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Alfred’s Obsession with Matriarchy
by Doniphan Blair with Davell Swan
Tippi Hedren, a modern day booty of war or her own Helen of Troy who holds her head high regardless of her Svengali's deprecations. photo: courtesy T. HedrenREGARDLESS OF WHETHER HITCHCOCK
was a misogynist or a feminist, or used public films to act out private fantasies, his art is what it is. It is now part of our cultural patrimony, unchangeable for all time and easy to examine in the digital era on YouTube, frame-by-frame, character-by-story and symbol-by-metaphor.
Given this, what exactly was Hitchcock showing or signaling, subliminally or overtly, in his large body of work about powerful women, in dangerous situations, dealing with romantic, moral or life-and-death issues?
If frightening women is a formula for horror, and if that was Hitchcock's game, why did he make his women so strong and hard to spook? And why did he so often have them dominate the narrative or dispatch or outwit their attackers?
"Just deep cover," detractors will say, a complaint which similarly applies to Stieg Larsson, author of "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" (original title, "Men Who Hate Women").
The "Millennium Series", as his books are called, and which became worldwide bestsellers and Swedish and Hollywood films, feature a male hero, who is beloved by women, and a very Hitchcockian female. Beautifully played in the Swedish version by Noomi Rapace, she is both brilliant and an able avenger, despite her size.
But the series also shows horrific abuse of women, which opens a morally-clean backdoor for the voyeur-viewer to access rape and violence porn, not to mention the regular variety in the "Millennium Series"'s many nude sex scenes.
Alas, art is about dramatizing conflict while porn is overlit copulation—those unable to differentiate will soon be dressing Greek statuary, as did Bush's Attorney General John Ashcroft.
Menelaus recaptures Helen but doesn't kill her because of her beauty and Eros' urging (the small flying figure), circa 450 BC. image: courtesy the LouvreWhy do girls often prefer horror films and practicing their scream reflex to boys? Could it be that, shielded from the shoddier side of life, girls need practice imagining and addressing danger, much as fairy tales introduce children to death and abandonment?
Hitch's sensitive and surly sides gave him an advantage inventing techniques and stories for the thriller or horror genres but the same can be said of love stories—they too need fully realized conflict and resolution.
By the time Hitchcock started making films, Frida Kahlo, the Jewish-Mexican artist, had cut out the middle-woman to make her own body the subject of her art, while the midwestern visionary Georgia O'Keefe was quietly paintings symbols of female genitalia.
Women were comparatively well-represented in film, from studio head Mary Pickford to editor Alma Reville, Hitch's wife and life-long collaborator. Moreover, they had conquered the novel a century earlier, starting with Jane Austen. But introducing new female narratives into the new medium of cinema would require a multiplicity of talents, tricks and perspectives which Hitch happened to have.
He was raised by and married to powerful women; he grew up in the uptight but romantic residue of the 19th century; and he came of age in the "The Roaring '20s", the first fully liberated decade when women got the vote. He was also sensitive and articulate enough to see things and tell stories from both the female and male sides.
Most importantly, even if Hitchcock didn't have a feminist bone in his body or recognize he was at a pivotal moment in social evolution—the regendering of civilization—in the film business, ticket sales are paramount (literally since he worked for that studio on occasion).
With every movie a Rorschach Test of the audience's psyche, not to mention Freud's popularity at that time, he developed a second sense for what was driving the masses. A consummate cinema artist, he strove to represent their dreams and desires BUT also blend it to perfection with the sum total of preceding aesthetics and ideas.
Yet another luminous shot of Hedren, with daughter Melanie Griffith, indicating she could easily play Helen of Troy if only Hitch had not tried to be her Menelaus. image: courtesy T. HedrenAlthough his films about women overcoming adversity while restoring balance through love could be called "Studies in Matriarchal Mastery", I prefer "Inverse Helen of Troyism". Gilgamesh, the Old Testament and ancient Babylonian poetry all feature powerful women but few tower above their societies like Helen of Troy, nee Sparta, who not only launched 1000 ships but, essentially, all of Western Civilization.
You see, until then, the Greeks lived in matriarchal clans and villages. To blossom into civilization, they would have to create new narratives, so new in fact they would be able to regender their society into a patriarchy.
Unfortunately, appreciation of this simple equation is inhibited by the rejection of the benefits of patriarchy, by one large segment of society, and of matriarchy by another. Without grasping the validity and history of both, we won't be able to understand their positive contributions and forge a new third way, let alone understand Hitchcock.
