The Women Who Knew Too Much

Hitchcock and Feminist Theory

Tania Modleski

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317417286
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

Originally published in 1988, The Women Who Knew Too Much remains a classic work in film theory and feminist criticism. The book consists of a theoretical introduction and analyses of seven important films by Alfred Hitchcock, each of which provides a basis for an analysis of the female spectator as well as of the male spectator. Modleski considers the emotional and psychic investments of men and women in female characters whose stories often undermine the mastery of the cinematic "master of suspense." The third edition features an interview with the author by David Greven, in which he and Modleski reflect on how feminist and queer approaches to Hitchcock studies may be brought into dialogue. A teaching guide and discussion questions by Ned Schantz help instructors and students to delve into this seminal work of feminist film theory.

1 Rape vs. Mans/laughter

Blackmail

DOI: 10.4324/9781315687155-2

The issue of sexual violence must be central to any feminist analysis of the films of Alfred Hitchcock. In film studies, Hitchcock is often viewed as the archetypal misogynist, who invites his audience to indulge their most sadistic fantasies against the female. Some critics have even argued that Hitchcock’s work is prototypical of the extremely violent assaults on women that make up so much of our entertainment today. Thus, Linda Williams has claimed that Psycho is the forerunner of the slasher films of the 1970s and 1980s (films like Halloween and Friday the Thirteenth and their numerous sequels), however superior it may be in aesthetic value to these later films.¹ As might be expected, such films are usually thought to appeal largely to males; women, it is claimed, can enjoy such films only by assuming the position of “masochists.”² Rape and violence, it would appear, effectively silence and subdue not only the woman in the films—the one who would threaten patriarchal law and order through the force of her anarchic desires—but also the women watching the films: female spectators and female critics.

Recent criticism has explored the relation between interpretation in the arts and interpretation in legal discourse. Not surprisingly, analyses like Ronald Dworkin’s “Law as Interpretation,” while insisting that interpretation is necessarily political, ignore the significance of gender and thereby perpetuate the myth that the legal system is, in Catharine MacKinnon’s words, “point-ofviewless” and “universal,” that it can incorporate and adjudicate women’s experience as fully as it does men’s.³ Women like MacKinnon who wish to expose the partiality of the legal system have done so by focusing on the issue of rape in order to show how interpretation always locates the meaning of the act in the man’s point of view. “Under conditions of sex inequality, with perspective bound up with situation, whether a contested interaction is rape comes down to whose meaning wins.”⁴ I suggest that the question of whose meaning wins is equally pertinent to interpretation in literary and film criticism and that to insist on the very different meaning a given text may have for women is in fact an act of survival of the kind Adrienne Rich believes is always at stake in feminist re-visions.⁵

Blackmail (1929) is the story of a shopkeeper’s daughter, Alice White, one of the first in a long line of tormented blonde heroines that Hitchcock featured throughout his career. Our introduction to this character is postponed, however, until the end of the film’s lengthy, entirely silent, opening sequence, which shows the capture, interrogation, and booking of a criminal. Following this sequence, shot in quasidocumentary style, the film’s detective hero, Frank Webber (John Longden), meets his fiancée, Alice White (Anny Ondra), in the outer rooms of Scotland Yard. Alice is petulant because Frank has kept her waiting for half an hour, but she perks up when a heavy, mustachioed detective whispers something in her ear. She exits laughing, pointedly excluding Frank from the joke, although he valiantly tries to share in the mirth. At the café they go to for their date, Alice deliberately picks a quarrel with Frank so that she can keep an assignation she has made with another man, an artist named Crewe (Cyril Ritchard), who at the end of the evening persuades the hesitant Alice to come up to his studio. Their conversation outside the building is punctuated by closeups of a mysterious man listening intently to hear what they are saying. The man calls to the artist, who explains to Alice that the interloper is a “sponger.” Once inside the building, Crewe stops in the foyer and—so much for passionate seduction scenes—checks his mail, queries his landlady about a disturbing note he has received, and finally ascends the staircase with Alice, the camera emphasizing this movement by recording it in a single impressive crane shot from the side of the stairwell. Blackmail is one of the first of many Hitchcock films associating a room at the top of the stairs with sexuality and with danger and violence to a woman. There ensues a very curious scene that ends with the artist assaulting Alice, dragging her screaming and struggling to his bed, where she finally stabs him to death—an event that occurs off screen, behind the bed curtains. We simply see her hand reach out and grab a knife conveniently placed near some bread on a night table; then there is an ominous silence, and the artist’s lifeless arm falls outside the curtains. Alice sneaks home after an agonized night of wandering the streets and manages to get into bed just before her mother comes up to wake her.

