Form Inversion in Alfred Hitchcock, Part 1

This paper originates from shorthand notes taken during a formal talk given by guest speaker Richard Allen, on March 15, 2007, at Montreal’s Concordia University. In an eloquent way, Allen was promoting his upcoming book, titled Hitchcock’s Romantic Irony: Storytelling, Sexuality and Style. [1] Subsequently, Allen’s book forms the basis for this paper, in which I demonstrate that inversion mechanisms function as important narrative plotting strategies in the corpus of Alfred Hitchcock’s work; and that such narrative pivoting devices are fundamental plotting elements which can be used to tell suspenseful stories, and that these types of narrative reversal may be useful to the structuring of other kinds of genre schema in the production of fictionalized narrative story telling.

Allen’s overall approach to studying Hitchcock begins with the recognition that there is a large amount of quality literature on the subject of his films. Many longstanding critics, such as Donald Spoto, Raymond Durgnat, Robin Wood, and Lesley Brill, as well as recent ones, such as Michael Walker and Susan Smith, have contributed to this bulk of critical literature on Alfred Hitchcock. For example, Allen recognizes the acknowledged reflexive nature of Hitchcock’s work. Indeed, Hitchcock’s practice of using the cameo appearance to create a narrative world of self-conscious artifice is well documented. [2] Another practice in reflexivity is authorial surrogacy. For instance, the character of Professor Jordan in The 39 Steps (1935) brings another major motif to Hitchcock’s work: the surrogate director. [3] Hitchcock’s films recurrently incorporate these surrogate figures, through whom he reflects on his own understanding of film authorship. But even if these motifs represent ways to address and invoke the role of the audience, Allen believes that it is not enough to explain Hitchcock’s formal method only in terms of reflexivity and authorial interpolation. Allen believes that there are other forms of evidence that exist within his films pointing to his method. We will find that this more elusive evidence supports an invisible presence that the director sustains throughout his work. The goal of this paper is to uncover the mysteries surrounding this invisible God-like presence whose hidden secrets give significance to the world that Hitchcock fabricates.

This paper hypothesizes that Hitchcock’s formal method is constituted of a distinctive worldview that reflects a uniquely chaotic universe, one based on a romantic ideal that somehow gets distorted. Accordingly, one of the goals of this paper is to uncover the relevant facts about romantic irony which, taken together, inform us about Hitchcock’s formal method. Once we arrive at recognizing the nature and character of romantic irony in Hitchcock, we can then identify its different forms. For instance, ‘ironic inversion’ can drive romantic irony in a downward spiral toward isolation, undercutting transcendence and the realization of the romantic ideal. In another instance, ‘moral inversion’ made possible by the subversion of our moral coordinates can function to create ironic ambivalence through a complex mix of suspense, mystery and surprise. While this paper will not greatly elaborate the subversion of our moral codes, it will closely examine the processes that lead to ironic inversion. In doing so, we will find that there is a locally active process that we will simply call form inversion, which works throughout the plot of a film, constructing a globally ironic view of the narrative and forming the overall impact that we attribute to ironic inversion.

The paradigm of romantic irony can be used to express two different aspects of Hitchcock’s narrative form. In a nomenclature similar to Allen, we define a vertical form that inscribes authorial self-consciousness and a horizontal form that maps narrative meaning beyond any self-reflexive explanation. [4] In short, Hitchcock’s films are made up of two narrative structures, one that is a specialized form of self-conscious narration and another that shares a particular attitude toward the romantic love story.

In the early writings of Robin Wood we have the notion of ‘The Therapeutic Hitchcock,’ an argument that Hitchcock’s films allow us to enter into the darker regions of human activities, bringing us into the taboo realms of humanity’s various perversities. But then, cathartically, they in turn allow us to come out ‘cleansed’ from these shadowy experiences of deviant or divergent social behaviors. According to Allen, the romantic ideal of the heterosexual romance is like a rope that is made up of two twisted strands. The human ideal of romance is entwined with man’s affinity for its opposite: human perversity. Allen makes a link between Hitchcock’s romantic ideal and Freud’s concept of polymorphous perversity. He states that: “In a literal sense, perversity is associated in Hitchcock’s work with the fact of human sexuality itself, considered as the uninhibited expression of impulse that is free of any moral or social restraint.” [5]

