CHAPTER SIX
Mark O’Hara
Perhaps best known for his spoofs such as Blazing Saddles (1974), Mel Brooks in High Anxiety (1977) devotes his entire send-up of suspense films to Alfred Hitchcock.1 Brooks includes shots of the legs of busy airport travelers, reverse zooms from high perches, a tense soundtrack—all of the conventions and off-balance plotting of the master, along with plentiful winks toward the viewer. In a re-creation of the shower scene from Psycho (1960),2 Brooks’s character Dr. Richard Thorndyke is pummeled not with a knife but with a newspaper wielded by a belligerent bellboy played by Barry Levinson; the camera pans from Thorndyke’s stunned face on the floor up to the tub drain, where the black ink flows like blood.
An amalgamation of vaudevillian goofiness and self-reflexive shtick (the camera twice crashes through the “fourth wall” and disturbs the actors), High Anxiety is a farce that offers merely cartoonish depictions of characters with diagnoses of mental illness. Although the film elicits laughter, it is useful to recall Wahl’s explanation: “Americans identify media as their main source of knowledge about mental illness, and because mental illness appears so frequently in American visual discourse.”3 Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 film Psycho is often blamed for reinforcing negative attitudes toward mental illness and people who are diagnosed with mental illness. Leading character Norman Bates is a relentless predator and murderer. But many of Hitchcock’s other films feature characters who face psychological issues in more realistic ways.
In the 1958 movie Vertigo,4 for example, John “Scottie” Ferguson, a police detective forced to retire because he has developed an intense fear of heights, accompanied by acute dizziness, falls in love with a mysterious woman that he has been hired to follow. Small details in the film, such as events that trigger Scottie’s anxieties—and the coping mechanisms he develops to deal with them—portray the protagonist as a flawed but likable character.
Acrophobia—and the vertigo/dizziness induced by it—acute melancholia, guilt complex: these are the terms assigned in the film to the disorders affecting Scottie, played by Jimmy Stewart. In today’s clinical lingo, diagnosticians might add a few more, certainly including obsessive compulsive disorder and perhaps voyeurism and scopophilia. Scottie’s career as a police detective has made him well aware of criminal law, but his neglect of ethical principles causes him barely to skirt the line of criminality. Long an effective law enforcement officer and respected citizen, Scottie exhibits behaviors that conflict with his reputation. Because of his recent trauma—witnessing a patrol officer trying to help him but falling to his death, in the scene that opens the film—Scottie has a visceral reaction to heights and has retired from the force. Nevertheless, he is able to blend into society; he even feels well enough to allow himself to be convinced by a friend to take on a sort of private detective job: following Gavin Elster’s wife Madeleine, whom Gavin believes is somehow possessed by the spirit of her great-grandmother, Carlotta Valdes.
The subplots of Vertigo seem to pivot on Scottie’s relations with women. Well into middle age, he appears comfortable with Midge Wood (Barbara Bel Geddes), who had actually broken their engagement years before. Their conversation in her apartment is tinged more with familiarity than flirtation. When Scottie first spots Madeleine Elster (Kim Novak), however, he is taken with her classic beauty, and accepts the task of shadowing her. What may have begun as curiosity becomes obsession. Madeleine’s movements among unusual locations—Carlotta’s portrait in a gallery, her house, and her grave—fascinate Scottie; he is attracted more when he apparently saves her life after she jumps into San Francisco Bay.
Scottie’s years as a detective do not serve him well in romance. The gaze that he directs at Madeleine becomes slanted with desire: as he falls in love, he does not appear to realize his betrayal of his college friend Gavin as well as of his own professionalism. Ravetto-Biagioli comments that the shift “between being captivated by the image of Madeleine and being captive of Scottie’s obsessive gaze forces us to see the relation of seduction to obsession, blurring the lines between possessing and being possessed by the gaze.”5 Scottie goes from policing the social order to experiencing chaotic emotions. What Scottie fails to detect are the layers of deception that this woman, whose real name is Judy Barton, and Gavin Elster have piled upon him.
Unaware that Elster has killed the real Madeleine, throwing her out of the bell tower of San Juan Bautista just before Scottie can reach the top of the tower, Scottie believes that he is responsible for Madeleine’s death. In his portrayal of the guilt-addled Scottie Ferguson, James Stewart shows a shocked passivity, as though he is incapable of responding to the unfair characterizations at the hearing over Madeleine’s death. In his study of mental illness in the media, Wahl states that consumers constantly watch depictions of people with mental health issues as comical, different, or dangerous, and these images carry on the negative stereotypes that lead to the stigmatization of real persons with psychosocial disorders.6 Even after Scottie forces Judy Barton to remake herself into Madeleine, the role she had played previously, Scottie is not viewed unfavorably.
