A Lot of Writing for a Lot of Watching

I watched five Hitchcock films over the past couple days, and honestly, I didn’t like them mostly. In fact, it was only the last film that I watched, Psycho (1960), that redeemed him. I tried to keep my eye out for the “amazing film angles and editing” that everyone associates with him, but I often didn’t notice them. I hypothesize that everyone who came after him started shooting and cutting like he did so that modern film audiences don’t even recognize the “revolutionary” or individualistic nature of his filmmaking anymore. Unfortunately, I’ve discovered that I am one of those moviegoers.

The first Hitchcock film I watched after Rear Window (1954) was Marnie (1964). This film, which I so reluctantly accepted in class, indeed did nothing for me. I admit that it is a relatively provocative psychological analysis of the title character, but it was really, really boring. I don’t think it was Hitchcock’s intention to make this movie scary; the suspense he built in this film was not the suspense of something horrible about to happen but rather the suspense of answering the question, “What the hell is wrong with Marnie?" The red flashes that obviously mean something, the increasing recurrence of her nightmare, and the queer fact that she won’t let Sean Connery manhandle her all lead the audience to wonder why she behaves so strangely, but it frustrated and bored me that I had to watch through the entire movie to discover at the end what had happened to her.

Then came The Birds (1963). As I discussed with George, some of the bird attacks were really hilarious. Tippi Hedren, sitting smugly in her little boat, gets clipped on the head by a random gull. When the birds come uninvited to the birthday party, one of the birds attacks a little girl who doesn’t fight back but instead lies on the ground and waits for someone to get her. All this funniness, yet I can’t decide which interpretation of the birds I like. I thought initially that the love birds represent star-crossed lovers, and I toyed with the same interpretation as George about the imprisonment of free spirits. Milly told me that the birds represent feminism or racism, but she might have been having a “moment.” I didn’t like this film much because I really want to know the director’s intention rather than hear what everyone else thinks the birds symbolize.

I then watched the rest of Vertigo (1958). I watched this movie too late, and Michelle had to keep looking over at me to make sure I wasn’t sleeping. The movie didn’t interest me from the beginning, so I fought to stay awake through all the dialogue and nothing-happening. Then a twist that woke me up. It was a bizarre one, and when Scottie catches on to Madeleine’s trick, I awaited what happened. And then the freaking nun. Michelle and I watched the last twenty seconds twice, and even knowing what would follow the second time, I was scared shitless.

But thank goodness I decided to watch Psycho. I was pretty disappointed by the other films, but this one really affected me. This film is brilliant: the plot that we follow from the beginning is not the actual plot, and the person that we trust to be the protagonist is murdered. After the shower-murder/sex scene, we don’t know who this film is about, and I was scrambling to try to figure out what was going on. I made the mistake of thinking that that murder was the biggest thing that would happen—we discussed in class that if you do something big like that in a film, you have to be able to top it, and I should have known better than to rest comfortably—so the next murder came as a shock. After the first murder, I had thought that the story would actually center on the private detective’s search for the truth, but apparently not. The explanation at the end was hinted at throughout the film, and for some time, I did think that Norman Bates had more to do with the murders than just cleaning up, but what I liked about the film is that it constantly had me second guessing myself.

It was in Psycho that I really noticed any of Hitchcock’s filmmaking. In the first half of the film, a popular thang was to show Janet Leigh (who I prefer to Tippi Hedren any day) driving while interposing the sounds of conversations that were occurring elsewhere but simultaneous to her action. This technique removed the need to show the conversation actually taking place and helped move the movie along. From the story’s standpoint, the conversations helped to show Marion’s paranoia as they could have been figments of her imagination. I also often noticed the bird’s-eye-view that Hitchcock used when filming the upstairs of the Bates home. One shot in particular that I think I remember started out by moving in toward the mother’s bedroom around foot level and near the door rose up and tilted down to achieve the bird’s-eye-view of the hallway and staircase; it was extremely cool. And I love the transition Hitchcock used in the end. You’ll miss it if you don’t pay attention, but there’s a shot of Norman Bates in the cell, wrapped up in a blanket, and before the shot fades into the final shot of a truck towing Marion’s car out of the marsh, his face fades into a skull. Pretty creepy.

Psycho helped me understand the deliberateness of Hitchcock’s shot choices and the implications that they have. When Marion leaves the office and goes home, there is a shot in her bedroom that starts at Marion, shifts down to the bag that contains all that money, and then pans over to a suitcase that we then observe she is packing. At no time does anyone say that she is about to steal the money and run off, but because Hitchcock filmed that shot in that way, we can infer that that is precisely what she is about to do.
Looking back, I realized that in Marnie, the first thing we see is a yellow purse, carried by a woman walking away from the camera. We can infer that this purse is important, but we don’t realize till later how much money she is carrying inside it. Later in the movie, we see a similar shot, but her clothes have changed, her hair is a different color, and her purse is black; we’ve learned from the earlier shot that she was pulling a con job, and we infer from this similar but slightly altered shot that she’s at it again.
Even in Vertigo, what I thought was an extremely corny shot is filled with implications. Scottie sees Madeleine sitting in front of a painting of Carlotta, and the camera pans from Madeleine’s hair to Carlotta’s hair and does a really long and embarrassing zoom into it; Hitchcock repeats the same technique with other features of Madeleine and Carlotta. Even though it’s a bit obvious, by zooming from Madeleine to Carlotta, Hitchcock is comparing the two women and implying that they are the same person or at least that they look the same. These examples demonstrate how one can visually imply what is happening without having to directly tell the audience, an important technique if you don’t want to explain things through dialogue or narration.

And what is up with Hitchcock’s mommy fixation? I don’t quite know what to make of all the bad moms in his films. In the three Hitchcock Moms that I observed, each was depicted as being bad somehow, but they all meant well. Marnie’s mom loved her but couldn’t get past her daughter’s role in “the accident,” Mitch’s mom just doesn’t want to be forgotten, and Norman’s mom was protective of him after his father died but made him crazy because of it. Anthony Lane touched on this topic slightly in his essay about Hitchcock, but I’m not satisfied.

With all that said, I do respect Hitchcock’s work, but I’m not yet a sophisticated enough watcher to fully appreciate it.