Taken to its limit, human perversity is associated with death. The death of the couple is always lurking in Hitchcock’s films, with the possibility for the annihilation of the ‘other’ and the dissolution of the ‘self.’ In many of his films, concealed within the mild mannered character of the gentleman hero is a sexual predator with a compulsion to kill women for his own sexual pleasure. An example of this behavior is seen in Suspicion (1941), where the hero, John Aysgarth (Cary Grant), seems to be trying to kill his wife, Lina MacLaidlaw (Joan Fontaine). The other side of this argument has to do with the heroine. Under the ostensible portrayal of her virginal character lies a sexually promiscuous woman. An example of the implicit prostitute is seen in the romantic thriller To Catch a Thief (1951), where the blonde heroine, Francie Stevens (Grace Kelly), seems determined to seduce the hero, John Robie (Cary Grant), with her open sexual behavior. According to Allen, the narrative logic that brings love/life and perversity/death together in Hitchcock’s works is the ‘both/and’ logic of romantic irony: “In general, Hitchcock, the narrator, self-consciously draws attention to the force of perversity by suggesting rather than by showing it. Hitchcock is an aesthete in the very precise sense that the extraordinary formal realization of his works functions as a displaced expression of human sexuality.” [6]

An examination of Hitchcock’s films reveals that sexuality carries with it not only the stench but also the stain of human perversity. His aestheticism works through three possible formulations of the romantic ideal: 1) An ambiguously connoted romance that achieves an idyllic transcendence to a state of love, 2) An idealization that contains something destructive, or 3) An idealization that leads to annihilation and death. These three possibilities can give us a glimpse into Hitchcock’s religious views on heaven, limbo, and hell, since the romantic ideal manifests the possibilities of rebirth (heaven), suspended animation (limbo/purgatory), and condemnation (hell). We can combine these forms of the romantic ideal into a unified nomenclature (as does Allen). Firstly, there are films about romantic renewal. In these comic thrillers, Hitchcock acts as a divine narrator controlling his characters from a position above the fictive world. In films like To Catch a Thief and North by Northwest he directs elements of good fortune onto his protagonists while making sure that the elements of human perversity are used to good ends toward romantic renewal. Secondly, there are films about ironic ambivalence. The majority of his works lie within this category. British films with an ambivalent tone are The Lodger (1926) and Murder! (1930). Hollywood films with ironic ambivalence are Strangers on a Train (1951) and Rear Window (1954). In these works, Hitchcock acts as a more reserved narrator who suspends himself from making any commentary, hovering in between the romantic ideal and its subversion. In this case, the simultaneously opposite perspectives compete in a back-and-forth struggle for dominance while the narration refrains from judgment. These competing perspectives are sustained by making use of the distinctions between the point-of-views of the characters and the narration. Thirdly, there are films about ironic inversion, which mostly interest us in this paper. Only a few of his works lie within this category, containing narratives that destroy the romantic ideal all together. Examples of such films begin with Downhill (1927), a silent British film that becomes a research platform for Hitchcock.

The basic thrust of Downhill is the feeling of descent and instability both of which are expressed by an anxious uncertainty that a situation of confidence and normalcy can be destroyed by an error or a trick in fortune. Even its title ‘downhill’ is revealing, as it anticipates the much later film Vertigo. It also tells us about the downward turn and continuous descent into misfortune of its hero. Despite a swift and happy ending, Downhill is one of the darkest and most pessimistic of Hitchcock’s early films. It is his most persistently misogynist work, with a succession of predatory and manipulative female characters who combine to torment our hapless young hero, Roddy, played by Ivor Novello. Downhill is like the downside of the performance of Novello in The Lodger, allowing his dramatic character to play out to its full rebellious nature against the family and institutions, and giving him the freedom to express fear and distrust, even hatred, of women. Other films that completely undermine the romantic ideal are Vertigo (1958) and Psycho (1960), both of which exhibit characteristics of play acting or masquerading that are often taken to the point of death. In these films, Hitchcock acts as a demon-like narrator who deceives the spectator.

According to the writer Lesley Brill, Hitchcock presents himself as a true romance director, one who uses a distinctive filmmaking approach that celebrates the formation of the romantic couple in the face of annihilation. Brill states that: “More important than any single formal characteristic of Hitchcock’s movies is the flexible structure of a romancer’s conception of his art and of human life … the romantic complications and solutions on which it [North by Northwest] is based underlie most of his other films. Even his ironic movies are best understood as parodies or inversions of the romantic formula.” [7] Brill’s statement makes an explicit connection between Hitchcock’s ironic films and the inversions of the traditional romantic model. This linkage is important to our understanding Hitchcock’s use of romantic irony in the form of ironic inversion in the global development of his narrative corpus. In another section of his book, titled The Hitchcock Romance, Brill states that: “Both [Vertigo and Psycho] are intensely ironic movies, with the attendant reversals, frustrations, and inversions of romantic motifs and ideas[my emphasis].” [8] Brill’s statement is important because it makes an explicit connection between Hitchcock’s ironic movies and the inversions of romantic motifs.

