This alternative ending remains downbeat, but it at least allows the audience to imagine some kind of future for Scottie and Midge and suggests that Elster will be brought to justice.
Hitchcock scholar Bill Krohn has studied in detail the multiple endings of Suspicion in relation to the overall ambiguous structure of the work. Krohn shows that Hitchcock toyed insistently with the possibility of an alternate ending in which Grant, the potential wife murderer, is shown to be guilty, even to the point of possibly shooting extra scenes during production that he could insert, if he so decided, to demonstrate Johnnie’s guilt. The three endings he actually shot all show that Johnnie is, against the odds, an innocent man. However, the one he let stand preserves ambiguity. Johnnie, having “confessed” to Lina his innocence of an intent to kill, and vowing to mend his ways, is forgiven by Lina. The car in which he is driving her away from their home and back to her mother does a U-turn in front of the camera. As they drive back into the space of the frame, Johnnie coils his arm around Lina in a gesture that recalls the images of natural predation that have been associated with him throughout the film. Is this a romantic embrace or a snakelike coil of death?
Voyeruism and Self-reflexivity
As legions of critics have pointed out, Hitchcock’s interest in the cinema is one that exploits the physical, objectifying, “pornographic” qualities of the medium that certain film theorists have claimed is inherent to it. In this way, even the affirmation of romantic love has an aura of perversity about it. In his staging of the kiss, Hitchcock’s camera dwells in tight close-up upon the intimacy of the couple as if it was, as Hitchcock described it, the third party in a ménage à trois. In Hitchcock’s home movie collection, there is a particularly revealing home movie in which Hitchcock himself puckishly acts out this ménage à trois on the set of Blackmail (1929) with Anny Ondra who plays the female lead and Cyril Ritchard who plays the attempted rapist she kills. Hitchcock himself presses the lips of the protagonists together and then playfully takes the place of the male protagonist and kisses Ondra himself!
Theories of voyeurism in the cinema tend to align the look of the camera with the look of a character within a film. For example, Robert Stam and Roberta Pearson argue that the audience is aligned through Hitchcock’s use of the point-of-view shot with the voyeuristic look of the character L. B. Jefferies in Rear Window. However, a film audience is never simply aligned with the voyeuristic gaze of a character, for only the fictional character is an actual voyeur; the film spectator is at best a camera-voyeur. Rear Window and other Hitchcock films exploit and explore the affinity and distance between voyeurism that may be evoked by looking at a film image and voyeurism. By inviting the audience to share the point of view of the character who is a voyeur, Hitchcock provides the spectator an excuse or pretext for engaging in camera voyeurism; after all, it is the character, not me, the spectator, who is really a voyeur. At the same time, the spectator is also in a position to reflect upon both the voyeurism of the character in the fi ction and the position they are encouraged to occupy or refuse.
The Author in the Film
Hitchcock’s cameos are a well-known feature of his work. They playfully draw attention to Hitchcock, the director, as a presence behind the work, by inscribing that presence, not as a character in his films but as the flesh-and-blood director himself who populates his own film as an extra. Following the example of Raymond Bellour, Michael Walker has analyzed these cameo appearances in detail and draws attention to their main characteristics. Often, though not always, Hitchcock’s appearances occur at the beginning of his films, which is congruent with their role in playfully acknowledging Hitchcock’s authorship. Hitchcock often appears in a public space “as a (usually unobserved) guest, fellow traveler or casual passer by”—for example, sitting on a train in Blackmail, getting on a train in Spellbound, and trying to get on a bus in North by Northwest. In this way Hitchcock announces his allegiance with his audience as an ordinary member of the public. This is further reinforced by the fact that, as Susan Smith points out, Hitchcock often makes himself the butt of his own joke. She cites the cameo in Blackmail where he is assailed by an unruly boy and the Reduco advertisement in Lifeboat (1944), where the fat Hitchcock strikes a lively pose and the slim Hitchcock looks depressed. This also applies to the scene in Marnie analyzed in detail by Bellour, where Hitchcock looks after Marnie Edgar (Tippi Hedren) and looks back at the camera, as if he has been caught out being a voyeur.
Walker also notes that Hitchcock’s cameos are often carefully timed interventions in the story which signal a decisive shift in the action as the protagonist “crosses a threshold” into the shadow world. Thus, in Psycho, Hitchcock appears outside the office where Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) works just before she is tempted to steal the $40,000. In Strangers on a Train, Hitchcock gets on the train in which Guy Haines (Farley Granger) is bound for Metcalf to confront his estranged wife in a scene that provides Bruno with “symbolic” justification to murder Miriam Haines (Laura Elliott) on Guy’s behalf. Hitchcock also carries a double bass, his own symbolic double, just as Bruno is the double of Guy. These appearances achieve their most self-conscious form when Hitchcock actually seems to acknowledge his role in orchestrating or precipitating the narrative action. This is nicely illustrated in his cameo appearance in Rear Window, where the attentive viewer will observe Hitchcock repairing the clock in the apartment of a composer who is struggling to write the song that will become the love theme of the film. As John Fawell has argued, Hitchcock, through this gesture, identifies himself with the composer as the orchestrator of his fi lm (perhaps reminded by Jean Renoir’s far more complex elaboration of this analogy in Rules of the Game [1939] ).
