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Big Ideas in a Small World: Trapped by Alfred Hitchcock by David Carren
Despite quadriplegic Christopher Reeves's heroic performance in the 1998 'Rear Window', directed by Jeff Bleckner, their Rotten Tomato rating, 35%, Hitchcock's 100%. photo: courtesy C. Reeves
Editor's Note: Our recent articles, "Why Me: An Investigation of Hitchcock’s Vertigo" and "Hitchcock's The Birds: Why?" by Davell Swan, stimulated a flurry of comments and submissions including this fascinating piece by David Carren. While Swan surveyed Hitchcock films which used the Bay Area as a backdrop, a symbol, often with sexual undertones, Carren examines the master's use of confined space to benefit the story, psychologically. I also helps the budget, through reduced production fees, a perfect indie filmmaking two-fer .
Environment is a key element in all feature films. Whatever the size or scope of a project, the nature of its world defines the intent of its story, theme, and characters.
“The environment of any film story is unavoidably limited by the events that the writer chooses to include… each genre makes use of a certain milieu that is not only the container for the story, but functions as a manifestation of the drama that is going on inside the main character,” Neill Hicks comments in “Writing the Thriller Film” (2001), p43.
Many filmmakers have used an intentionally limited environment to enhance the drama and suspense of a story while still exploring large themes. Even though circumscribed locations, a foreshortened time frame, and small cast can impune a movie as low budget or second rate, if that film has a powerful concept and good writing it can present an experience more substantial than films with far larger budgets and casts.
Limited worlds and populations have provided a foundation for projects as diverse as the hard-edged "Sunset Boulevard" (1950), the sweet tempered “Pieces of April” (2003) and horror films like “Halloween” (1978), “Saw” (2004) and “Insidious” (2010). They offer physically bounded worlds that achieve a sense of dread and anxiety along with forceful points of view and intriguing characters. Many thrillers, like "Breakdown" (1997) or "Single White Female" (1992), take place in confined environments which emphasize the physical jeopardy their protagonists are facing while enhancing their interior drama.
Being confined with Grace Kelly, whose frame breaking entrance is arguably the most gorgeous in film history, is not so bad for Jimmy Stewart in Hitch's 'Rear Window'. photo: courtesy Universal Studios
Of all the filmmakers who have taken advantage of small worlds to relay big ideas, few surpass the master of film horror for the latter half of the 20th Century, Alfred Hitchcock—perhaps not surprising considering his earliest traumatic memory was of being trapped in a prison.
"Hitchcock often cited the terrible moment when he was five years old and his father, to punish him for some infraction, sent him down to the chief of police, with some note asking he be put in a jail cell for five minutes to teach him a lesson. This was long before the days of identified child abuse and Hitchcock himself told the story to explain his life long fear of the police," noted Tony Lee Moral in his "Hitchcock and the Making of Marnie", 2002, p200.
From this event, it can be surmised that, literally before he entered grade school, Hitchock was introduced to the potential horror of a constricted space. Better than any filmmaker of his day, or of all time, arguably, Hitchcock understood that, in thriller and horror films, the environment itself can become an opponent, a death trap, and the more confined and threatening it may be the more effective the story.
At least as important, Hitchcock also understood the value of "The Devil." In thriller and horror films, antagonists are often representations of demonic forces: inhuman in their characteristics or intent, openly hostile to civilized society, usually impervious to harm, and always difficult to defeat. The Devil archetype coupled with a confined environment can create an almost unbearable sense of tension and jeopardy. It presents a theme fundamental to a civilized people: racial memories of a millennia of forebears huddled in caves, terrified of what lived beyond the night fires in the dark.
If Satan enters our universe, or we enter his, can we survive him?
As is clearly evidenced in his films, Hitchcock was fascinated with the Devil, his power, his temptation, and his limitless capacity for doing harm. In most of his projects, the Devil was a horribly flawed human. In "Strangers on a Train" (1951) it was the psychopathic Bruno, in "Marnie" (1964), the haunted and damaged title character, in "Psycho", the marvelously insane Norman Bates. In "The Birds" (1963), the Devil is nature itself in the form of the world’s avian creatures, gone mad with an unreasoning, anti-human rage. In all of these movies, the worlds of the stories were focused and immediate. Hitchcock’s visual acumen and technical brilliance took full advantage of the often-claustrophobic environments present in his movies’ situations.
