Hitchcock: The Deceptive Screen

In the world of Alfred Hitchcock, everything is in doubt. Throughout his films, he repeatedly demonstrates that all forms of knowledge, including visual information, are unreliable. For Hitchcock, the notion that nothing is as it seems is a vehicle for suspense, but it also takes on a far greater importance. The visual deceptions in Hitchcock's films are actually indicative of his deep concern with the extremely deceptive nature of the real world. For Hitchcock, perception only provides clues to the truth and these clues must be scrutinized carefully before the viewer can understand their importance.

The deceptive nature of the world, and of visual perception, appear in many forms in Hitchcock's films. The film Strangers on a Train (1951) is structured upon a system of duality which creates its own pattern of connections within the narrative. The film's photographic compositions contain many carefully balanced "pairs" and the characters and scenes are presented in terms of "two's." There are two fathers, two merry-go-round scenes, and two women in glasses who are either strangled or nearly strangled. The first key to understanding Strangers on a Train lies within the film's repetition of images.

At the core of Strangers on a Train are the characters of Bruno (Robert Walker) and Guy (Farley Granger). On the surface, Bruno's decadent and psychotic personality is in sharp contrast to that of Guy, a professional tennis player. It is Guy, however, who accidently sets the stage for Bruno's act of murder. In turn, it is Bruno who represents a sense of strength rather than Guy, although Bruno's strength is manifestly bizarre. The apparent differences between Guy and Bruno are superficial, for they are actually perverse reflections of each other.

he 1953 production of I Confess is an intense elaboration on Hitchcock's theme of guilt. The film tells us at its very beginning who committed the murder when the man confesses the crime to the priest played by Montgomery Clift. The murderer does not even intend, at first, to frame the priest for the crime. The killer had worn at the time, however, the priest's coat and hat and despite the difference in their physical appearance, the priest-like wardrobe is the only detail noticed by witnesses to the crime.

More importantly in I Confess is the degree to which the priest inadvertently implicates himself in the murder. The murderer's sense of guilt compelled him to confess to the priest, but the priest's feeling of guilt for his own act of adultery is something which he is afriad to confess. Thematically, as well as narratively, the sins of murder and adultery become interlinked in the film, and the admission of the crime eventually becomes dependent upon the priest's admission of his sin.

The conflict between guilt and innocence is the central concern of Shadow of a Doubt (1943). In the film, the niece named Charlie yearns for a sense of worldly sophistication and views her Uncle Charlie, her name sake, as an enviable figure of urbane knowledge. Uncle Charlie is, however, an obsessive killer who has returned to the niece's small town because the police are searching for him across the country. In a way, the uncle does have worldly knowledge, but it is a disturbed and genuine knowledge of evil.

The visual effect of Shadow of a Doubt is one of Hitchcock's most deceptive. The myths and illusions of small town America evoke a placid and banal existence. But beneath the film's surface present­ation of the small town is a complex reality of fears, repressions, and unfulfilled lives. While Uncle Charlie represents the darkest manifestation of these fears and repressions, he is nonetheless a plausible product of this small town society.

The ease with which film viewers can be mislead by the visual information presented to them in a film is one of the prime concerns of Stage Fright (1950). One assumes that the visual information is true, yet it is this very assumption which Hitchcock attacks in Stage Fright. While the narrative of the film suggestively plays with the illusionary nature of acting and the theater, the film's visual imagery clearly demonstrates that seeing is not the same as under­standing.

While Stage Fright challenges the verisimilitude of film, The Wrong Man (1957) creates a complex series of contradictions between observation and truth. There is no question as to the innocence of the film's main character, yet all of the evidence points increasingly to his guilt. The investigative police work presented in The Wrong Man, which was based upon a real case, is routine and thorough and yet the conclusions are persistently wrong. Empirical evidence, Hitchcock suggests, is not enough to pierce through the misleading nature of reality.