Let's start with matriarchy, the very existence of which is denied by patriarchs, most historians and even some feminists. Prior to the emergence of male heroes, matriarchs must have ruled societies, given that children were unable to irrefutably identify their fathers—and vice versa—until DNA testing arrived in the 1980s. Since possession is nine-tenths of the law, this simple fact distanced men from both childrearing and village life.
In NO WAY does this imply matriarchies were bad, wrong or ineffective. Indeed, they worked wonders for tens of millennia, developing language, Paleolithic culture and farming. Nevertheless, matriarchal culture was unable to generate enough romanticism to inspire men to work like dogs for the benefit of their mates or children—whom they had to identify to love.
Hence the normative need for patriarchy, and allowing men to become sexual selectors and family heads, if only nominally (indeed, matriarchy operates well undercover, as it were, and many supposed patriarchies remain hidden matriarchies).
In addition to benefiting children and increasing population, patriarchy created civilization, writing, high art and the refined romance needed to bring together individuals with the very different identities females and males began developing . To be sure, patriarchy overshot its mark and was often very hard on women, not to mention men (all those wars) and tribal cultures had great art, too.
But leaving men out of family administration was infinitely tougher on women because they would simply contribute much less. Women wouldn't have signed up for the "patriarchy project" if it didn't provide immense benefit—for an excellent summary of these delicate issues see the history of Khadijah, the wealthy and older business woman who became the Prophet Muhammad's first wife—which brings us back to Helen of Troy.
You see, Helen was the last of an ancient lineage of Spartan queens. Contrary to what Homer tells us, she simply went off with the handsome Paris to his palace in Troy, taking along two boatloads of goods (a little odd for a kidnapping), simply because great matriarchs go with WHOM EVER THEY WANT! ("Free women don't commit adultery," as Hind tried to explain to Muhammad.)
But telling such a story would simply continue the matriarchy and new perspectives and methods were desperately needed.
Helen is kidnapped in style, with two boatloads of goods, in this drawing by 19th c. American illustrator Henry Justice Ford. image: courtesy HJ Ford Estate Helen was the turning point because it finally dawned on Menelaus, her supposed king, that you can't be a man, let alone a king, and have a wife, let alone a queen, if you allow her to elope with every boy-toy who catches her fancy (or wins a bribe from the goddess Aphrodite).
For the first time, in narrative history, at least, it became worth fighting a brutal ten year war, which included the invention of the highly intellectual "Trojan Horse" strategy, to win the woman back.
As Menelaus rages through the city searching for Helen, ready to exact the revenge that many patriarchal families practice to this day, her beauty convinces him to forgive. Although classic Greek culture is famous for its lack of romance, these modest beginnings were developed by Homer in Odysseus' relationship to his wife Penelope and, most notably, by the poetess Sapho.
Whether these events were in fact factual is irrelevant insomuch as new narratives were needed and some one must have done something to inspire them, something on which to scaffold the new concepts of gender relations. Homer did not just conjure the epic out of thin air nor did he go around forcing people to listen.
As it happens, we are at a similar if opposite moment in cultural evolution today: another regendering of society. Now that patriarchy has become dysfunctional, we desperately need women's views and morality, as well as their material contributions to the family, to support our children, the exact inverse of the situation three thousand years ago—hence "Inverse Helen of Troyism".
While Helen was the passive figurehead and "The Iliad" focuses on an episode in the war when Achilles is denied his slave girl booty, Hitchcock Women are active, out front and do the sexual selecting themselves. While the Greeks fought a war to establish the bona fides of patriarchy, Hitch's females struggle with adversity and evil to restore functional balance between men and women.
But now that Helen has been inverted, why should women worry so much about love, when they could be curing cancer, being policewomen or even fighting in armies in their own Trojan War? Well, sexual selection or mate choice is the prime power of the matriarch, which she always wields, even under the boot of the patriarch, simply because 99% of the reproductive process occurs in or around her body.
A marble bust of Helen possibly by Antonio Canova (1757-1822). photo: courtesy Carlton-HobbsWhile we desperately need women's stories, to support our children and save the planet, we don't need them preached or commanded a la patriarchy or voiced through traditional "chick flick" aesthetics. Indeed, they must be nurtured and seduced through sophisticated artifice, deep understandings and visionary leaps.