Ivor Novello and Marie Ault get close in 'The Lodger', Hitch's first feature from 1927, which concerns a lovely landlady and her fears her new lodger is a ladykiller—and not the fun kind. photo: courtesy Hitchcock Estate
In "The Lodger" (1927), a young woman and her mother become convinced the new renter who lives directly over their heads is a Jack the Ripper-like serial killer, a situation stylishly represented by the director. “The landlady listens to the lodger’s footsteps and we look up at him through a specially constructed floor of plateglass,” explains Raymond Durgnat, "The Strange Case of Alfred Hitchcock" (1974), p71.
In "Rear Window" (1954), trapped in his apartment with a broken leg, the hero's horror builds as he becomes convinced one of his neighbors has murdered his wife. The action almost never leaves the hero’s domicile nor his point of view, which is limited entirely to the courtyard of his building, a beautifully realized studio set.
In "Rope", (1948) two human monsters kill a young man simply to prove they can achieve such an inhuman act. The story’s action is set solely in their apartment, the whole film shot in eight ten minute takes. “The compression of stage time interact effectively with the shuffled continuity of screen space to produce a tension which, brilliantly, is both theatrical and cinematic.” (Durgnat, p208)
In each case, the limited environment compounds the tension as the story develops and as the Devil looms in proximity to the hero or the hero’s loved ones. The fact that the settings of Hitchock’s films tend to be traditional, even banal, only enhances the horror of their situations, contrasting light and dark or good and evil in striking ways. “Even in "Psycho," which uses some of the most outlandish machinery from traditional horror movies, the real menace arrives not in the dark house, but in a completely sanitary motel bathroom.
The greatest moments in Hitchcock’s films have had settings which are so placid, so ridiculously incongruous, that they are sometimes like grand overstatements of his leading idea: a killer’s face unmoving in the audience at a tennis match, a murderous airplane swooping down to attack an ad executive stranded on a mid-western prairie in broad daylight.
Moreover, virtually every strong emotional effect in his work, whether comic or not, is nurtured by repressive counterforces. He wants to show us "fear and disorder being restrained by and then ultimately breaking through a complacent, usually middle-class surface”, ("Filmguide to Psycho", James Naremore, 1973, p11-12). This is certainly the case in "Psycho". The film takes place in a series of trite, uninspired locations, progressing from the “light” of Marion Crane’s Phoenix to the “dark” of the Bates Motel.
The shower scene in 'Psycho', starring Janet Leigh, is an orgy of confined space tropes and manipulation. photo: courtesy Hitchcock Estate
“On the one hand is Marion’s relatively normal if barren life as a receptionist, presented largely through a series of gray, unemphatic settings – the beat-up hotel room where she has a love affair, the real estate office where she works, and the small bedroom where she lives. On the other hand is the decidedly abnormal life of Norman Bates, the sexual psychopath who surrounds himself with stuffed birds of prey and lives in a huge Victorian house atop a hill. The Marion Crane story involves the city, the America of the fast buck; the Norman Bates story involves the country, the America of “rural virtue,” and sexual repression… 'Psycho' is all the more remarkable for the way it plays these entirely different modes off against one another without falling apart, as if to suggest a relationship between daytime Americana and a night world of baroque terror,” (Naremore, p37).
After Marion steals $40,000, the young woman leaves the “light” of Phoenix and plunges into the darkness of a new, if very short, career as a fugitive. This sequence ends as Marion arrives at the Bates Motel, “which seems to materialize abruptly out of the darkness in front of her. She has by her actions penetrated the shell of order, and like Macbeth plunged herself into the chaos-world, which finds its most terrifying definition. ("Hitchcock’s Films", 1965, Robin Wood, p116)
"Psycho" is justly famous for the death of its protagonist, the audience’s point of view character, at the top of the first act, an unheard of notion at the time the film was produced. Marion dies in the most intimate and helpless manner possible, stabbed to death in the close confines of a bathroom shower stall as water cascades across her naked body. The audience never really recovers its equilibrium as the film’s all-too-human devil, Norman Bates, destroys Marion then threatens or kills additional point of view characters almost to the end of the film.
The compressed nature of the locations (most of the action occurs in small offices and rooms) enhances the film’s tension and overwhelming sense of dread. This culminates in the search of Norman’s home by Lila, Marion’s sister.