Meanwhile, Scotland Yard enters the case, and Frank finds Alice’s glove during a search of the studio. When he visits her father’s shop, where the family also lives, and takes Alice into the phone booth to talk, the two are surprised by the stranger who was lurking about the studio the night before—a Mr. Tracy (Donald Calthrop). Tracy has found Alice’s other glove, and he begins to blackmail the pair, installing himself comfortably at the breakfast table with her puzzled parents. But when Frank learns that Tracy was observed by the artist’s landlady the night before and is now Scotland Yard’s chief suspect, he gleefully begins to taunt and threaten Tracy despite Alice’s protests. There ensues a frantic chase that eventually winds up on the domed roof of the British Museum, where Tracy plunges through a skylight while on the verge of identifying Alice as the killer. The chase is intercut with closeup shots of Alice paralyzed with guilt and fear, and it ends as Alice decides to write a note to Frank declaring her intention to confess, since she cannot bear the thought of an innocent man’s suffering for something she has done. When she gets into the office of the Chief Inspector, however, she finds Frank there and before she can disclose the truth, the phone rings, and the inspector instructs Frank to handle the matter. Frank removes her from the office and acknowledges awareness of what she has done; on their way out they encounter the mustachioed detective who ushered Alice in and who laughingly asks Frank, “Well, did she tell you who did it? You want to look out or she’ll be losing your job, my boy.” The men laugh heartily at the thought of “lady detectives” on the police force, of women usurping male roles and possessing masculine knowledge, and the camera tracks in on Alice visually caught between them, trying to force herself to laugh along. Then, as she catches sight of something out of the frame, her expression sobers, and the final shot of the film shows us what she sees: a picture of a laughing, pointing jester painted by the murdered artist, which recedes from a closeup view as a detective carries it down the hall.⁶

Even so cursory a summary suggests the extent to which the film, through a classically Hitchcockian “parallel reversal,” may be viewed as a “set-up” of the woman, who begins the film by flirtatiously laughing at another man’s joke to provoke her lover and ends by standing between two detectives who share a joke at her expense. Here, the woman literally and figuratively occupies precisely that place that Freud assigned to women in the structure of the obscene joke: the place of the object between two male subjects.⁷ It might be argued that one of the main projects of the film is to wrest power from the woman, in particular the power of laughter, and to give the men the last laugh, thereby defusing the threat of woman’s infidelity, her refusal to treat with proper seriousness patriarchal law and authority. Alice’s private joke with the second detective is, after all, occasioned by her expecting “the entire machinery of Scotland Yard to be held up to please” her, as Frank sarcastically observes. In other words, she unreasonably demands that the law conform to her, instead of accepting the reverse.

It is scarcely accidental that contemporary feminist theory has stressed the subversive potential of woman’s laughter, as for example, Hélène Cixous does in “Castration or Decapitation?” where she recounts the parable of the warrior Sun Tse. Instructed by the king to train the king’s wives in the arts of war, Sun Tse found that “instead of learning the code very quickly, the ladies started laughing and chattering and paying no attention to the lesson.” So he threatened them with decapitation, whereupon they stopped laughing and learned their lessons very well. “Women,” concludes Cixous, “have no choice other than to be decapitated, and in any case, the moral is that if they don’t actually lose their heads by the sword, they only keep them on condition that they lose them—lose them, that is, to complete silence, turned into automatons.”⁸ If castration is, as Laura Mulvey has persuasively argued, always at stake for the male in classical narrative cinema, then decapitation is at stake for the female—in the cinema as elsewhere. In the scene in the studio, Alice tries to paint a picture on the artist’s canvas, and she draws the head of a woman. The artist takes her hand, guiding it to “complete the masterpiece,” and draws a nude female body, which Alice then signs, authorizing, as it were, man’s view of woman and thereby consenting to the silencing of her own possibly different ideas about herself. Maurice Yacowar writes of this episode, “That routine is a comic miniature of the scene in the studio, the girl having gone to his room for some playful headwork, conversation, but (artists being what they are) finding the body soon forced into play.”⁹ Thus does the critic, with his little oxymoronic witticism about rape, add his voice to the chorus of male laughter that ends the film.