As flawed as Hitchcock may have been as a man and a romantic, he was perfectly suited, with his mix of artistry, inner conflict, alternative understandings and capital "R" Romanticism, to tackle the matriarchal story. And he certainly did, not just once or a few times but in dozens of scripts, making him a great feminist filmmaker and one of the premier pioneers of "Inverse Helen of Troyism".
Doniphan Blair is a writer, filmmaker, musician and graphic designer, not to mention scoff-law and editor/publisher of this rag, currently residing in Oakland. He can be reached .
Posted on Dec 01, 2013 - 10:48 PM
by Doniphan Blair with Davell Swan
Tippi Hedren, a modern day booty of war or her own Helen of Troy who holds her head high regardless of her Svengali's deprecations. photo: courtesy T. Hedrenwas a misogynist or a feminist, or used public films to act out private fantasies, his art is what it is. It is now part of our cultural patrimony, unchangeable for all time and easy to examine in the digital era on YouTube, frame-by-frame, character-by-story and symbol-by-metaphor.
Given this, what exactly was Hitchcock showing or signaling, subliminally or overtly, in his large body of work about powerful women, in dangerous situations, dealing with romantic, moral or life-and-death issues?
If frightening women is a formula for horror, and if that was Hitchcock's game, why did he make his women so strong and hard to spook? And why did he so often have them dominate the narrative or dispatch or outwit their attackers?
"Just deep cover," detractors will say, a complaint which similarly applies to Stieg Larsson, author of "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" (original title, "Men Who Hate Women").
The "Millennium Series", as his books are called, and which became worldwide bestsellers and Swedish and Hollywood films, feature a male hero, who is beloved by women, and a very Hitchcockian female. Beautifully played in the Swedish version by Noomi Rapace, she is both brilliant and an able avenger, despite her size.
But the series also shows horrific abuse of women, which opens a morally-clean backdoor for the voyeur-viewer to access rape and violence porn, not to mention the regular variety in the "Millennium Series"'s many nude sex scenes.
Alas, art is about dramatizing conflict while porn is overlit copulation—those unable to differentiate will soon be dressing Greek statuary, as did Bush's Attorney General John Ashcroft.
Menelaus recaptures Helen but doesn't kill her because of her beauty and Eros' urging (the small flying figure), circa 450 BC. image: courtesy the LouvreHitch's sensitive and surly sides gave him an advantage inventing techniques and stories for the thriller or horror genres but the same can be said of love stories—they too need fully realized conflict and resolution.
By the time Hitchcock started making films, Frida Kahlo, the Jewish-Mexican artist, had cut out the middle-woman to make her own body the subject of her art, while the midwestern visionary Georgia O'Keefe was quietly paintings symbols of female genitalia.
Women were comparatively well-represented in film, from studio head Mary Pickford to editor Alma Reville, Hitch's wife and life-long collaborator. Moreover, they had conquered the novel a century earlier, starting with Jane Austen. But introducing new female narratives into the new medium of cinema would require a multiplicity of talents, tricks and perspectives which Hitch happened to have.
He was raised by and married to powerful women; he grew up in the uptight but romantic residue of the 19th century; and he came of age in the "The Roaring '20s", the first fully liberated decade when women got the vote. He was also sensitive and articulate enough to see things and tell stories from both the female and male sides.
Most importantly, even if Hitchcock didn't have a feminist bone in his body or recognize he was at a pivotal moment in social evolution—the regendering of civilization—in the film business, ticket sales are paramount (literally since he worked for that studio on occasion).
With every movie a Rorschach Test of the audience's psyche, not to mention Freud's popularity at that time, he developed a second sense for what was driving the masses. A consummate cinema artist, he strove to represent their dreams and desires BUT also blend it to perfection with the sum total of preceding aesthetics and ideas.
Yet another luminous shot of Hedren, with daughter Melanie Griffith, indicating she could easily play Helen of Troy if only Hitch had not tried to be her Menelaus. image: courtesy T. HedrenYou see, until then, the Greeks lived in matriarchal clans and villages. To blossom into civilization, they would have to create new narratives, so new in fact they would be able to regender their society into a patriarchy.
Unfortunately, appreciation of this simple equation is inhibited by the rejection of the benefits of patriarchy, by one large segment of society, and of matriarchy by another. Without grasping the validity and history of both, we won't be able to understand their positive contributions and forge a new third way, let alone understand Hitchcock.
