Rather than expressing anything particular to his own psychology, Hitchcock tended to frame his interest in murder as an inevitable expression of his cultural heritage. As he explained in his conversation with Dr. Wertham, “Many great English literary figures have always interested themselves in crime. . . . The whole thing is examined on a very high plane. Now, this is indigenous, it seems to me, to the English.” He believed there to be a “crime mystique in England, and it rubs off on everyone,” evidenced by the ubiquity of violence in the English popular culture of his youth. As a boy he likely would have been exposed to the penny dreadfuls and half-penny periodicals, which conveyed gruesome stories of supposed real-life murder and malice to a readership of adolescent boys and young men.
The war brought devastating violence right up to Hitchcock’s front step. Immediately after, there was a nationwide panic, nurtured by the popular press, about an apparent surge in everyday violence. “Much perturbation appears to have been caused among the public by the wave of crime which is reported to be sweeping over the country at the present time,” ran one story in the Guardian in January 1920, which referred to “a series of particularly cruel and ghastly murders and violent robberies which have occurred during the last few weeks.” This was the world in which Hitchcock began his movie career. Indeed, he claimed to have a personal link to Edith Thompson, one of Britain’s most notorious murderers of the 1920s, from whose father he had taken dancing lessons. Thompson was executed in 1923 for manipulating her lover into murdering her husband, the type of strange, complex tale that absorbed Hitchcock. Her case received saturation news coverage at the time, though today her conviction is regarded as an outrageous miscarriage of justice.
Hitchcock as victim and murderer, 1955.
Hitchcock believed that not only were the English—whom he often conflated with the British—powerfully drawn to murder, the nature of English violence was a locus of national identity and experience. The first talkie he made, Blackmail, features a memorable scene in which a family discusses news of a stabbing. One character is appalled at the revelation: “A good, clean, honest, whack over the head with a brick is one thing. There’s something British about that. But knives? No, knives is not right.” Hitchcock told the New York Times that unlike American murders, which tend toward dullness in their blunt brutality, murders in England reveal its people’s understatement, politesse, and “an ingrained racial sense of drama,” which he claimed one could trace back to the work of Shakespeare. American gangsters and professional killers with their clinical gunshot murders were of no interest to him because they were professional crooks; it was the fair-play ethics of amateur gentlemen murderers that made for the most gripping crimes. He explained that there was virtually no gun culture in Britain; as the police very rarely use them, “it’s a matter of courtesy that the criminals don’t.” Gun murders are not unknown to Hitchcock films—The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) climaxes with a lengthy gunfight—but are certainly in the minority. Even in North by Northwest, when Eve (Eva Marie Saint) appears to shoot Roger O. Thornhill (Cary Grant) dead, it turns out to have been a ruse, her gun loaded with blanks. In the United States, said Hitchcock, “people get blasted all over the place. I prefer my own style.”
By his “own style” he meant death by poison and noose, or shoved from the top of a building, in the spirit of his favorite English murders, which were strange, eccentric cases revealing undercurrents of sex, class, and churning, repressed emotions in the lives of outwardly respectable people, often Londoners from social backgrounds similar to his and who shared his emotional reserve. There was the case of Dr. Crippen, which featured adultery and cross-dressing, and that of John Christie, a fantasist and necrophiliac who preyed on young women at 10 Rillington Place, the quiet home he shared with his wife. Hitchcock’s favorite, as he mentioned on many occasions, was that of Edwin Bartlett, a grocer from London (an obvious parallel to his own life) who died on New Year’s Eve in 1885 from chloroform poisoning. Bartlett’s beautiful young wife, Adelaide, was arrested on suspicion of murder, and during her trial the details of a scandalous affair, encouraged by Bartlett, between Adelaide and a local clergyman became public. In a final otherworldly twist, Adelaide was acquitted, because medical experts had no idea how the chloroform could have been administered without causing severe burns to the victim’s throat.