As some of these cameos suggest, Hitchcock also figures in his text in a more allegorical way as the double of his characters. When he appears holding the double bass in Strangers on a Train, Hitchcock is at once identified with Guy Haines, but equally with Bruno, his dark double. In Rear Window, the cameo aligns him with the composer, but Hitchcock is also identified with L. B Jefferies, who bestows names like “Miss Torso” and “Miss Lonely Hearts” upon the “characters” across the courtyard in the manner of a director. Sometimes Hitchcock casts a character in a film with whom he bears a clear physical resemblance, such as the saboteur Mr. Verloc (Oscar Homolka) in Sabotage (1936), who, as Susan Smith writes, “in his dual role as cinema proprietor and saboteur serves as a rather compelling, complex surrogate for Hitchcock.” More generally, as William Rothman points out, Hitchcock is aligned in his films with the figure of the “gamesman aesthete” who serves to orchestrate narrative events within the film, whether it is the figure of the ostensible hero, like the actor-writer-director Sir John Menier (Herbert Marshall) in Murder!, or the figure of the villain, like the duplicitous Gavin Elster in Vertigo, who orchestrates the web of deception in which the character of Scottie Ferguson is ensnared.
However, Hitchcock’s authorial surrogacy extends beyond male characters (hero and villain alike) to the female characters in his work. Paula Cohen has demonstrated the manner in which Hitchcock’s use of his daughter (Patricia Hitchcock) as a kind of Hitchcock surrogate in three of his films—Stage Fright (1950), Strangers on a Train, and Psycho—suggests Hitchcock’s alignment with the point of view of the young female character. And Michael Walker has ingeniously pointed to a connection or identification between Hitchcock and Grace Kelly. In To Catch a Thief, Hitchcock appears on a bus on which John Robie (Cary Grant) is escaping the police, his face half-bisected as a kind of Janus face (see chapter 5). Walker points out that Hitchcock actually takes the place of the Grace Kelly character who is sitting on the bus in David Dodge’s novel from which the film was adapted. Only this fact, it seems, can account for the strange look that Cary Grant gives the director. Would Hitchcock like to be Grace Kelly for Cary Grant?
Most of these formal and stylistic aspects of romantic irony are evident in Hitchcock’s remarkable third film, The Lodger, which I believe functions as a baseline work for understanding Hitchcock’s subsequent films and provides a veritable anthology of his future filmmaking practice. In The Lodger, a mysterious man, the Lodger, played by matinee idol Ivor Novello with the aristocratic mannerisms and sartorial heir of a dandy and an aesthete, appears suddenly at the working-class household of the blonde heroine, who is courted by a dull but apparently dependable policeman, Joe Betts (Malcolm Keen). The Lodger’s appearance coincides with a series of brutal murders of blonde women, of “golden curls,” by “the Avenger,” and his actions cast suspicion, especially in the mind of the landlady, Mrs. Bunting. The Lodger exhibits a curious fascination for and repulsion from the pictures of golden-curled women on his bedroom wall; he anxiously paces his room; he myste-riously enters and leaves the house; and his room contains a map of the murders. Yet while he is a suspected serial killer, Novello’s lodger is also a romantic hero who becomes the object of affection to Daisy Bunting (June), the daughter of the house, who steadfastly protests his innocence.
Hitchcock creates competing, unambiguous points of view, both contradictory and undecidable, that focus on the identity of the Lodger. Is the Lodger an aristocratic, amateur sleuth seeking to capture the criminal who murdered his sister or is he that criminal himself? Is he a figure of threat or sympathy? Is he a gentleman or a sexual predator? In both roles, the Lodger appears as the figure of the “gamesman-aesthete” authoring the world of the film, either as the presumptively impotent aristocratic dandy-criminal ranging over the spaces of urban modernity like a vampire-alien preying on unwary victims, or as the dandy Holmesian detective who channels potentially antisocial impulses (he is, after all, perfectly able and willing to take the law into his own hands) toward the social good. Either way he is a figure who seeks to bring into being or “author” a certain kind of outcome in the social world, and thus in both roles he functions as an authorial surrogate for Alfred Hitchcock. Hitchcock appears early on in the film as a newspaper editor who gesticulates in animated fashion as news of another murder rolls off the presses. It is perhaps tempting to interpret this as Hitchcock’s first self-conscious cameo that suggests the alignment of his own film, as part of a mass medium, with the role of the print media in whipping up public hysteria, as Tom Cohen does in a recent book. But Hitchcock himself rejects the idea that his role, at this stage, was an intentional cameo; rather he was filling in for a bit-part actor who failed to arrive: “It was strictly utilitarian; we had to fill the screen.”