Hitchcock’s inversion aesthetics can be understood from two different perspectives. First, Hitchcock reverses the romantic ideal to the point of creating a sensibility akin to fairy tales or mythic stories. Second, he simultaneously perverts the idea of romance in order to reveal its darker underside. Although Hitchcock seems to be schizophrenically split within his totalizing ways of seeing, these two apparently diverging perspectives function in complementary fashion and form the basis for romantic irony’s logic, which is a form of anti-logical reasoning. Thus, the logic of romantic irony is anti-logical with respect to the Socratic perspective. In Socratic irony one can say something about a subject through the assertion of its opposite. In romantic irony, stating an opposite does not function to assert any truth, instead it functions to create ambiguity through simultaneous assertion of incompatible propositions. For example, romantic irony has been used to secularize the concept of redemption within the idea of nature, as opposed to that of the divine. Thus, in late romanticism, we have the secularization of the concept of romance, in which the ideals of divine redemption come face-to-face with nature’s annihilating forces, at least from the perspective of existential nihilism. In human beings, there is a spiritual quest to regain a state of pure innocence that has been lost due to some contact with the impurity of the natural environment. This is akin to the desire of regaining one’s health after being exposed to some corrupting disease. For Hitchcock, it is the ideal state of romantic love that is lost when it comes into contact with the ironic perversities of human beings. It is the assertion of simultaneously incompatible propositions that facilitates romantic ideals mingling with the ironies of everyday life. Thus, there’s a substantive dimension of romantic irony that gets built into a Hitchcock film. Lesley Brill puts it this way: “Loss and recovery and quests for innocence organize the plots of almost all his movies. In the majority of Hitchcock’s works, the conventions of happy fairy tales, displaced into cinematic forms, lead to conclusions in which central lovers live more or less happily ever after. In the ironic movies, romantic expectations are raised only to be disappointed” [my emphasis]. [9] Brill is clear about how romantic irony gets built into the films of Alfred Hitchcock. His previous statement about the inversion of the romantic formula [my emphasis] helps us understand how Hitchcock works at the strategic level to develop his narratives and realize his worldview. His last statement about romantic expectations being disappointed implies that Hitchcock uses romantic irony, specifically ironic inversion, to undermine the romantic ideal in its totality.

The remainder of the first part of this paper will be confined to a discussion of films that take the form of ironic inversion. The best Hitchcockean example of an ironic inversion is Vertigo. It’s antithesis is North by Northwest, which is a narrative of romantic renewal. The plot of Vertigo is a complex narrative construction that points forward in time to the equally contrived plot of North by Northwest, which conspires to protect the hero from the possibly harmful ironies of everyday life and brings about the realization of the romantic ideal at its ending. But this is not the case with the former film which undercuts Scottie’s fantasy and brings death to his ideal woman. The powerful impact of the ironic inversion is best seen on a global level of narrative development when we compare the endings of these two films. The sensibility of romantic irony in the form of a romantic renewal is exemplified in the cut on action that bring North by Northwest to a climax. In a sublime match on action, Hitchcock cuts from Roger Thornhill holding onto the wrist of Eve Kendall dangling over the edge of the cliff on the side of Mount Rushmore, to a shot of Roger pulling Eve up to a warm bed on a transcontinental express train. The match on action is a perfect example of how ironic juxtaposition causes romantic transcendence, in which it immediately dramatizes and overcomes the contrast between the real danger and the ideal outcome, that is, romantic renewal. It is the transition –where the second scene is negated by the first– that creates the formal ironic reversal. It is a form inversion associated with transcendence and romantic renewal. The black figure of the nun at the end of Vertigo is an inversion of its angelic form and it is her apparition that causes Scottie to lose hold of his beloved Judy/Madeleine and to frighten her into falling to her death, all of which is an inversion of the ending of North by Northwest.