The Bartlett case was obviously tied up with things that could not otherwise be discussed in polite society, which raises the question of what Hitchcock—and other English people—talked about when he talked about murder. First, the act of killing provided a vehicle with which to approach taboo subjects of sex. Young viewers today might still find the shower scene in Psycho disturbing, but it’s unlikely they’d be startled by the film’s opening scene in which John Gavin and Janet Leigh are seen in a hotel room, not entirely clothed. In 1960, the year of Psycho’s release, it caused almost as much uproar as the shower scene. The New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther wrote Hitchcock to ask for an explanation of why Psycho began with such an explicit scene, for an article Crowther was writing on “the evident trend towards greater candor about sex in our Hollywood films.” Allusions to sex in the moment of death, and vice versa, can be found in many of Hitchcock’s films, Psycho included. In Dial M for Murder (1954), Grace Kelly’s character is attacked by a man who has been coerced into killing her on behalf of her jealous husband. Pinned to a desk with her assailant on top of her, she writhes to free herself, before grabbing a pair of scissors and stabbing him in the back. If the audience hadn’t already been privy to the murder plot, it would be possible to mistake the attack for an attempted rape. Devotees of the canon would also recognize a nod to Blackmail, in which a young woman uses a knife to fight off a rapist. Other Hitchcock murders are loaded with associations with taboo sexual acts: asphyxiation; bondage; homosexuality; transvestitism; incest. As with murder, these were all things that held Hitchcock rapt, but of which he had no—or very little—firsthand experience.
Hitchcock was far from the only English cultural figure of his generation to use murder as a means of exploring a particular idea of Englishness. In 1927, the year that Hitchcock’s first movies received widespread release in the UK, Miss Marple made her debut in the decorous pages of The Royal Magazine. Sweet old ladies sleuthing in manor houses and rural parsonages was exactly the kind of atmosphere George Orwell evoked in his essays “Decline of the English Murder” and “Raffles and Miss Blandish,” in which he cited traditionally “English” homicides—inspired by class resentments and sexual frustration, carried out with good manners and fast-acting poison—as markers of a distinctive sense of Englishness that was being silenced by raucous Americans. From the early to mid-twentieth century, murder was used by mainstream English writers and artists as a statement of their cultural identity. It was comforting, perhaps, for them to think that England’s sturdy middle classes could take even the most diabolical manifestations of modern vulgarity and make them genteel, adhering to the manners of an increasingly distant golden age, before the impact of modern America began to make itself felt. Naturally, this reverie of English gentility obscured a more brutal reality. Orwell conceded that “within living memory . . . kicking your wife to death” could have been called “a typically English crime,” the kind of sudden blaze of domestic rage to which Hitchcock was also drawn.
Orwell thought that England’s “great period in murder, our Elizabethan period, so to speak, seems to have been between roughly 1850 and 1925,” the very year, coincidentally, that Hitchcock committed his first murder to celluloid. Hitchcock’s killings fused the two things that Orwell considered opposites. With his films of the twenties and thirties he used German art and Hollywood sizzle to hurl the tradition of English murder into the new age of speed, machines, and sensation. Adopting the language of modernist artists of the era, many of whom extolled violence and disruption as a cultural force, he argued that the violence and peril he put on screen were not desensitizing his audiences bu
t reconnecting them with the raw reality of human existence. “I am out to give the public a good healthy mental ‘shake-up,’ ” he said, without which modern societies “grow sluggish and jellified . . . our civilization has so screened and sheltered us that it isn’t practicable to experience sufficient thrills at firsthand.” In a reversal of the predominant logic of our own times, Hitchcock was arguing that the best way to live in the moment was to spend more time in the dark, staring at a screen.
Hitchcock wanted his film murders to affect viewers in the same way that reading about his favorite domestic murderers had always affected him, disrupting the humdrum of middle-class daily life. This is evident in his American work, too, in which a phalanx of fatally charismatic men from respectable backgrounds seek to reshape the world in their own vision, using murder as their tool. “I certainly admire people who do things,” says Robert Walker as Bruno in Strangers on a Train (1951) while plotting a murderous scheme that he thinks will elevate him above ordinary people. Guy, a handsome tennis player, expresses horror at Bruno’s suggestion that they each commit a murder on behalf of the other, causing Bruno to plead “what is a life or two, Guy? Some people are better off dead.” When Joseph Cotten was struggling to get inside his serial killer character in Shadow of a Doubt, Hitchcock said it was simple: “To him, the elimination of his widows is a dedication, an important sociological contribution to civilization. Remember, when John Wilkes Booth jumped to the stage in Ford’s Theatre after firing that fatal shot, he was enormously disappointed not to receive a standing ovation.” Hitchcock may have been appalled by real-life violence, but he understood the urge to be publicly known for one’s audacious brilliance, to subvert reality, with an audience gasping in thrilled disbelief.
