Hitchcock's Romantic Irony

Alfred Hitchcock is widely acknowledged as a reflexive or self-reflexive filmmaker who inscribes himself within his own works through cameos and authorial surrogates, orchestrates the narrative world as a world of self-conscious artifice, and acknowledges and invokes the role of the audience in his films, most notably in the spectatorial role assigned to L. B. Jefferies (James Stewart) in Rear Window (1954). However, it seems to me that in order to understand the nature of Hitchcock’s formal dexterity, the idea of reflexivity or self-reflexivity is insufficient. First, it is a concept that tends to emphasize overt moments of authorial interpolation or audience address as against the more pervasive, invisible presence that Hitchcock sustains in his work. Second, the concept tends to privilege the role of the author in self-consciously fabricating the fictional world over the quality and significance of the world that is fabricated. However, is it my contention that Hitchcock’s formal dexterity does not operate in a void to quote John Belton, quoting Bosley Crowther.¹ Rather, Hitchcock’s formal dexterity is constitutive of a worldview articulated by his works.

It is for this reason that I have turned in this book to the concept of romantic irony in order to understand the nature of Hitchcock’s work. The concept of romantic irony, though elusive, accounts for both vertical and horizontal form—that is, for both the inscription of authorial self-consciousness and the organization of narrative meaning, which the idea of self-reflexivity alone fails to adequately explain. Furthermore, it is a concept that allows us to understand Hitchcock’s relationship to romanticism, one that is mediated by fin de siècle aestheticism and by European modernism, German expressionism in particular. Romantic irony has wide, indeed ever-widening, currency in the field of literature, but its application to understanding film has been minimal, and to my knowledge the term has never been applied to films of Hitchcock. The purpose of this chapter is to introduce the concept of romantic irony, to explain in detail how romantic irony in Hitchcock’s work involves at once a specific kind of self-conscious narration and a particular attitude or stance toward the emplotment of romantic love, and to describe the basic forms that romantic irony takes in Hitchcock’s films. This chapter begins with a discussion of the origins of the concept of romantic irony in romantic philosophy. Readers who wish to move straight to the explication of Hitchcock’s romantic irony should skip to page 11.

The Concept of Romantic Irony

Any critic who seeks to employ the term romantic irony is faced with the necessity of defining a term whose usage is so amorphous and wide-ranging as to appear inchoate. What do the words romantic and ironic mean in romantic irony? Do they have a separate reference, that is, does irony in romantic irony serve to qualify the term romantic and describe a specific inflection of the romantic? Finally, to what aspects of a text does the term apply? Is it a worldview or a way of thinking, or is it an aesthetic category, a narrative mode or form? The concept of romantic irony is taken from the writings of Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) where it is formulated, at least implicitly, for the first time. Schlegel discusses irony extensively in his early published writings, which consist of trenchant aphoristic fragments whose form itself seeks to express or reflect his philosophy, and he develops a theory of romantic poetry in which the concept of irony plays a central role. However, Schlegel did not actually use the term romantic irony at all in his published writings.

For Schlegel, the concern of philosophy is the relationship between the relative and finite, which are chaotic, and the absolute or infinite, which are unified and complete: Only in relationship to the infinite is there meaning and purpose; whatever lacks such a relation is absolutely meaningless and pointless. For Schlegel, irony is not merely a local rhetorical ploy in which you mean the reverse of what you say: it is nothing less than a cognitive instrument through which the relationship of the finite to the infinite may be grasped. Subjectively, Schlegel’s concept of irony may be understood in relationship to Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s idealist philosophy. For Fichte, reality is created by the subject as an external constraint against which it defines itself. This self-definition consists in a ceaseless dialectical opposition or self-division between the empirical, finite self, and the self that, aspiring to the absolute, constantly confronts, overcomes, and confronts again its own finitude. Schlegel states that irony is constant alternation of self-creation and self-destruction,² and by its means one transcends oneself.³ The role irony plays as an instrument for objectively grasping this mobility is defined in Schlegel’s romantic, rhetorical logic in which the either/or Aristotelian logic of non-contradiction (something cannot be both a and not-a) is replaced by the both/and principle of a romantic logic or a = a and a ≠ a.⁴ Schlegel writes, An idea is a concept perfected to the point of irony, an absolute synthesis of absolute antithesis, the continual self-creating interchange of two conflicting thoughts (A 121).