Hitchcock orchestrates the relationship between objective and subjective point of view in The Lodger in the “macro” sense of orchestrating point of view in relation to suspense, but also in the “micro” sense of anticipating the rhetoric of analytic expressionism that became the hallmark of his mature style. Hitchcock’s innovative use of what he termed “subjective suspense” is illustrated in a sequence in the film where the Lodger, creeping out for a nocturnal assignation (is he going out to kill a blonde or rescue her?), is overheard by the landlady, Mrs. Bunting, who eavesdrops at her bedroom door. Hitchcock creates a sustained pattern of alternation between Mrs. Bunting straining to hear him and the Lodger creeping down the stairs. Because The Lodger is a silent film, the idea that Mrs. Bunting is listening to the Lodger is only conveyed through Hitchcock’s editing, thereby foregrounding the hand of Hitchcock, the narrator, who shows the audience what the character can only (strain to) hear. In a broader sense, while we share the character’s anxiety about the Lodger, the detachment from her point of view afforded by Hitchcock’s analytical editing also ensures that we can respond to her reaction as a needless worry. We may view the Lodger’s careful steps as motivated by the innocent desire to not wake and unduly disturb her rather than as a sign of his guilt and fear of discovery.
Furthermore, in The Lodger, a deadly serious question—“Is the Lodger a psychotic killer?”— becomes for Hitchcock a source of entertainment, of black comedy. Hitchcock playfully deploys the rhetoric of expressionist mise-en-scène and commentative editing to hint at a predatory vampirism and to evoke the shadow world of perverse desire. By subtle editing and visual symbolism, Hitchcock orchestrates a point of view of the character’s motivation that differs from the point of view of the heroine, such that we imagine him entertaining predatory and murderous impulses thatshe appears not to see. Rather than share her suspense, as in the case of Mrs. Bunting, here we fear on Daisy’s behalf. For example, when Daisy brings the Lodger his breakfast and, for the first time, they are in closeproximity, we see the Lodger in close-up pick up a knife from the break-fast table. In a masklike profile shot, we see a gleam of light on the Lodger’steeth as his mouth is frozen slightly open. Beneath the controlled, gentlemanly veneer may lie a chaotic murderous desire. It turns out that the Lodger uses the knife, innocently, to flick an unsightly speck (of food?) from Daisy’s clothing, but even this gesture is ambiguous given the Lodger’s intense preoccupation with the image of the feminine. Later, Daisy and the Lodger play chess in front of the fireplace. As Daisy reaches to pick upa chess piece, we see that the Lodger, unknown to her, has picked up apoker which is poised in the frame close to her head. At this moment, Hitchcock cuts to Joe, the erstwhile boyfriend, arriving at the house—he has just been put on the Avenger case—and when we return to the couple, the Lodger is stoking a raging fire with his poker. He puts the poker downand impulsively reaches to caress Daisy’s hair. “Beautiful Golden Hair,” he asserts, and they look into each other’s eyes before they and the camera nervously pull back.
Hitchcock’s visual narration suggests a motivation that the heroine does not share. And yet we cannot help asking why is it that the heroine is attracted to a man that her mother suspects is a serial murderer. In this way, it is as if Hitchcock’s voyeuristic camera is inviting us to entertain a motivation possessed by the character that the character herself cannot acknowledge—namely, that the Lodger is alluring in virtue of his possession of these concealed predatory desires, desires that are romantic precisely to the extent that they remain contained and concealed within the mask of respectability. Hitchcock shoots the kiss between Daisy and the Lodger in a shot/reverse-shot. Daisy looks in medium shot with chest heaving and eyes glinting. The Lodger in reverse shot approaches the camera, his pallid face highlighted against a black background that abstracts the figure from space. His accen-tuated half-opened lips approach the camera in tight close-up (the lips of a vampire?). Hitchcock cuts to a medium two-shot as the Lodger hesitates, intoxicated by her golden curls. Is he afraid of the kiss and of the desires it awakens or is he overtaken by longing? Finally, slowly, in tight close-up, their white faces framed against a black background, the couple kiss, and Hitchcock cuts to an overhead shot as Daisy’s head and eyes fall back in a swoon.
The ending of The Lodger is both doubled and ambiguous. After the Lodger has been exonerated, and the real murderer has ostensibly been caught, we see the Lodger in long shot languishing on a hospital bed where the doctor reports that while he has had a severe nervous strain his youth and energy will pull him through. He languidly puts out his arm, and Daisy, sitting beside him, clasps it. Then a title self-consciously announces, “All stories have an end.” We are introduced to the Lodger’s mansion. The Lodger leads Daisy up a sweeping staircase and they embrace in front of a large window. Again, the Lodger is intoxicated by her hair, while outside the window a neon sign flashes “Tonight Golden Girls,” a sign whose earlier display in the film signaled both the dance revue, the promise of romance, and the possibility of murder. While the sign, as seen through the window, is now diminished in size and “contained” within the scene, in a manner that might suggest, as Charles Barr contends, that the threat it represents has been finally neutralized,44 it also connotes the sense that the threat has migrated into domestic space, in a way that anticipates Hitchcock’s later narratives like Rebecca or Suspicion, where the figure of Jack the Ripper now becomes an incipient Bluebeard or wife murderer.
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