Nicholas Haeffner,
Alfred Hitchcock.
Harlow, England: Pearson Education Limited, 2005.
ISBN: 0 582 43738 5
US$14.95 (pb)
125pp
(Review copy supplied by Pearson Education Limited)

Hitchcock’s cameo appearance in Lifeboat (US 1944) occurs at one remove, in a newspaper advertisement for ‘Reduco, The Sensational New Obesity Slayer’. The ad features two Hitchcocks – fat and thin, ‘Before’ and ‘After’ – who photographically attest to Reduco’s efficacy: ‘In Only Four Months You Too Can Be Slender’. Though recent Hitchcock studies have tended toward ‘thick’ description – literally (Patrick McGilligan’s Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light), conceptually (Christopher D. Morris’s The Hanging Figure: On Suspense and the Films of Alfred Hitchcock), or both (Tom Cohen’s two volume Hitchcock’s Cryptonymies) – Nicholas Haeffner’s Alfred Hitchcock is a book decidedly on the slender side, though what it loses in gravity of argument or detail is balanced by an admirable degree of intellectual agility.

Haeffner’s synoptic, late-stage account of ‘Alfred Hitchcock’ follows a roughly chronological, biographical itinerary, from ‘Hitchcock’s heritage’ (chapter 1) through ‘Hitchcock’s legacy’ (chapter 8). Its ‘biography’, however, is a resolutely institutional one, less concerned with Hitchcock as a ‘unique’ individual à la Donald Spoto’s ‘tormented and woman hating’ Hitchcock than with the culture(s) whose ‘genius’ he expressed. Haeffner “is less interested in the concept of the Freudian unconscious or in the torment said to lurk deep inside Hitchcock. Instead, the force which has been called Hitchcock’s genius will be seen to originate not in his psyche or personality, but in his objective social and economic situation” (1). Accordingly, nearly every chapter of Haeffner’s Alfred Hitchcock approaches Hitchcock from an historical or institutional angle; many chapters invoke some early influence or practice before elaborating how that theme (class, graphic design, gender, psychoanalysis, etc.) can be traced through the entirety of Hitchcock’s career. The chapters that linger on particular films also do so in chronological order: The Wrong Man (US 1957) in chapter 4, Vertigo (US 1957) in chapter 5, and Psycho (US 1960) in chapter 8.

The most obviously praiseworthy aspect of Haeffner’s Alfred Hitchcock is the often elegant way he draws upon the extended tradition of Hitchcock criticism to elaborate his picture of Hitchcock’s place in cultural and cinematic history without appearing overly dutiful or weighed down by precedent. His chapter 1, ‘Hitchcock’s heritage: class, culture, and cosmopolitanism’, for example, while emphasizing Hitchcock’s middle-class origins and middlebrow ambitions, draws on the work of Charles Barr, S.S. Prawer, Tom Ryall, and Tom Gunning (among others) to discuss particular influences on Hitchcock. These include, respectively, the (feminist) influence of Marie Belloc Lowndes, author of The Lodger; the influence of German Expressionism and Kammerspiel (Lang, Murnau); of the (London) Film Society and ‘minority film culture’; and of Sergei Eisenstein and his (modernist) ‘Cinema of Attractions’. This chapter, like many others, also draws significantly on Hitchcock’s own writings and interviews to advance the claim that Hitchcock was self-conscious in his use of German, American (D.W. Griffith), and Soviet precedents to assert a claim, on his own behalf but also on behalf of the rising middle class, to a central role in British culture, despite the qualms of business types who feared that Hitchcock’s “overt ‘artiness’ would alienate audiences” (26).

The extent of Hitchcock’s self- and cultural-consciousness is a key element in Haeffner’s critique of status quo Hitchcock criticism, even if that cuts somewhat against the grain of his emphasis on institutional determinants. His chapter on ‘Hitchcock and women’ is typical in this respect. It begins with a 1935 attack on Hitchcock for his disregard of “glamour, love-interest, sex-appeal, and all the other feminine attributes” (67) as helping to pose the question of Hitchcock’s “reputation as a misogynist” (67), which he then traces at some length by reference to Hitchcock’s “monstrous or neurotic” (68) mother figures, to his “cool” blondes (68), and also to Molly Haskell and Donald Spoto. He then goes on to consider the “paradoxes and contradictions” (69) in Hitchcock’s actual relationships to women, preeminently his wife, Alma, but also Joan Harrison, and in his relationships to the genre of the ‘women’s picture’ (via Selznick) and subsequently to feminist film scholars, especially Laura Mulvey.

But against Mulvey’s picture of ‘scopophilia’ as compulsive, unconscious, and androcentric, Haeffner argues (with some help from Mulvey herself) that Hitchcock’s “exploration of voyeurism and fetishism was, to a significant degree, conscious” (72), that Hitchcock attributed “the fetishistic impulse to his female characters too” (72), that his camera often maintained “a critical distance” (74) from his male protagonists, e.g., Devlin in Notorious (US 1946), and that Hitchcock, to judge by his interviews and the recollections of his collaborators, was “quite conscious of his tendency to cross-identify with men and women” (75). Not surprisingly, Haeffner adopts a very similar strategy in chapter 6: ‘Delirium of interpretation? The uses and abuses of psychoanalysis’. Here he defends the use of psychoanalytic models, and only in part because of Hitchcock’s frequent references to, or depictions of, psychoanalysis or psychoanalysts, not all of which were positive. More to the point is Haeffner’s claim regarding Hitchcock and Freud that there were “numerous points at which their more general worldviews seem to converge” (85), most especially in the conviction “that people see what they desire to see” (87). The cautionary force of the admonition applies to viewers and critics even more than to depicted characters, and leads to the observation that “psychoanalytic critics could do well to reflect on the idea that blindness can easily be mistaken for insight” (92).

