a quibble with ken moog [nothing new; we've been doing this for millennia]

he writes:

in truth i had not forgotten this “explanation”; i just don’t buy it . . . there is nothing in the film – either in thei scene or elsewhere – to suggest a conspiracy . . . . of course it’s s possible that there was a conspiracy, just as it’s possible that when judy falls to her death it too is just a charade arranged by midge to drive scottie crazy because he betrayed her love . . . the minute we start filling in what we now call back story according to our own whims or wishes, we’re in trouble [cf: “How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth”]

it’s worth noting that my students almost universally want to posit a conspiracy because they deeply WANT everything in the film to be explicable . . . hitchcock could easily have provided some clue to allow us to do that – but, and this seems to me the heart of the issue, he chose not to . . . whether that counts as “occult” or not depends on lots of things, but i don’t think we can easily explain that scene away

-----Original Message-----
From: Film-Philosophy [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Ken Mogg
Sent: Sunday, September 02, 2012 4:01 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [FILM-PHILOSOPHY] Hitchcock and the occult

Hi Henry. A big topic. The principal writer on Hitchcock as 'occultist' has to be Jean Douchet in his book 'Alfred Hitchcock' (1967; 1985), in French. There's a summary in Jane Sloan's 'Alfred Hitchcock: A Guide to References and Resources' (1995), and you can get the general flavour from Douchet's article "Hitch and His Public", translated into English and included in Deutelbaum & Poague, 'A Hitchcock Reader' (2nd edition 2009) - the translation is also on the Web as a PDF file. Basically, Douchet sees two types of suspense, 'esoteric suspense' and 'aesthetic suspense'. (I can't help being reminded of Kierkegaard's categories, Aesthetic, Ethical, Religious.) The 'aesthetic' type is Hitchcock's 'unique subject and the object of his work', and concerns the interaction of anxiety and imagination. But 'esoteric suspense' is, as its name implies, more abstruse, and occurs at several levels, starting with the 'occult' or hidden level, which involves 'the battle of shadow and light'. (The other levels are the logical or plot level and the quotidian level which involves particularly the characters, who may themselves be caught up in 'the battle of shadow and light'.) As someone has said, it's the sort of writing that reads much better in the original French.

(In a moment - forgive me - I'll plug my own 'Schopenhauerian' understanding of Hitchcock, which works a bit like Douchet's.)

On the ROSEMARY'S BABY matter, I checked with Stephen Rebello. He confirms that 'Hitchcock was offered the book in galleys and said in an interview that he didn't know how to bring off the notion of witches in modern-day Manhattan.' Stephen added: 'Ernest Lehman was offered the adaptation, too, and wanted no part of it. Lehman told me that Hitchcock thought lots of the book was "silly hokum" but that he did like the idea of mistrust and betrayal between husband and wife.'

Of course, there are definite - or seeming - 'occult' moments in Hitchcock. For example, there's the 'canine telepathy' in SECRET AGENT which I'm fairly sure Hitchcock included because he believed in it! (I used to think that this sequence was perhaps the silliest in all of Hitchcock, and I still feel that it may alienate some audience members, those who aren't animal lovers.) It was already in the Maugham story "The Traitor" and, before that, in one of Chesterton's Father Brown stories, "The Oracle of the Dog".

Telepathy also figures in SHADOW OF A DOUBT (and the teenage girl, played by Teresa Wright, is its suitable locus, as she thinks she feels the influence of her revered Uncle Charlie - again I could cite Kierkegaard here, on adolescent psychology and the beginning of loss of innocence, which is indeed a subject of SOAD - and note also a rough parallel with REBECCA, where the Joan Fontaine character feels herself 'haunted' by the first Mrs De Winter, and of course there's a foretaste of VERTIGO, albeit these matters in REBECCA and VERTIGO are eventually 'explained away', at least at the level of plot, if not audience psychology, to which I now come).

On audience psychology, I've time only to say that Hitchcock knew well how 'the quickness of the hand deceives the eye' and that audiences are very gullible, if you know how to manipulate them, i.e., us. (Back in about 1932 Hitchcock told screenwriter Rodney Ackland pretty well what I'm saying here.) In effect, audiences - people - will believe anything, up to a point. Even the 'hard-headed Scot' played by James Stewart in VERTIGO willingly suspends his disbelief once he succumbs to Madeleine's (Kim Novak's) influence. So Hitchcock's films are like embodiments, inter alia, of Edgar Morin's thesis about the star-system in 'The Stars' (1960, re-issued in 2005), which Dana Polan says concerns 'a resonant, "magical" art'. In that sense, the films are indeed about 'occult' matters.

At a different level again, I think they are about what Schopenhauer called the omnipresent cosmic Will, the One behind the Many. I have argued elsewhere that the avians in THE BIRDS are precisely the embodiment of Will, which Schopenhauer further characterised as a blind, indifferent 'force' that is both 'within' and 'without'. So I find Zizek's reading of THE BIRDS - cited here by Jared Ashburn - not penetrating enough! Sorry! (Please see my online monograph, "The Day of the Claw: A Synoptic Account of ... THE BIRDS".) The films are ultimately about us, the audience, and about each individual viewer in particular. And I detect a decided influence of Hitchcock's beloved Symbolist artists ('For a time, I even had Symbolist dreams' - quoted in Charlotte Chandler's 2005 'personal biography' of Hitchcock). Note: a major influence on the Symbolist movement was Schopenhauer. (This time I must cite my essay on "Hitchcock's Literary Sources" in Leitch & Poague, 'A Companion to Alfred Hitchcock', 2011.)

Nearly finished, Henry. I do regret that Hitchcock in the 1940s never realised his project to adapt Heinrich Heine's verse drama 'Ratcliff', which might have been his first 'ghost' film, somewhat akin to 'Wuthering Heights'. (And then, of course, there was his dream of filming J.M. Barrie's 'Mary Rose' - but that was sabotaged by Tippi hedren who 'got' to producer Lew Wasserman. I bet that piece of information isn't in THE GIRL, which I hear is a poor show. Tony Lee Moral's review of it will go up on the 'MacGuffin'/Hitchcock Scholars website within a day or so.)

Lastly, I'm disappointed that Mike Frank forgot how I'd told him that the McKittrick Hotel scene in VERTIGO is indebted to its predecessor in Curtis Bernhardt's CONFLICT (1945), starring Humphrey Bogart (Essentially, the VERTIGO landlady is in cohoots with Gavin Elster and Judy to put one over Scottie - and again us, the audience.) But this wasn't a new thing in Hitchcock. There's a similar 'vanishing person' moment in the baggage-car scene in THE LADY VANISHES, momentarily inviting us to suspend disbelief and to believe in 'magic'. On analysis, the scene does appear 'inexplicable' even when it seems to be otherwise - but finally it's 'all in the acting'. And Hitchcock has achieved the effect he wanted! Of course, at this point Douchet is the person to turn back to.

- KM

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