Building upon Carla’s presentation about Female Representation in the film industry and “The Male Gaze” in cinema, I decided to share my research on “the gaze” found in two of the movies of one of my favorite movie directors – Alfred Hitchcock.
“Give them pleasure – the same pleasure they have when they wake up from a nightmare“
This is how Alfred Hitchcock explains his filmmaking philosophy. Widely known as the king of suspense, had a sixty years career, throughout which he explored new revolutionary cinematic techniques and helped the development of the drama and psychological thriller genre tremendously. His movies are filled with suspense and terror, created through the brilliant use of juxtaposition of characters and sound, and camera movement.
Despite being so influential in the human psyche and emotions, Hitchcock’s opinion on psychoanalysis is rather controversial. He undermined the significance of it as a scientific field but found useful the psychoanalytical concepts and approaches in his narratives, as a tool to shock and scare the audience. His work is still influential, and film critics and scholars have written thousands of analyzes on movies like Psycho and Vertigo.
One of the most notable psychoanalytical elements in a Hitchcock movie is what film critics and psychoanalysts call the look. The look“is like the cement that ties Hitchcock’s narratives together” (Walker, 177) as it is “a crucial structure feature in his films”. The change of perspective in his movies helps the audience identify with the protagonist and establishes a relationship between the spectator and the characters (Walker, 177). Clifford Manlove in her article Visual “Drive” and Cinematic Narrative: Reading Gaze Theory in Lacan, Hitchcock, and Mulvey, states that “Freud and Lacan’s theories focus on the interaction of pleasure and repetition necessary for subjectivity itself, whether masculine or feminine.” (90). In this way, Hitchcock used different cinematic techniques to “reinforce the power of looking in cinema” (90). Manlove discusses the slip between the gaze and the eye. The camera is “subjective”, and the viewers are forced to see the scenes from the point of view chosen by the director. Therefore, the spectators “gaze” is limited, and certain parts of the film are left without an answer on purpose.
The Gaze in Psycho:
Psycho is unarguably one of the best horror and suspense films of all time. In this Hitchcock classic,this subjectivity of the gaze can be found in the occurrence that the audience never sees Norman talking to his mother. It is always someone who overhears them talking, but we never see the action. This creates an image of suspense and mysticism. In the article Hitchcock: The Murderous Gaze, in Psycho, William Rothman states that “the camera itself is called upon to suffer incarnation” (260) thus creating a mystic world of the movie where reality and fantasy merge and fuse. The cinematic apparatus shows the narrative through the gaze of the mother. There is a separation between the eye and the gaze. Marion’s vision is limited, she is a passive victim of a greater gaze. Hitchcock’s camera point of view separates the viewers from the heroine, but yet “reveals close familiarity with her mind” (269). The audience sees her consumed by her thoughts in her car in one of the first scenes when she had just escaped with a large sum of money. The scene can be analyzed as a visual representation of her nightmare where her mind is filled with doubts and the fear of being caught.
Cinematically, Hitchcock uses changes in the depth of the background of light and darkness to create an image of the parallel objective reality and the subjective mind of the protagonist. The gaze in Psychocan be analyzed through the uncanny – the Freudian concept of experiencing something familiar, yet unfamiliar that creates trouble in the mind, i.e. seeing something common in a new strange way. The uncanny is also connected to one’s desires. The main protagonists, Norman and Marion, are uncanny doubles of each other. At the end of the first scene, Marion looks straight to the camera and smiles. In the end of the movie, when Norman is caught, and the mystery is solved, he does exactly the same, which could be interpreted as a hidden symbol that both characters are in fact uncanny doppelgangers. They both have anxieties of being judged and accused of their crimes, presented by their inner voices. The mother’s gaze presses both Marion and Norman. However, while Marion is the passive object of the gaze, Norman is seen as an active viewer. At the beginning of the movie, in a scene where Marion says that she wants to have dinner with Norman in her house where the picture of her mother will be on the wall, indicates the presence of the gaze of authority. Later on in the film, we see the silhouette of Norman’s mother spying from the window. The audience never sees the mother, but her possessive and controlling gaze is present until the very end of the movie. It feels like the house itself is part of this “gaze” – the paintings on walls, the mirrors, and the stuffed animals starring at Norman and Marion as they have dinner together.
Female Representation in Psycho:
The heroine is a victim of the powerful male gaze: she is paranoid and anxious because she does not understand the intentions of the spectator. Even after changing her car and escaping from the eyes of the law, Marion is still a subject of the gaze of the camera. The audience follows her as she finds a safe place where she can stay over for the night, where she becomes a victim of Norman Bates’ “gaze of desire”. The male gaze is reinforced in the scene where Norman watches Marion undress through a hole in the wall. According to Rothman “this hole-within-a-hole is changed symbolically; it is an eye, and it is an emblem of female sexuality” (296). The audience’s point of view is “the deferred view” and we are watching Marion together with Norman, but we are furthermore in possession of the authoritarian gaze of Hitchcock’s “eye” – Norman is watching through the peephole as “a subject of the camera, a creature who can be framed in its view” (296). However, the greater gaze of the viewers is also limited as it is derived from the view of the naked body of the heroine. Hitchcock used cuts to limit the vision of the audience thus creating the feeling of suspense and ambiguity (297).