Schlegel captures the active, transforming nature of this self-creating interchange with the term wit. Wit is an explosion of the confined spirit (L 90) and the outward lightning bolt of the imagination.⁵ In all its manifestations wit is at once the principle and the organ of universal philosophy" (A 220). Schlegel describes wit as partaking of a logical chemistry. The witty juxtaposition of opposites functions like the then recently discovered processes of chemical combination whereby elements separate out of compounds and join to form new compounds which are more than the sum of their parts. Thus, sodium carbonate (Na2CO3) mixed with hydrochloric acid (HCl) forms sodium chloride (Na2Cl), that is, salt and carbonic acid (H2CO3). This in turn breaks down into water (which is hydrogen plus oxygen, H2O) and carbon dioxide (CO2).⁶ Schlegel writes, Whoever has a sense for the infinite and knows what he wants to do with it sees here the result of eternally separating and uniting powers, conceives of his ideals at least as being chemical, and utters, when he expresses himself decisively, nothing but contradictions (A 412).

Philosophical irony achieves its realization, for Schlegel, in romantic poetry. As Hans Eichner has made clear, the term romantic poetry in this context should be treated with care. Romantic is opposed to classical by Schlegel, and he applies the term romantic poetry to any work of fiction, primarily ‘modern,’ that did not belong to any of the three classical genres—the epic, the drama, and the lyric.⁷ In contrast to classical fiction that, for Schlegel, was dictated by prescribed forms and hence objective, romantic poetry is an arabesque that mixes together different genres, modes, or styles in a manner that creates contradictory perspectives, a sense of fragmentation, and moments of self-conscious authorial commentary. Romantic poetry fuses poetry and prose, inspiration and criticism, the poetry of art and the poetry of nature (A 116). Ideal modern fiction is fragmentary both in form and content, simultaneously completely subjective and individual, and completely objective and like a necessary part in a system of all the sciences (A 77).

Romantic poetry for Schlegel is in the arts what wit is in philosophy (A 238). Indeed, it perhaps provides an ideal realization of philosophical irony or wit at the level of both horizontal and vertical form. Horizontally across the text, wit is manifest in the self-creating interchange of opposed ideas that Schlegel describes as artfully ordered confusion and a charming symmetry of contradictions, which yields that wonderfully perennial alternation of enthusiasm and irony.⁸ Vertically, wit is manifest in the irony of self-transcendence. Romantic poetry hovers at the midpoint between the portrayed and the portrayer … and can raise that reflection again and again to a higher power, can multiply it in an endless succession of mirrors (A 116). In summary:

There is a kind of poetry whose essence lies in the relation between the ideal and real, and which therefore, by analogy to philosophical jargon, should be called transcendental poetry. It begins as satire in the absolute difference of ideal and real, hovers in between as elegy, and ends as idyll with the absolute identity of the two. But just as we wouldn’t think much of an uncritical transcendental philosophy that doesn’t represent the producer along with the product and contain at the same time within the system of transcendental thoughts a description of transcendental thinking: so too … this poetry should describe itself, and always be simultaneously poetry and the poetry of poetry. (A 238)

Schlegel defines irony as divine, yet, in the same breath, as transcendental buffoonery, and he compares it to the mimic style of the averagely gifted buffo. That is, the author is like the buffoon in the Italian comic opera who is constantly laughing at his own histrionic performance and the world of the play.

The idea of irony as wit also serves to link Schlegelian irony to the self-conscious invocation of the reader or listener as interlocutor for the author. For Schlegel explicitly compares the imaginative, creative function of irony, in the form of wit, to the spark of conversation between old friends. Wit, Schlegel writes, is logical sociability and many witty ideas are like the sudden meeting of two friendly thoughts after a long separation. Wit is not simply like communication but it stems, as Gary Handewerk points out, from seeking to overcome a sense of communicative isolation.⁹ Schlegel speaks at once of the impossibility and necessity of complete communication (L 108). The explosion of the confined spirit in wit breaks out of communicative isolation and expresses the desire to solicit a response from the reader, listener, or spectator. But it is not a question of simply blurting out everything one has to say and imposing oneself on the other. Nor is it a matter of making a calculated impression. Rather, it involves making the reader or listener an interlocutor: The synthetic writer constructs and creates a reader as he should be; he doesn’t imagine him calm and dead, but active and critical. He allows whatever he has created to take shape gradually before the reader’s eyes, or else he tempts him to discover it himself (L 112).