Even though Gavin Elster is guilty of planning the murderous ruse, it is Judy who appears the recipient of the harshest punishment. She loves Scottie enough to allow him to dress her as Madeleine. However, she overlooks the gold necklace that she had worn during the charade, and when Scottie spots it, his anger seems justified. Perhaps his returning to the mission is his attempt to force Judy’s confession, but the trip results in her death. Regardless of the variables that make up the equation of Scottie Ferguson’s likability, losing the woman he loves for the second time can only continue to affect his mental health.
Tippi Hedren plays the title character in Hitchcock’s 1964 film Marnie.7 Opening shots show Marnie carrying a suitcase along a train platform. Bernard Herrmann’s suspenseful string music draws in viewers as the camera stops on a marquee poster: “Alfred Hitchcock’s Suspenseful Sex Mystery.” We don’t see Marnie’s face until, washing out dark hair dye, she tosses back her head to reveal her face framed by her true blonde hair. Swiftly-paced sequences tell us about Marnie: she has stolen nearly $10,000 from her employer, Mr. Sidney Strutt, who is describing her to two detectives. Among Strutt’s denigrating comments is the odd (and foreshadowing) phrase, “Always pulling her skirt down over her knees as though they were a national treasure.” The narrative reveals that Marnie has developed paralyzing fears of storms, of intimacy with men, and of the color red; she is also an unrepentant liar and thief. A publisher named Mark Rutland, played by Sean Connery, falls in love with Marnie, and after a series of suspenseful complications, coaxes her into marriage.
Marnie is surely one of Hitchcock’s more troubled female leads. The director is to be admired for not naming Marnie’s disorders beyond her being “sick” or having kleptomania. In one scene we hear girls who are jumping rope and chanting, “Call for the Doctor, Call for the Nurse, Call for the Lady with the Alligator Purse… .” This rhyme echoes the school children singing in The Birds; it seems appropriate here because no one in the rhyme is able to give a correct diagnosis for the afflicted child. One of Marnie’s problems is her unusual relationship with her mother, Bernice Edgar. With stolen money Marnie buys her mother a mink scarf. Her mother reacts indifferently, even when Marnie sits on the floor and rests her head on her mother’s lap. Resentful of her mother’s attentions toward a girl whom Bernice is babysitting, Marnie soon asks bluntly, “Why don’t you love me?” The scene ends with Marnie receiving a slap from her mother, and going to lie down before dinner. The following scene reenacts the start of a traumatic night from Marnie’s childhood. A window shade tapping, red light flooding the screen, Marnie seems beset by a dream. She awakens when her mother, standing in the doorway, calls her for dinner. Marnie comments that she was having the “same dream,” and the feeling of cold started when her mother entered the room.
One method that Hitchcock frequently uses to build both suspense and characterization is dichotomous in nature. In Marnie’s case, we viewers notice her revulsion by the color red, as when she spills ink on her sleeve—like a sudden blooming of blood—and alarms her coworkers when she rushes out of the office to the bathroom. Obsessively scrubbing at the stain, Marnie utilizes the defense mechanism of denying the near-hysteria of her reaction. Accompanying her shocked behavior is the Hitchcockian artifice of the red filter filling the shot whenever Marnie spots the provocative color. Although the filter may be heavy-handed, it serves to highlight how sudden and unwelcome are the emotions evoked by redness—and ultimately by the repressed trauma that generates these emotions.
This two-sided technique—Marnie’s panic attacks triggered by physical factors, and heightened through the red filtering—is often accompanied by noises like knocking or rapping, and especially by the flashing and din of thunderstorms. Called in for Saturday overtime work, Marnie meets Mark Rutland in the empty office complex. Rutland appears to have been grooming her for a relationship, but as Marnie sits down to a fresh piece of paper in the typewriter, a storm suddenly crashes upon them, tossing a tree limb through a window and shattering display cases containing pre-Columbian art—the last of Rutland’s mementos of his deceased wife. Her face frozen in terror, Marnie retreats to the far end of the room. He embraces Marnie against the paneling; she accepts passively, crying, “Stop the colors”; the racket and strobing lightning have transfixed her. After a few seconds Rutland gives her a kiss that is not returned, and it seems that he has exploited Marnie’s vulnerable state. However, Marnie recovers and does not seem to remember or react to the stolen kiss.