Vertigo works in an opposite way to North by Northwest, even though both films can be viewed as being romantic. Indeed, Vertigo is a deleteriously romantic film but without a comical tone. According to information given to us by Allen in his talk, one of the co-writers of Vertigo, Samuel A. Taylor, said that the character of Marjorie ‘Midge’ Wood (played by Barbara Bel Geddes) was included to render a sense of normality, which would in turn give a certain amount of credibility to the character of John ‘Scottie’ Ferguson (played by Jimmy Stewart). This kind of embedment allows Hitchcock to produce romantic irony at a local level of the plot in the form of an inversion of a romantic motif, as Lesley Brill points out in his book. It is a formal inversion mechanism that falls under the general category of a form inversion. In our case, it contributes to the formation of ironic inversion at the global level of narrative development. This is especially true for the scene where Midge has painted herself into the figure of Carlotta Valdes. With the painting as the romantic motif, [10] we have an interesting double form inversion, the inversion of the image in the painted portrait of Dorian Grey, and the inversion of the image in another painting that is seen in one of Hitchcock’s early movies, Blackmail (1929). In Blackmail a painting of a clown is used ingeniously to end the film. The clown painting symbolizes Alice’s lingering feelings of guilt and belongs to the category of Hitchcock’s buffoonery devices. In Vertigo the painted portrait of Midge as Carlotta Valdes punctures Scottie’s romantic illusion, as the painting is a sign of the femininity (maybe even the femme fatale kind) which resides in the ghost-like image of Carlotta Valdes. What all this means is that the romantic ideal sought by Scottie is an obsessive love that can only be realizable in death.

Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo is a film with two forms of aestheticism. At the beginning of the film a masculine aesthetics dominates, but as the movie progresses a feminine aesthetics takes over. In the first half of the film a masculine aesthetics functions primarily through Scottie’s point-of-view shots. Scottie is hired by an old acquaintance, Gavin Elster (played by Tom Helmore), to follow his wife who seems possessed by a dead relative, Carlotta Valdes. But Scottie is tricked by a masquerade in which Judie Barton (played by Kim Novak) poses as Ester’s wife, Madeleine (also played by Kim Novak). The plan is to trap Scottie into witnessing Madeleine’s apparent suicide from a bell tower, after she goes mad from this seemingly demonic possession. The plan is ingenious because Galvin knows that acrophobia will prevent Scottie from climbing to the top of the bell tower where the suicide is supposed to take place. In fact, Madeleine Elster is already dead and it is her corpse that falls from the tower. But there is a twist in the plot because Scottie Ferguson’s mission moves from following Galvin’s wife to rescuing Madeleine from herself. This pseudo-inversion goes further because there is an ostensible romance that develops between the ‘second’ Madeleine and Scottie. The result is that Scottie is so emotionally distraught after Madeleine’s death that he needs medical treatment.

In the second half of the film, Scottie leaves the hospital a reduced figure. In his diminished capacity, Scottie encounters the person of Judy Barton, a woman who looks like Madeleine. He begins to pursue her romantically but there is another twist in the plot. He is also obsessively trying to re-create her into the ideal image of Madeleine. It is the sublime beauty that Scottie sees in the image of his ideal, which transforms (inverts) the film’s aesthetics from masculine to feminine. Hitchcock’s inversion aesthetics is another kind of form inversion that enters into the ironic inversion of this film.

The full impact of the ironic inversion comes at a specific moment in the climactic scene, just before Judy Barton, playing Madeleine Elster for the second time, falls off the top of the bell tower at the Spanish mission. The moment of the staging of the kiss seems to be a last chance for Scottie to finally get the ‘ideal girl’ of his dreams. But just as they embrace, a black figure moves up to the top of the stairs and enters the bell tower. This horrible apparition causes Judy to suddenly turn away from Scottie. It is as though she has just seen a ghost, the specter of the real Madeleine Elster. It shocks her into taking a step backward onto the ledge of the tower, where she trips and falls to her death. This deadly event leaves Scottie devastated. At the ending of the film, we see him standing on the ledge, right up to its edge, slightly leaning forward, and looking partly downward. He seems frozen in place and isolated in time. He is like a man who has been flipped inside out –inverted. Lesley Brill explains the ending of Vertigo this way: “For a moment, love seems to have conquered all knowledge and all resentment. There can be ‘no bringing her back’ (she has committed murder), and still Scottie embraces Judy. In doing so, he implicitly accepts both her love and his own for her (but only for a moment). Even if Scottie and Judy briefly transcend themselves, the artistic logic of the film is too powerful for them. A specter rises out of the shadows, Judy shrinks back, and we hear her scream as she falls to her death. The pull of the downward has again triumphed. Freedom, safety, and love prove fleeting or illusory. In the vengeful, entropic fictional universe of Vertigo, no mistake goes unpunished. What goes up must come down, what is gained cannot be held (for long).” [11] We can truly say that the re-creation of the illusion is what shatters the illusion. In the end, Scottie is left with nothing because he has not only lost Judy/Madeleine but also his memory of Madeleine, his romantic ideal from the past. The ironic inversion is complete because he is left in total isolation, a man frozen in time with no past, no future.