In the first half of the twentieth century, the interpretation of romantic irony centered upon a debate as to whether romantic irony was essentially subjective or objective in character. The question at stake was whether romantic irony is to be equated with the kind of authorial self-consciousness or self-reflexivity to be found in the works of Laurence Sterne and Schlegel’s friend and contemporary Ludwig Tieck. This kind of subjective romantic irony, it was argued, was not what Schlegel had in mind. Instead, Schlegel’s model for romantic irony was the kind of objective romantic irony to be found in the works of Shakespeare, where the hand of the author is evenly and essentially invisibly distributed, like the presence of God that is immanent within every aspect of his creation according to the Pauline doctrine.¹⁰ Objective romantic irony was deemed superior to subjective romantic irony in which the text was merely an occasion for flaunting the presence or dexterity of the author, and content is ceded to the play of form. While this debate seems largely to have been forgotten, it does receive an echo in the way in which romantic irony has been treated by contemporary commentators.

One group of literary theorists and critics continues to define romantic irony primarily in terms of subjective romantic irony. D. C. Muecke, in The Compass of Irony, equates what he calls proto-romantic irony with formal self-reflexivity or artistic irony, where an author draws attention to the fictional status of the artwork by a deliberate destruction of the fictional illusion, in the manner of Sterne’s authorial interpellations in Tristam Shandy.¹¹ Lilian Furst contrasts romantic irony with traditional irony. In traditional irony, of the kind to be found in the novels of George Eliot, irony is used as a weapon to discriminate truth from falsity in a way that preserves a consistent texture for the fictional world. The knowing narrator guides the reader to the correct meaning that lies beneath a form of words that might appear to say the reverse. Romantic or modern irony is situated not between the narrator and the reader, but between the narrator and his narrative, where the storyteller openly manipulates the elements of his story to reflect upon the nature of his tale and himself as a writer. The storyteller becomes a narrative gamesman who delights in sporting with his creation, exploiting it as a medium for displaying the fireworks of his creativity.¹² Rather than guide the reader to certainty, the reader is made to realize the unattainability of truth and the pervasiveness of paradox.

However, other critics such as Anne Mellor and Clyde de L. Ryals have noted that the equation of romantic irony with self-reflexivity tends to downplay the way in which romantic irony may be inscribed in a text laterally or horizontally rather than vertically.¹³ The orchestration of competing or dichotomous voices that refuses to choose between one and the other but adopts Schlegel’s logic of both/and, and tonal ambiguity, such as the juxtaposition of seriousness and humor, is central to romantic irony. Romantic irony always displays a playful authorial self-consciousness with its accompanying sense of address to the spectator—an attitude of hovering or hesitating between two competing views in suspended judgment—but this attitude need not (though it might) involve the breaking of fictional illusion or an overt display of authorial voice. Furst’s definition implies the idea of radical paradox or uncertainty that privileges the nature of the telling over the story that is told in a manner that seems inspired by contemporary writers such as Donald Barthelme, Jr., Samuel Beckett, and Jorge Luis Borges. Raymond Immerwahr pointed out many years ago in his subtle analysis of the debate between subjective and objective romantic irony that while romantic irony is not to be equated with the disguise of the narrator in and through his creation in the manner that the theorists of objective romantic irony maintain, neither can it simply be equated with self-reflexivity. Rather the ironic poet exercises ‘objective’ restraint by not losing himself in his poetic inspiration but consciously shaping and ordering its diverse products. His ‘subjective’ license or caprice is a constant readiness to turn from one element of this inspiration to the other.¹⁴