As in Vertigo, the romantic subplot of Marnie serves to show the more “normal” sides of Hitchcock’s characters. By film’s end, Marnie is apparently “cured,” and Mark Rutland has attained his goal of seeing her “fixed.” Viewers witness portrayals of the lived experience of Marnie Edgar’s character, and perhaps come away with sharper understanding of her complex behaviors, and more importantly, of what caused them. In fact their cause is what’s most intriguing about the film: the seemingly minor character of the mother, Bernice, appears only a few times, but when in flashback we see her working in her own apartment as a prostitute, waking the six year-old Marnie so that Bernice can use the only bedroom with a sailor, we are introduced to the depravity whose result is the anguish that has stayed with Marnie into adulthood. From a 21st-century perspective, the mental illness of the male lead of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1945 mystery Spellbound,8 John Ballantyne (Gregory Peck), is not a fault within himself but a disability imposed upon him by society. He is treated differently as a result of his nonnormative behaviors. Whether they are physiological or psychological, impairments are socially conditioned and framed.9 Other phrases suggest the easy marginalization of postwar lingo: “emotional problems of the sane,” “the locked doors of his mind,” “the illness and confusion disappear,” imply that talking with a psychoanalyst results in a “disappearance”—or sure cure.
No movie of Hitchcock’s uses more clinical language than Spellbound—not modern clinical terminology, but phrases like “guilt complex” and simplified theories of Freudian psychology. Even the setting is the clinic, the place in history where citizens were removed in order for their disorders to be examined. This clinical gaze comes from medical doctors with the power to make decisions and order interventional treatment.10 The institution is called Green Manors, and the retiring head psychiatrist, Dr. Murchison (Leo G. Carroll), presides over the entrance of his replacement, Dr. Anthony Edwardes (Gregory Peck). The protagonist is the only woman on staff, Dr. Constance Petersen (Ingrid Bergman), and she falls in mutual infatuation with Edwardes at first contact. The doctors have apartments in this institution, and Petersen leaves her rooms to visit the library, ostensibly to borrow Edwardes’ latest book but really to visit his apartment to pursue a romance. Soon they kiss. Their embrace is interrupted, however, when Edwardes seems frozen in revulsion: he’s staring at the lines in the fabric of Petersen’s robe. At their first meeting a few hours earlier, Edwardes acted unduly alarmed at a pattern that Petersen had drawn on the tablecloth with a fork, rectilinear lines shaped like a pool. She soon discovers the man she’s in love with is only posing as Dr. Edwardes. As he has amnesia, he cannot say his real name (we discover later that it’s John Ballantyne, and his knowledge of medicine hints that he is some sort of doctor).
Gregory Peck’s masterful acting, enhanced by the minute details of Hitchcock’s direction, sketches Edwardes’s/Ballantyne’s character as extremely complex yet likable. Growing agitated whenever he spots patterns of parallel lines—especially against a white background—he enters a state resembling fainting before he recovers. The dedication depicted by Bergman seems so real that viewers’ disbelief remains suspended when Petersen leaves her place of work, Green Manors, for Manhattan to follow Ballantyne after he is suspected in the murder of the real Dr. Edwardes.
It is safe to say that the director’s agenda is to make Spellbound suspenseful, and that the police chasing a “madman” (as a radio report calls Ballantyne) and his psychiatrist/girlfriend does not supply enough “white-knuckled” moments. Perhaps that’s why Ballantyne is at times portrayed as menacing. Hiding out in the house of her mentor, Dr. Alexander Brulov, Petersen lies about her relationship with Ballantyne, claiming they’re married. Acting as a gentleman, Ballantyne takes the couch and leaves the bed to Petersen, but in the middle of the night, sleepless, he enters the bathroom and stirs up some shaving soap. Caught in a spell of anxiety by the black brush bristles against the white soap, Ballantyne retreats to the bedroom, where he stands beside the sleeping Petersen. Holding a straight razor, he’s transfixed by the lines in the bedspread. Tense moments pass. Ballantyne silently leaves the room to descend the stairs, where a wakeful Dr. Brulov sits at the far end of the parlor. Hitchcock’s famous camera work cuts in here, showing a long shot of Brulov chattering away, with occasional close-ups of the razor in Ballantyne’s hand.