The allusion to Paul de Man’s Blindness and Insight hints at a relation to postmodernity. The deconstructive potential of Haeffner’s contextual analysis is evident in the way the following passage, from the first volume of Tom Cohen’s Hitchcock’s Cryptonymies, echoes Haeffner’s approach to Hitchcock’s ‘genius’: “What we call Hitchcock does not leave ‘his’ signature; rather, ‘he’ is the product of a system of signature effects” (xvii). The possibility that these effects are self-canceling, as deriving from and referring to nothing but arbitrary signifiers – though not pressed so aggressively or skeptically in Haeffner as in Cohen – plays a central role in Haeffner’s chapter 3, “Fascinating design: image, nothingness, sound and silence”. But where Cohen sees Hitchcock as an ‘anarchivist’ – an anarchist who both sustains and dismantles the post-auratic, teletechnic archive – Haeffner evokes Existentialism and ‘Eastern thought’ by way of claiming that, “In Hitchcock’s films it is nothingness, emptiness and, crucially, silence, which provide some of the richest possibilities to create sense and emotion” (46). Moreover, the chapter gives Haeffner opportunity to discuss at some length Hitchcock’s collaboration with Bernard Herrmann, which he describes in modernist terms, observing how the films’ commercially obligatory ‘happy endings’ are often undercut by the musical ‘irresolution’ of Herrmann’s music (52). The subsequent break with Herrmann over the score for Torn Curtain (US 1966) also provides Haeffner with a key example of the commercial pressures Hitchcock increasingly had to confront in his later years.

I take the partial convergence of Cohen and Haeffner as indicating Haeffner’s general mastery of Hitchcock criticism and his attunement to developing critical trends, though he could not have read Cohen’s book while writing his own (both appeared in 2005). A book he should have read and cited, perhaps, is Thomas M. Leitch’s 1991 Find the Director and Other Hitchcock Games. I have in mind the way Leitch’s ‘game theory’ approach is echoed in Haeffner’s repeated discussions of the ‘contractual’ relationships between Hitchcock and his audience. Hitchcock’s desire to educate the expectations of audiences and critics was evident from early on – he established a public relations firm in 1930 to influence press accounts – but Haeffner invokes the ‘contract’ model chiefly in discussing moments of crisis, when Hitchcock failed (at least in retrospect) to prepare audiences sufficiently for the films they were about to see. Thus his chapter 4 describes The Wrong Man – in discussing its odd combination of documentary (neo)realism with expressionistic cinematography – as an art-house film before its time, as it were, that might have done better business had Hitchcock’s name not been attached. And Haeffner describes The Birds (US 1963) – in chapter 7, “Audiences and identification” – by reference to the film’s promotional trailer, where an interrogative evocation of ‘the SHOCKING mystery of the birds’ established an expectation of a mystery solved that the film itself never fulfilled, thus effecting “a breakdown in the contract Hitchcock had built up with his followers” (98).

As Haeffner points out, Hitchcock’s willingness to risk the ire of his viewers in The Birds – by way of challenging civilized ‘complacency’ (95) – was partly a response to the work of his New Wave and art film contemporaries, but it also confirmed his role as a class-conscious, slyly subversive cinematic ‘moralist’ (95). Typically, Hitchcock accomplished this task, according to Haeffner, by involving “the audience as participants in a moral theorem” via “patterns of cutting which encourage intense identification” (102). The claim could hardly be more familiar to Hitchcock critics. Some reference to Leitch’s elaboration à la Gregory Bateson of the “endless oscillation” in Hitchcock “between the poles of affirmation and critique” (260) might have helped Haeffner to present a more sophisticated picture of the way Hitchcock both appeals to and challenges his audience.

Nowhere in his Alfred Hitchcock does Haeffner delve very deeply into close textual analysis; even the chapters ostensibly devoted to specific films – ‘Realism and The Wrong Man’ and ‘Hitchcock’s legacy: Psycho and after’ – focus largely on questions of production and reception. Indeed, his focus on the ‘contract’ between Hitchcock and his viewers allows Haeffner to avoid the kind of textualist vertigo encouraged by Tom Cohen. Accordingly, comparing Haeffner to Cohen or to Leitch may be unfair, because Haeffner is nearly always looking at the larger Hitchcock picture, from a ‘bird’s eye’ view, as it were. Readers seeking revelatory interpretations of Hitchcock’s films will likely be frustrated by Haeffner’s overview approach. Then again, it seems clear that the primary audience of this book – once it passes muster with the film study professoriate – will be undergraduate students. Though they may not fully appreciate the skill and thoughtfulness of Haeffner’s synthetic account of Hitchcock’s career and cultural force, they will be well served, in the main, by Haeffner’s historical and thematic approach; by book’s end, they will have engaged most of the standard topics in Hitchcock study with a surprising degree of sophistication, given the book’s admirable brevity and accessibility.

Leland Poague,
Iowa State University, USA.

Created on: Saturday, 9 June 2007