The sequence in the shower is one of the most analyzed scenes in the history of cinema. In these iconic 45 seconds of Marion taking a shower, Hitchcock uses 78 camera setups and 52 cuts to create the brutal image of the murder without even showing the actual action. It is presented as a rape, an act of penetrating her intimate world, her “love scene” with the shower in the role of the partner (Rothman, 300). The point of view of the voyeuristic gaze in the scene is the shower. It is “the peephole through which our gaze penetrates the shower curtain and through which Norman’s gaze continues to possess the frame” (Rothman, 301). The shower is the “eye” through which the audience satisfies its voyeuristic desires (Rothman, 302). We are interested not in the act as a purifying from her crime ritual, but rather in “our fantasy of rape” which is “disavowal of our own desire” (304).
The Gaze in Vertigo:
There are two types of gaze in the movie that present a “split between the eye and the gaze” (Manlove, 91): (1) Scottie’s gaze that kills Judi and her “failure” to be the woman from his fantasy, and (2) a greater gaze, which is the reason for Scottie’s vertigo, appearing in the opening scene of the accident on the rooftop. She describes Hitchcock’s “Vertigo shots” used to present this mental occurrence as they were “created by simultaneously tracking the camera backward while also zooming the camera lens in; an effect that is repeated in several scenes to mark the presence of the gaze” (92). In the book Hitchcock’s Motifs, Michael Walker states that “the act of watching” is a significant part of Hitchcock’s director style. Hitchcock’s ‘audience-identification techniques”, part of which is cutting, editing and repetition of the scenes, the apparatus shows the narrative from the point of view of the “voyeuristic hero”.
Female Representation in Vertigo:
The female is a representation of the male fantasy and it’s doomed to die because death is the only way to satisfy one’s desires. Judi is a real woman, and Scottie is only interested in her just because she reminds him of his dead fantasy. He wants to project his dreams onto her, and thus kill the “real” her. Judie, led by her desire to be loved, suppressed her identity in order to satisfy his romantic fantasies. In the hotel scene, where Judy fully “transformed” herself into Madeline, the three hundred and sixty degree shot of the camera of Judy and Scottie kissing creates a spiral movement around them “emphasizing once again that we cannot be rid of spirals and their spectral suggestion of sexuality” (Belton, 69). The narrative of the movie follows the spiral motif of repetition. Scottie falls in love with Madeline and loses her because his vertigo takes over him and he cannot save her when she jumps from the bell tower. He finds Judy and projects his love and adoration he had for Madeline just to lose her the same way he lost Madeline, further enhancing the unbreakable cycles of human nature. Furthermore, in a shocking plot twist, Judy is revealed to be an actress hired by Gavin Elster to help him to cover up the murder of his wife. So, actually, Scottie loses the same woman twice, and they were both just a fantasy, an illusion of his own creation.
In conclusion I would say that Hitchcock fulfills his audience’s unconscious desires by giving them the active role of the one with the gaze, observing and peaking onto his subjects. The director skillfully plays with the emotion of the audience by the juxtaposition of the camera and the characters. Even without considering the “scientific validity” of psychoanalysis, Hitchcock transforms it into a useful cinematic technique to create an ambiguous world where nothing is what it seems to be.
Bread and Butter,
Salt and Peaches,
Nicole
References
Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” Art and Literature. Vol. 14. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985.
Belton, James. Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo and the Hermeneutic Spiral cite. Canada: The University of British Columbia, 2017. Print.
—. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Ed. James Strachey. 1949 Paperback. Simple Books, 2011.
Lacan, Jacques. “The Split between the Eye and the Gaze.” The Four Fundamental Concepts of Pyscho-Analysis. New York: Norton & Company, 1981. 67-105. Print.
Manlove, Clifford T. “Visual ‘Drive’ and Cinematic Narrative: Reading Gaze Theory in Lacan, Hitchcock, and Mulvey.” Cinema Journal, vol. 46, no. 3, Spring 2007, pp. 83–108.
Rebello, S. Alfred Hitchcock and the Makin of Psycho. London: St. Martin’s Griffin. 1998.
Rothman, William. Hitchcock : The Murderous Gaze. Vol. 2nd edition, State University of New York Press, 2012.
Sandis, Constantine. 2009.“Hitchcock’s conscious use of Freud’s unconscious”. Europe’s journal of psychology.Oxford Brookes University, 2009:56-81.
Walker, Michael. Hitchcock’s Motifs. Amsterdam University Press, 2005.
Wexman, Virginia Wright. “The Critic as Consumer: Film Study in the University, ‘Vertigo’, and the Film Canon.” Film Quarterly, vol. 39, no. 3, 1986, pp. 32–41.