That the murderer of the eminent Dr. Edwardes turns out to be his predecessor at Green Manors, Dr. Murchison, is an indicator of the unjust blame directed toward John Ballantyne. (Further irony surfaces when we ponder Murchison’s comment that his own reason for retiring from Green Manors was his “crumbling,” or some unspecified psychological disorder.) A character’s perceived mental illness is a variable that cannot be ignored in the viewing of a film, as suggested by Dr. Petersen when she refuses to let Ballantyne surrender before the murder is solved: “If you turn yourself in in your condition, there is no afterward.” In fact, John Ballantyne has been objectified by the part of society intent on disciplinary action. Foucault comments that it is “the fact of being constantly seen, of being able always to be seen, that maintains the disciplined individual in his subjection.”11 Dr. Petersen may be breaking the law, but she is also protecting a loved one from the power collected through observing and controlling the populace.
In 1963’s The Birds,12 the supporting character Lydia Brenner, played by Jessica Tandy, has an inordinate fear of abandonment. She’s the mother of Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor), the lawyer who meets Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren) in the bird shop. After Melanie drives 60 miles out of San Francisco to deliver love birds to the Brenner house, using the cover story of visiting the teacher Annie Hayworth, she meets Mrs. Brenner and finds her distant. Mrs. Brenner watches Melanie move throughout the house, and questions Mitch about her presence and her reputation as a scandalous socialite. In a conversation with Annie Hayworth, Melanie learns that Mrs. Brenner can be difficult to deal with—as Annie had discovered while in a relationship with Mitch. Having lost her husband, Mrs. Brenner now cannot stand the thought of being alone.
In a famous scene, Mrs. Brenner drives her pickup truck to the farm of a friend, only to find the inside of the house in disarray and the owner dead in his bedroom, apparently killed by birds. Running in panic, dropping her purse as she heads to the truck, Mrs. Brenner cannot even summon words to speak to a farmhand, or to Mitch and Melanie as she arrives home. Of course this is one bit of characterization and one tense moment of many to come. It is followed, however, by a break in which Melanie brings tea to Mrs. Brenner, and they converse, Mrs. Brenner confiding her wish to be stronger than she is, and Melanie offering to go to the schoolhouse to pick up Cathy, Mitch Brenner’s younger sister. In the cinematic condensing of time, Melanie grows closer to the entire Brenner family, helping Cathy through several bird attacks and falling in love with Mitch.
Strangers on a Train (1951)13 opens with shots of the legs of two men as they leave their taxis and board a train, the waist-down perspectives highlighting the similarities of the soon-to-be compartment-mates. Guy Haines, played by Farley Granger, is a social-climbing tennis player whose girlfriend’s father is a U.S. senator, while Bruno Antony, played by Robert Walker, reveals himself early as a rich and risk-taking sociopath. After Antony talks his way into an easy acquaintance with the younger man, discovering Haines’s hatred for the wife who will not divorce him, Antony proposes the two should “swap” murders, with Haines killing Antony’s meddlesome father and Antony killing Miriam Haines.
That Antony is Haines’s secret self, or doppelganger, is suggested through several images and conversations. First, the two often dress alike, in well-tailored suits and fedoras; Antony also continually appears as Haines’s shadow, stalking him from the steps of the Jefferson Memorial or from the stands of a tennis court. The main plot hinges on Antony’s interpretation of the exchange on the train, which Haines took as a joke. Viewers are struck by Antony’s aberrant behavior when he catches Miriam Haines on an island at an amusement park and strangles her. Hitchcock enhances this scene by showing the murder: not directly but in the reflection of Miriam’s large eyeglasses that have fallen in the grass. Further, the shot lingers in the lens to feature Antony’s hands before he picks up the glasses as a keepsake, and then the lighter that he’d dropped, the lighter that Haines had left behind in the train car.
Antony’s psychopathology is unique. His conversational style is familiar, his manner insouciant. Able to endear himself swiftly to strangers, he introduces himself to Haines’ circle and insinuates himself into conversations with Senator Morton (Leo. G. Carroll) and Mrs. Cunningham (Norma Varden), the wife of a judge. A small but definite turning point in the perception of Bruno Antony comes when he places his hands around Mrs. Cunningham’s neck, in a demonstration of a technique of murder that is intended to be humorous and witty. As Antony commences his mock choking, Barbara Morton (Patricia Hitchcock), the sister of Haines’ girlfriend Anne Morton (Ruth Roman), steps behind Mrs. Cunningham. Barbara is appalled at the spectacle of this man, whom she suspects of murdering Miriam Haines and framing Guy Haines, reenacting the crime. And the scene indeed becomes a reenactment as Antony is for a second time transfixed by Barbara Morton—by her resemblance to Miriam Haines. Staring at her eyes framed by large glasses, Antony tightens his grip on the now-whimpering Mrs. Cunningham. Antony’s occasional bouts of paralysis remind viewers that he is operating with an array of disorders, not the least of which is an outsized ego.