The nude is only one of two important pictures in Blackmail. The second is the jester. In the artist’s studio Alice at first laughs at the picture and even points back at it, but after she has stabbed Crewe it seems to accuse her, and she lashes out and tears it. Later, when Frank discovers Alice’s glove in the studio, he immediately confronts the jester, who appears to be mocking Frank’s cuckoldry. At the end, a realignment has clearly taken place, and the sound of male laughter, Frank’s included, accompanies the image of the laughing jester pointing at an Alice who can no longer even smile. According to Yacowar, “the clown is the spirit of corrective comedy, recalling the shrewd, manic wisdom of the jester in King Lear. … The painting, like its dapper, elegant artist, works as a test of the people it meets. It is the very spirit of irony, seeming innocent but a tricky test of its viewer’s moral alertness.”¹⁰ Every jester, I suppose, is bound to recall King Lear, but in any case, what the spirit of this jester comically “corrects” is a world in which the female is temporarily in control. If Yacowar is right to see a self-reflexive element in the painting, to see, that is, the artist in the film as a representative of Hitchcock the artist, then by extension, the filmmaker’s work of art, Blackmail, would be like the painting in the final shot, a cruel but not unusual joke on woman, a joke which the critic retells in his own style.

Commentators have most often praised Blackmail for its innovative and creative use of sound. In particular, they have pointed to the breakfast table scene, in which Alice, having stabbed a man to death just hours before, listens to a chattering neighbor deplore the killer’s choice of a knife for the murder weapon; the voice becomes a mumble, with only the often-repeated word “knife” clearly audible; then with the camera fixed on a closeup of Alice, her father’s voice comes on the soundtrack asking her to “cut us a bit of bread.” As the voluble neighbor drones on, another closeup shows Alice’s hand reaching out hesitantly to pick up the utensil, which she sends flying when the word “knife” suddenly screams out at her. Generally, critics of the film content themselves with celebrating the cleverness of such manipulations of sound without discussing its narrative function; they simply admire the way Hitchcock “so masterfully controls [this element] by turning the cinematic screws.”¹¹ And even when they do consider the matter further, they tend to discuss Hitchcock’s concern with “the limits and the problems of human communication.”¹² What is remarkable to me, however, is that this first British sound film specifically foregrounds the problems of woman’s speaking.

To begin with, we can cite a historical accident, one that nevertheless profoundly affects the way we experience the film. Since Anny Ondra, the Czech actress who plays Alice, had much too pronounced an accent for the daughter of a British shopkeeper, Hitchcock had another woman, Joan Barry, stand near the camera and say the lines that Ondra mimed. In a way, the film is uncannily prophetic, anticipating all those sound films for decades to come in which women are more spoken than speaking, hysterics reduced to communicating in “body language,” to use Yacowar’s telling phrase.¹³ As Ondra clearly hesitates before each line, listening for her cue, and then accompanies the lines with slightly exaggerated gestures, she does indeed resemble Cixous’s “automatons”—a word, moreover, that captures the marionette-like nature of Alice’s movements after the murder when she emerges from the bed dazed and “out of herself,” holding the knife in what Deborah Linderman notes is a “phallic position.”¹⁴ She has, after all, usurped the male prerogative of aggression against the opposite sex.