In reading Vertigo, we can see that the black figure of the nun is the augmented image of nothingness. It is a seemingly demonic image that ordinarily should be angelic. It is the opposite of the diminished image of Scottie Ferguson before he slips into nothingness. After Scottie comes out of the hospital he is a human soul that needs saving. But there is another form inversion at play, one that adds again to the overall impact of the ironic inversion. It comes in the form of a visual pun in which the nun is mistaken for a ghostly figure of death, the apparition of the dead body of Madeleine Elster. Initially, the figure of the nun is a deus ex machina, an unexpected event saving a seemingly hopeless situation. However, the form inversion undercuts the possibility of transcendence and the realization of the romantic ideal. The Catholic nun, who is normally the servant of God, is now inverted to be a demonic agent of death. It is this form inversion that, in an implicitly cinematic way, causes Scottie to lose his beloved Judy/Madeleine and send her to her death. There’s no greater horror in a Hitchcock film than the failure to properly use the human instincts of love and redemption, on which the recuperation of innocence depends.

Theologically, the apotheosis of the human impulse of redemption manifests itself in Christ. Lesley Brill explains it this way: “We have seen that Hitchcock in more romantic films displaces and eroticizes Christian doctrine by associating it with the redemption and rebirth that his heroines and heroes achieve through their love and faith in each other. In Vertigo, Christian symbolism, like other romantic motifs, is inverted [my emphasis]. It is diminished to one more ironic sign of the irremediable human condition.” [12] It is important to notice that Brill’s statement about religious symbolism in Hitchcock’s movies is a pointer to his own religious views. Throughout Vertigo, inverted Christian symbolism is associated with Scottie’s emotional state of mind, which manifests mostly anguish and frustration. We see him suffer for the sins of others but unlike Christ’s power to redeem our sins, we see him agonize in vain. Hitchcock’s religious views are particularly ironic because he places the horrible deaths of Madeleine and Judy in the mission of San Juan Bautista, which represents the symbol for John the Baptist, the messenger of renewal in Christ. Not only does this religious setting mock the anti-redemptive outcomes of their visits there, but also inverts the symbol of the messenger’s power to heal. Moreover, the Holy Cross represents Christ’s crucifixion and his death, followed three days later by Christ’s resurrection and his return to life, a powerful symbol for the heavenly possibility to redeem ourselves from our earthly sins and achieve a spiritual ideal. But in Hitchcock’s Vertigo, this possibility is totally frustrated because Christian symbolism, like other romantic motifs, is inverted. There is no mercy in this film because the Holy Spirit’s blessings of the divine grace cannot take hold. Brill puts it in these words: “The quality of mercy, indeed, hardly ever appears in Vertigo. The nun’s words, and the Christian imagery that Scottie’s pose in the last shot culminates, only confirm the crushing absence of grace. The emptiness at the center of life that inversions of Christian imagery is reiterated by artifice and such related motifs as reflections and dreams.” [13] Hitchcock’s Vertigo is like the portrait of a person taken in silhouette: it withholds as much as it shows. The other side is concealed by the profile that we do not see. Mirrors and the reflections that they produce represent the existence of the other side, as does the form inversions that build up into the overall force of the film’s ironic inversion. Physics show that a reflection is the result of an optical inversion of the light hitting and bouncing off the surface of a non-absorbing material. Cine-physics, if such a term applies, show that certain form inversion mechanisms, such as pattern reversals, frustrated expectations, and motif inversions, drive Vertigo into a cinematically romantic state of ironic inversion. However, the reader should be aware that other approaches to Hitchcock exist. For example, Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis as another approach to explain the intricacies of Hitchcock’s work. [14]

Whatever approach we take to reading the ending of this film, we have moved, in an arbitrary moment, from the possibility of regaining the lost romance to total annihilation: the nihilistic isolation of Scottie and the death of Judy. On this basis, we can see that we are dealing with a process of focalization that is produced by the interplay of multiple and simultaneous co-existing perspectives. Accordingly, we may ask ourselves two different questions. Does Judy fall to her death on the basis of fate? Or does she throw herself into the abyss? Whatever the response, the outcome is the same: death. Truly, there is an anti-Aristolean logic at play in Vertigo, which is the ‘both/and’ logic of romantic irony. The ironic inversion of Scottie’s romantic ideal certainly supports this conclusion.

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