“Lila’s exploration of the house is an exploration of Norman’s psychotic personality. The whole sequence, with its discoveries in bedroom, attic and cellar, has clear Freudian overtones. The Victorian décor, crammed with invention, intensifies the atmosphere of sexual repression. The statue of a black cupid in the hall, the painting of an idealized maiden disporting herself at the top of the stairs, a nude goddess statuette in the bedroom, are juxtaposed with the bed permanently indented with the shape of Mrs. Bates’s body (the bed in which, we learn later, she and her lover were murdered by Norman)... The attic, Norman’s own bedroom, represents the sick man’s conscious mental development: strange confusion on the childish and the adult, cuddly toys, grubby, unmade bed, a record of the “Eroica” symphony… Consequently we accept Norman more than ever as a human being, with all the human being’s complex potentialities.” (Wood, p120)
Hitchcock goes full bore with confined space in 'The Birds' trapping Melanie (Tippi Hedren) in a phone booth where she is almost killed. photo: courtesy Universal Studios
It’s ironic but appropriately Hitchcockian that a magnificent fiend like Norman Bates would exist in a modest home in a normal town. “Hitchcock has repeatedly set his American films in attractive little communities… Again and again he has created satire by showing evil intruding on the small town ethos – one thinks of "Shadow of a Doubt", and especially "The Trouble with Harry", where a group of loveable characters keep dragging a body around the sunlit, autumnal landscape of a New England village. A related theme can be detected in "North by Northwest", which uses the mid-western prairies and the bourgeois solidity of the presidential monuments at Mount Rushmore as scenes of terror.
Bodega Bay in "The Birds" is arguably the ultimate representation of these destroyed Edens and in the center of that film we have another small town American family. It is as if the evil were fostered by the complacent setting, even if on the surface the two things do not always seem casually related.” (Naremore, p65)
In "The Birds", civilization itself comes under assault and the family at the center of the action is eventually driven from their home into an uncertain future. “Hitchcock compared the climatic family scenes to the behavior of a family during the blitz”, (Durgnat, p348). Again the action is focused in a finite environment, a small, idyllic seaside town. In due course, the entire community is reduced to disorder, terror, and death.
“Here Hitchcock disrupts our complacent belief that technological hardware must render animal flesh derisory. Man, in thoughtfulness or hysteria, wrecks the system which he controls, being, despite everything, imagination, and therefore flesh. The seagulls caw derisively as they fly over the town whose centre seems to writhe as it burns”, (Durgnat p341).
Melanie Daniels, the film’s point of view character, is repeatedly trapped and/or attacked in tight or close locations—a small boat in the middle of a bay, at a country school, in a phone booth, in a dark attic. The continued claustrophobic assaults by an inhuman Devil beyond all reason create a sense of terror that never relents through the film’s bucolic beats. Even during a child’s birthday party, one of the attendees is not safe from sudden, unprovoked attack.
The majority of today’s horror projects employ far cruder situations, characters and stories and far less complex Devils than Hitchcock used in his projects. We see the hockey masked Jason stalking teenagers in the "Friday the Thirteenth" films, the mutilated Freddy Krueger chasing victims through their dreams in the "Nightmare on Elm Street" series, or the aliens bursting from human chests in the "Alien" movies. The limited locations and thin casts visible in many of these projects appear to be dictated more by budget restrictions than artistic intent, the nature of their Devils defined simply for shock or adventure effect as opposed to emotional impact.
While these movies have their entertainment value, their lack of true human feeling is unnecessary. One only has to look at "Psycho" or "The Birds" to see that the Devil can be a compelling and unique creation and that Horror can provide an emotional experience beyond the merely visceral. With these projects, Hitchcock also proved that big ideas in a small world can make for riveting drama.
If a filmmaker effectively develops a story that focuses on a substantial theme yet takes place in a narrow realm; he can make best use of his production’s resources while also offering his audience thrills, tension, theater, and suspense as well as an effective comment on the human condition.
is an associate professor in the communication department at the University of Texas-Pan American, Edinburg, Texas, who has long been obsessed with Hitchcock.
Works Cited
Durgnat, Raymond. "The Strange Case of Alfred Hitchcock". Cambridge,
Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1974.
Katz, Ephraim. "The Film Encyclopedia." New York: Harper & Row, 1990.
Hicks, Niell D. "Writing the Thriller Film, The Terror Within." Studio City, Ca.:
Michael Wise Productions, 2002.
Moral, Tony Lee. "Hitchcick and the Making of Marnie." Scarecrow Press, 2005.
Naremore, James. "Filmguide to Psycho." Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1973.
Wood, Robin. "Hitchcock’s Films," New York, Castle Books,1969.
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