Further, as we have seen, the film apparently works to reduce Alice to a silent object between two male subjects—and this objectification occurs not just at the end. The film repeatedly places Alice in a triangular relationship with two men: Frank and the artist; the artist and the film’s spectator; Frank and the blackmailer; and Frank and the laughing detective. One of the most famous shots occurs in the artist’s studio and involves a “split screen” effect: Alice changes clothes on one side of the artist’s screen while on the other side Crewe sings and plays the piano with his back to Alice, whose undressing is thus presented pornographically for the sole delectation of the film spectator. As Deborah Linderman observes, woman is here positioned at the point of a triangle “completed by two male sightlines,” which subsequently collapse into “a single point of identification” between the male viewer and Crewe. For Linderman, this scene provides evidence for Raymond Bellour’s thesis that “in classical cinema the spectator is always male.”¹⁵

Alice appears at the point of another triangle later when Frank is gloating over the turned tables in his dealing with the blackmailer. She is seated, quaking, in the foreground of the image, and the blackmailer and Frank stand talking on either side of her in the background. Frank maintains that though Tracy will try to blame the murder on Alice, “our word’s as good as, or perhaps a bit better than, that of a jailbird.” At one point during the scene the camera cuts to a medium closeup of the blackmailer, who says, “When the surprise comes, it won’t be for me.” There is a pan to Alice, and he continues, “It’s my word against hers.” Unable to bear it any longer, Alice gets up and goes round to Frank’s side, with the camera following, and says, “Frank, you … you can’t do this”; he tells her to be quiet, and she walks around behind the two men, where she is again caught between them as the camera pans back and forth. When Tracy asks, “Why can’t you let her speak?” Frank replies, “You mind your own business. And in any case she’ll speak at the right moment.” Tracy begins to plead and even tries to return the blackmail money, but Frank ignores it. As the camera follows the blackmailer’s hand pulling the money back in front of Alice’s body, the shot neatly captures her role as object of exchange between males. When Frank continues to disregard Tracy’s pleas, Tracy falls back on his previous formula, “All right, then, it’s still my word against hers.”

But what might Alice say about her situation if she could speak about it? What language adequately describes the episode in the artist’s studio? What, in short, is the woman’s “word” against which the blackmailer pits his own? Lindsay Anderson describes the incident leading to the murder as a seduction;¹⁶ Donald Spoto calls it an act of “violent love” on the part of the artist: “his passion overcomes him and he attempts to make violent love to her.”¹⁷ John Russell Taylor characterizes it as “a fairly violent pass.”¹⁸ Hitchcock himself uses the word “rape” on one occasion and “seduction” on another, suggesting that for him, as for many men, there’s not much difference between the two.¹⁹ Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol also speak of rape, but only to introduce a doubt. They write, “He apparently tries to rape her,” and they go on to suggest that she gets what she deserves: “To defend her virtue, which one would have thought to be less precious to her, she stabs him with a bread-knife.”²⁰ Raymond Durgnat actually subjects Alice to a mock trial; after appearing to consider both sides of the issue, he concludes, “Hitchcock would not have been allowed to show incontrovertible evidence of rape even if he had wanted to so there’s room for doubt even on the issue of whether Alice is right in thinking she’s being raped rather than merely forcibly embraced.”²¹ “Forcible embrace” or “violent love”: the oxymorons seem to proliferate when rape is the issue. In the court over which he presides Durgnat effectively eradicates the very category of rape (at least as far as the film world is concerned) by ruling that a condition of its legal existence must be the kind of “incontrovertible evidence” that it is illegal to show. Another Alice finds herself in Wonderland. In any case, it is impossible to imagine what would constitute adequate proof for the male critic, since it is a question here of attempted rape. The film, after all, does have the artist begin to pull Alice across the room while she screams to be let go, then we see the shadows of their figures projected on the wall as he pushes her into his bed, where the struggle continues until shortly after Alice seizes the knife. Interestingly, since the episode is not presented directly to the spectator’s view, it is a question here of accepting the veracity of the woman’s words, her expression of protest and fear. As frequently occurs in real life, critics in the main refuse to accept the w...