Let's start with matriarchy, the very existence of which is denied by patriarchs, most historians and even some feminists. Prior to the emergence of male heroes, matriarchs must have ruled societies, given that children were unable to irrefutably identify their fathers—and vice versa—until DNA testing arrived in the 1980s. Since possession is nine-tenths of the law, this simple fact distanced men from both childrearing and village life.
In NO WAY does this imply matriarchies were bad, wrong or ineffective. Indeed, they worked wonders for tens of millennia, developing language, Paleolithic culture and farming. Nevertheless, matriarchal culture was unable to generate enough romanticism to inspire men to work like dogs for the benefit of their mates or children—whom they had to identify to love.
Hence the normative need for patriarchy, and allowing men to become sexual selectors and family heads, if only nominally (indeed, matriarchy operates well undercover, as it were, and many supposed patriarchies remain hidden matriarchies).
In addition to benefiting children and increasing population, patriarchy created civilization, writing, high art and the refined romance needed to bring together individuals with the very different identities females and males began developing . To be sure, patriarchy overshot its mark and was often very hard on women, not to mention men (all those wars) and tribal cultures had great art, too.
But leaving men out of family administration was infinitely tougher on women because they would simply contribute much less. Women wouldn't have signed up for the "patriarchy project" if it didn't provide immense benefit—for an excellent summary of these delicate issues see the history of Khadijah, the wealthy and older business woman who became the Prophet Muhammad's first wife—which brings us back to Helen of Troy.
You see, Helen was the last of an ancient lineage of Spartan queens. Contrary to what Homer tells us, she simply went off with the handsome Paris to his palace in Troy, taking along two boatloads of goods (a little odd for a kidnapping), simply because great matriarchs go with WHOM EVER THEY WANT! ("Free women don't commit adultery," as Hind tried to explain to Muhammad.)
But telling such a story would simply continue the matriarchy and new perspectives and methods were desperately needed.
Helen is kidnapped in style, with two boatloads of goods, in this drawing by 19th c. American illustrator Henry Justice Ford. image: courtesy HJ Ford EstateFor the first time, in narrative history, at least, it became worth fighting a brutal ten year war, which included the invention of the highly intellectual "Trojan Horse" strategy, to win the woman back.
As Menelaus rages through the city searching for Helen, ready to exact the revenge that many patriarchal families practice to this day, her beauty convinces him to forgive. Although classic Greek culture is famous for its lack of romance, these modest beginnings were developed by Homer in Odysseus' relationship to his wife Penelope and, most notably, by the poetess Sapho.
Whether these events were in fact factual is irrelevant insomuch as new narratives were needed and some one must have done something to inspire them, something on which to scaffold the new concepts of gender relations. Homer did not just conjure the epic out of thin air nor did he go around forcing people to listen.
As it happens, we are at a similar if opposite moment in cultural evolution today: another regendering of society. Now that patriarchy has become dysfunctional, we desperately need women's views and morality, as well as their material contributions to the family, to support our children, the exact inverse of the situation three thousand years ago—hence "Inverse Helen of Troyism".
While Helen was the passive figurehead and "The Iliad" focuses on an episode in the war when Achilles is denied his slave girl booty, Hitchcock Women are active, out front and do the sexual selecting themselves. While the Greeks fought a war to establish the bona fides of patriarchy, Hitch's females struggle with adversity and evil to restore functional balance between men and women.
But now that Helen has been inverted, why should women worry so much about love, when they could be curing cancer, being policewomen or even fighting in armies in their own Trojan War? Well, sexual selection or mate choice is the prime power of the matriarch, which she always wields, even under the boot of the patriarch, simply because 99% of the reproductive process occurs in or around her body.
A marble bust of Helen possibly by Antonio Canova (1757-1822). photo: courtesy Carlton-HobbsAs flawed as Hitchcock may have been as a man and a romantic, he was perfectly suited, with his mix of artistry, inner conflict, alternative understandings and capital "R" Romanticism, to tackle the matriarchal story. And he certainly did, not just once or a few times but in dozens of scripts, making him a great feminist filmmaker and one of the premier pioneers of "Inverse Helen of Troyism".
Doniphan Blair is a writer, filmmaker, musician and graphic designer, not to mention scoff-law and editor/publisher of this rag, currently residing in Oakland. He can be reached .
Posted on Dec 01, 2013 - 10:48 PM