As an artistic gesture, the shower scene echoed an event sixty-six years earlier, when Aubrey Beardsley’s illustrations of Oscar Wilde’s play Salomé were published, and the world got its first shocking glimpse of John the Baptist’s severed head dripping thick ropes of black blood onto the milk-white page. Fittingly, in Robert Bloch’s novel, the shower murder isn’t a frenzy of stabbing as it is in the film, but a decapitation, the victim’s head sliced off by the blade of Bates’s butcher knife.
Wilde and Beardsley were prominent among a generation of late nineteenth-century artists who rejected realistic depictions of the natural world in favor of fantasies, dreams, and nightmares, locating beauty in disorder and disharmony. Their work fed the shadows and monsters of German expressionist cinema, which in turn had a profound impact on Hitchcock’s films. Hitchcock publicly acknowledged the debt. He said that in his youth he had been so taken with symbolism, the movement of painters that included Paul Gaugin and Gustav Klimt, that their canvases spilled into his dreams. The aestheticism of Wilde, itself directly influenced by symbolism, had a similarly strong impact. The Picture of Dorian Gray was one of Hitchcock’s favorite novels, and Wilde’s dry witticisms, logical inversions, and agreeable iconoclasm all manifest themselves in Hitchcock’s work.
The evidence of Wilde’s influence seems to have been in Harold Hayes’s mind when he wrote to Hitchcock a few months after the release of Psycho, asking for a contribution from Hitchcock that would unpack for his readers “those aspects of your technique which give violence a certain sophistication in this day and age” for a forthcoming edition of Esquire magazine. Under Hayes’s guidance, Esquire would become an important voice in the sixties, tapping into the cultural ferment of that decade, and he apparently recognized earlier than most critics that Psycho was more than a scary movie. It was, he believed, a marvelous example of Hitchcock’s elevated depictions of violence in a world after Auschwitz and Hiroshima; “people have undergone so much in the past 30 years that it takes a particular kind of genius today to shock them at all.” The resulting article provided Hitchcock’s tips for how to conduct the perfectly sophisticated murder, in distinctly Wildean terms, ironic and playfully goading. On selecting a victim, Hitchcock suggests that “for amusement, choose from among the pillars of the community; for whimsey, have a go at The Common Man.”
In certain ways, Hayes was surely right. Psycho was the climax of a creative life spent exploring imaginative, novel, often humorous depictions of cruelty, domination, and obsession. Even so, it seems wrong to cite Psycho as the apotheosis of Hitchcock’s “sophistication.” Though Hitchcock was adamant that the shower scene was no more violent than any of his other murders because it was impressionistic, it was a disingenuous view. The whole point had been to film something that the viewer experienced as the most shocking act of bloodshed; the fact that this end was achieved by technical ingenuity is neither here nor there. On top of the terror and agony that Marion Crane suffers, she is humiliated, slaughtered while defenseless and naked, and done so in a way that is also meant to mock the audience. We’ve spent forty minutes looking at the world through her eyes, listening to her thoughts, feeling her anxiety, and hoping that she’ll somehow get away with her theft of forty thousand dollars that began the whole story. We thought we were with her for the long haul—and suddenly she’s butchered and tossed away like the carcass of a Christmas turkey. The still image of Leigh’s screaming face, her wet hair stuck slick to her head, is a spectacle of horror perpetrated for its own sake, exhilarating but awful. David Thomson writes of “the moment of Psycho,” how the movie, and especially that one infamous scene, announced the arrival of a thing called “the sixties,” intent on raising hell and undermining truths. Psycho, he argues, presaged the Zapruder tape of Kennedy’s assassination, and the Vietnam War on the nightly news, or at least gave us a visual point of reference to help us absorb the shock of the footage. By extension, one can see it as the prelude to the even more horrifying screen violence of recent years, not just the gorefests of modern horror movies but also the filmed executions by terrorists literate in Western popular culture. No matter how beautifully lit, magnificently scored, and expertly edited—and Psycho is all those things—the shower scene isn’t a work of sophistication, it’s Hitchcock trolling all those he’d spent decades convincing that even murder could be “art”—beautiful, charming, harmonious. Perhaps the shower scene belonged more to the 1970s than the 1960s; anticipating a future generation of Londoners, it was a punk gesture, gleeful in its creative act of destruction.