From this brief review of the literature we can extract two dimensions to the problem of understanding romantic irony which cut across the opposition between objective and subjective. The first dimension involves the relationship between horizontal and vertical form, that is, the nature and role of authorial self-consciousness or self-reflexivity. The second involves the character of the horizontal form, that is, whether it is unitary, divided, or plural in perspective or point of view. On this basis, we can define romantic irony in contrast to two other narrative modes, and here I adapt the conclusions of John Francis Fetzer.¹⁵ In traditional, preromantic irony, irony functions as a rhetorical device where the writer or filmmaker invites the reader to choose between conflicting viewpoints, through presenting the correct viewpoint in the guise of its opposite. The traditional ironist is self-conscious rather than self-reflexive and therefore preserves a unified point of view within the text. In romantic irony, the writer or filmmaker presents competing, opposed perspectives in unstable equilibrium, following Schlegel’s both/and logic, with the author self-consciously hovering between them. The articulation of this double perspective entails the insistent presence of a self-conscious or commentative narrator, who will be manifest, periodically, in formal moments of self-reflexivity or metafiction that invoke the relationship between the author and the reader or viewer. In postromantic or modern irony (that Furst confusingly wishes to call romantic irony), the text is not merely bifurcated in point of view but fragmented into paradox and uncertainty. This horizontal dispersal of meaning becomes a product of a narration where the telling is privileged over what is told, narrative collapses into narration, and self-reflexivity is the dominant mode.

Some discussions of romantic irony seem to break off at precisely this point of formal definition. However, it seems to me that a question that is equally fundamental to defining romantic irony is the relationship that the concept bears to a romantic worldview. Most critics seem to agree that the concept has an extension beyond the literature of the romantic period and this is certainly in accordance with Schlegel’s definition of romantic poetry. But romantic irony in Schlegel is linked to a romantic attitude or stance that involves the aspiration or quest for the ideal or the absolute following the logic of Fichte’s subjective idealism. I shall define the romantic component in romantic irony as the propensity to measure what is real and finite against what is ideal and absolute. Thus the orchestration of competing voices in romantic irony has a specific purpose and tone, and that is to foster a sense of the perpetual transcendence of limits and hence of the aspiration toward the ideal.

However, as Furst points out, Schlegel’s conception of romantic irony is a double-edged sword. Instead of ascending to an ideal, Schlegel’s dialectical irony that relentlessly decreates and recreates might provoke a spiral of descent into dejection, melancholy, or nihilism. Instead of creatively transcending the real in self-transformation, the ideal may collapse or implode back into it. According to Ernst Behler, this is precisely the direction the philosophy of irony took in Germany in the early to middle period of the nineteenth century. He quotes philosopher Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand Solger: Immeasurable sadness must seize us when we see the most glorious entities dissolved into nothingness because of their necessarily earthly existence …. This moment of transition when the idea is destroyed must be the true seat of art …. Here the mind of the artist must combine all directions into one synoptic view. We call this view, soaring above everything and destroying everything, irony.¹⁶ Here the shape of the romantic ironic text orchestrates incompatible or contrasting viewpoints not with a view toward transcendence but in a downward dialectic or spiral of descent.

But there is a third possibility. This would be a form of romantic irony that in terms of its attitude to the ideal is neither positive nor negative but rather holds that ideal itself in suspended judgment. This form of romantic irony would, in Morton L. Gurewitch’s terms, blend a romantic ardor with an anti-romantic animus.¹⁷ Furst criticizes this formulation as one that naively splits off the romantic and ironic components of romantic irony rather than conceiving romantic irony as a composite mode. However, suspended between the ideal and its opposite, this form of romantic irony remains a composite mode. It is just that in this form of romantic irony, the dialectical relationship between the ideal and its opposite remains suspended between its component parts rather than integrated into an upward or downward spiral of descent. Indeed, a text that is structured in this way can be understood as one that hovers between the upward dialectic of transcendence and the downward dialectic of descent. In this sense, the romantic irony of suspended judgment can be viewed as the primary form of romantic irony from which the positive dialectic of transcendence and the downward spiral of descent are generated. As we shall see, these three forms of romantic irony circumscribe the parameters of Hitchcock’s 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 unfinished 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 romantic 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.¹⁸

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 biography, 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 gentlemanhero, 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 perversity 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.¹⁹ 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 distinction 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 first 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 François 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.²⁰ 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 perception 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.²¹ 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 1929.²² 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.²³ 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.²⁴ 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).²⁵ 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 the aesthetics 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.²⁶ This shadow world appears as a psychological projection of a character’s state of mind. For example, 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 world is 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 paralleled 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 circumstances). 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.²⁷ 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 sadistic, 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 fits 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