The mix of Bruno Antony’s social ease and edginess fits Merskin’s concept of the compensated psychopath, a figure that “defies convention, breaks rules, and fearlessly flaunts convention. He is predatory and to be feared, and yet he is alluring, manipulative, powerful, and successful.”14 Despite the knowledge possessed by viewers—about Antony’s premeditated murder of Miriam Haines, about his obsessive stalking of Guy Haines, about the past transgressions that have made Antony’s father seek to “commit” him—Bruno Antony’s gentlemanly charade is beguiling, making his character almost likable. His determination to frame Haines for Miriam’s murder is simply an extension of his neglect of truth and decency: “For Bruno, the act of killing Miriam was as ethically and mechanically pure as one of the death sentences handed down by the judge he harangues at Senator Morton’s party.”15 Bruno Antony falls short, however, of Norman Bates’s status as serial killer: both men follow no code of morals, but Bates’ sinister manners attract more stigmatization.
Lead characters in Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Marnie, Spellbound, The Birds, and Strangers on a Train behave in ways that cause their titles to be listed more as suspense films, as opposed to Psycho, which has been dubbed by some critics as the “granddaddy of modern horror films.” Although Alfred Hitchcock keeps shock value high on his shelf of cinematic devices—think of the demise of Detective Arbogast in Psycho, or our glimpse of Norman’s mother—the director gives away measurements of his understanding of the dimensions of human behavior most clearly in his studies of suspense. Hitchcockian characters defy normative behavior; viewers are alarmed when they see a person who seems agreeable suddenly turn murderous. Finally, Hitchcock’s use of tropes continually activates viewers’ cultural catalogs. That’s why Mel Brooks has so much material to lampoon.
Notes
1. Mel Brooks and Madeline Kahn, High Anxiety, DVD, dir. Mel Brooks (1977; Los Angeles: 20th Century Fox, 2006).
2. Anthony Perkins and Janet Leigh, Psycho, DVD, dir. Alfred Hitchcock (1960; Los Angeles: Universal Pictures, 1998).
3. Otto Wahl, Media Madness: Public Images of Mental Illness (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006).
4. James Stewart and Kim Novak, Vertigo, DVD, dir. Alfred Hitchcock (1958; Los Angeles: Universal Pictures, 1999).
5. Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli, “Vertigo and the Vertiginous History of Film Theory,” Camera Obscura 25, no. 75: 100–114 (2010). Academic Search Complete, EBSCOhost (accessed August 6, 2015).
6. Wahl, Media Madness, 164–165.
7. Tippi Hedren and Sean Connery, Marnie, DVD, dir. Alfred Hitchcock (1964; Los Angeles: Universal Pictures, 2001).
8. Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck, Spellbound, DVD, dir. Alfred Hitchcock (1945; Los Angeles: Anchor Bay Entertainment, 1998).
9. Abram Anders, “Foucault and ‘the Right to Life’: From Technologies of Normalization to Societies of Control,” Disability Studies Quarterly, 33, no. 3 (2013), http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/3340 (accessed August 9, 2015).
10. Jonathan Joseph, Social Theory: An Introduction (Washington Square: New York University Press, 2003), 165.
11. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (New York: Vintage, 1977), 187.
12. Tippi Hedren and Rod Taylor, The Birds, DVD, directed by Alfred Hitchcock (1963; Los Angeles: Universal Pictures, 2000).
13. Farley Granger and Robert Walker, Strangers on a Train, DVD, directed by Alfred Hitchcock (1951; Los Angeles: Warner Home Video, 1997).
14. Debra Merskin, “Smooth Operator: The Compensated Psychopath in Cinema,” in Mental Illness in Popular Media: Essays on the Representation of Disorders, ed. L. C. Rubin (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2012), 54.
15. Peter J. Dellolio, “Hitchcock and Kafka: Expressionist Themes in ‘Strangers on a Train,’” Midwest Quarterly 45, no. 3 (Spring 2004), 249. Academic Search Complete, EBSCOhost (accessed August 14, 2015), 99.