The world in which Hitchcock grew up had its own “moment of Psycho” a decade before his birth, when Jack the Ripper established himself as a defining piece of East End mythology. When given the opportunity to select a story to film for his third movie, Hitchcock chose The Lodger, a 1913 novel by Marie Belloc Lowndes, based on the Ripper murders, which had previously been adapted into a stage play that Hitchcock saw as a teenager. The movie—The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog, about a young man who is mistakenly identified as a serial killer whose victims are all blonde women—was a huge success with audiences and critics; it was the first great stride on Hitchcock’s path to stardom. The lasting afterglow of this triumph was perhaps part of the reason why Hitchcock described The Lodger as his “first good film” and “the first time I exercised my style. In truth, you might almost say that The Lodger was my first picture.” Its numerous similarities with Psycho are worth noting. The action in both is catalyzed by a mysterious outsider in search of a hideaway; both balance shocking horror with dark comedy, shot in a way that evokes the unreal atmosphere of German expressionism. Both were also based on novelized interpretations of real killers who committed depraved crimes against women. In The Lodger, the murderer is a cloaked figure known only as the Avenger, though partly because of changes to the script insisted on by the film’s producers, his identity is never revealed, meaning it’s never specified what he’s avenging—it could be read as simply a howl against the existence of females who remind him of his crippling inadequacies, in anticipation of Norman Bates, the original incel, and a precursor to Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker.
Some believe that through these films Hitchcock was revealing his own torments and dark fantasies. Certai
nly, he explored submission and domination in his work, and found in moviemaking ways of controlling beautiful young women, which excited him. To Truffaut he mentioned the sadomasochistic connotations that accompany the many handcuffs in his movies, and told of his interest in the various instruments of torture, violence, and restraint he had seen at the Vice Museum in Paris. Strangulation appears in several Hitchcock films, and he posed for various photos with his hands clasped around a female throat, and sometimes his own.
However, the common denominator among Hitchcock’s murderers isn’t their victims—who are not all women—but male destructiveness, an emotional aberrance that Hitchcock was attuned to, and perhaps felt inside himself, but never truly understood. His murderers hit out at women, but also at other men, a government, or civilization as a whole. Norman Bates’s rage tumbles out in explosions of ham-fisted brutality, whereas the Avenger is presented as a fiendishly brilliant criminal with the power to haunt and terrorize an entire city.
Murder as a twisted expression of artistic flair was something Hitchcock repeatedly addressed. “All murderers regard their work as a fine art,” he explained, half-jokingly. “The better ones, I mean.” The reference to murder “as a fine art” was one Hitchcock made often; it derives from Thomas De Quincey’s satirical essay of 1827, “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts,” an aesthete’s ironically disinterested appreciation of the act of killing, which outlines the ways in which a murder can be beautiful, an idea Hitchcock borrowed in his “Sophistication of Violence” piece for Esquire. De Quincey had a deep obsession with the serial killer John Williams, whose slaughter of seven people in twelve days in the East End of London was an early nineteenth-century precursor of the Ripper. Williams’s crimes also inspired De Quincey’s gothic tale “The Avenger,” the name given to Belloc Lowndes’s, then Hitchcock’s, murderer in The Lodger. “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts” had a sizable impact on subsequent generations of British writers, not only in terms of its urbane, acrid irony but also in cementing a cultural association between murder and artistic brilliance.
The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock Page 5