The last two months I watched 30 Alfred Hitchcock movies. I recommend the experience. The filmography is fun, fleet, fast. People — the hottest people! — go on the run, fall in love, fight for their life. Nobody will ever look like this again: Calm, backlit, their cars rear-projected, men with Clip Art hair, women very gala. Smooth, not plastic; slim, not fit. These very Put Together people learn valuable lessons for surviving in a mad world. Don’t trust the police, don’t trust your husband, don’t trust your uncle, don’t trust yourself. Spielberg has the gaze, that upward marvel at magnificent sights. Hitchcock has a glare: A person (or angry mob) staring right at the camera with suspicion or horror. I didn’t do it, the hero will protest. But every Catholic knows we’re all guilty.
I had the honor of talking Hitchcock with Mark Harris and Adam B. Vary on the latest episode of Screen Drafts, the greatest podcast in the world. We’re picking up the baton of a month-long Mega Draft, focusing on slots 11-20. William Bibbiani, Walter Chaw, and Drea Clark already drafted 30-21. Maureen Lee Lenker, Ben Mankiewicz, and Oriana Nudo will construct the top ten in a couple weeks. That is a murderer’s row of amazing film minds plus my idiot self. I hope you’ll give the whole Hitchcock series a listen.
Before doing this draft, I was a very basic Hitchcock person. Had watched the Most Famous movies, the Less Famous Greats, the Hidden Gems Everyone Knows About, a few Bad Ones Someone Online Swears Are Masterpieces. One I had never seen before was Frenzy, his delirious penultimate freakout. By 1972, Hitchcock was a 19th century man living under porno chic. (His star, Jon Finch, came fresh from the blood and boobs in Roman Polanski’s Macbeth.) Frenzy has a rep for pure nastiness, and one corpse disposal is like Marx Brothers Breaking Bad. But the best set piece — the last great thing Hitchcock did — is a monumental misdirect. A woman (you like her) walks through a door with a man. You know he’s going to murder her, and worse. Then the camera retreats: Down the stairs, out the building, into the street. Almost a full minute, the sounds of London rising, pedestrians passing by like non-playable characters who keep moving after the game kills its player. You don’t see the murder. You feel it.
It’s a visual idea I kept seeing in Hitchcock: The absence, the crucial action left offscreen. When he shows you an empty chair, he’s showing you the woman who should be sitting there. When he shows you a madman’s fingers curling in midair, he expects you to sense the neck they’re strangling. There’s the empty bed someone slept in. There’s the tall cliff where a man was standing a moment ago. Some of this was a function of censorship, a professional need to imply evolving into an artistic gift for implication. (Many Hitchcock movies are now understood to be about things no characters ever talk about: Homosexuality, the patriarchy, Lacan.)
But I think it was also a game: I’m so good at showing you everything, I will even show you nothing! You feel this in Dial M for Murder, in which Ray Milland’s devious husband carefully walks rehearses the choreography of his planned assassination. Walk here, wait here, this phone will ring, she’ll walk through that door. He’s constructing the scene for us, in advance. When the attack goes awry, he has to plant clues to paint a different picture for the police. One homicide seems to happen three ways. Murder’s murder is its big scene — Grace Kelly, scissors, 3D! — but I could watch Milland playact the killing for hours.
When you remove the action, you’re left with the emotional consequences of the action. A news report about the events of Rear Window would note, in a couple sentences of unsparing detail, what a husband does to his wife inside their apartment. The movie keeps that event offscreen to glimpse the deeper mania in the watchers across the courtyard (read: us). So there’s an edge of sincere human interest, a feeling for psychological investigation over visceral thrill. Hitchcock’s mutant stepson David Lynch picked up this absence thing and ran with it. Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive are about murders you never see. I think Inland Empire is, too — who knows? — and I still can’t tell if Amanda Seyfried dies in Twin Peaks: The Return.
A very proto-Lynchian feeling of the void recurs in my three favorite Hitchcock movies. Shadow of a Doubt, Vertigo, and The Birds are the Northern Californian trilogy from a director with a Santa Cruz getaway house; this Bay Area boy may just be biased. Different movies, disparate settings: family noir in a small town, detective romance in the big city, creatures rampaging in the country. But there’s a quadruple-backflip quality to what they show, and don’t reveal. Shadow is serial killer story that never shows the killer doing a proper murder. Vertigo’s famous twist reveals the identity of the villain — then keeps the mastermind offscreen for the rest of the movie. The Birds has no explanation, no music, and (arguably) no climax.
On all fronts, I think, the absence has a moral dimension. The dawning horror or Shadow of a Doubt depends on seeing Joseph Cotten’s Uncle Charlie transform through the eyes of Teresa Wright’s scared niece. Vertigo’s final act is like the wreckage after a bombing raid: With the murderous magus far away, we’re left to watch how the two people he ensnared love (and prey upon) each other. I think in 50 years The Birds will just be THE Hitchcock movie, because its elliptical final act anticipates the way natural disaster and climate emergency overwhelms all human concerns.
The most famous thing Hitchcock ever did, of course, was Psycho’s shower scene. Nudity, blood, scream, knife: Bravura. But going Full Hitch led me to an intriguing contrasting scene in Blackmail, the 1929 film he made right between the Silent and Sound eras. A woman (spitfire Anny Ondra) goes to a man’s apartment. He woos her — he’s an artist — and then attacks. There’s a single shot, static, of the two of them behind a curtain. We don’t see what’s happening, just a lot of ferocious billowing. Her hand reaches for a knife. More ferocious billowing. The curtains stop moving. His hand reaches out, lifeless. She steps out, vacant look in her eyes. We don’t see what she sees. But we see her.
PS: I’m on Letterboxd now. It seems fun!